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By Sarah Stillman $19.90
By John Stauffer $19.80
$40
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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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 Flickr / alancleaver_2000 (CC-BY)
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By Moshe Adler — The notion that taxes are bad for the middle class is akin to the notion that cigarette smoking is harmless, and it should be dealt with by similar means.
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Is China on its way toward becoming the feared colossus of the 21st century, surpassing the United States in its imperial ambitions and economic hegemony?
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Today on the list: Why Liz Cheney’s fear-mongering is blowing up in her face, how Florida plans to de-gay Hollywood and why books are overrated.
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 AP / Bebeto Matthews
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By Moshe Adler — Like many of us, President Barack Obama is outraged by how out of control executive compensation is, but his plan to fix the problem simply won’t work.
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 United States Treasury
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News that China sold $34 billion in U.S. government bonds at the end of last year has raised the fears of analysts, some of whom think that the move—which involved less than 5 percent of the overall amount of bonds held by China—is meant to signal a loss of confidence in U.S. economic policy.
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 Flickr / World Economic Forum
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The logic of global capitalism is everywhere. New investigations are showing that the same Wall Street tactics—and companies—that ushered our own economy to economic collapse have emerged to exacerbate Greece’s current financial crisis.
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 businessinsider.com
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While seemingly intuitive, it’s bit frightening to see the correlation so clearly illustrated: A graphic, covering a 12-year period, shows the tie between Ohio’s unemployment rate and the amount of alcohol purchased. With unemployment and booze consumption at their contemporary highs, many are wondering about the public health effects of unemployment on those out of work.
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 Flickr / DetroitDereck Photography
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Ford Motor Co. has seemingly shifted out of crisis mode and is now reporting a profit of $2.7 billion for 2009, a considerable success given the state of the U.S. auto industry and the sluggish economy.
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 gawker.com
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The Obama administration, perhaps getting wise to public opinion, is lashing out at Wall Street firms. White House senior adviser David Axelrod called the huge bonuses executives received this year “offensive” in light of the fact that the rest of us are struggling through an economic crisis.
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Jon Stewart interviews Justin Fox, columnist for Time magazine and author of “The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward and Delusion on Wall Street.” He suggests (gasp!) that markets aren’t rational and human behavior cannot always be predicted. Check out this clip from last night’s “Daily Show.”
Posted on Jul 2, 2009
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 imf.org
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A shrinking global economy has many at the International Monetary Fund worried, as economists project that 2009 will see a decline of 1.3 percent in world economic output—the first global recession since World War II.
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 flickr.com
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No matter how trite it has become for the media to focus on the “clashes” and “violence” that have “erupted” at the G-20 demonstrations in London, stories on the economic summit seem to overlook the legitimate concerns that protesters have against the world’s 20 largest economies orchestrating macroeconomic policy for the rest of the world.
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 AP photo / Elizabeth Dalziel
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By Scott Ritter — Forget about terrorism for a moment. The potential catastrophe that climate change could unleash on America makes every other national security crisis pale in comparison. President Obama cannot secure the homeland without addressing this global emergency.
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 mariopiperni.com / Mario Piperni
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The current year’s federal budget deficit, according to congressional economists, will top $1.8 trillion, the biggest ever by far. And their projection for the fiscal 2010 budget shortfall is tickling $1.4 trillion, putting both estimates much higher than they were in forecasts back in January.
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 fitsnews.com
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Wednesday will mark the day Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, rejected “some” of the estimated $8 billion in federal stimulus money his state is slated to receive. Sanford’s anti-deficit spending stand has sparked talk that the Republican may be eyeing a 2012 presidential campaign. Updated.
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 kukuchew.com
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Not since Ronald Reagan’s reckless free marketeering have we seen unemployment this high: The U.S. jobless rate hit 8.1 percent in February, with 651,000 jobs cut during the month.
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 nytimes.com
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With little surprise but incredible effect, the U.S. unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent in January, hitting its highest level since 1992. President Obama used the report to prod Congress to pass his economic stimulus package.
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 bloomberg.com
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Amending current TARP rules and regulations, President Obama is expected to put a $500,000 cap on executive salaries at companies that receive large amounts of bailout funds. It would mean major pay cuts for the likes of Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis, who took home more than $20 million in 2007.
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 nation.co.ke
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Without skipping a beat, once-troubled financial entities are continuing to spend big to lobby Congress as they pocket billions in TARP bailout money. The lobbying is defended by the bail-outted firms as a “transparent and effective way” to be heard on policy issues.
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 bloomberg.com
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It’s the first full day of Obama’s administration and things are looking a bit different in D.C. Treasury secretary nominee Timothy Geithner called for “fundamental reform” of the $700 billion bailout, claiming the existing bailout package favored big business over struggling families.
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By Eugene Robinson — President-elect Obama will have more urgent matters to deal with after he takes the oath of office. But somewhere on his long to-do list, he should make a note to finally bring five decades of counterproductive American policy toward Cuba to a definitive end.
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By Amy Goodman — A Utah student’s disruption of a federal auction has temporarily blocked a Bush-enabled land grab by the oil and gas industries.
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 AP photo / Andre Penner
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In a summit that celebrated the absence of the U.S. on its guest list, Latin American leaders met in Brazil to discuss a post-U.S. hegemonic world. The talks, which centered on the “demise” of the capitalist model, also snubbed former colonizing nations Portugal and Spain in a further demonstration of the increasing political autonomy of the region.
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 aolcdn.com
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With a bailout of the Big Three hovering over our political landscape, popular opinion has signaled a considerable voice against any federal support for the failing auto industry. A poll shows 61% of Americans oppose a bailout, believing any government assistance would be both unfair and ineffective in fixing the economy.
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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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By Eugene Robinson — If things get much more “interesting,” we might have a collective nervous breakdown. But along with the anxiety, there’s also a sense of rare opportunity—a chance to emerge better than we were economically, politically and socially.
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 AP photo / Chris Carlson
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Judging by the new additions to Barack Obama’s economic squad, the president-elect appears to be borrowing heavily from Robert Rubin’s ranks, but here’s an argument as to why Obama’s approach will differ from Rubin’s (but consider the source here).
Posted on Nov 24, 2008
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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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 news.aol.com
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If the hierarchy of staff salaries in the McCain/Palin campaign has anything to say about what Republicans really care about this election, then voters will likely be unsurprised that the McCain camp’s highest paid individual these past couple weeks is none other than Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist, Amy Strozzi.
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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 Joe Conason — Wherever John McCain appears on the stump in these waning days of the presidential campaign, he is always accompanied by his imaginary friend “Joe the Plumber,” but it is the specter of Karl Marx that lurks just offstage.
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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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 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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By Arthur Blaustein — Many Americans believe, despite the current financial crisis, that Republicans are generally better at managing the economy. History tells a very different story.
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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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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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 AP photo / Anjum Naveed
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Asif Ali Zardari, widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, assumed the presidency of Pakistan on Tuesday, concluding a transfer of power that began with the resignation of former President Pervez Musharraf just two weeks ago. Zardari’s presidency is likely to be one of conflict, as an ongoing Taliban resurgence and a 26 percent approval rating already riddle his first days in office.
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 freshdames.com
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The power of Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement is clearly quantifiable when it comes to her “favorite things” (e.g. book sales), but how about her favorite people (e.g. Barack Obama)? Well, a scholarly duo from the University of Maryland came up with 1 million votes as the impressive, if somewhat strangely derived, number that represents the boost Oprah has given Obama since she gave him her official stamp of approval.
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 flickr.com
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A government report released Friday signals worsening economic tides as the U.S. tries to navigate through its highest level of unemployment in four years. The seven-month-long trend of net job losses is likely to persist, with few signs of a turnaround on the horizon.
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A plan to legalize sex work in time for South Africa’s 2010 World Cup has many in the country upset. While supporters believe criminalization puts women in harm’s way, religious groups and others argue that “family values” trump the interests of both the national economy and individual workers.
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 AP photo / Lisa Poole
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The once-mighty U.S. dollar is full of hot air, or at least the rate of inflation is at a 26-year high due to the recent economic toils and astronomical energy prices. Prices U.S. consumers pay shot up 1.1 percent in June—or more directly, your paycheck just got 1.1 percent smaller.
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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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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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 blog.kir.com
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By Mark Engler —
How has the Bush administration changed the world economically, and what it will mean for the next administration? Also, if Bush-style “imperial globalization” is rejected in January, what will American ruling elites try to turn to—Clinton-style economic globalization?
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A survey released Friday showed that U.S. consumer confidence has fallen to the lowest point since the “stagflation” of the early 1980s. According to the survey, lower-income households, citing rising food and fuel prices, were the main source of the drop in confidence.
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By David Sirota — What passes for smart economic policy is actually a set of right-wing globalization measures that destabilizes the world economy. For the sake of Americans and others, our politicians need to wise up.
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By Amy Goodman — As the media coverage of the Democratic presidential race continues to focus on lapel pins and pastors, America is ailing.
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