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By Linda Gordon $23.10
By D. D. Guttenplan $23.10
$22
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By Amy Goodman — President-elect Barack Obama introduced his principal national security Cabinet selections to the world Monday and left no doubt that he intends to start his administration on a war footing. It is revealing that his choice for national security adviser is a director of Boeing, a weapons manufacturer, and Chevron, an oil giant.
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By Marie Cocco — Two weeks ago I wrote that this was going to be a Wal-Mart Christmas. I could not have anticipated the most macabre manifestation of the syndrome: the death of a Wal-Mart worker who was trampled by a mob of early shoppers Friday on Long Island.
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 Flickr / SteelCityHobbies
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The auto industry bailout would have no chance of passing without the muscle of the Big Three’s unionized work force. Yet you can’t turn around without hearing someone trash autoworkers for the terrible crime of trying to earn a decent living.
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 whatpricejusticeblog.com
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While it’s great that it has finally been acknowledged, the National Bureau of Economic Research’s announcement on Monday that the U.S. is officially in a recession is old news—even by the bureau’s own estimation. Updated
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 timesonline.co.uk
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It seems the British have found a way to cope with the global economic crisis. A survey by the Terrence Higgins Trust, a UK AIDS charity, found that sex is the most popular free activity in the empire, beating out window shopping and going to a museum.
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Brian Fairrington, Cagle Cartoons —
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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 Marie Cocco — At the earliest, it is likely to be at least February or March before the first dollar of an Obama recovery plan is felt. This is a national disgrace.
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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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 my.barackobama.com
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Not only is Barack Obama packing his inner circle with neo-liberal Clinton stalwarts, he’s also avoiding the question of labor by not including any representative of workers in the economic policy team he announced Monday. What gives?
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After a series of depressing announcements, Barack Obama will finally turn to an economic adviser who wasn’t directly responsible for the current crisis or mentored by someone who was. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the president-elect wants former Fed Chair Paul Volcker to lead a new presidential advisory board focused on saving America from financial ruin. Update
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 publicradio.org
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The mortgage market got a lift following Tuesday’s announcement that the Federal Reserve was throwing in with a $600 billion resuscitation bid, but as Fortune’s Colin Barr points out, history offers at least two examples that the road ahead could be rocky.
Posted on Nov 25, 2008
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By Amy Goodman — As President-elect Barack Obama focuses on the meltdown of the U.S. economy, another fire is burning: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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 timesonline.com
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Barack Obama’s economy-oriented speaking spree continued on Tuesday, with a third speech planned for Wednesday. Tuesday’s talk focused on eliminating federal budget waste and introducing new additions to his economic team.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s selection of a team of highly skilled pragmatists has already been described as a move to the political center, but Obama advisers and longtime acquaintances say that this is a misreading of the incoming president and his approach.
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 White House / Paul Morse (altered)
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By Eugene Robinson — Having two presidents is starting to feel like having no president, and that’s the situation we’ll face until Inauguration Day. Heaven help us.
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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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 AP photo / Kiichiro Sato, file
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By Chris Hedges — The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess, if he does not radically redirect the nation’s resources to assist the working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country.
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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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 Flickr / LoopZilla
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What’s a hundred billion dollars between capitalists? The Fed and the Treasury are once again throwing good cash after bad business. This time the culprit is Citigroup, which could get bailed out—courtesy of you—to the tune of $100 billion. And with that, we’d like to announce that Truthdig is officially too big to fail. Update: Done deal.
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 youtube.com
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Congress is planning to give Barack Obama some serious motivation to jump right into the job on Inauguration Day, with two key lawmakers saying they plan to have a major economic stimulus package waiting for him on Jan. 20.
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 Wikimedia Commons / federalreserve.gov
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Friday brought more news from purportedly reliable sources close to Barack Obama, this time suggesting that the president-elect was zeroing in on Timothy Geithner as his pick for treasury secretary and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for commerce secretary.
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As President Bush shuffled through the reception line before a photo op last Saturday at the G-20 summit in Washington, visiting heads of state seemed to give him the cold shoulder, even as they greeted other attendees with a handshake. What gives?
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By Eugene Robinson — The Big Three left Capitol Hill empty-handed, but they’re bound to get some kind of federal help, however grudging. In the end, I don’t think either George W. Bush or Barack Obama wants to be remembered as the president who lost the auto industry.
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 AP photo / Carlos Osorio
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By Bill Boyarsky — If jobs weren’t disappearing and a depression threatening, it would be easy and satisfying to send the American auto industry into bankruptcy or liquidation. But this isn’t the time to make Chrysler, General Motors and Ford pay for their years of failure and shortsightedness.
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 finance.google.com
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In a little over two weeks, the Dow has tumbled more than 2,000 points as bad economic news continues to pile up. Word on Thursday that jobless claims hit a 16-year high, combined with a dreary outlook for Detroit and a lack of confidence in major financial institutions, helped drive the DJIA down to 7,552.29.
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 AP photo / Carlos Osorio
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By Titus Levi — There’s no guarantee that a bailout would save the incompetently managed American automobile industry. However, doing nothing may be worse, especially for the state of Michigan.
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By Ellen Goodman — Sen. Robert Byrd, 91, announced that he will give up the chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee to Sen. Daniel Inouye, 84. The torch has passed to a new generation.
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By Amy Goodman — Evo Morales knows about “change you can believe in.” He also knows what happens when a powerful elite is forced to make changes it doesn’t want.
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 chicagotribune.com / Barack Obama
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It looks like a $2,075 investment in a sketch by then-no-name artist and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama could really have paid off. The doodle, drawn as part of a 2007 “National Doodle Day” charity event, is now said to be worth in the six figures.
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 telegraph.co.uk
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Analysts believe the economy is already in “horrific shape”—with news this month of record-breaking drops in the cost of living and new home construction—and is inching closer to a dangerous deflationary period, which could worsen the current economic crisis by making debts even harder to repay.
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 AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — This is not change we can believe in. Not if Robert Rubin or his protégé, Lawrence Summers, get to call the shots on the economy in President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration.
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On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke faced a lineup of vexed, perplexed and otherwise agitated members of Congress, including Reps. Barney Frank, Ron Paul and Nydia Velazquez, all eager to ask some serious questions about the infamous bailout.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — There is a second transition under way over which President-elect Barack Obama has no control—the transition of conservatives to minority status. How they do this will have a powerful impact on the new presidency.
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 Flickr / Brave New Films
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By Marie Cocco — The giant discounter is the only store where hard-squeezed consumers can afford to buy anything, and so it has kept posting sales gains amid the retail bloodbath.
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By Will Evans and Peter Overby —
Scores of independent groups went into hyperdrive for this election, reaching millions of people with some of the most vicious attack ads of the year. But figuring out what impact the groups actually had on the campaigns is a tricky proposition.
Posted on Nov 17, 2008
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 change.gov
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Barack Obama and John McCain have both made a big fuss about working with the opposition, so the cooperative theme of their meeting on Monday, something of a tradition among presidential rivals, was no surprise. But will McCain really help Obama? “Obviously,” says Mr. Arizona.
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 AP photo / Morry Gash
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By Chris Hedges — War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to ensure their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease it is meant to eradicate.
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Barack Obama covered a lot of ground during his first post-election interview Sunday. The president-elect said he will close Guantanamo, re-regulate the economy and wait until he’s settled before getting his daughters that puppy. Michelle Obama, joining her husband, said she will become an active first lady once her children make the adjustment to their new home.
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President-elect Barack Obama made his first weekly video address via YouTube this weekend. What’s it about? “Make no mistake—this is the greatest economic challenge of our times,” he says. Oh. Right.
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What’s to be done to pull the U.S. out of economic quicksand? You can bet that “Left, Right & Center” stalwarts Robert Scheer, Tony Blankley and Matt Miller might differ in their takes on this question, as well as others posed on this week’s show.
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By David Sirota — Bush reportedly suggested to Obama he might support an economic stimulus package and aid to struggling automakers if Democrats drop their opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia. Strange behavior? Yes and no.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s most urgent task is to repair an ailing economy. But one of his most important promises was to end the cultural and religious wars that have disfigured politics for four decades.
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