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By Ben Bagdikian
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By Linda Gray Sexton
$15.98
$18
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Check out the most recent “Morning Review Friday with Roy Ulrich,” where UC Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses Proposition 8’s current legal status, and Truthdig’s own Titus Levi engages in a fruitful debate on the virtues and pitfalls of a bailout of the auto industry in Detroit with the Cato Institute’s Dan Ikenson.
Posted on Nov 21, 2008
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By Eugene Robinson — The Big Three left Capitol Hill empty-handed, but they’re bound to get some kind of federal help, however grudging. In the end, I don’t think either George W. Bush or Barack Obama wants to be remembered as the president who lost the auto industry.
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AP photo / Carlos Osorio
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By Bill Boyarsky — If jobs weren’t disappearing and a depression threatening, it would be easy and satisfying to send the American auto industry into bankruptcy or liquidation. But this isn’t the time to make Chrysler, General Motors and Ford pay for their years of failure and shortsightedness.
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AP photo / Carlos Osorio
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By Titus Levi — There’s no guarantee that a bailout would save the incompetently managed American automobile industry. However, doing nothing may be worse, especially for the state of Michigan.
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washingtonpost.com
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Republican Sen. Richard Shelby seems to be one of the only real capitalists left on Capitol Hill. The Alabaman argued Wednesday that U.S. auto firms should be left to the realities of the market, letting companies like Ford, GM and Chrysler go bankrupt and forcing the failing industry to carry out what Shelby believes are much-needed reforms.
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On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke faced a lineup of vexed, perplexed and otherwise agitated members of Congress, including Reps. Barney Frank, Ron Paul and Nydia Velazquez, all eager to ask some serious questions about the infamous bailout.
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Flickr / SteelCityHobbies
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The chief executives of the Big Three American car companies head to Washington Tuesday along with the head of the United Auto Workers to beg Congress for a bailout that seems less and less probable.
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It’s clear from this monologue by Rep. Elijah Cummings that, when he wonders aloud if Neel Kashkari is a “chump” for enabling companies like AIG to hand out huge executive bonuses while seeking federal bailout money, Cummings already knows the answer.
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What’s to be done to pull the U.S. out of economic quicksand? You can bet that “Left, Right & Center” stalwarts Robert Scheer, Tony Blankley and Matt Miller might differ in their takes on this question, as well as others posed on this week’s show.
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Collage: Meutia Chaerani / Indradi Soemardjan and Shealah Craighead / White House
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“I will never apologize for changing a strategy or an approach if the facts change,” explained Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who has retreated from his original plan of buying up near-worthless mortgage securities with taxpayer funds. Instead, Paulson will continue to pump money into troubled banks in exchange for equity, a scheme that has proved more expeditious and popular.
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AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Perhaps we should be more surprised than we are by the news that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his DOT crew managed to sneak a handful of sentences into the approved bailout bill that amounted to a $150-billion “quiet windfall” for American banks, as The Washington Post put it.
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AP photo / Jose Luis Magana
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By Chris Hedges — Tomorrow I will go to a polling station in Princeton, N.J., and vote for Ralph Nader. I know the tired arguments against a Nader vote. But there is little disagreement among liberals and progressives about the Nader and Obama campaign issues. Nader would win among us in a landslide if this was based on issues.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — A good politician triumphs by adapting to the times and taking advantage of opportunities as they come. A great politician anticipates openings others don’t see and creates possibilities that were not there before.
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us.penguingroup.com
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An insightful book discloses how a confidence game combined pride and cunning and stupidity to bring America to the brink of catastrophe.
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By David Sirota — John McCain and Barack Obama have made the race’s final weeks an ideological proxy war between two presidential icons who still loom larger than them: Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt.
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By David Sirota — Is John McCain stupid, or does he believe we are? That’s the question as he criticizes Barack Obama for allegedly trying to “redistribute the wealth” with a plan to lower taxes on the middle class and raise them on the super-rich.
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AP photo / Chris Carlson
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By Robert Scheer — Instead of running with the “European socialist” crowd, as John McCain has claimed, Barack Obama has turned to the same American “free market” elite that views government as merely a corporate subsidiary. Even within that group, however, there are serious splits, and the more enlightened side seems to be winning.
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andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
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The New York Times’ conservative stalwart William Kristol should receive some kind of award for being wrong with such baffling consistency while still retaining his job. Not only has he been credited (if that’s the right word) with steering John McCain toward picking Sarah Palin and waving his proverbial pompoms for the Iraq invasion, but he has just let fly with another doozy in his latest column.
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AP photo / Henny Ray Abrams
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By Chris Hedges — Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of the common good.
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spiegel.de
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If you thought the United States’ $700-billion bailout would quell the global financial crisis, think again. The German parliament just approved a $675-billion bailout of Germany’s financial markets, a plan that is part of a coordinated European response to volatile global and regional markets.
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By David Sirota — No Republican says aristocrat like Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon. And no Senate election could more intensely shift economic politics than his state’s.
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listphile.com
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It would seem imprudent, given the government’s recent and unprecedented bailout of companies such as insurance giant AIG, for the likes of AIG to even entertain the idea of hefty executive payouts.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Titus Levi — Wall Street has yet to recover after the economic shocks of recent weeks. Why? Two problems. One we already know: The “plan,” even with revisions, is deeply flawed. The second problem has not been mentioned all that much because it’s pretty scary: Put simply, we have no idea what we’re doing.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — And the winner is … Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Remember him—the great Democratic president who saved capitalism from the capitalists by reining in their exorbitant greed? Forget the Reagan Revolution heralding a new era of small government, which turned out to be nothing more than a fig leaf for legalized corporate crime. The hero of the hour is FDR.
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lasvegasvegas.com
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What would Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider from Oliver Stone’s 1987 classic cautionary tale “Wall Street,” have to say about the current state of the American economy? Well, we just might find out.
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group30.org
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Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said Tuesday that the U.S. was already in a recession, despite the efforts of the U.S. government and other nations’ leaders to intervene. “I have seen a lot of crises but I have never seen anything quite like this one,” said Volcker, who headed up the Fed for eight years before Alan Greenspan took over in 1987.
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Flickr / soggydan
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John McCain has laid out his plan for how he would help Americans recover from the recent shocks to the domestic and international markets. He took the action on Tuesday, a day later than he initially said he would and a day after Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama released his own economic plan—and McCain’s timing was not lost on the Obama campaign.
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Wikimedia Commons / Asymptote Architecture
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The Dow shot up more than 900 points Monday after nations around the world pitched into the effort to resuscitate the dangerously flagging global marketplace by announcing their own rescue plans.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Each campaign has given voters ample notice about the inclinations, temperaments, habits, philosophical leanings and advisers they would bring to the White House. That’s enough.
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By David Sirota — Is Henry Paulson a crony communist or a businessman? The answer could be the difference between economic disaster and recovery.
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During a sit-down interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson that aired on Wednesday, Barack Obama talked about the economy and how he’d lead differently from President Bush before addressing the McCain-Palin campaign’s ramped-up attacks of late. “All these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points,” Obama told Gibson.
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By Marie Cocco — In the second presidential debate, the questioners seemed to understand better than either candidate that we are in the midst of a national emergency as grave and possibly more far-reaching than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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By Amy Goodman — The reviews are in, and the latest U.S. presidential debate, the “town hall” from Nashville, Tenn., was a snore. One problem is that in a debate it is important for the debaters to actually disagree.
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foxnews.com
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With all the negativity in the ether regarding the stability of the world economy, it’s surprising that the International Monetary Fund took so long to throw its two cents into the fray. Never the fund to disappoint, the IMF issued a report Wednesday that warns of a pending global downturn following the U.S. credit crisis, as confidence falters in finance and credit markets around the world.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Bill Boyarsky — As was the case in the first presidential debate, Barack Obama emerged from Tuesday night’s confrontation with John McCain in Nashville, Tenn., in command of the situation. The Democratic nominee looked calm, confident and presidential as he won their second contest.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George Bush would stop asking God to bless America. Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president’s evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration?
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0-60mag.com
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Sure, we’ve all heard the stories about Wall Street bigwigs lining their pockets with gold dubloons while the rest of us scramble to save pennies, but The New York Times has drawn out that contrast in graphic detail with a handy series of charts showing the total earnings (including bonuses) of 12 top executives from 2003-2007.
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World Economic Forum / Remy Steinegger
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On Monday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee took a look into the collapse of Lehman Brothers as part of a larger review of the factors leading to the current economic crisis, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Judging by the committee’s account, leaders at Lehman Bros. disregarded key warnings of impending trouble and cut hefty checks for their fellow executives even as the firm teetered on the brink of disaster.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Chris Hedges — The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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European leaders decided against a joint bailout of the Continent’s financial system, but that hasn’t stopped individual governments from trying to save failing and financially shaky institutions. The German government, which has been highly critical of U.S. economic mismanagement, just backed a $68-billion deal to save one of its biggest banks.
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In the latest edition of “Left, Right & Center,” co-commentators Matt Miller, Robert Scheer and Tony Blankley (Arianna Huffington is still at large) give their expert analyses of Thursday’s vice presidential debate, inspecting Sarah Palin’s and Joe Biden’s arguments and self-presentation styles down to the smallest detail.
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AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
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With just a month to go before the presidential election, the Obama and McCain campaigns are making some strategy changes in reaction to the seismic shifts that shook the economy over recent weeks. The forecast currently looks better, to some analysts, for Obama than McCain, but McCain’s supporters don’t see it that way.
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The New York Times / Doug Mills
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On Friday the House approved, after initially rejecting, the $700-billion bailout package for the financial industry in what is likely to be the most expensive government intervention in the nation’s history. This, of course, only slightly surpasses another notable “government intervention”—the nearly $600 billion spent in the war in Iraq.
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bls.gov
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A government report released Friday morning leaves little room for any defense of the failed policies of the Bush administration or any belief in the economic wisdom of John McCain, whose erroneous assertion that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong” failed to mention a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, up nearly two percentage points since 2007.
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By David Sirota — The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair—stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror.
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By Eugene Robinson — We all owe a debt of thanks to the skeptics who refused to be steamrollered by the Bush administration’s $700-billion financial bailout plan until we at least had some understanding of what we were doing and why.
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AP photo / Don Emmert, pool
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By Bill Boyarsky — Gov. Sarah Palin survived Thursday night’s debate, much to the disappointment of Democrats who hoped she would crumble as she did in her interview with Katie Couric. But she ducked tough questions, gave canned answers, tried to smile her way out of tough spots and cheerfully distorted Sen. Barack Obama’s record.
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How America Became a Third World Country: 2013-2023
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