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By Ricardo Cortes
$17.95
By Jeff Sharlet
$17.13
$24
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By Marie Cocco — I long for a candidate who would ‘‘focus like a laser beam’’ on the economy. That’s what voters are doing as they see their paychecks shrink from inflation, their jobs threatened and their middle-class dreams diminished.
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Courtesy of the Brave New Films team, here we have a property-by-property breakdown of John McCain’s many fancy domiciles, which provide ironic contrast to footage of the presumptive Republican nominee holding forth about how Americans with mortgage troubles can just scrimp ‘n’ save their way back to solvency.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Those words from the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who warns that the global economic malaise is only at its halfway point, if that. “The U.S. is not out of the woods,” says Ken Rogoff.
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flickr.com/terrapin_flyer
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Although this might strike the kids involved as a good deal, it’s a definite sign of the times for the adults: A rural Minnesota school district has decided to strike Mondays from the calendar this fall in order to save money, making classes slightly longer on other days to make up the lost time.
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The Beijing Olympics are proof that the rule of China’s Communist Party has been validated. Yet human rights abuses continue. What’s really going on? What kind of country is China becoming? Two new books help provide answers.
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By David Sirota — If you believe the chatter, Barack Obama is desperately seeking a white guy—any white guy—to be his running mate. Hopefully, he doesn’t choose Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, whose only major accomplishment is helping to bend his party to the will of corporations.
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Stagflation: It’s always sounded like a dirty word, and is hopelessly tied to retro jokes about the ‘70s. But with GDP growth already, well, stagnant, the Labor Department announced Thursday that July saw the highest rate of inflation in 17 years, meaning you can now appropriately drop the word into water cooler convo without seeming like a potty-mouth or a retro hipster. On the downside, you are now paying 5.6 percent more for things than you did at this time last year.
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By David Sirota — Twenty-two Electoral College votes in the Rocky Mountain West are up for grabs, meaning this vast expanse is more pivotal than Ohio. And that’s only the beginning of the region’s burgeoning influence on energy, taxes, trade and health care.
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By Joe Conason — Touring America’s oil rigs and nuclear plants, John McCain sometimes sounds as if he’ll produce enough wind to power the nation all by himself.
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AP photo / Alex Brandon
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By Bill Boyarsky — After enduring the silly debate over who injected race into the presidential campaign, let’s look at some recent numbers that indicate how Barack Obama could win this close election.
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guardian.co.uk
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A national strike left South Africa’s streets largely deserted Wednesday as 2 million people refused to work in protest of soaring food and fuel prices. The action, led by a coalition of trade unions, was symbolic and precautionary, suggesting additional strikes if the government and business remained inept at managing the national economy.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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Finally, some slightly better financial news has hit the wires after months of sobering reports: Oil prices dropped to a three-month low on Tuesday, which may be due to “the softening market,” as one analyst puts it in this NYT account, but whatever the reason it still means a slight reprieve from weeks of punishing prices. Stock markets had their biggest gains in four months.
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AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Chris Hedges — An attack on Iran, which Israeli and Bush administration officials appear set to carry out if Iranian uranium enrichment is not halted, would ignite a regional war in the Middle East and lead to economic collapse and political upheaval in the United States.
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flickr.com
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A government report released Friday signals worsening economic tides as the U.S. tries to navigate through its highest level of unemployment in four years. The seven-month-long trend of net job losses is likely to persist, with few signs of a turnaround on the horizon.
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Despite the massive federal stimulus package, national GDP only grew 1.9 percent from April to June, the Commerce Department has announced, and it actually shrank in the last quarter of 2007. Meanwhile, high gas prices, supposedly reflecting costs, spiked profits of oil companies, with Exxon recording its most profitable quarter ever. In fact, reports the NYT, “It was the highest quarterly profit ever for any American company, as Exxon made nearly $90,000 a minute.”
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boston.com
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The World Trade Organization talks in Geneva finally imploded Wednesday, as negotiations over farm subsidies and labor standards collapsed into an immovable standstill between wealthy and poorer countries. The talks, defended heavily by the “developed world,” are seen by critics as an instrument to serve corporate interests.
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Detroit News / Ankur Dholakia
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In the face of a U.S. housing crisis and a troubled economy, Bush administration officials claim that the past two years have seen a 30 percent drop in the levels of chronically homeless people, crediting the decrease to a strategy of finding permanent shelter for the long-ignored disabled and addicted.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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By Robert Scheer — This is a time to condemn the bankers, not to embrace them. They are the scoundrels who got us into the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, lining their own pockets while destroying the life savings of those who trusted them.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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George W. Bush rode into office with a budget surplus, courtesy of his predecessor. When he leaves in January, he will not return the favor. The White House estimated the budget deficit for next year at a record $482 billion—and that doesn’t include the full cost of two wars, the potential bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the full stimulus package or the loss of tax revenue from an economy in the toilet.
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foreclosurewearhouse.com
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Congress to the rescue! Mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are being propped up in their time of dire need, thanks to a bill passed Saturday that will lift the world’s two largest financial institutions out of immediate danger and help some homeowners handle mortgage crises.
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Flickr / PetroleumJelliffe
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According to the most recent data from the IRS, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans took home a greater share of the nation’s income in 2006 than in any year of the previous 19. It’s possibly the biggest income disparity Americans have seen since the Great Depression. The average tax rate of the super-rich was at its lowest level in at least 18 years.
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By David Sirota — History books teem with six-word phrases, from the comforting (“Nothing to fear but fear itself”) to the inspiring (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”) to the embarrassing (“Read my lips, no new taxes”). But the six words “on the basis of union membership” could be more momentous than any of those.
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Flickr / M@rcopako
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By Marie Cocco — In its own way, Starbucks has a lot in common with SUVs, hot tubs and television screens wide enough to fill a wall. That is, it represents the bit-by-bit extravagances that helped get us into the tight economic jam we find ourselves in today.
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Wiki Commons
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Last week it was Budweiser that was sold to the Europeans, this week it is the NBA that fell victim to a global economic shift that’s seen the dollar nose-dive vis-à-vis the euro. Respected young forward Josh Childress accepted a fatter offer from a Greek club than the one his U.S. team reportedly was making. He may not be the last.
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By Marie Cocco — Using taxes as the centerpiece of—or as a substitute for—a more comprehensive economic policy is the idea that has dominated Washington since the rise of Reaganism nearly three decades ago, but the global forces shaping the U.S. economy are more powerful than a mere tax cut, or tax hike.
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The percentage of women in their prime earning years who work has gone down, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers cut across demographics, and have more to do with a sluggish economy and a lack of opportunity than a rekindled interest in child rearing. As one congressional economist told The New York Times, “A woman gets laid off and she stays home for six months with her kids. ... She doesn’t admit that she is staying home because she could not get another acceptable job.”
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momocrats.typepad.com
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The backlash following Phil Gramm’s comments about the “mental recession” he believed Americans were bringing upon themselves through negative thinking has evidently caused the former Texas senator to leave his position as a top adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign.
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Are workers to blame for the fix that General Motors (along with many other corporations) is in? A new book by Roger Lowenstein argues that they are. He couldn’t be more wrong.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — On the issue of gasoline prices, Republicans think they have a winner in their call for new drilling and Democrats are playing defense. Democrats need—this is a technical term—a lot more oomph. Al Gore wants to help them.
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By Amy Goodman — While the presidential candidates trade barbs and accuse each other of flip-flopping, they agree with President Bush on their enthusiastic support for nuclear power.
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By Ellen Goodman — We are expected to interact with “labor-saving technology” without realizing that it’s labor-transferring technology. The job has not been “saved”; it’s been taken out of the paid sector, where employees have a nasty habit of expecting salaries, and put into the unpaid sector, where suckers ‘r’ us.
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AP photo / Lisa Poole
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The once-mighty U.S. dollar is full of hot air, or at least the rate of inflation is at a 26-year high due to the recent economic toils and astronomical energy prices. Prices U.S. consumers pay shot up 1.1 percent in June—or more directly, your paycheck just got 1.1 percent smaller.
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Flickr / zoliblog
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While depositors at IndyMac banks in California do battle for a chance to get their cash out, financial analysts have been crunching the numbers to identify other troubled lenders. ABC News snuck a peek to come up with this handy guide to banks with an unfortunate “Texas ratio.”
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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President Bush is still insisting that the U.S. economy is in generally good shape, even as he asks Congress to support legislation to help Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while insisting in the same breath that he’s not proposing a “bailout” for the ailing mortgage companies. Hmmm.
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By Marie Cocco — Phil Gramm’s dismissal of America’s economic suffering has forced him to the political sidelines, but as one of the congressional architects of Republican economics, the mess he made will haunt Americans no matter who the next president is.
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How does someone go from being a trusted economic adviser to being a prospective ambassador to Belarus? Ask McCain fixture Phil Gramm, who dismissed America’s economic problems as a figment. Here with more, the nation’s finest talking heads.
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AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Scott Ritter — Iran’s recent missile tests should remove all doubt that an attack by either the United States or Israel would be a terrible mistake.
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foreclosurewearhouse.com
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Although certain Washington denizens from both sides of the aisle might have been thrown when the two government-backed mortgage finance companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, hit the skids last week, several of their current and former colleagues had long seen the crisis coming.
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Next thing you know, they’re going to say unicorns are real, too. On an episode of Fox News’ “Special Report” late this week, Weekly Standard Editor Fred Barnes chimed in about McCain adviser Phil Gramm’s assessment that America was on the verge of a “mental recession,” calling Gramm’s statement “straight talk.”
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momocrats.typepad.com
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According to Phil Gramm, the former senator from Texas who’s now a key economic adviser to Sen. John McCain, America’s economic woes, insofar as they actually exist, are the product of some stinking thinking by “a nation of whiners” and doom-and-gloom headlines from the U.S. media.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.
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Flickr / wwarby
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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke expects America’s economic struggles to continue well into next year and has asked Congress to expand his regulatory powers. Lawmakers are unlikely to fulfill his request any time soon. Bernanke also suggested that the Fed could continue to bail out investment banks.
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What are we to make of this new John McCain campaign ad, in which colorful countercultural degenerates prance through the opening frames, and, near the end, a still of Noble Older McCain is superimposed over footage of Hunky Younger Ex-POW McCain?
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Flickr / h-angele
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According to Mikhail Gorbachev, John McCain and Barack Obama have more in common than they’d like to admit. Both have refused to address their country’s unprecedented military spending, which the former Soviet leader blames for America’s economic woes. Writing in a Russian newspaper, Gorbachev argued that the U.S. behaves “as if the Cold War were not a thing of the past, and the country were surrounded by enemies.”
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Flickr / jslander
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Starting with 2009 models, new cars in California will sport a sticker that rates just how environmentally friendly they are, based on emissions and fuel economy. Not to be outdone, the European Union might require governments to monetize and budget for emissions.
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By William Pfaff — The relationship among the three principal centers of world power of the past half-century is now at the edge of fundamental change.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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