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Jane M. Hightower
$16.47
By Benny Morris
$17.16
$18
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MSNBC host Chris Hayes explained on his program Thursday how the Bush administration—and specifically the former vice president’s son-in-law—played a critical role in defeating regulations that would have strengthened federal oversight of chemical plants like the one that exploded and killed 15 people in West, Texas, last week.
Posted on Apr 26, 2013
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USDAgov (CC BY 2.0)
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The Obama administration is set to dramatically reduce the USDA’s oversight of the nation’s poultry slaughterhouses while allowing companies to speed up their kill lines.
Posted on Apr 25, 2013
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AP
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By Robert Scheer — For all of the strident attacks on Stockman’s column, I have yet to read a serious critique of his most brazen claim.
Posted on Apr 2, 2013
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White House/Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary.
Posted on Jan 11, 2013
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AP/Michael S. Green
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By Robert Scheer — Where are Phil and Wendy Gramm hiding now that UBS, like Enron before it, has been nailed by the G-men?
Posted on Dec 21, 2012
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AP/Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — Reports in the business press tout a prime participant in the great banking hustle as a possible candidate to be the next Treasury secretary.
Posted on Dec 7, 2012
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AP/Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Bill Clinton bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the wild applause for his disingenuous speech at the Democratic National Convention last week is a sure sign of the poverty of what passes for progressive politics.
Posted on Sep 10, 2012
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DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt —
JPMorgan Chase is the biggest campaign donor to many of the members of the Senate Banking Committee who were charged with investigating the bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, in mid June.
Posted on Jun 21, 2012
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ssoosay (CC BY 2.0)
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Over the last decade, New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell has managed to metamorphose from a trained shill for Big Tobacco, Big Pharma and the deregulatory movement into an intellectual darling of mainstream “liberal” America. How did he do it?
Posted on Jun 21, 2012
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AP/Dima Gavrysh
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By Robert Scheer — The men most responsible for the collapse of the American dream are heaped with honors at the highest levels of society.
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Farm Sanctuary (CC-BY)
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And you thought pink slime was bad: The Obama administration is proposing to fire USDA inspectors and let the poultry industry inspect its own slaughterhouse lines—while simultaneously speeding up the kill line.
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — That Lawrence Summers and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.
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AP / NBC News / William B. Plowman
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Jack Lew is a liberal who worked for Speaker Tip O’Neill and studied under beloved progressive Sen. Paul Wellstone, but he was also the chief operating officer of a Citigroup unit and doesn’t fault deregulation for the shoddy economy. (more)
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AP / Andrew Burton
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By Robert Scheer — Funny, he doesn’t look like Marie Antoinette. But when former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller asks his readers if they are “bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,” it displays the arrogance of disoriented royal privilege.
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Flickr / lucianvenutian
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An old argument says that full or empty bellies lead to contentment or revolt. Recent research supports that claim, showing that spikes in global food prices have coincided with the surge of social unrest and political instability seen recently in North Africa and the Middle East. (more)
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Here we go again. When Bill Clinton suffered an electoral reversal after his first two years in office, he abruptly embraced the corporate money guys who had financed his congressional opposition in an effort to purchase a second term.
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We here at Truthdig know that our own Robert Scheer really wishes that he didn’t have to write his latest book “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street,” but ... (continued)
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AP / Jessica Hill
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By Robert Scheer — What is so great about our bloated federal government that when a libertarian threatens to become a senator, otherwise rational and mostly liberal pundits start frothing at the mouth? What Rand Paul thinks about the Civil Rights Act, passed 46 years ago, hardly seems the most pressing issue of social justice before us.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan faced the proverbial firing squad, or in this case the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, to answer questions Wednesday about his leadership choices at the Fed with regard to some key factors that triggered the financial implosion in 2008.
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AP / Haraz N. Ghanbari
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By Robert Scheer — Maybe I got it wrong. During the presidential campaign I wrote columns blasting Sen. John McCain for siding with the big bankers on deregulation, citing his choosing ex-Sen. Phil Gramm, currently a vice chairman of the Swiss-owned banking giant UBS, as his presidential campaign chair.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — Most Americans now know that Wall Street bankers are so greedy as to never be trusted, and I suppose it is a sign of progress that our president finally seems to grasp the obvious.
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AP / Dean Cox
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By Robert Scheer — In recent days yet another wealthy private customer of the Swiss-based banking conglomerate UBS admitted to criminal fraud in a growing parade of perp walks that could extend into the thousands. It is a case that threatens to ensnare former Sen. Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who is vice chairman of UBS’ investment banking business.
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By David Sirota — Only months after the 2008 primaries, most Americans probably don’t remember Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. But that doesn’t mean the conservative populism they championed during their campaigns is as fleeting as their dark-horse candidacies.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — We are lucky to have Barack Obama as president. I write that even though I believe the content of his Tuesday evening speech deserved no more than a B+ / A-, for its failure to seriously address the origins of the banking crisis and for only hinting at the severe military budget cuts required to get close to his goal of reducing the federal deficit by the end of his first term.
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White House / Paul Morse / Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — Congressional Republicans, with the exception of that embarrassingly shrunken contingent of three moderates, will rue their legacy of deep indifference at a time of true national emergency, one that makes George W. Bush’s far more costly war on terror now seem an absurdly irrelevant exercise.
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At last, a revisionist takedown of our 40th president, portrayed as an empty suit too often lauded by the common people he betrayed.
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By David Sirota — Only weeks ago, the political world was buzzing about a “team of rivals,” but instead President Obama has populated his administration with Bush yes-men and Wall Street kleptocrats whose discredited theologies cannot be killed.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — He is making trillion-dollar decisions that will cast the die for the rest of his promising agenda. Unfortunately, while he has already proved to be a brilliant agent of change in so many ways, in economic policy he has relied on the financial “experts” who helped get America into this mess.
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By Marie Cocco — Remember this, President Obama: There are few Washington traditions as annoying as the cultish worship of bipartisanship, for it ignores the simple fact that sometimes one party gets things disastrously wrong.
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treas.gov
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Almost a year ago, Citigroup’s then-director Robert Rubin downplayed the enormity of the economic catastrophe headed our way and made a pre-emptive move to shift any potential blame to politicians instead of financial experts such as himself. Fast-forward to the present and the picture changes considerably.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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On Thursday, President-elect Barack Obama introduced three top financial appointees who will help him with the unenviable task of revamping the government’s economic regulatory system and “crack[ing] down on this culture of greed and scheming that has led us to this day of reckoning,” as Obama put it.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Oh, my: Barack Obama is still more than a month away from assuming the presidency and already there are reports about “the left” being dispirited about change it no longer believes in.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Let the record show that it was George W. Bush, the rich Texas Republican, who brought socialism to America, so don’t blame it on that African-American Chicago Democrat community organizer who made it into the White House.
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By David Sirota — Judging by the proliferation of capital letters in the e-mail correspondence I receive, many seem worried that Barack Obama may not deliver the promised “change we can believe in.”
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By Joe Conason — Barack Obama’s appointees will implement the Obama program, not only because that is what he tells them to do but because that is what they have come to believe is best for the country.
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change.gov
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To fix the ailing economy, Barack Obama has turned to two men who helped break it. On Monday, the president-elect announced Timothy Geithner as his choice for treasury secretary, and Giethner’s former mentor in the Clinton Treasury Department, Lawrence Summers, as his pick to head the White House Economic Council.
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Getting a grip on the economic catastrophe that rocked the country during the fall of 2008 is no easy feat, what with so many players, back-room deals, bills, upswings and meltdowns to consider. Updated
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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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By Marie Cocco — Conservatives fear a “period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy” should Barack Obama and the Democrats sweep in November, but the voters care more about competent government than ideology.
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AP photo / Henny Ray Abrams
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By Robert Scheer — How dare you throw that tea into Boston Harbor! Such is the anti-democratic arrogance of the fear-mongering pundits and politicians who tell us if we taxpayers don’t instantly give the Wall Street banking bandits a $700-billion bailout, we are destroying America.
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AP photo / Chip Somodevilla, pool
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By Bill Boyarsky — Was he too calm? Did he pull his punches in an effort to look presidential? Not really. The viewers got a clear choice: a reasoned and reasonable Obama versus an old-fashioned Cold Warrior who would keep us in Iraq endlessly and extend the boundaries we must defend to Georgia and Ukraine.
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By Will Durst — I’m sorry to be the one to have to say this, Gov. Palin, but you are so earlier-this-month. It’s your partner, John McCain, who’s back in the news. And not in what you call your good way.
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What to make of the bailouts and sellouts that dominated the past week’s financial headlines? Well, “Left, Right & Center” commentators Matt Miller, Robert Scheer and Tony Blankley (Arianna Huffington was away) have some ideas about what caused the nightmare on Wall Street and what the future holds.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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By Robert Scheer — Has the war on terrorism become the modern equivalent of the Roman Circus, drawing the people’s attention away from the failures of those who rule them? Corporate America is a shambles because deregulation, the mantra of our president and his party, has proved to be a license to steal.
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By Joe Conason — With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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John McCain’s Tuesday was so filled with gaffes and bad news that no one seemed to notice when one of his top advisers held a BlackBerry aloft and declared “you’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.” That spectacle simply couldn’t compete with former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and, more significantly, the very public failure of deregulation.
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listphile.com
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Here we go again: The Federal Reserve is bailing out another tanking financial institution—the insurance behemoth American International Group—by sinking $85 billion into AIG in return for a stake in the company. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a Wall Street investigation following this latest startling agreement between big government and big business.
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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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