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By Ruth Harris
$23.10
By Edward W. Said
$18
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No more presidential debates (at least for a couple months or so)! Who won the last one, Barack Obama or John McCain? Tony Blankley, Matt Miller and Truthdig’s own Robert Scheer size up the candidates and their campaigns and discuss the latest developments in the economic arena on this week’s “Left, Right & Center.”
Posted on Oct 17, 2008
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By Eugene Robinson — Grouchiness, twitchiness and haughtiness didn’t help John McCain in Wednesday’s debate, but what he said hurt him more than how he said it.
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By David Sirota — No Republican says aristocrat like Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon. And no Senate election could more intensely shift economic politics than his state’s.
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When Sen. John McCain finally appeared on “Late Night” on Thursday, David Letterman didn’t let him forget that he had stood Letterman up last month. Later, McCain joked, “I haven’t had so much fun since my last interrogation.”
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After enduring many grueling weeks of campaigning and three tense debates, John McCain and Barack Obama turned up in tuxes for Thursday night’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York to cut loose and try out some lighter material on a crowd ready to laugh, and they laughed as well—at themselves and (especially) at each other.
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By William Pfaff — Military and economic disasters have caused Europeans and European governments to view the United States in a new, unflattering light.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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The Dow gained 401.35 points Thursday but had volatile swings through most of the day. Investors, The Wall Street Journal reports, are still trying to figure out what stage of suck the economy is in.
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By Marie Cocco — The last thing we need is another “economic stimulus” package. What we need is a jobs package. And we ought to start calling it that.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Titus Levi — Wall Street has yet to recover after the economic shocks of recent weeks. Why? Two problems. One we already know: The “plan,” even with revisions, is deeply flawed. The second problem has not been mentioned all that much because it’s pretty scary: Put simply, we have no idea what we’re doing.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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It seems like only a couple of days ago that the Dow jumped 936 points. The market went back to freaking everyone out on Wednesday, with a sobering drop of 733.08 points. Stimuli and bailouts aside, it appears that we’re in for a substantial recession.
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AP photo / Rick Bowmer
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By Bill Boyarsky — From the Southern California suburbs to Ohio’s Appalachia, places that have not been especially friendly to African-American candidates, Sen. Barack Obama seems to be convincing a substantial number of whites that their votes should be determined by their economic troubles rather than race.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — And the winner is … Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Remember him—the great Democratic president who saved capitalism from the capitalists by reining in their exorbitant greed? Forget the Reagan Revolution heralding a new era of small government, which turned out to be nothing more than a fig leaf for legalized corporate crime. The hero of the hour is FDR.
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lasvegasvegas.com
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What would Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider from Oliver Stone’s 1987 classic cautionary tale “Wall Street,” have to say about the current state of the American economy? Well, we just might find out.
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group30.org
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Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said Tuesday that the U.S. was already in a recession, despite the efforts of the U.S. government and other nations’ leaders to intervene. “I have seen a lot of crises but I have never seen anything quite like this one,” said Volcker, who headed up the Fed for eight years before Alan Greenspan took over in 1987.
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Flickr / soggydan
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John McCain has laid out his plan for how he would help Americans recover from the recent shocks to the domestic and international markets. He took the action on Tuesday, a day later than he initially said he would and a day after Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama released his own economic plan—and McCain’s timing was not lost on the Obama campaign.
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By Eugene Robinson — Can any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?
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Flickr / Allison Harger
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Barack Obama unveiled his $60-billion economic rescue plan on Monday and urged Washington not to wait for a new president to take up his proposals. The Obama plan includes tax breaks for companies that hire new workers, a short moratorium on foreclosures and, with an eye on job creation, federal financing for public works and infrastructure projects.
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You know it’s troubs when McCain campaign spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer turns on The New York Times’ resident McCain campaign strategist, William Kristol—and on Fox News, no less—claiming he’s fallen for the Obama party line. Over to you, Bill.
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Collage: commons.wikimedia.org / senate.gov
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After Team McCain’s negative strategy over recent days seemed to hurt the Republican’s campaign more than help it, John McCain took a new tack on Monday, calling off the attack dogs—or at least reining them in a bit—during a speech in Virginia Beach, Va.
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Flickr / BohPhoto
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William Kristol was becoming apoplectic, Hillary Clinton was sounding optimistic, and the McCain campaign was being perhaps a tad unrealistic—or so read Monday’s political barometer as an ABC/Washington Post poll indicated that the Obama campaign had taken a 10-point lead in the presidential race.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Chris Hedges — It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
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Wikimedia Commons / Hk1992
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Stock traders in Asia and Europe seemed to like the news that European governments will coordinate with one another as they throw cash at troubled banks. The euro zone plan was announced on the heels of similar British and American schemes.
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Two new books resurrect the seductions and corruptions of pre-revolutionary Cuba.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Each campaign has given voters ample notice about the inclinations, temperaments, habits, philosophical leanings and advisers they would bring to the White House. That’s enough.
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By David Sirota — Is Henry Paulson a crony communist or a businessman? The answer could be the difference between economic disaster and recovery.
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By Eugene Robinson — Here’s a question I’d like to ask Barack Obama and John McCain: Is the United States destined to look and feel increasingly like a “developing country”? Is this the way it’s going to be?
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news.bbc.co.uk
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After seven straight drops, the Dow landed at 8579.19 on Thursday, a year to the day after hitting a record of more than 14,000 points. The owners of the national debt clock in New York, meanwhile, announced they will add two digits to the board in order to display a quadrillion—because that’s where we’re headed.
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White House / Shealah Craighead
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, with much prodding from Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, is thinking about using some of that $700 billion to buy ownership stakes in shaky banks. The scheme would ostensibly give taxpayers a share in the fortunes of the bailed-out institutions.
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During a sit-down interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson that aired on Wednesday, Barack Obama talked about the economy and how he’d lead differently from President Bush before addressing the McCain-Palin campaign’s ramped-up attacks of late. “All these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points,” Obama told Gibson.
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By Ellen Goodman — Uncertainty is the backdrop for a presidential campaign whose last month is being conducted over the shakiest terrain. What we didn’t know yesterday, last week, last month suddenly reshapes the contours of our lives.
Posted on Oct 8, 2008
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By Marie Cocco — In the second presidential debate, the questioners seemed to understand better than either candidate that we are in the midst of a national emergency as grave and possibly more far-reaching than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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AP photo / Madalyn Ruggiero
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Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has pulled significantly ahead of Republican rival John McCain, taking an 11-point lead after Tuesday night’s presidential debate, according to the latest Gallup Poll.
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A lobbying powerhouse with an emphatically pro-Republican political action committee is pounding Democratic Senate candidates for supporting legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize. The ads portray Al Franken in Minnesota and Tom Allen of Maine as backing Big Brother-style surveillance of American workers.
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starwoodhotels.com
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What’s $85 billion if you don’t get to spend it? Just days after taxpayers saved AIG from ruin, executives of the insurance giant spent $440,000 pampering themselves at the exclusive St. Regis resort in Monarch Beach, Calif.
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Tuesday night marked the second debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. While Brokaw struggled to stick to the script, the two candidates fielded questions about the current economic catastrophe and American foreign policy.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Bill Boyarsky — As was the case in the first presidential debate, Barack Obama emerged from Tuesday night’s confrontation with John McCain in Nashville, Tenn., in command of the situation. The Democratic nominee looked calm, confident and presidential as he won their second contest.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Tuesday night’s debate, a town-hall discussion dominated by economic questions, made it clear that John McCain’s effort to change the campaign’s focus to the culture wars of the 1960s is not going to work.
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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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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain and Sarah Palin are going to try their best to make us talk about anything but the big issues facing our country, because most Americans think Barack Obama’s solutions are better.
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World Economic Forum / Remy Steinegger
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On Monday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee took a look into the collapse of Lehman Brothers as part of a larger review of the factors leading to the current economic crisis, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Judging by the committee’s account, leaders at Lehman Bros. disregarded key warnings of impending trouble and cut hefty checks for their fellow executives even as the firm teetered on the brink of disaster.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Chris Hedges — The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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European leaders decided against a joint bailout of the Continent’s financial system, but that hasn’t stopped individual governments from trying to save failing and financially shaky institutions. The German government, which has been highly critical of U.S. economic mismanagement, just backed a $68-billion deal to save one of its biggest banks.
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Flickr / buddhakiwi
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“Americans need to ask themselves if they’ve ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist,” says McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. The AP called similar remarks by running mate Sarah Palin “racially tinged” and Time said the claim was “simply wrong,” but the McCain campaign shows no signs of backing down from its new strategy.
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AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
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With just a month to go before the presidential election, the Obama and McCain campaigns are making some strategy changes in reaction to the seismic shifts that shook the economy over recent weeks. The forecast currently looks better, to some analysts, for Obama than McCain, but McCain’s supporters don’t see it that way.
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The New York Times / Doug Mills
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On Friday the House approved, after initially rejecting, the $700-billion bailout package for the financial industry in what is likely to be the most expensive government intervention in the nation’s history. This, of course, only slightly surpasses another notable “government intervention”—the nearly $600 billion spent in the war in Iraq.
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bls.gov
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A government report released Friday morning leaves little room for any defense of the failed policies of the Bush administration or any belief in the economic wisdom of John McCain, whose erroneous assertion that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong” failed to mention a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, up nearly two percentage points since 2007.
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Truthdigger of the Week: Medea Benjamin
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