This is just the beginning. And it won’t be too long before we look back at these moves and wonder what we were thinking. Hopefully by then we’ll have moved on to a period where Uncle Sam isn’t a partner in a seemingly endless stream of businesses and industries. But for now, as it relates to your investments, the here and now dictates that you need to gear up to invest right along with Uncle Sam Inc.

Who hasn’t experienced firsthand what it means for the S&P 500 to be down 24 percent over the last two months and 33 percent year-to-date? The market’s gut-wrenching implosion is spelled out daily, red numbers all over computer monitors, TV screens, and newsprint.

But there’s more havoc lurking. It’s not drawing much media attention--yet. Wait until investors those investors brave enough to do it open up their brokerage statements. We all know about the share-price declines, but a story that will play out over coming months is the heavy falloff in dividend income. This is the insult after the injury.

Chaos: That pretty much sums up the thinking on global markets. The follow-up is: Get me out of everything. Sell it; I don’t care what it is, or what the price is. Just get me out.

One market opens and folks sell, and keep selling into the close. The next market opens and picks up with the selling. As the world turns, market after market keeps selling.

It doesn’t matter what happened on Capitol Hill this week. What does matter is having a plan to get for getting past not just the next several days of ups and downs in the market but the coming year as well.

I thought we won the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell, pushed over by Ronald Reagan and his crusade for individual rights and free markets--free from as much government as he could dismantle during his political life.

Just as many of you were looking up at the sky rise towers of the big banks around the nation to make sure that you aren't going to be squashed like a bug by defenestrated bank executives, the government has stepped in with a fix for the whole credit market fiasco.

Embattled investment bank Lehman Brothers is now in liquidation mode. Regulators and what’s left of the street are hoping for a workout or, for some in the latter group, licking their chops like vultures over carrion.

With all the unfolding shenanigans--from stock analysts pimping companies they know aren’t worth the ink and paper used to report trades on your brokerage statements to hedge funds and prime brokers getting to play by different sets of rules--the market continues to get more and more dicey for the average stock investor.

Will the stock market ever recover? Where is the bottom for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 or the Nasdaq Composite--which hasn’t recovered since the last market blowup at the start of this decade--and when will we reach it?

Election years bring investors all sorts of anxieties. Aside from the various campaign promises designed to attract us to a particular candidate, we must also consider which nominee’s policy changes threaten to erode our financial well-being. Such considerations give new meaning to the term political plank, and pocketbook politics always hit home during times of economic and market malaise.