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By Jabari Asim
$4.95
By Abraham H. Foxman
$24.95
$23
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Flickr / jpellgen
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After the Dow’s freaky dip last week, Monday’s news that the U.S. stock market was closing in on its biggest day in terms of gains this year might just boost some spirits on and off the trading floor.
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
Finance ministers from 16 EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.
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Flickr / Center for the Study of Ethics
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Bob Bennett, three-term Republican senator from Utah, has been ousted from running for re-election by the conservative tea party movement after he was deemed unfit (he supported health care reform). Bennett came in third at the state Republican convention in Salt Lake City.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Ever heard the one about the guy who hated government until a deregulated Wall Street crashed, an oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, a coal mine collapsed, and some good police work stopped a terrorist attack?
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Flickr / david.nikonvscanon (CC-BY)
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Danny Schechter’s new movie, “Plunder: The Crime of Our Time,” tells the story of the economic collapse as “a crime narrative as opposed to a mistakes narrative.”
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Flickr / david.nikonvscanon (CC-BY)
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Danny Schechter’s new movie, “Plunder: The Crime of Our Time,” tells the story of the economic collapse as “a crime narrative as opposed to a mistakes narrative.”
Posted on May 5, 2010
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By William Pfaff — The present crisis of the European Union was inherent in the creation of the institution itself.
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Flickr / Andres Rueda (CC-BY-ND)
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The once-mighty euro, a currency that humbled American tourists in its day, has sunk to a 13-month low against the dollar. Greece’s impending bailout apparently isn’t settling nerves in the eurozone, which includes other major economies that look a little wobbly as of late.
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youtube.com
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Thousands of angry Greeks took to the streets on May Day, protesting a wave of wage cuts, tax increases and pension reductions implemented to deal with the country’s growing debt crisis.
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By Joe Conason — Discredited as the financial powers are, their wealth alone continues to provide them with wildly disproportionate influence over the political process.
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Step right up and you’ll see spectacles that will amaze from Tuesday’s face-off between senators and Goldman Sachs boss men, such as the awesome Fabrice Tourre denying “categorically” that he misled clients by selling them mysterious bundled financial entities tied to doomed mortgages.
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Flickr / The Truth About Credit Cards
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President Obama and his allies won’t have an easy time as they attempt to do some major renovations of our financial system, but according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, they at least have the support of the majority of Americans.
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By Chris Hedges — The difference between the tea party and the secessionist movement bubbling up in some two dozen states is that the tea party believes America can be fixed.
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By Eugene Robinson — Perhaps Obama could have scored more popularity points if he had ordered a few financiers to be led out of the Cooper Union auditorium in handcuffs.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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President Obama spoke before a group of fat cats—or rather, “titans of industry,” as he called them—from Wall Street on Thursday at Cooper Union in New York City, the same site where he’d delivered his pre-bailout, pre-presidential speech on the economy two years ago, in an attempt ... (continued)
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Wikimedia Commons / U.S. Congress
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Financial reform is the next big task on Congress’ list of action items, and on Wednesday the Senate Agriculture Committee made progress by approving a bill by committee Chair Blanche Lincoln that targets the derivatives market. (continued)
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AP / Andy Blenkush
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By Moshe Adler — Why should a poor borrower be held more responsible than a rich borrower for the default of another poor borrower?
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Congressional Republicans are mobilizing for an assault on President Obama’s next regulatory project: financial reform. However, Obama’s not hearing it when it comes to the GOP’s claim that the Democrats’ current bill would make it easier for big financial institutions to angle for government bailouts down the line.
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By Chris Hedges — Ernest Logan Bell, a 25-year-old Marine Corps veteran walking 90 miles to make a point, is the new face of the resistance. He is young, at home in the culture of the military, deeply suspicious of the federal government, disgusted by the liberal elite, unable to find work and angry.
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Flickr / U-g-g-B-o-y-(-Photograph-World-Sense-)
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The 16 nations that use the euro have just revealed an aid package of up to $40 billion in an effort to stem the Greek financial crisis. Finance ministers see the offer as a “step of clarification” for markets and a boost for the faltering euro.
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Let us stop to collectively mourn a new figure from The New York Times: Chief executives in the United States’ largest publicly traded companies found that their compensation dropped 15 percent in 2009, hitting bourgeois rock bottom at a measly $9.53 million yearly average.
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Why is America so deeply polarized, politically speaking? This week’s episode of “Left, Right & Center” finds Robert Scheer and Tony Blankley discussing the partisan divisions in the country and agreeing at least on the point that those rifts have never been this deep. But why is there so much anger?
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By David Sirota — Even as the word progressive is now ubiquitous, a perverted form of liberalism has almost completely snuffed out genuine progressivism.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Chris Hedges — As politicians go, Rep. Dennis Kucinich is about as good as they get, but he is still a politician. And so he signed on to a bill that will do nothing to ameliorate the suffering of many Americans, will force tens of millions of people to fork over a lot of money for a defective product and, in the end, will add to the ranks of our uninsured.
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Flickr / eflon
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Coming only a year too late to the party, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has asserted that regulators must be “significantly tougher” on the large financial firms, arguing that the perception of those institutions as “too big to fail” threatens competition in the financial markets.
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AP / Petros Giannakouris
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In an effort to save the Greek economy, and by extension the euro itself, eurozone countries—the 16 European Union states that use the common currency—have agreed on a multibillion-euro bailout that also will impose financial austerity measures on Greece.
Posted on Mar 12, 2010
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AP / Harry Hamburg
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By Robert Scheer — How convenient that seemingly everyone in the liberal blogosphere, and even at many points to the right, got to use Jim Bunning as a scapegoat. The venom of the attacks suggests that the maverick Republican senator from Kentucky provided a welcome alternative to the real villains: bankers much closer to the centers of power.
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Wikimedia Commons / Federal Reserve
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The Federal Reserve’s vice chairman, Donald L. Kohn, is ready to leave the building. Providing what could be a substantial opportunity for the Obama administration to change the central bank’s course, Kohn announced Monday that he’ll retire June 23, the official end date of his four-year term at the Fed.
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
Posted on Feb 26, 2010
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AP / Evan Vucci
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By Robert Scheer — They do have a license to steal. There is no other way to read Tuesday’s report from the New York state comptroller that bonuses for Wall Street financiers rose 17 percent to $20.3 billion in 2009. Of course that is less than the $32.9 billion for bonus rewards back in 2007, when those hotshots could still pretend that they were running sound businesses.
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Flickr/richardefreeman
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It seems that the romantic notion of cutting back on executives’ astronomical salaries, especially execs at corporations that benefited from government funding, hasn’t exactly caught on like wildfire in the American auto business. Take General Motors, for example.
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AP / Jack Plunkett
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Authorities continue to investigate why Joe Stack of Texas flew his small airplane into the Austin offices of the IRS, but based on early reports and a tirade the attacker posted on the Internet, it had something to do with taxes, big government, corporate crime and bailouts. (continued)
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AP / Petros Giannakouris
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By Robert Scheer — “What is this Goldman Sachs and why has it caused us so much grief?” is a question they must be asking in even the most remote of Greek villages, as they are throughout much of this economically troubled world.
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By Amy Goodman — President Obama’s publicly financed resuscitation of the nuclear power industry in the U.S. is bound to fail, another taxpayer bailout waiting to happen.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The ferocity of the tea party movement’s opposition to President Obama is mystifying to political progressives. Most of the left simply doesn’t see the current occupant of the White House as especially liberal, let alone “socialist.”
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Wikimedia Commons / Prolineserver
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There are few things, we imagine, that could elicit a heartfelt OMG (make that O.M.G., rather) from certified economics whiz and evident adult Paul Krugman, but President Barack Obama’s latest take on the egregious and profane bonuses of Wall Street executives has clearly tripped that wire in Krugman’s mind.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — “Buyer’s remorse” is the way Sen. John Cornyn, the Senate Republicans’ fundraiser, gleefully refers to Wall Street moguls’ current disenchantment with the U.S. president they thought they had bought.
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U.S. Department of State
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John Thain is back. The ex-CEO of Merrill Lynch, who also once held top posts at Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange, has returned to the Wall Street fold, this time as chairman and CEO of the CIT Group. However, this time, one imagines, he won’t have a $35K commode at his disposal.
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The creator of “iBailout!!” says he wants to put his socially conscious games in front of a mainstream audience that might not normally engage with politics and activism.
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Nick Marroni says, “My goal is to make games that have social and political relevance.” To that end he has created a satirical iPhone game called “iBailout!!” You play as the “Fed,” a robot that eats money. Just don’t let the angry mob get you.
Posted on Feb 4, 2010
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By Joe Conason — The most revealing moments in President Obama’s State of the Union address were not in his remarks, but the reaction to them by those listening on the Republican side of the aisle.
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Eliot Spitzer is attempting to work his way back into the public’s good graces, and the former New York governor braved “The Colbert Report” on Tuesday night, only to be roundly “condemned” by Stephen Colbert. However, Spitzer has a certain likability, Colbert admitted, which might have something to do with having nothing to hide anymore. (continued)
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youtube.com
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Turns out that Barack Obama’s extemporaneous critique of the Supreme Court during his State of the Union speech Wednesday wasn’t the only such (apparently) unscripted moment he’d spend this week. On Friday, the president engaged in a frank exchange with Republican House members at a retreat in Baltimore, where he ... (continued)
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Bill Boyarsky — Words won’t put people to work. Not even Obama’s eloquence—and he did reach that point on occasion—will be enough to inject courage into the gutless Democrats running from a mild heath care reform bill. Nor will words turn Republicans away from the unrelenting opposition they think will bring down the Democrats.
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White House / Pete Souza
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It was his third address to a joint session of Congress in less than a year, and it had all the usual gestures toward bipartisanship, but Barack Obama’s big speech was not without sizzle. The president shamed Republicans for obstructing, Democrats for giving up and the Supreme Court for auctioning off our democracy.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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By Robert Scheer — The state of the union is just miserable, no matter how President Obama sugarcoats it. He will claim that progress has been made in stabilizing the markets, increasing national security and advancing toward meaningful health care reform, but he will be wrong on all three counts.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The only proper response to the distortion of our political system by ideologically driven justices is a popular revolt of a sort deeply rooted in the American political tradition.
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AP / Wong Maye-E
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President Barack Obama might have done well to keep former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in closer reach during his first year of office rather than rely on the dubious advice of Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers. Too late for that—but hopefully not too late for Volcker to help the president in his future dealings with Wall Street.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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