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By Manning Marable
$16.50
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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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amnesta.net
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This information should shock no one by this point, but it seems that there are more tales of alleged fraud emerging from the general direction of Wall Street. Move over, Bernie Madoff.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s message was plain: The era of bashing government is over. So, too, is the folklore of a marketplace capable of producing abundance without regulation, oversight or public intervention.
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By Marie Cocco — For someone who spent much of the Democratic primary season running against the Clinton era, Obama sounds an awful lot like President Clinton.
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RJ Matson, The New York Observer —
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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
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In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama acknowledged the dire state of the economy, but struck a hopeful tone as he expanded on his vision for recovery. Investments in energy, education and health care will be key, he said, as will an expanded bailout of the financial sector. (Summary, video and full text after the jump)
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Flickr/dsb nola
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Perhaps keeping an eye on the 2012 election, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal has gone public with his critique of President Barack Obama’s proposed solutions to the country’s economic woes. ThreatDown!
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topnews.in
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While he was able to give the banking business a little lift on Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke also delivered the sobering news that the economy as a whole isn’t likely to make big gains in terms of recovery before 2010 or later.
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By Marie Cocco — It is time to wipe the term entitlement reform, a monument to the dark art of disinformation, out of the political dictionary. There is no crisis in Social Security, or even in Medicare and Medicaid.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s reaching the point where desperate measures—brutal honesty and complete transparency—may be the only way to bring the economy out of its kamikaze dive. If so, this won’t be pretty.
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collage: Flickr (epicharmus) / Google
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The Dow hasn’t been this low since “Titanic” won Best Picture, appropriately enough. Investors, apparently convinced the worst is yet to come, sent stocks tumbling to a 12-year low on Monday. The Dow sank to a depth of 7114.78.
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blogs.ft.com
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It’s time for teamwork, according to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who made a call for unity—and a “global New Deal”—during a meeting about the worldwide economic crisis with other European heads of state over the weekend.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — After Obama began to campaign around the country for the stimulus, support for the package rose. Administration officials have taken notice. Count on this to be a road-trip presidency.
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Flickr / stan
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Uncle Sam already gave Citigroup $45 billion and promised to limit the bank’s losses on $300 billion in troubled loans, but executives at the ailing bank are now reportedly asking the federal government to sweeten the deal. One scheme has Washington exchanging preferred stock for common stock.
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For everyone forced by the global economic meltdown to pinch pennies, the Onion has this friendly reminder that consumption isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Warning: This clip has an abundance of salty language.
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Flickr / geerlingguy
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While just about every state in the Union is starving for funds, a small band of Republican governors is debating whether or not to reject the stimulus bill’s cash infusion, citing concerns over future taxes. This California editor says good. Give their stimulus money to my state. It’s broke.
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AP photo / Darin McGregor, Pool
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Despite the fact that he’s looking at a trillion-plus deficit for 2009 as he settles into his second month as president, Barack Obama has plans to cut the annual deficit by half by the time his first term ends.
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Jeff Madrick’s new book insists that the anti-government ethos that is a treasured American prejudice is not grounded in the new economic reality. But is he fighting the last war?
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AP photo / Frank Franklin II
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The employment market and the stock market both took major hits Thursday, with new jobless claims registering as high as 627,000 and market indicators like the Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite index dipping alarmingly low.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Bill Boyarsky — The national health care crisis, intensified by the recession, is so bad that nothing can be permitted to stop reform of the system, not even the implosion of the president’s health czar.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It makes sense to prop up ailing carmakers. Allowing GM and Chrysler to go bankrupt could be a triggering event that might make a very bad economy much worse.
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By Ellen Goodman — If freedom is just another word for no high-flying jobs left for new college graduates to lose, it opens room for risk-taking. And—dare I say it?—idealism.
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By Marie Cocco — We seem to have spent our way—to the tune of $864 billion—into allowing our friends the Pakistanis to enter into a peace treaty, or something that looks like it, with the Taliban.
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By Joe Conason — Republicans congratulate themselves for remaining unified in defeat and whine about Obama’s refusal to capitulate—but in fact it is they who have failed in the initial episode of a confrontation that will certainly continue for four years.
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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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Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City —
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Flickr / jphilipg
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ProPublica did some digging into the infrastructure spending bundled into the stimulus package—the $100 billion that promises have the biggest impact in terms of job creation—and found that Wyoming is getting more than $20,100 per unemployed worker while Michigan, a state on the verge of a labor apocalypse, is expected to have to make do with just $2,434.37.
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minimemodelworks.com
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Ah, capitalism. First, we had Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff making big money off his clients, and now here comes ModelWorks, a toy manufacturer with an enterprising plan for how to profit off the failed financier in turn.
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AP pool photo / Alexei Druzhinin
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By Scott Ritter — Relations with Russia haven’t been this frosty since there was an East Berlin. President Obama may be distracted by other priorities, but getting reacquainted with Vladimir Putin and his nuclear arsenal should be at the top of the list.
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By Marie Cocco — This didn’t start with the mortgage and credit crisis. It all began with the wage crisis.
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By Eugene Robinson — Obama must deal with a new presidential role that he did not seek but cannot avoid: managing big chunks of the private-sector economy.
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osmoothie.com
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California has the biggest economy in the union, but the state is in a real hole. With major shortfalls and a $40 billion budget in legislative gridlock, Sacramento has laid off some workers, furloughed others and slashed wages. Now the governor is threatening to, er, terminate 20,000 more employees.
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Here’s one way to get through a meeting: Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa denies getting tanked at a recent G7 get-together. Nakagawa was caught slurring and nodding off during a press conference, for which he apologized and blamed cold medicine. We’ll have to remember that one. Update
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flickr/jetheriot
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His presidency is not yet a month old, but there already are some who are wondering aloud whether Barack Obama is going to make good on his pre-election pledges. What’s this—he’s a politician?
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flickr/jeffrey beall
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It’s finally happening: President Barack Obama is about to sign the stimulus bill. Get ready, people of Denver—he’s going to do the honors at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, of course—where else?
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AP photo / Petros Giannakouris
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By Chris Hedges — It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. Just ask the new director of national intelligence, who warned that the deepening economic crisis could trigger a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama senses that fate has handed him opportunities few presidents ever get, and that his test will be whether he makes good use of his chance to bend history at one of its “inflection points.”
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Flickr / Jeffrey Beall
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President Obama on Tuesday will sign the stimulus bill, which passed without the support of a single House Republican and with only three votes from the GOP in the Senate. With battle lines that stark, lawmakers have tied their fates to that of the bill.
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How stimulating is the stimulus, really? Did Obama bite off more than he could chew? Who wears the pants at the Treasury Department? Answers to these questions and more in this week’s episode.
Posted on Feb 15, 2009
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By David Sirota — One thing is obvious after Michael Phelps’ marijuana “scandal”: Our society is addicted to fake outrage—and to break our dependence, we’re going to need far more potent medicine than the herb Phelps was smoking.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Eugene Robinson — The treasury secretary will get much better at making his case. I’m confident in that prediction because after watching his debut this week, I don’t see how he could get much worse.
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Jon Stewart applies his usual comic talents to Barack Obama’s first news conference, complete with a showdown between Bill O’Reilly and Chris Matthews.
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By Ellen Goodman — What wasn’t predicted was that women might finally reach the goal of equality less because they scaled the heights than because men slipped downward. But here we are.
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By Marie Cocco — Well, that didn’t work out. In pushing for a new financial industry bailout, Treasury Secretary Geithner came across like a banker trying to do a politician’s job. Obama owes us some hands-on involvement.
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Does Anything Change in Los Angeles With Election of New Mayor?
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