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By Ned Sublette $18.45
By Michael Jerryson (Editor), Mark Juergensmeyer (Editor)
$22
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 AP / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Back in July of 2008, when most of us were still blissfully ignorant about the approaching economic apocalypse, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was very aware of some important market distress signals, and he chose to share some of those with an elite group of financial executives, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
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 imdb.com
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By Robert Scheer — It is not true, as a Wall Street Journal reviewer claimed, that the HBO movie version of Andrew Sorkin’s book “Too Big to Fail” was “Too Boring to Watch.” On the contrary, the problem with the film, as with the richly anecdotal book, is that it is all too effectively misleading.
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 Wikimedia Commons / Efloch
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Does the name Neel Kashkari ring a bell? Think way back to the year 2008, when the word bailout was just entering the vernacular in relation to Wall Street, not prison, and when Henry Paulson was still in charge of the Treasury Department.
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 Center for American Progress (CC-BY-ND)
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Chairman Phil Angelides and the five other Democrats on the 10-person Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have released their devastating report, which assigns blame for the economic meltdown. They pointed at Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (above), among others.
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 AP / LM Otero
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By Robert Scheer — The Harvard MBA is the degree that George W. Bush and his last treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, had in common, and their shared ignorance as they presided over the collapse of the U.S. economy is on full display in the former president’s newly published memoir.
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 AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Behind the wonderfully engaging smile of this president there is the increasingly disturbing suggestion of a cynical power-grabbing politician whose swift rise in power reflects less the earnestness of his message and far more the skills of a traditional political hack.
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 AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.
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Barack Obama’s top campaign strategist, David Plouffe, paid a visit to “The Daily Show” on Tuesday night, the anniversary of his candidate’s big win, to look back on Obama’s strategy for getting to the White House and how the president has done over the course of his first year. Jon Stewart doesn’t let Plouffe off easy, especially when it comes to Obama’s choice of economic advisers.
Posted on Nov 4, 2009
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 AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — A president has only so much capital to expend, both in tax dollars and public tolerance, and Barack Obama is dangerously overdrawn. He has tried to have it all on three fronts, and his administration is in serious danger of going bankrupt.
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 AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — What a hoot. The Chinese Communists invaded Washington on Monday demanding not that we sacrifice our freedoms but rather that we balance our budget. Creditors get to make that kind of call. And the Marxists of Beijing, who have turned out to be the world’s most prudent bankers, are worried about their assets invested in our banana republic.
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 AP / Charlie Neibergall
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Rep. Dennis Kucinich talks about winning a big victory for health care reform, grilling Hank Paulson over the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger, and the battle against crony capitalism.
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 AP / Charlie Neibergall
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Rep. Dennis Kucinich talks about winning a big victory for health care reform, grilling Hank Paulson over the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger, and the battle against crony capitalism.
Posted on Jul 17, 2009
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 AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation’s history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?
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 AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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By Robert Scheer — We are so inured to tales of business corruption that even a devastating exposé in The Wall Street Journal no longer shocks us. The fact that the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank made millions off his secret purchase of Goldman Sachs stock has barely registered a blip of outrage.
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 AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — We are being robbed big-time, but you can’t say we haven’t been warned. Not after the release Tuesday of a scathing report by the Treasury Department’s special inspector general, who charged that the aptly named Troubled Asset Relief Program is rife with mismanagement and potential for fraud.
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 AP photo / Harry Hamburg
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There has been much hand-wringing, not to mention finger-pointing, regarding who knew what, and when, about the financial calamities that have recently come to pass. However, Brooksley Born and Sheila Bair won’t be counted among the willfully or accidentally ignorant: They’ve been named this year’s winners of the JFK Profile in Courage Award for sounding the alarm far ahead of time.
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 AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — It is instructional that only one of the three tax-challenged Obama appointees has survived public scorn to claim a high position in the new administration. Oddly enough, it is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the man who will collect our taxes, whose career has not been stunted by his failure to pay them.
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 AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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Here’s a news bite that could have written itself a few weeks, if not months, ago: Barack Obama is Time’s 2008 Person of the Year. Even the magazine’s editorial staff members knew that the choice would hardly shock anyone, but they allowed themselves to be swept along by the tides of history—or perhaps inevitability.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Maybe Ralph Nader was right in predicting that the same Wall Street hustlers would have a lock on our government no matter which major party won the election. I hate to admit it, since it wasn’t that long ago that I heatedly challenged Nader in a debate on this very point.
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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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 AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Perhaps we should be more surprised than we are by the news that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his DOT crew managed to sneak a handful of sentences into the approved bailout bill that amounted to a $150-billion “quiet windfall” for American banks, as The Washington Post put it.
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Did Nancy Pelosi’s speech just before the House vote on the proposed bailout on Monday lead to the bill’s demise? Let’s hope our legislators aren’t so susceptible that an 11th-hour speech would reverse their positions vis-à-vis a $700-billion measure. Here’s a clip of the House speaker’s comments on the floor.
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 desmoinescatholicworker.org
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By Chris Hedges — The coals of radical social change smolder among the poor, the homeless and the destitute. As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our hope, our only hope, is to connect intimately with the daily injustices visited upon them. Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement.
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 abcnews.go.com
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson certainly has his Democratic detractors, but they aren’t the only ones who have some serious doubts about his controversial $700-billion bailout plan. In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous” on Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich blasted Paulson’s plan, calling it “un-American” and even opining that Paulson should have resigned.
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