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By Nir Rosen
$17.16
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By Dave Zirin
$18.95
$22
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gizmodo.com
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With everybody’s eyeballs and earlobes focused on the economy and the election, the Justice Department pushed through rule changes that allow the FBI to go back to the bad old days of spying more aggressively on Americans. Civil libertarians and even some lawmakers are in an uproar. The Center for Investigative Reporting has a must-read report that explains why.
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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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California Governor's Office
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Tight credit has put California’s state budget into a bit of a pickle, with funding for the government’s day-to-day operations drying up faster than Sarah Palin’s popularity. A sign of trouble is a letter—leaked Friday—from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that warned of a potential emergency request for a $7-billion loan within the coming weeks.
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Former Time correspondent Andrew Meier presents a riveting exhumation of the previously unknown story of Cy Oggins, an early American-Jewish communist who spied for the Soviets and was killed by them in 1947.
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By David Sirota — The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair—stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror.
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By Eugene Robinson — We all owe a debt of thanks to the skeptics who refused to be steamrollered by the Bush administration’s $700-billion financial bailout plan until we at least had some understanding of what we were doing and why.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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The Bloomberg news service counts 10 lawmakers who may be ready to switch their votes when the bailout proposal takes another run at the House of Representatives. The original measure failed by only 23 votes and has since been substantially fattened by the Senate.
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By Joe Conason — The initial failure to pass bailout legislation reflected a political system as bereft of confidence as the financial markets.
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White House / Susan Sterner
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The House couldn’t swallow the $700-billion bailout proposal, so the Senate added about $100 billion of incentives—mostly in the form of tax cuts. The Senate will vote on the proposal tonight and the House could decide as early as Friday whether $700 billion is too much, but $800 billion is just about right.
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By Amy Goodman — If the economy does collapse, if people can’t go down to the bank to withdraw their savings, or get cash from an ATM, there may be serious “civil unrest,” and the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team may be called upon sooner than we imagine to assist with “crowd control.”
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By Eugene Robinson — A new internal report confirms our fears about the politicization of the Justice Department. That same contempt for government can be found in the current financial crisis as well as the meteoric rise of the former mayor of Wasilla.
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By Marie Cocco — Americans are reluctant to make John McCain pay for George W. Bush’s sins, but with so many crises on so many fronts, the country can’t afford to cut him any slack.
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Co-founder Sergey Brin explains on Google’s blog why the tech giant officially opposes California’s Prop. 8, a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage in the state: “While there are many objections to this proposition ... it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8.”
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By David Sirota — In the late 1990s, Washington was in the throes of a deregulatory orgy. Many lampooned Rep. Bernie Sanders’ opposition to the grotesquerie, and his notoriety as the only self-described socialist in Congress. Nobody guessed that in a few years our country would become the United States’ Socialist Republic.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s sudden intervention in Washington’s deliberations over the Wall Street bailout could not have been more out of sync with what was actually happening.
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain is rapidly making his temperament an inescapable issue in the presidential campaign. Does the nation really want so much drama in the White House?
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AP photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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By Stanley Kutler — Wall Street will not trouble its collective consciousness with worry over the Constitution. But this bailout bill is virtually unprecedented in its assumptions and its reach for unchecked power.
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By Joe Conason — Before this is over, we will need a special prosecutor with an ample budget to find, prosecute and imprison the criminals responsible for this disaster and ultimately deter such criminals in the future.
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By Ellen Goodman — Why is a welfare mother to blame for her poverty while Wall Street fat cats can count on the federal government for $700 billion?
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propublica.org
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Assuming the administration’s $700-billion scheme is approved, the total price tag for bailouts this year—including Bear Stearns, AIG and Freddie and Fannie—will be roughly three times greater than all other U.S. bailouts ever. Because $1.015 trillion is a hard figure to wrap one’s head around, ProPublica puts the numbers in perspective.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Unless something very strange happens, Congress will pass a massive bailout of the financial system by the end of this week simply because every other option is worse. But the content of the bailout package matters enormously.
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By Marie Cocco — So this is how the “ownership society” works. We own all the bad stuff.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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While lawmakers debated exactly how to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at Wall Street, the Dow dropped 372 points on Monday. The price of oil, meanwhile, had a $25 surge that took many analysts by surprise.
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Flickr / world economic forum
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel is furious with the United States for roiling the world economy and expecting Europe to help clean up the mess. “We did what we were supposed to do. ... We adopted a decent EU regulation ... but when it came to it, the Americans said ‘that’s not for us.’ ”
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain was telling the truth when he said that economics wasn’t his strong suit. In response to what many economists have called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Republican nominee has sounded—and let’s be honest here—totally, embarrassingly and dangerously clueless.
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By David Sirota — Barack Obama isn’t going to win any arguments about the economy if he keeps winking at the robber barons who helped wreck Wall Street.
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commons.wikimedia.org / Ramy Majouji
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Truthdig’s editor in chief warns against thinking about the economic crisis as an “act of God,” saying “this is man-made” and that the individuals responsible are well known and entirely too influential in the current election.
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By Amy Goodman — With financial institutions begging for bailouts, taxpayers should be in the driver’s seat. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Americans don’t mind wealthy and even rapacious capitalists as long as they deliver the goods to everyone else. But when the big boys drag everyone else down, Americans rise up in righteous anger.
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fbi.gov
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The Justice Department was dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on Friday on a new set of rules designed to help FBI agents zero in on potential national security threats within the U.S., allowing them to gather information in public places—and even conduct interviews—without identifying themselves.
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By Rep. Dennis Kucinich — America must move from the errant, retributive justice of 9/11 to a healing, restorative process of truth and reconciliation.
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By William Pfaff — The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it’s the same story as in Indochina in 1970.
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By Joe Conason — Even cursory examination shows that Sarah Palin’s posturing is wildly exaggerated and her campaign claims veer toward fraud.
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Flickr / Mykl Roventine
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The Justice Department could be gearing up for an antitrust case against the world’s leading search and online advertising provider because of a deal with Yahoo that puts Google in control of the vast majority of online ads. Despite a pledge to not do evil, Google’s image has been tarnished in recent years, mainly over privacy concerns.
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain is no silver-tongued orator, as he proved in St. Paul, but it’s hard not to be stirred when he speaks of wanting only to serve a cause greater than himself—until you take a closer look and see that he’s running one of the most egocentric presidential campaigns in memory.
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Investors have been throwing money at stock markets the world over following the news that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been placed under federal conservatorship. Some analysts are confident that the move will stabilize the mortgage giants and, in turn, a tanking housing market. With hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on the line, let’s hope they’re right.
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AP photo / Matt Rourke
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By Chris Hedges — St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
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Just how dangerous are evangelical zealots? A new book by Jeff Sharlet takes a close and disturbing look at the group known as The Family and its disturbing and apparently widespread influence on mainstream political culture.
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By David Sirota — In the imminent confrontation over the Employee Free Choice Act, an almost embarrassingly modest proposal, corporations are actually billing themselves as the underdog—the poor, overmatched peasant David against the Philistine monster Goliath.
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By Marie Cocco — Here is what we have gotten with John McCain’s vice presidential selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, picked in part for her extreme anti-abortion credentials: an exquisite endorsement of the pro-choice argument.
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In Jonathan Mahler’s new book, George W. Bush emerges as the most lawless president in American history, the first to usurp the law as a matter of policy.
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By Marie Cocco — It is worth pausing during these orchestrated partisan celebrations to look afresh at entitlements. There is no more recent evidence of their enduring value than the latest report from the Census Bureau on the number of Americans who are doing without health insurance.
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Wikimedia Commons / Ansgar Walk
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Not only is George W. Bush’s secretary of the interior trying to rewrite endangered species protections, he also appears to be tuning out public input, which is required by law. Scientists and activists from more than 100 environmental groups have signed a petition demanding a longer, more democratic hearing before environmental protection goes the way of the icecaps.
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Congressional Quarterly investigates John McCain’s curious decision to pollute his maverick image by hiring a bunch of lobbyists to run his campaign. The list includes “campaign manager Rick Davis, senior adviser Charlie Black, deputy campaign manager Christian Ferry, congressional liaison John Green, senior policy adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer” and neocon chicken hawk Randy Scheunemann.
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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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NASA
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The agencies responsible for the welfare of endangered species are proposing rule changes that would cut through all the red tape keeping animals such as the bald eagle alive. True to the administration’s tradition of considering the fox before the hen house, officials hope the changes will assist frustrated developers.
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By Eugene Robinson — World attention, in addition to fixing on the spectacle of the Olympics and the Chinese economic miracle, will be cast on a record of human rights abuse and environmental degradation.
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By William Pfaff — The Chinese authorities’ anxiety that the Olympic Games will be a success reflects their need to find international confirmation of their general political and economic policies of the past 20 years.
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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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According to an internal e-mail obtained by the AP, the chief of staff of the EPA’s enforcement wing has issued a gag order, telling staffers in June exactly what to do should a reporter, the inspector general or the Government Accountability Office call: “Please do not respond to questions or make any statements.”
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