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By Sheldon S. Wolin
$19.77
By Sheldon S. Wolin
$40
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By Marie Cocco — At the earliest, it is likely to be at least February or March before the first dollar of an Obama recovery plan is felt. This is a national disgrace.
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timesonline.com
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Barack Obama’s economy-oriented speaking spree continued on Tuesday, with a third speech planned for Wednesday. Tuesday’s talk focused on eliminating federal budget waste and introducing new additions to his economic team.
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By David Sirota — If you’re having trouble remembering what the recent election was all about, rest easy: You’re probably not going senile – you’re likely experiencing the momentary effects of brainwashing.
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U.S. Navy / Petty Officer 3rd Class Josue L. Escobosa
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The Defense Business Board, an official oversight body appointed by the secretary of defense, has warned the president-elect that the Pentagon’s bloated budget ($512 billion this year, not including war costs) is “not sustainable.” An unprecedented spending spree since 9/11 has run head-on into a financial meltdown, and Barack Obama is now stuck in the middle.
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By Marie Cocco — Republicans will try to tie memories of Jimmy Carter to the new Democratic president by conjuring up disturbing visions of policy failure and “malaise.”
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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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By Eugene Robinson — Can any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?
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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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California Governor's Office
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Tight credit has put California’s state budget into a bit of a pickle, with funding for the government’s day-to-day operations drying up faster than Sarah Palin’s popularity. A sign of trouble is a letter—leaked Friday—from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that warned of a potential emergency request for a $7-billion loan within the coming weeks.
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By Joe Conason — Before this is over, we will need a special prosecutor with an ample budget to find, prosecute and imprison the criminals responsible for this disaster and ultimately deter such criminals in the future.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Unless something very strange happens, Congress will pass a massive bailout of the financial system by the end of this week simply because every other option is worse. But the content of the bailout package matters enormously.
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By Marie Cocco — Obama shows more promise than McCain, if only because he correctly sees deregulatory zeal as a culprit. But Obama’s economic strategy simply can’t be implemented now: He wants to spend on necessary investments such as health care, but would have no money to do it.
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By Joe Conason — Even cursory examination shows that Sarah Palin’s posturing is wildly exaggerated and her campaign claims veer toward fraud.
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AP photo / Washingtonpost.com
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As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, now the mother of a pregnant teen, cut state funds that would have helped house and support teenage mothers. This on top of the news that both Palin and John McCain have opposed teen pregnancy prevention programs.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Although it’s currently the Democrats’ turn in the spotlight, California’s Republican governor stole a few headlines Thursday with the news that he may skip his party’s convention next week. The Golden State is still trying to work through a budget stalemate, and it just wouldn’t do to have the star governor basking in the warmth of Republican love while his state is in fiscal turmoil.
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flickr.com/terrapin_flyer
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Although this might strike the kids involved as a good deal, it’s a definite sign of the times for the adults: A rural Minnesota school district has decided to strike Mondays from the calendar this fall in order to save money, making classes slightly longer on other days to make up the lost time.
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A congressional report has found that the Iraqi government will soon have a $79-billion surplus, thanks to the record price of oil. It’s a figure that will surely raise eyebrows as the U.S. shells out an additional $48 billion for reconstruction, but the situation, like all things involving billions and bombs, is a lot more complicated.
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joystiq.com
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Amid a state budget standoff, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered that some 200,000 state workers receive only the federal minimum wage. That’s a $1.45-per-hour cut from California’s minimum wage. But the man who issues the checks, the state controller, says he will refuse to follow the order and, if necessary, will borrow funds to maintain present pay rates.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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George W. Bush rode into office with a budget surplus, courtesy of his predecessor. When he leaves in January, he will not return the favor. The White House estimated the budget deficit for next year at a record $482 billion—and that doesn’t include the full cost of two wars, the potential bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the full stimulus package or the loss of tax revenue from an economy in the toilet.
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The independent Congressional Budget Office has announced the expected federal taxpayer bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will appear as a $25 billion budget expense, but that the real bill could be anywhere from zero to $100 billion. This, even though the once-governmental agencies were formally privatized in 1968.
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By Marie Cocco — Phil Gramm’s dismissal of America’s economic suffering has forced him to the political sidelines, but as one of the congressional architects of Republican economics, the mess he made will haunt Americans no matter who the next president is.
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Flickr / h-angele
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According to Mikhail Gorbachev, John McCain and Barack Obama have more in common than they’d like to admit. Both have refused to address their country’s unprecedented military spending, which the former Soviet leader blames for America’s economic woes. Writing in a Russian newspaper, Gorbachev argued that the U.S. behaves “as if the Cold War were not a thing of the past, and the country were surrounded by enemies.”
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Flickr / jslander
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Starting with 2009 models, new cars in California will sport a sticker that rates just how environmentally friendly they are, based on emissions and fuel economy. Not to be outdone, the European Union might require governments to monetize and budget for emissions.
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The evidence collected from rape victims after they’ve been assaulted goes into something called a rape kit. It’s the product of a lengthy and uncomfortable examination process that, according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, far too often leads to nothing. Some 400,000 rape kits are sitting in storage, untested, right now.
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joezuikerforcongress.com
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Pork, as in earmarks, not as in pig, is again in vogue this political season only a year after a 2007 congressional promise to curb what some call wasteful spending in politicians’ home districts. At the top of the earmarking ladder is the defense authorization bill (read military-industrial complex), which saw a 29 percent increase in district spending since 2007.
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By Marie Cocco — In 225 days, at least one high-ranking politician will become unemployed. How many will join President Bush in retirement?
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AP photo / LM Otero
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By Robert Scheer — What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II?
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Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the privatization of the military and the surge in defense spending since 9/11, individual Pentagon auditors now have to keep track of more than three times as much money as they did 10 years ago. Because of limited resources, the Defense Department inspector general revealed in a recent report, about half of the military’s $316 billion weapons budget went under the radar last year.
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Flickr / Jeff Keen
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For the working poor who depend on food stamps to feed their families, it’s hard enough keeping up with inflation, let alone the steep price of food these days. Even in the richest country on Earth, the cost of basic foods has a huge impact on families that count every dollar, and benefits simply aren’t keeping pace.
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Flickr / LHOON
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Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agree on many issues, but it’s a bit surprising to see two candidates who’ve talked so much about the climate crisis and a new green economy tout their love of coal. Obama has an ad up in Kentucky that claims “Barack understands” the plight of the coal industry, while Clinton has promised voters in the state she would put more money into coal programs.
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By David Sirota — Congress is ravaged by a disease inside the Washington Beltway inhibiting emotions like compassion and integrity. As the housing crisis intensifies, this malady is getting worse.
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By Marie Cocco — Fittingly, and with dreadful predictability, John McCain used April 15—tax day—as the day to release his economic plan. Fittingly, and with dreadful predictability, it offers more of the same. But more of the same what?
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Flickr / Kevindooley
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By James Harris — Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes speaks about the book on the Iraq war’s costs that she wrote with Joseph Stiglitz. The two former Truthdiggers of the Week have been working hard to uncover even more hidden expenses for the war, which they estimate will cost the taxpayers and their children trillions of dollars.
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We’ve all heard of Publishers Clearing House, but this is a whole new ballgame, people. Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films team has come up with a game that offers each player the fictional (sigh) amount of $3 trillion, the same amount the Iraq war is projected to cost the U.S., and a whole virtual mall’s worth of fun “shopping” items to buy.
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blogspot.com
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After two months and 261 rounds of bidding, the FCC announced Tuesday that it has raised a total of $19.6 billion from the sale of the U.S. wireless spectrum. The revenue, slated to fund “public safety and digital television transition initiatives,” is nearly double what Congress had previously estimated for the publicly owned spectrum.
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By Marie Cocco — The overdose of Reagan nostalgia to which we’ve been subjected during the Republican presidential primaries is as understandable as it is misplaced.
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aoc.gov
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All three presidential candidates are scheduled to be back in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. A Republican senator has proposed a yearlong ban on earmarks and, shocking though it may seem, John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are apparently on board with the idea. Their colleagues in the Senate, however, are somewhat less enthusiastic.
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flickr.com
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So much for the “war on crime”: According to a new report from the Pew Center on the States, 1 in 100 American adults is now in jail. The report states that “current prison growth is not driven primarily by a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the population at large”; instead, “it flows principally from a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and ... keeping them there longer.”
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — As Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain twisted briefly in the wind kicked up by that New York Times story suggesting he had swapped political favors for the personal favors of an attractive lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, I kept waiting for the public policy punch line.
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By Joe Conason — As a presidential candidate, John McCain stands out not only for his vocal endorsement of the unpopular war in Iraq, but also because one of his own sons is a Marine Corps officer on active duty there.
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By Marie Cocco — The president and other fear mongers love to harangue Americans with the specter of terrorism when their pet projects (and our freedoms) are on the line, but when it comes to the basic programs that protect us from disaster, money talks louder than threats.
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By Marie Cocco — Bush may be a lame duck, but he’s also a president who has shown an unparalleled capacity to blow it.
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By Marie Cocco — House Republicans were able to keep an extension of unemployment benefits out of the recently announced stimulus package, which is too bad, since it’s one measure that would actually help the ailing economy.
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By Chalmers Johnson — A powerful new book by a young South Korean-born economist at Cambridge University provides a compelling critique of the contradictions and hypocrisies of globalization and neoliberalism. The perfect antidote to the nostrums of Thomas Friedman.
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overspun.com
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President Bush’s new budget will not fully fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, the White House plans to ask for “bridge” funds—enough to pay for the wars until the next president takes over. Though no official figure has been given, congressional estimates put the amount at less than half of what we spend on the wars in a year.
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cnn.com
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The House has followed in the wake of the Senate, saying yes to $70 billion in funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-war Democrats have had little success overcoming Republican filibusters and a publicity blitz meant to sell the “surge.”
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whitehouse.org
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Twenty-one Senate Democrats, Joe Lieberman and all but one Republican just approved $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democrats had tried for weeks to tie funding for the wars to a withdrawal plan, but in the end the president got his way.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Imagine a place where the leading politician pokes fun at those who “regard all taxes as a pestilence, a plague or a disease.” Imagine the same politician saying: “Not one of us wants to pay more in taxes. But you know what we want even less? What we want even less is to leave our country to our kids in a worsened condition.”
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — What can you get for a trillion bucks? Or make that $1.6 trillion, if you take the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as tallied by the majority staff of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee. Or is it the $3.5-trillion figure cited by Paul, whose concern about the true cost of this war for ordinary Americans shames the leading Democrats?
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