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By Ted Hughes $29.70
By Nat Hentoff $18.15
$20
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 AP / Alex Brandon
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By Robert Scheer — What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation?
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 AP / David Guttenfelder
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By Robert Scheer — True, he doesn’t seem a bit like Lyndon Johnson, but the way he’s headed on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog down his presidency. LBJ also had a progressive agenda in mind, but it was soon overwhelmed by the cost and divisiveness engendered by a meaningless, and seemingly endless, war in Vietnam.
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 AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — The light has gone out, and with it that infectious warm laugh and intensely progressive commitment of the best of the Kennedys. Not, at this point, to take anything away from the memory of his siblings—Bobby, whom I also got to know, was pretty terrific in his last years—but Sen. Ted Kennedy was the real deal.
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 AP / Dean Cox
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By Robert Scheer — In recent days yet another wealthy private customer of the Swiss-based banking conglomerate UBS admitted to criminal fraud in a growing parade of perp walks that could extend into the thousands. It is a case that threatens to ensnare former Sen. Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who is vice chairman of UBS’ investment banking business.
Posted on Aug 18, 2009
54 COMMENTS
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 AP / Shizuo Kambayashi
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By Robert Scheer — This week marks the anniversary of a U.S. attack that deliberately took the lives of thousands of children on their way to school.
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 AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — By now everybody must know that the top banking executives responsible for our economic meltdown have no shame. Otherwise they would not have dared give themselves such hefty bonuses as a deeply perverse reward for actions that caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs and homes.
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 AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — What a hoot. The Chinese Communists invaded Washington on Monday demanding not that we sacrifice our freedoms but rather that we balance our budget. Creditors get to make that kind of call. And the Marxists of Beijing, who have turned out to be the world’s most prudent bankers, are worried about their assets invested in our banana republic.
Posted on Jul 28, 2009
91 COMMENTS
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 AP photo
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By Robert Scheer — It was the stark evil Robert McNamara perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him. To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions he caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense.
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 AP photo / Louis Lanzano
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By Robert Scheer — Bernard Madoff should be exhibit A in why the dark world of totally unregulated private money managers and hedge funds should be opened to the light of systematic government supervision. Instead, he is being treated as an aberrant menace.
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 AP photo / Brennan Linsley, pool
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By Robert Scheer — The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.
Posted on Jun 24, 2009
94 COMMENTS
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — On Monday, two men with considerable responsibility for enabling the banking meltdown confronted the error of their ways. Hopefully Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers’ sudden conversion to common sense indicates the seriousness of the banking regulation plan that their boss, President Obama, will present to Congress today.
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 AP photo / J. David Ake
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By Robert Scheer — You probably don’t know much about Sheila Bair, but she is looking out for you, and that is why the big guys on Wall Street and their allies in the Obama administration are out to get her.
Posted on Jun 10, 2009
54 COMMENTS
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 Reagan Library
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By Robert Scheer — It would be nice to blame Ronald Reagan for the economic meltdown, as Paul Krugman did recently, but the facts don’t support it. Unfortunately, the real villains are closer at hand.
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 AP photo / Rich Pedroncelli
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By Robert Scheer — I expected a federal government that has spent trillions salvaging the banks that got us into this mess to find the relatively minor sums needed to bail out California and other states that have been the victims of Wall Street’s dangerous games. But I didn’t count on the tough-love steeliness of the Obama administration.
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 AP photo / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — How much do you know about BlackRock and the hedge funds they manage? Better bone up fast, now that the folks at BlackRock are calling the shots in the government’s trillion-dollar bailout program. BlackRock execs are now directing key elements of the government program at a time when they stand to reap great profits from the fallout of a problem they helped create.
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