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 . '/' . substr('9781568586434',-6,3) . '/' . '9781568586434' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
$25.99
By Allen Barra
$18.45
$22
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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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By David Sirota — If you’re like me, you sometimes find yourself speechless when confronted with abject insanity, such as conservatives’ newest talking point—the one designed to stop Congress from passing an economic stimulus package.
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By Marie Cocco — Peace is not at hand, at least not as Americans define it. Yet peace has been breaking out all over.
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By Eugene Robinson — In a sense, we’re all Bernie Madoff. We’ve been running our economy in accordance with his accounting principles for a generation—and now we face a most unpleasant reckoning.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
Global markets swooned this week in reaction to photos showing that President-elect Barack Obama had lost his shirt.
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By David Sirota — For most of us, Benjamin Franklin’s words in 1789 still apply: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” However, millionaires, by definition, are not most of us.
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By Joe Conason — To understand the philosophy of government that Dick Cheney brought to Washington over the past seven years, it is most instructive to see “Frost/Nixon,” with Frank Langella’s remarkable reanimation of Tricky Dick for a generation that never knew him.
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By Ellen Goodman — The 43rd president is going home with less remorse and fewer regrets than my grandchildren express for spilling their cereal.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — On this consumer holiday, let us recognize those whose satisfaction comes not from accumulating material goods or political power: The relief workers and community builders lending their energy to the poorest people in villages and urban slums scattered around the globe.
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canada.com
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When the global economy takes a serious plunge (i.e., like right now), one would think that such frivolities as facial fillers and Botox would be the first to go from the regimens of even the most image-conscious among us.
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Flickr / Brave New Films
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Wal-Mart will pay as much as $640 million to settle 63 lawsuits around the country alleging that the retailer had exploited its workers. The payout could add up to less than 0.1 percent of the company’s revenues this year.
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Tab, The Calgary Sun —
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The Treasury Department’s inspector general has been looking into the failure of IndyMac, which set the taxpayers back $8.9 billion, and what he found isn’t pretty. It seems a certain regulator let the bank present itself as “well-capitalized” when the truth was something entirely different.
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AP file photo / Reed Saxon
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By Mike Farrell — The Hollywood-centric “Membership First” faction that has controlled the Screen Actors Guild’s national board for most of the last five years chooses tactics—misinformation, tough talk and over-promising—that undermine the union’s credibility.
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Tab, The Calgary Sun —
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Aislin, The Montreal Gazette —
Posted on Dec 19, 2008
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letstravelvacations.com
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By David Sirota — A voyage to Sin City in this moment of ecological and economic crisis is a journey to a giant concave mirror reflecting back the magnified—and ugly—truths about this epoch of cataclysmic consumption and hubristic hedonism.
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By Marie Cocco — Today’s brainteaser: Name the top female executives who were forced to go before Congress, explaining why their companies made multibillion-dollar mistakes that helped wreck the economy but nonetheless deserve billions in taxpayer bailouts.
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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 Amy Goodman — Bernard Madoff’s criminal pyramid scheme, in which losses are expected to be $50 billion, paints a grim picture—unless you are a corporate executive. Read the fine print. Of the TARP bailout funds, only those that were technically spent “in an auction” carry limits on executive pay.
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By Marie Cocco — I must admit that when the danger of a global financial implosion became apparent in March, I did not understand how all those worthless Wall Street credit swaps really could be the fault of an overpaid union welder at an auto plant somewhere in Michigan.
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By Eugene Robinson — Despite the popular myth, lemmings don’t really hurl themselves off a cliff to reduce their numbers. That sort of behavior is seen only among Republicans in the Senate, who gave us a demonstration when they torpedoed legislation to bail out the auto industry.
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Federal Reserve
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Ben Bernanke and his squad of rate setters are expected to cut interest by as much as three-quarters of a point on Tuesday. With rates already at 1 percent, we mortals are left wondering what the Fed chief plans to do when he runs out of rates to cut. Update
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AP photo / Gary C. Knapp
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By Titus Levi — The U.S. budget is bleeding red ink by the buckets. So even as we take on deficits and debts, we should look for places to trim the budget. The incoming administration should start by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000 a year and by putting the ax to the most sacred of sacred cows in the federal budget: the Department of Defense.
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elitemrp.net
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The White House has shifted from its original position to state that it now is willing to consider using bailout funds from the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, to keep the country’s top three automakers afloat. The announcement comes after negotiations in Congress to provide a $14-billion bailout to Detroit broke down.
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By David Sirota — With the release of three new reports, there’s no debate anymore about who was correct and who wasn’t concerning the economic collapse and the Wall Street bailout. The studies prove that progressive critics were right and the Washington ideologues and the pundits were wrong.
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By Joe Conason — Nearly every current poll shows that most Americans oppose federal assistance to the auto industry, but legislators should also consider how voters would feel if the nation suffered the full consequences of a cratering auto industry—and if those voters then found out that the facts were not quite what they seemed to be.
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By Ellen Goodman — Now, competitive consumption has been replaced by contagious anxiety. Buying hit the wall with the housing collapse, the stock market plunge, the credit card crunch and the surge in unemployment figures.
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Flickr / Joe Crimmings Photography
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Seventy-three percent of adult Americans think Barack Obama is off to a good start, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. An even larger number think Obama’s trials will test him more than other recent presidents. Folks are scared, and whether they voted for Obama, John McCain or Snoopy, they’re pulling for the president-elect.
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shop.npr.org
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The financial crisis has hit the tote bag set: National Public Radio is cutting two shows and 7 percent of its work force, thanks to $23 million in red ink. Non-pledging fans of “Day to Day” and “News & Notes” have only themselves—and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act—to blame.
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telegraph.co.uk
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In a move that further complicates the anti-government unrest rocking Greece for the past four days, the country’s two biggest trade unions have declared their intention to go ahead with a planned 24-hour strike, likely to paralyze the economy in protest against government policies and incompetent handling of the economic crisis.
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Another day, another big meeting about a serious global crisis for President-elect Barack Obama, who joined forces on Tuesday in Chicago with former Vice President Al Gore and Obama’s own veep, Joe Biden, in discussing Gore’s signature cause—climate change.
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Flickr / Ian Muttoo
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Japanese technology giant Sony Corp. announced Tuesday that it is planning to slash 8,000 jobs—or about 4 percent of its global work force— in response to the deepening international economic crisis.
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Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner —
Posted on Dec 9, 2008
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White House / Eric Draper
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Putting a positive spin on George W. Bush’s two terms in office is no easy feat, which is why the White House has sent out a two-page memo detailing the president’s numerous achievements, including his protection of “the honor and the dignity of his office,” whatever that means.
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By Marie Cocco — As Congress and the White House lurch toward possible approval of a loan package for the crippled auto industry, we are undoubtedly in store for more union-bashing.
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Manny Francisco, Manila, The Phillippines —
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AP photo / Douglas Healey
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By Chris Hedges — The multiple failures that beset the country can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead on creating hordes of competent systems managers.
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AP photo / Brian Kersey
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President-elect Barack Obama has added his voice to the chorus of encouragement for a group of Chicago workers who are sitting-in at their former factory. Obama said the workers, who have protested their way into the national spotlight, were “absolutely right” and “what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.”
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Should the Big Three U.S. automakers be driven out of Washington (or Detroit) without the financial help they desperately need? What’s to be done about the massive job losses across the country?
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Barack Obama paid a visit to the Internet on Saturday with his weekly president-elect-themed YouTube address, sounding an urgent note about the economy, pointing to the dismal news about job losses in November and pointing out what his team plans to do about it.
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AP photo / Paul Sancya
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By Michael D. Intriligator — Considering only two options for an imperiled General Motors —either bailout by the U.S. government or bankruptcy—omits an important alternative, which I see as the best option: a takeover of GM by Toyota Motor Corp.
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U.S. Department of Labor
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The news continues to get worse after the government finally put the “official” stamp on the current recession. The Labor Department has announced that 533,000 jobs were lost in November, the biggest monthly cut in 34 years—with analysts fearing that the 11-month trend of increasing job losses will deepen even further.
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There’s a revolution underway in Chinese culture as young women flock from villages to factory employment in the cities, leaving traditional values behind.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — No, the federal government isn’t going to discover new billions under some rock in a national park. But with the economic downturn, the new president’s imperative will be to spend as fast as he can, to the tune of perhaps $500 billion, to keep the economy from going belly up.
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U.S. Air Force
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Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki speaks with Truthdig’s Kasia Anderson about his new book, whether Obama can deliver, and why the U.S. is like Elvis.
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