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By Toni Morrison
$14.37
The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
By Chris Hedges
$19
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Nate Beeler, Cagle Cartoons, The Washington Examiner —
Posted on Jul 1, 2011
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By William Pfaff — Athens in recent days has experienced continuing popular protest, sporadically violent, against the economic austerity program demanded of Greece by the IMF.
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AP / Giorgos Kontarinis / Eurokinissi
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Despite thousands of protesters’ fierce opposition to the PM’s austerity plan and with calls of “traitor” ringing in their ears, members of the Greek Parliament voted Wednesday in favor of economic solvency rather than popular opinion. (more)
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Olle Johansson, Cagle Cartoons, Sweden —
Posted on Jun 21, 2011
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Paresh Nath, Cagle Cartoons, The Khaleej Times, UAE —
Posted on Jun 19, 2011
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Christo Komarnitski, Cagle Cartoons, Bulgaria —
Posted on Jun 18, 2011
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President Obama went over to Toledo, Ohio, to thank the workers at a Chrysler plant for the bailed-out auto industry’s newfound profitability, but, as this video attests, the workers of that community are not feeling the love from Obama’s corporate welfare.
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Arcadio Esquivel, Cagle Cartoons, La Prensa, Panama —
Posted on Jun 14, 2011
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Wikimedia Commons / Martin St.-Amant
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Though he once referred to them as “fat cats,” President Obama now has to sing a different tune to Wall Street’s bigwigs in order to persuade them to open their wallets as he revs up for campaign 2012. Awkward!
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AP / Paul Sakuma
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In a startling move, the Obama administration is holding three major banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase—accountable for their bad lending habits on the mortgage market, cutting off funds from the Home Affordable Modification Program until they shape up.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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By Robert Scheer — How I wish that Ben Bernanke would get caught emailing photos of his underwear-clad groin. Otherwise we don’t stand a chance of reversing this administration’s economic policy, which is shaping up to be every bit as disastrous as that of its predecessor.
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Olle Johansson, Cagle Cartoons, Sweden —
Posted on Jun 5, 2011
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By Joe Conason — The current puppet play in Congress—where Republicans sponsored a bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling only because they wanted to vote it down—would be funny, if only they weren’t risking economic disaster.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — What was Timothy Geithner thinking back in 2008 when, as president of the New York Fed, he decided to give Goldman Sachs a $30 billion interest-free loan as part of an $80 billion secret float to favored banks? The sordid details of that program were finally made public this week in response to a court order for a Freedom of Information Act release, thanks to a Bloomberg News lawsuit.
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Flickr/Images_of_Money
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According to at least some sources, certain sectors of the American economy are showing signs of life, but the housing market sure isn’t one of them, especially considering the news expected to surface Tuesday that prices have now dipped below the previous lowest point recorded since this recession kicked in three years ago. The recession’s earlier bottom for housing prices occurred in 2009.
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AP/ Chris Pizzello
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The legendary musician tells Robert Scheer that his new album, including a song inspired by one of Scheer’s Truthdig columns, was written out of feeling frustrated, helpless and angry with current events.
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imdb.com
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By Robert Scheer — It is not true, as a Wall Street Journal reviewer claimed, that the HBO movie version of Andrew Sorkin’s book “Too Big to Fail” was “Too Boring to Watch.” On the contrary, the problem with the film, as with the richly anecdotal book, is that it is all too effectively misleading.
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timpawlenty.com
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As expected, erstwhile Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has come rumbling into the ring to challenge Barack Obama for the presidency in 2012. In launching his bid, T-Paw ran through the GOP’s list of top gripes with the current administration: the bailout, the stimulus and, of course, “Obamacare.” And he’s going to tell the truth!
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Taylor Jones, Cagle Cartoons, El Nuevo Dia, Puerto Rico —
Posted on May 23, 2011
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AP / Shannon Stapleton, pool
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By Nomi Prins — As newly resigned International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn hunkers down in his jail cell, IMF news has fallen into two categories. Both miss the devastation the IMF causes, regardless of who heads it.
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AP / Frank Franklin II
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This week we celebrate New York’s attorney general for refusing to let Wall Street off the hook. (More, including honorable mentions, after the jump).
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AP / Frank Franklin II
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By Robert Scheer — The fix was in to let Wall Street off the hook once and for all for its role in the Great Recession ... until last week when the attorney general of New York refused to go along.
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Flickr / Protest Photos1
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Homing in on mortgage-backed securities, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has requested records from Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as part of a broad investigation into the causes of the financial meltdown of 2008. (more)
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Chris Hedges — The celebrated intellectual did 65 campaign events for Barack Obama and now nurses the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. During their last personal encounter, West says, “I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Don’t expect to see a lot of newspapers and websites with this headline: “Big Government Bailout Worked.” But it would be entirely accurate.
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Wikimedia Commons / Efloch
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Does the name Neel Kashkari ring a bell? Think way back to the year 2008, when the word bailout was just entering the vernacular in relation to Wall Street, not prison, and when Henry Paulson was still in charge of the Treasury Department.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — In the ever-so-smug company of the rich and powerful, it is a given that there is never to be any expression of remorse or other acknowledgement of the pain they have inflicted on the lesser mortals they so cavalierly plunder.
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AP / Jason DeCrow
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By Robert Scheer — The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy.
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AP / Reed Saxon
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By Chris Hedges — The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.
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By David Sirota — For most of history, we had undebatable definitions of words such as bailout and bankruptcy. Sadly, that’s not the case during a deficit crisis that is seeing language redefined in ideological terms.
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By David Sirota — Decisions by bought-off elected officials highlight a larger corporatist ideology—one that says attracting the best and brightest to the “greed is good” financial industry is more important than attracting that work force to common-good endeavors.
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Good thing for that, too, as the middle and lower classes are clearly still feeling the fallout from Wall Street bandits’ fraudulent scheming. Here, Taibbi names some names and tells Amy Goodman how the architects of our current economic catastrophe got away with their crime ... so far.
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Flickr / Tracy O (CC-BY-SA)
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Big banking execs on Wall Street might have noticed a slight pinch in their cash bonuses last year, but that doesn’t mean those clever business minds didn’t find a way to make up for it through other financial channels.
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By Amy Goodman — As many as 80,000 people marched to the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison on Saturday as part of an ongoing protest against newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to not just badger the state’s public employee unions, but to break them.
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By David Sirota — The Great Paradox—that is what future generations will likely call this era, and rightly so.
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nosha (CC-BY-SA)
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Critics of the financial chop shop, of which there are many, would like to see Goldman Sachs return billions in taxpayer dollars paid out to cover a $20 million bet. The huge payout was passed through AIG, orchestrated by then-Chairman Timothy Geithner’s New York Fed, and publicized by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
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Given the outsourcing, the massive bailout, the abandoned houses and the rest of the city’s emotional baggage, it was sort of inevitable that Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” ad, featuring Eminem and spanning roughly $12 million worth of airtime, would elicit cheers and jeers from Congress.
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Flickr / Michael Gray (CC-BY-SA)
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Bank of America has reported its second straight quarterly loss, $1.2 billion for the last three months of 2010 after a devaluation of its mortgage business.
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By Joe Conason — In their ideological zeal, the new Republicans on Capitol Hill seem eager to gamble everything—even the chance of a worldwide depression—on a showdown over the national debt ceiling.
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Flickr / Nick Bygon (CC-BY)
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By Chris Hedges — “The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes,” Ralph Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on Sunday.
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By David Sirota — If you’ve turned on the tube these last few weeks, you’ve probably been a collateral casualty of the biggest televisual war of attrition in recent memory.
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AP / Fradioon Pooya
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By Robert Scheer — One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Richard Reeves — I doubt that President Obama is about to sit down at the end of this year and tell Oprah Winfrey that he is giving himself a B-plus as he did just a year ago.
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AP / Daniel Roland
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Despite sounding more like an arcade than a currency oversight organization, European Union leaders have agreed to set up an official bailout fund for eurozone members as soon as 2013, doing “whatever is required” to defend the beleaguered currency.
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Wikimedia Commons / Robert Mihaly (CC-BY-SA)
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Thanks to Bernie Sanders and the new financial regulation passed by Congress, we’re learning more about the Federal Reserve’s $3.3 trillion bailout of Wall Street in 2008. It turns out the Fed lent money ... (more)
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Wikimedia Commons
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Iceland’s President Olafur Grimsson, surveying the global financial mess, including the pending $112 billion bailout of Ireland’s shaky banking sector, can gloat a bit. His country, he says, is in better shape because it let private banks fail two years ago.
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AP / Seth Wenig
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By Robert Scheer — Welcome to the brave new world of post-bailout capitalism. The Commerce Department announced Tuesday that corporate profits are at their highest level in U.S. history, and the Fed released minutes of an early November meeting in which officials predicted a stagnant economy and continued high unemployment.
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Riber Hansson, Cagle Cartoons, Sweden —
Posted on Nov 19, 2010
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AP / Peter Morrison
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Although it may sound like a delicious alcoholic beverage rather than a $50 billion rescue of Ireland’s capitalist apparatus, an Irish bailout by the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank is being discussed as the island country reels from debt and failed banks.
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By David Sirota — What would happen if the criminals who destroyed the economy were thrown in jail—or the electric chair? We’ll never know.
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Arctic Tundra ‘Will Turn to Forest’
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