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$16.00
Sam Harris
$11.53
$17
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By Eugene Robinson — If you’re among those who believe the news media have focused too much on the presidential horse race and the personalities of the candidates—and not enough on vital issues of state—let me submit that you’re wrong.
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international.wi.gov
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What has the power to unite progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans? According to a compelling article in the San Francisco Chronicle, agribusiness is having its way in Congress, even getting Democrats to cut food stamps to make room for subsidies.
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Petar Pismestrovic, Kleine Zeitung, Austria —
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Truthdig
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Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer interviews documentarian Alex Gibney about his 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a compelling examination of the circumstances that led Americans to commit torture.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If you want to talk about candidates borrowing from each other, consider how much Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are taking on loan from the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, the affable populist killed in a plane crash shortly before the 2002 election.
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By David Sirota — When it came to sex, Bill Clinton made us debate the definition of “is.” Now, when it comes to economics, Hillary Clinton wants to debate the definition of “long,” claiming this week in Ohio that “I’ve long been a critic of the shortcomings of NAFTA.”
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Officials at the Federal Reserve are running out of creative ways to stave off a recession and expect the U.S. economy to slow to a crawl in 2008, with a growth rate of only 1.3 to 2 percent over the year.
Posted on Feb 20, 2008
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain has the advantage of getting to run right away. Too bad he’s campaigning on failed policies and bad ideas.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The boilerplate in a candidate’s speeches gets little attention because words used over and over never constitute “news.” But one of John McCain’s favorite lines—his declaration that “the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists,” or, as he sometimes says it, “extremism”—could define the 2008 election.
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Alen Lauzan Falcon, Caglecartoons.com —
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Arcadio Esquivel, La Prensa, Panama —
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By Marie Cocco — As they prepare to vote, thousands of Virginia Democrats are struggling to decide between two able candidates. Many of those will not make that decision until they have ballots in their hands.
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By Eugene Robinson — It is insane to waste time and energy worrying that somewhere, doubtless in a high-tech subterranean lair, Republican masterminds are cackling over their diabolical plot: The use of reverse psychology to lure unsuspecting Democrats into nominating Barack Obama, an innocent lamb who will be chewed up by the attack machine in the fall. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
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By David Sirota — For all the hype about generational and gender wars in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, we have a class war on our hands. And incredibly, corporate America’s preferred candidate is winning the poorer “us” versus the wealthier “them.”
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By Marie Cocco — Kitchen-table worries trumped even the charisma of Camelot. This theme has sounded again and again since the Democratic primary contests began, yet neither the national media nor, apparently, the Obama campaign can hear it.
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By Eugene Robinson — Now that the presidential field has been winnowed to four—barring a miraculous return by one of the contestants recently voted off the island—the new national pastime is gaming the electability factor.
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By Marie Cocco — Bush may be a lame duck, but he’s also a president who has shown an unparalleled capacity to blow it.
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The FBI has announced an investigation into the practices of more than a dozen companies related to the subprime mortgage crisis that has destabilized the American and global economies. The Securities and Exchange Commission has already launched investigations of its own, and though it’s nice to see the authorities crack down on improper practices, it would be nice to have some oversight before there was a crisis.
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George W. Bush, the president who lied America into a war that will end up costing trillions of dollars, scolded the Democratic-controlled Congress in his final State of the Union address on Monday for undermining “the people’s trust in their government” with too many pet projects. Now that’s chutzpah, coming from a man who never met a spending bill he didn’t like unless it had to do with stem cells and sick children.
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By Marie Cocco — House Republicans were able to keep an extension of unemployment benefits out of the recently announced stimulus package, which is too bad, since it’s one measure that would actually help the ailing economy.
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Tab, The Calgary Sun —
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Sometimes it’s useful to let a story’s own lead speak for itself. Take, for example, the doozy of a question that opens Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s New York Times article about Bush’s economic focus in Monday’s State of the Union address: “Will George W. Bush be remembered as the president who lost the economy while trying to win a war?”
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Societe Generale
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How did a 31-year-old low-level bank trader with limited access lose five times as much money as the worst rogue trader ever? That’s the question European authorities and Societe Generale, France’s second-largest bank, are trying to answer.
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By Chalmers Johnson — A powerful new book by a young South Korean-born economist at Cambridge University provides a compelling critique of the contradictions and hypocrisies of globalization and neoliberalism. The perfect antidote to the nostrums of Thomas Friedman.
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By David Sirota — Stimulus—you’ve probably heard this nebulous, scientific-sounding word this week. Every politician suddenly wants economic “stimulus,” and wants you to think this “stimulus” is unequivocally good.
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By Joe Conason — Supporters of one Democratic candidate or another may insist that their man or woman won last Monday’s debate in South Carolina, but in their hearts most viewers could only have been disappointed by its childish tenor and puerile content.
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Olle Johansson, Sweden —
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By Marie Cocco — While the president and Congress consider a cure for the Bush economy, they should look to the root of the problem: stagnant incomes.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Stock markets across the world Monday suffered the worst losses since Sept. 11, 2001. The drop prompted analysts to theorize that investors have major doubts about the ability of the proposed stimulus package to mend the American economy.
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brokerforyou.com
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What to do about the slumping U.S. economy? President Bush may disagree with congressional Democrats on dozens of issues, but he seems to agree with their call for some kind of temporary stimulus measure to be implemented as soon as possible. Bush’s potential bailout plan will likely focus on income tax rebates to inspire Americans to go out and spend for their country.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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Winter 2008 is shaping up to be a gloomy season for the American economy, with mounting concerns over subprime mortgage prices and a plunging stock market. Thursday was a particularly dreary day on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones industrial average down 307 points and the Standard & Poor’s 500 falling almost 3 percent.
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marketplace.publicradio.org
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You know the economy is in trouble when investors and analysts are relieved that Citigroup lost only $9.83 billion in the last quarter of 2007. The banking giant managed to squeeze a few billion out of Abu Dhabi and Singapore, and will still pay a dividend on its stock, so for now the mood is upbeat.
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By Marie Cocco — With the economy teetering on recession, there’s a way out of the usual political impasse, if the politicians want to find it.
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By Doug Henwood — Just how sick is the U.S. economy? Just how deep is the divide between the super-rich and the rest of us? Just how bad would a meltdown of our political economy be? And what, if anything, can be done about it?
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AP photo / Jim Cole
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By Chris Hedges — Why isn’t Dennis Kucinich treated as a viable candidate? Because, Hedges argues, it’s all too easy for the comfortable to dismiss him.
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By Marie Cocco — If we seemed doomed to refight the battles from eight years ago, perhaps it’s because Al Gore’s warnings about a Bush presidency turned out to be so prescient.
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The term “subprime mortgage” has certainly been in heavy rotation in recent months, and economic panic has spread as a result of lenders playing fast and loose with their home-lending criteria, causing chaos in the mortgage market. Enter the Federal Reserve to try to undo some of the damage and prevent a recurrence.
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By Benjamin Barber — Can an overheated market remedy an underachieving democracy? Can the public interest be served by an economic engine in which corporate rivals use government to quash their competitors? These and other questions are the subject of a provocative new book by Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Clinton. Benjamin Barber, author of “Jihad vs. McWorld” and “Consumed,” takes a close look at Reich’s argument.
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By Marie Cocco — After a generation of self-indulgence, America is very close to taking a big step away from foreign oil and all of the environmental and security problems we’ve come to associate with that phrase. Now, if we can just keep the energy industry at bay… .
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By Will Durst — Talk about how the almighty have fallen. The dollar is headed downhill faster than Bode Miller on a set of rocket skis. Think nose dive. Plummetville. Plunge City. Belly Floppo Rama. Recession is such an ugly word.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Chris Hedges — All great empires and nations decay from within. By the time they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them successful and powerful no longer has relevance.
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By Eugene Robinson — We think of the United States as a land of unlimited possibility, not so much a classless society, but as a place where class is mutable—a place where brains, energy and ambition are what counts, not the circumstances of one’s birth. But three important new studies suggest that Horatio Alger doesn’t live here anymore.
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By Amy Goodman — “Rev. Billy” wants you to stop shopping. He’s the brainchild of an anti-consumerism activist and the subject of a new movie that takes a hard and entertaining look at our shopping-addicted culture just in time for “Black Friday.”
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zdnet.com
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With the dollar getting weaker all the time, the ailing housing market is getting a little relief from an unexpected source: foreigners. Brits in particular have been tempted by bargain homes in glamorous locales such as Manhattan, where one-third of all new condominiums are selling to foreign buyers.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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The dollar has simply fallen too low for India, which will no longer accept the greenback at its many tourist sites, including the Taj Mahal. Tourism ministry officials said they had to move quickly in order to protect Indian revenues from the dollar’s free fall. Remember when the dollar was like gold in the developing world?
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AP photo / Katsumi Kasahara
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By James Harris — The New York Times columnist brings his liberal conscience and economic expertise to bear on the housing crisis and sheds light on the dirty secret behind many political victories by conservatives: “The consistent source of [Republican] success has been race.”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It’s time that we subject the Iraq war to the same cost-benefit analysis that we are called upon to impose on other government endeavors. We are supposed to repeal or revise domestic programs that don’t work. Shouldn’t a troubled war policy be treated the same way?
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