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By Sheerly Avni
$26.37
$16.00
$21
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tumblr.com
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The world economy this year is likely to grow at a rate of only 0.5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund, which re-evaluated its figures after the U.K. officially entered into recession last week. The growth rate, as projected, is the lowest in more than 60 years.
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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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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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President Barack Obama visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday to angle for support for his proposed stimulus plan ... from Republicans. Though he wasn’t likely to win them all over, Obama huddled with members of the House and Senate. He emerged in one piece and “optimistic” after the exchanges.
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Christo Komarnitski, Bulgaria —
Posted on Jan 26, 2009
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Beneath the warm pledges of bipartisanship and the earnest calls for cooperation lurks an unpleasant fact: From the moment it loses power, the opposition party turns to the task of getting it back.
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What’s it going to take to jump-start the economy? How does almost a trillion dollars sound? That’s the amount that President Barack Obama is considering for his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, which he introduced to the public in his weekly address on Saturday.
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By David Sirota — Though presidential festivities and media superlatives tried to numb any feeling other than happiness, it’s only natural to experience a twinge of anxiety while celebrating at the edge of an abyss.
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama’s is a restoration presidency. His job in office, as during the campaign, is to summon up the better America that was abandoned or repudiated during the past eight years by his predecessor.
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Tab, The Calgary Sun —
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By Ellen Goodman — After the collapse of trust in every sort of expert—after lenders financed houses for people who couldn’t afford them, bankers created systems they couldn’t even describe and, finally, we hear, Bernie Madoff ripped off even his high school friends—there is a residue of resilience.
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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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By Joe Conason — When Obama delivered his stunningly eloquent and inspiring address at midday on Jan. 20, he provided a powerful hint of what bipartisan, a term hollowed out by habitual and insincere misuse, means to him now.
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AP photo
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By Robert Scheer — Tuesday was welcome theater, as profound as it gets—but today, as Obama has declared, begins a new era of responsibility and accountability.
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By Eugene Robinson — Rarely has a new presidency been greeted with such a consensus of good will—and rarely has a new president so needed it.
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By Marie Cocco — George W. Bush promised to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House, but he leaves with less honor and with lower public approval than any other president since Richard Nixon.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Want to know where the $350 billion banking bailout went and why it hasn’t done a bit of good? Read, and weep over, this little-noticed report from the congressional panel set up to monitor the Treasury Department’s distribution of our taxpayer funds.
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0-60mag.com
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So, the government forks over a ton of money to flailing banks and, naturally, their customers (i.e., taxpayers) might expect to gain something from this helpful transaction as well, right? Guess again, customers.
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Flickr / Betsssssy
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The taxpayers’ bank opened a new branch on Thursday: Uncle Sam just threw $20 billion Bank of America’s way. The government is also on the hook for $118 billion more in crap assets. Bank of America chief Ken Lewis calls it the “deal of a lifetime.” No kidding.
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By David Sirota — Somehow, immediately releasing more bailout funds is being portrayed as a self-evident necessity. Amid Barack Obama’s paeans to “new politics,” we’re watching old-school paybacks from a politician who raised more Wall Street dough than any other.
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Flickr/respres
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We knew this news was bound to be bad, but we didn’t think it would be quite this grim: The number of American homeowners who faced foreclosure proceedings in 2008 passed the 2.3 million mark, an 81 percent increase over the previous year.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. Whitney Houston
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Here’s what Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s top talker, had to say about whether the next president would work to end the military’s policy of discrimination against gay service members: “You don’t hear politicians give a one-word answer much. But it’s ‘Yes.’ ”
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By Marie Cocco — Sorry to rain on the inaugural parade, but we need to find a better way to pay for these things. The financing of President-elect Barack Obama’s big day is just as much of an embarrassment to the country as the financing of inaugurations past.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama has made it hard for anyone to pin him down philosophically. So when he raises his hand on Tuesday, exactly what can the American people expect?
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Flickr / exfordy
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By Joe Conason — Would it be rude to ask whether the Republicans have any new proposals to save the country from this worsening recession? If not, they should halt their reactionary opposition to Barack Obama’s stimulus plan.
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marcelinopena.files.wordpress.com
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Forget that business with the maid whose work papers expired. The real scandal with Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama’s choice to head the Treasury Department, is his history of lax regulation—at least where his friends at Citigroup were concerned. ProPublica did some digging and found that Geithner’s New York Fed “eased the reins as the company blew billions. ...”
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Flickr.com / PMorgan
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After reconfiguring its output figures, China has finally found itself on the medal podium for gross domestic product, ousting Germany from its role as third largest economy in the world. China’s economy has grown tenfold in the past 30 years, and its development, while marveled at, worries many environmental, human rights and labor activists.
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AP photo / Jose Luis Magana
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By Bill Boyarsky — Like many other people, I’d like to party all week when Barack Obama is sworn in as president. But this isn’t the year for it, not with unemployment rising and fear spreading through the land.
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AP photo / Lawrence Jackson
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By Robert Scheer — Why rush to throw another $350 billion of taxpayer money at the Wall Street bandits and their political cronies who created the biggest financial mess since the Great Depression? And why should we taxpayers be expected to double our debt exposure when the 10 still-secret bailout contracts made in the first round are being kept from the public?
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Flickr / laverrue
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New England is becoming a gay marriage zone. Five of the six states already have protections for gay couples, and state lawmakers and groups like Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders are pushing for full marriage rights in all six by 2012. Beyond human rights, that could mean big bucks for the region.
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United States Senate
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Barack Obama made sure that anyone who might oppose his plan for rolling out the next part of the $750 billion bailout package understands that he means business: In a meeting Tuesday on Capitol Hill, he threatened to veto a possible disapproval resolution, according to Democratic senators who met with him.
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President-elect Barack Obama says he thinks he can find a way to fix the American economy, which leads top economic wonk Stephen Colbert to conclude that Obama might just need a little extra confidence—and the help of a strangely alluring body spray for men.
Posted on Jan 13, 2009
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Flickr / tomsaint11
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Barack Obama wants to spend as much as a trillion dollars on the nation’s infrastructure, from roads to bridges. A video on his transition Web site even touts the economic advantages of fixing potholes. Why so car-centric? A new article in the Washington Monthly claims that spending some of that money on rail lines instead of roads could pay dividends.
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The incoming first lady sends this friendly reminder in support of her husband’s call for a national day of service. In keeping with the Obamas’ Web savvy, Michelle would like you to visit usaservice.org, a volunteer networking site created in the image of the campaign’s old home page.
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Flickr / respres
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With half of the $700 billion in TARP funds already spent and not a whole lot to show for it, Barack Obama has pledged to spend the second parcel differently, with at least some of the money going to desperate homeowners. President Bush has agreed to request the funds on Obama’s behalf in order to expedite the process.
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George Stephanopoulos picked the president-elect’s brain Sunday in a wide-ranging interview. On Gaza, Obama defended his silence but he said to expect Mideast action on Day 1. On prosecuting Bushies for abuses such as torture or domestic spying, don’t hold your breath. On the economy, “Everybody’s going to have to give.”
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In his weekly address posted on Change.gov Friday, Barack Obama explains why he’s starting his job before assuming office: It’s the economy, stupid.
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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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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The substantive issues surrounding an economic stimulus are clearer than the politics of getting it passed fast. Here’s how Obama is trying to weave the politics and the substance together.
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By Ellen Goodman — The standard male narrative about flying solo to the top, bootstraps in hand, energized only by your own talents, always seemed a bit cockeyed to me. The female narrative was not so much self-effacing as it was realistic.
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By Marie Cocco — Much of the business-tax package Obama contemplates fails his own test of cutting business taxes “where it makes sense and is going to work.”
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economistmom.com
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With news of a $1.2 trillion federal budget deficit and continually rising unemployment numbers, President-elect Barack Obama is facing an economy that has the constitution of a sickly cat. A remedy for what ails it may be coming in a restructuring of Medicare and Social Security, which Obama said will be central to efforts in how he will curb spending.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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There were just a few action items—emphasis on action—for the 111th Congress to contend with on the broad domestic and global scale as veteran members reconvened and new recruits made it official on Tuesday. Get to work, people.
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Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com —
Posted on Jan 6, 2009
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In this series of weekly addresses posted on Change.gov before news of the Bill Richardson scandal broke, the president-elect makes an appeal for an economic recovery strategy that would ideally prevent further job losses and spark a turnaround in Americans’ prospects as soon as possible.
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Flickr / FaceMePLS
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President-elect Obama is still working out the nuts and bolts of his recovery (fingers crossed) package, but Obama advisers have disclosed that at least one proposal would expand benefits and compensation to the unemployed. With the economic meltdown vaporizing more and more jobs, here’s hoping Congress gets it done before February.
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msnbc.com
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Following in the footsteps of 2008’s dismal economic news, global manufacturing has fallen to low levels unseen for decades. In the U.S., factory activity has dropped to a 28-year low, marking a slump that further adds to the bad economic trends as we enter 2009.
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Does Anything Change in Los Angeles With Election of New Mayor?
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