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By Steven J. Ross
$29.95
The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
By Chris Hedges
$22
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AP
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By Robert Scheer — For all of the strident attacks on Stockman’s column, I have yet to read a serious critique of his most brazen claim.
Posted on Apr 2, 2013
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AP/Jae C. Hong
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By Robert Scheer — President Obama is to be applauded for questioning Mitt Romney’s legacy, although his motives seem to be as opportunistic as those of Romney’s opponents in the Republican primaries who took the same tack.
Posted on May 23, 2012
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — That Lawrence Summers and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.
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AP / Charles Krupa
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By Robert Scheer — GOP candidates are embracing populism, but as the presidential election is now shaping up, voters will not be given a choice to rebuke Wall Street by either major party.
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Harvard’s “Occu-Elves” deliver lumps of coal to “naughty boys,” including the school’s former president, Lawrence Summers, and Robert Rubin, two men who helped engineer the economic meltdown.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — Can we all agree that a $1 billion swindle represents a lot of money? So why isn’t former Citigroup Chairman Robert Rubin breaking a sweat?
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — Why are Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama just now discovering that there is a jobs crisis in this country?
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Flickr / stevendamron
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Essayist, Yale English professor and TomDispatch contributor David Bromwich takes a careful accounting of the “sacked” and “saved” members of the Obama administration in an attempt to reveal the similarities between his presidency and George W. Bush’s. (more)
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — Two years into the Obama presidency and the economic data is still looking grim. Don’t be fooled by the gyrations of the stock market, where optimism is mostly a reflection of the ability of financial corporations—thanks to massive government largesse—to survive the mess they created.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — The sight of Bill Clinton back at the White House podium defending tax cuts for the super-rich was more a sick joke than a serious amplification of economic policy.
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AP / Cliff Owen
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By Robert Scheer — Paul Volcker, or the “big guy,” as President Barack Obama refers to the former Federal Reserve chair who heads his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, nailed it in a series of blistering remarks on the sorry state of our economy.
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So, clearly President Obama felt obliged to get all gushy about outgoing adviser Larry Summers’ contributions to his administration’s efforts to save our nation’s economy from total catastrophe. Now hear the real deal on Summers, courtesy of Robert Scheer and Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!”
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AP / Susan Walsh
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By Robert Scheer — Finally! The announced departure of Lawrence Summers as the president’s top economic adviser is welcome news. Harvard’s loss in taking back its $586,996-a-year professor and “president emeritus,” who is also paid millions by Wall Street on the side, is the nation’s gain.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — When will the president give Lawrence Summers his pink slip? He can thank him for his years of service and use the excuse that his top economic adviser wants to spend more time with his family. I don’t care how he sugarcoats it.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve.
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AP / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — Out of respect for privacy, even concerning famous people, I wasn’t going to write about the marriage of Chelsea Clinton to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler with the resources to buy a $4 million loft so soon after graduating from Stanford.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Do Democrats honestly think that nickel-and-diming on stimulus now will either have a substantial impact on the long-term deficit or be of greater help to them in this fall’s elections than more robust growth?
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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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AP / Evan Vucci
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By Robert Scheer — They do have a license to steal. There is no other way to read Tuesday’s report from the New York state comptroller that bonuses for Wall Street financiers rose 17 percent to $20.3 billion in 2009. Of course that is less than the $32.9 billion for bonus rewards back in 2007, when those hotshots could still pretend that they were running sound businesses.
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AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — Finally President Barack Obama has come to his senses on financial regulation. His endorsement of what he calls the “Volcker Rule” for once puts him squarely on the side of ordinary Americans as opposed to the banking bandits who have so thoroughly fleeced the public.
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AP / Wong Maye-E
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President Barack Obama might have done well to keep former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in closer reach during his first year of office rather than rely on the dubious advice of Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers. Too late for that—but hopefully not too late for Volcker to help the president in his future dealings with Wall Street.
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AP / Jose Luis Magana
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By Robert Scheer — Jail, anyone? Perhaps that’s too harsh, and at any rate premature, but is anyone ever going to be held accountable for the behind-the-scenes sweetheart deals that passed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through the AIG shell game to the very banks that caused the financial meltdown?
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AP / Alex Brandon
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By Robert Scheer — What’s up with Barack Obama? Finally someone has a good idea about how to deal with Wall Street and the White House condemns it.
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AP / Lawrence Jackson
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There is some rumbling among the congressional Republican ranks that Team Obama’s stimulus package has driven the country into ever deeper economic trouble, but one prominent member of said presidential team, economic adviser Lawrence Summers, begs to differ—and he’s written a letter to House GOP honcho John Boehner to tell him why.
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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 / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Not surprisingly, Lawrence Summers is convinced that he deserved every penny of the $8 million that Wall Street firms paid him last year. And why shouldn’t he be cut in on the loot from the loopholes in the toxic derivatives market that he pushed into law when he was Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary?
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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Lawrence Summers is the man President Obama turns to for insight into the economy, so it’s more than a little disturbing that the very financial institutions the taxpayers are now rescuing—to the tune of nearly $3 trillion—paid Summers almost $8 million last year. Goldman Sachs & Co., a major beneficiary of the government’s largesse, paid him $135,000 for one speech.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont who is independent in spirit as well as party label, has placed a hold on President Obama’s nomination of Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Sounds like a minor issue to get worked up about, but I see this appointment as further evidence that the president has entrusted his economic policy to the wrong people.
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What’s to be done when companies that received major bailouts from taxpayers turn around and brazenly offer beaucoup bucks to the executives who helped put us in the hole in the first place? Here are a couple suggestions by way of an answer: Pitchforks! Angry mobs!
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — We are lucky to have Barack Obama as president. I write that even though I believe the content of his Tuesday evening speech deserved no more than a B+ / A-, for its failure to seriously address the origins of the banking crisis and for only hinting at the severe military budget cuts required to get close to his goal of reducing the federal deficit by the end of his first term.
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AP photo / Lawrence Jackson
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By Robert Scheer — What an insipid anticlimax! Rising to “a challenge more complex than our financial system has ever faced,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner promised on Tuesday to give trillions more to the very folks who profited from that malignant complexity.
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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 / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — He is making trillion-dollar decisions that will cast the die for the rest of his promising agenda. Unfortunately, while he has already proved to be a brilliant agent of change in so many ways, in economic policy he has relied on the financial “experts” who helped get America into this mess.
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AP photo / Lawrence Jackson
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By Robert Scheer — Why rush to throw another $350 billion of taxpayer money at the Wall Street bandits and their political cronies who created the biggest financial mess since the Great Depression? And why should we taxpayers be expected to double our debt exposure when the 10 still-secret bailout contracts made in the first round are being kept from the public?
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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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AP photo / Chris Carlson
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Judging by the new additions to Barack Obama’s economic squad, the president-elect appears to be borrowing heavily from Robert Rubin’s ranks, but here’s an argument as to why Obama’s approach will differ from Rubin’s (but consider the source here).
Posted on Nov 24, 2008
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AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — This is not change we can believe in. Not if Robert Rubin or his protégé, Lawrence Summers, get to call the shots on the economy in President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration.
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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Barack Obama is rumored to favor Lawrence Summers as his treasury secretary. That’s a terrible choice, says Robert Scheer, if the president-elect is at all concerned about the financial meltdown.
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AP photo / Chris Carlson
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By Robert Scheer — Instead of running with the “European socialist” crowd, as John McCain has claimed, Barack Obama has turned to the same American “free market” elite that views government as merely a corporate subsidiary. Even within that group, however, there are serious splits, and the more enlightened side seems to be winning.
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Benghazi: Dissecting Congressional Follies, Media Coverage and ‘Cover-Up’ Charges
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