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By Reese Erlich
$14.95
By Chris Hedges
$17
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AP photo / Kiichiro Sato, file
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By Chris Hedges — The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess, if he does not radically redirect the nation’s resources to assist the working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country.
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signonsandiego.com
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Maybe it was the past eight years, or maybe it was the past three months, but a new report by the U.S. intelligence community estimates that American global power is on the decline, and will be for the next two decades as upcoming powers like China and India gain greater international standing.
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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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Flickr / Brave New Films
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By Marie Cocco — The giant discounter is the only store where hard-squeezed consumers can afford to buy anything, and so it has kept posting sales gains amid the retail bloodbath.
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stopthewall.org
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It’s been only about a week since Israel closed the border into the Gaza Strip, denying the occupied territory humanitarian supplies and fuel and even blocking journalists, but the UK-based aid group Oxfam is already warning that Gaza “faces disaster” if the blockade is not immediately broken.
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imdb.com
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Here’s a solution to the energy crisis Americans are sure to love: A company called Geoplasma is building a plant in Florida that will vaporize garbage with a plasma torch, turning 1,500 tons of waste into 60 megawatts of the good stuff. It may not be as clean as solar, but hey, America is the Saudi Arabia of trash.
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wfxl.com
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As if to prevent surplus national exuberance over the electoral defeat of John McCain on Tuesday, the Labor Department announced that the country’s unemployment rate has hit a 14-year high of 6.5 percent, with 240,000 jobs lost in October as joblessness continues to increase in the face of economic turmoil.
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World Economic Forum
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While many of us are still celebrating Barack Obama’s historic victory, rumors of a major buzzkill are flying: Lawrence Summers, a Clinton-era treasury secretary and deregulation enthusiast, is said to be the front-runner to take over the Treasury Department.
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bbc.co.uk / Kate Eshebly
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The chaos in the Democratic Republic of Congo escalated Friday as a refugee camp of 50,000 people reportedly was looted and burned, probably by Tutsi rebel groups. The violence is rooted in the colonial ethnic divisions that led to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
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While the McCain campaign is doing everything it can to distance itself from the presidency of George W. Bush, “SNL” still managed to imagine how an endorsement from the commander in chief would go, and how gosh-darn down-home a Bush/Palin administration might really have been.
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usatoday.com
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As if there was no better way to conclude the past eight years of the current administration, President Bush will host his own personalized going-away party: the world’s first “global financial summit,” where leaders will discuss the current global economic troubles and hopefully ways to prevent such crises from recurring.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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It seems like only a couple of days ago that the Dow jumped 936 points. The market went back to freaking everyone out on Wednesday, with a sobering drop of 733.08 points. Stimuli and bailouts aside, it appears that we’re in for a substantial recession.
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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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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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Wikimedia Commons / Hk1992
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Stock traders in Asia and Europe seemed to like the news that European governments will coordinate with one another as they throw cash at troubled banks. The euro zone plan was announced on the heels of similar British and American schemes.
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guardian.co.uk / Barry Batchelor
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Following the Dow’s 600-point drop, former President Jimmy Carter had some pointed words for the Bush administration on Friday, blaming the current economic crisis on the “atrocious” policies of the past eight years and declaring the economic situation to be an “entrenched problem” that will “take years to correct”.
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White House / Shealah Craighead
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, with much prodding from Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, is thinking about using some of that $700 billion to buy ownership stakes in shaky banks. The scheme would ostensibly give taxpayers a share in the fortunes of the bailed-out institutions.
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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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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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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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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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AP photo / Reed Saxon
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The tanking economy is screwing over citizens both as homeowners and voters. The past two years have seen more than 1 million people lose their homes through foreclosure, and November’s election may see the same people also disqualified from voting due to election laws requiring official notification of voters’ new addresses.
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propublica.org
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Assuming the administration’s $700-billion scheme is approved, the total price tag for bailouts this year—including Bear Stearns, AIG and Freddie and Fannie—will be roughly three times greater than all other U.S. bailouts ever. Because $1.015 trillion is a hard figure to wrap one’s head around, ProPublica puts the numbers in perspective.
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Flickr / jurvetson
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Nancy Pelosi isn’t buying into the idea of a $700 billion gift basket for Wall Street without any strings attached. The House speaker is all for a bailout, so long as it’s clear that “the party is over for the Bush administration’s anything goes, failed economic policies.” Update 2
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AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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If you thought the Iraq war was expensive, the Bush administration is also throwing an estimated $1-trillion bailout of major finance firms to prevent a meltdown of the U.S. economy. President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined such a “bold approach” Friday morning, yet detailed plans still remain forthcoming.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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President Bush had been laying low over recent days, but it seems his inner circle considered it prudent to trot him out for a brief appearance at the White House. He surfaced on Thursday to speak vaguely about the snowballing economic crisis on Wall Street before disappearing once again.
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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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AP photo / Douglas Healey
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By Robert Scheer — Gag me with a spoon, as Valley girls used to say. Did you see that McCain-Palin ad promising “tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings, no special interest giveaways”? Just how dumb do they think we are?
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Financial columnist Paul Krugman, trying to make sense of the Lehman Brothers debacle, warns that “the defenses set up to prevent a return of those bank runs, mainly deposit insurance and access to credit lines with the Federal Reserve, only protect the guys in the marble buildings, who aren’t at the heart of the current crisis. That creates the real possibility that 2008 could be 1931 revisited.”
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In “One Minute to Midnight,” Michael Dobbs’ definitive book on the 1962 crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, the question of lessons learned and unlearned remains as acute as ever.
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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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treehugger.com
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While environmentalists and opponents of foreign oil may have found common cause in the use of biofuels, a new, confidential World Bank report estimates that the recent increase in plant-based fuel production has actually contributed to a 75 percent rise in global food prices, sparking riots across the world and pushing millions beneath the poverty line.
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Nerilicon, CagleCartoons.com, Mexico City —
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independent.com
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Critics and challengers of Naomi Klein’s work had better take a close look at her latest book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” before launching their attacks. This is one writer whose research and documentation are so exhaustive that would-be detractors will not only find her analysis to be dauntingly watertight, even if they don’t share her views about the unnatural disasters enabled by free-market capitalism, but they might also discover that some of her source material seems strangely familiar.
Transcript available here.
Posted on Jun 30, 2008
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independent.com
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By Kasia Anderson — Critics and challengers of Naomi Klein’s work had better take a close look at her latest book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” before launching their attacks.
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broadcatching.wordpress.com
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Seems like everything is a crisis these days, what with the subprime mortgage crisis, the oil crisis and, perhaps most troubling of all, the climate change crisis. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledged the complexity and interconnectedness of these unsettling trends Tuesday, stopping short of declaring that a major recession is on the way but without ruling out a recession of lesser magnitude.
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Arcadio Esquivel, Cagle Cartoons, La Prensa, Panama —
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By William Pfaff — The Italian-Canadian chief executive of Fiat, the leading Italian industrial enterprise, Sergio Marchionne, speaking about the present economic crisis last weekend, mentioned the well-known argument first made by the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter about the function of “creative destruction” in modern capitalism.
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Clinton enthusiast James Carville tells CNN that Barack Obama should select Al Gore as his vice president candidate and energy czar in order to “send a signal to the world ... that America’s gettin’ serious about this horrendous problem that we face.”
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Flickr / mattdente
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Humankind’s steady migration from fields to cities may have to take a slight detour. There are a lot of people in the world now and feeding them is becoming a problem. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told world leaders we face a “historic opportunity to revitalize agriculture,” warning that production would have to go up by 50 percent over the next 20 or so years.
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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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AP photo / Hasan Jamali
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The Lebanese government and the Hezbollah opposition group came to a power-sharing agreement Wednesday, potentially marking the end to the country’s two-year-old political crisis, which only weeks ago erupted in clashes that left 65 people dead. The move, which some analysts say may benefit Hezbollah more than the Western-backed government, has been hailed by the parties directly involved and others, including the U.S. as well.
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Flickr / sfadden
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Leading senators think they have made a bipartisan breakthrough on legislation aimed at the mortgage crisis. A parallel effort in the House met with Republican opposition, and it’s not entirely clear where President Bush and his veto pen stand on the matter.
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Flickr / feverblue
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The plight of the polar bear has come to represent the real-world impact of the climate crisis, so it is only fitting that the Bush administration had to be ordered by a court to make a decision on the endangered status of the species. After years of delay, the Interior Department finally classified the animal as threatened, but also promised to fight any meaningful protection.
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AP photo
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As more details of the devastation left by Cyclone Nargis in Burma emerge, it’s becoming clear that the storm is one of the worst disasters in years. The Burmese government is being criticized for responding inadequately and too slowly to the crisis, and President Bush, himself no stranger to this kind of criticism, is calling on Burma’s “military junta ... [to] allow our disaster assessment teams into the country” in order to help.
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By Amy Goodman — Food riots are erupting around the world. Behind the hunger, behind the riots, are so-called free-trade agreements, and the brutal emergency-loan agreements imposed on poor countries by financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund.
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Flickr / Kiwi NZ
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From the L.A. Times: “In what appears to be the latest symptom of the nation’s mortgage meltdown and credit crisis, insurers, law enforcement officials and state agencies nationwide report a jump in home and automobile fires in the last year believed to have been set by owners unable to pay their debts.”
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