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By John W. Dean; Barry M. Goldwater, Jr.
By Beverly Gage $18.45
$23
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 AP / Mark Lennihan
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In a move that may signal the beginning of the end of Goldman Sachs’ golden era, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit Friday against the banking behemoth, accusing the company of selling customers subprime mortgage derivatives ... (continued)
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 taisha.org
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Fresh off the bailout, Goldman Sachs raked in $3.44 billion in net profit this quarter, beating analysts’ already high expectations, and the firm’s success will pay off for employees in the form of generous bonuses. Not surprisingly, pro-Goldman types think this is all good news.
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 bloggernews.net
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Not many big hitters from the financial sector have managed to stay afloat, let alone turn a profit, since the economic crisis kicked in, but George Soros has done quite well for himself. Soros made $1.1 billion last year, and he’s not even at the top of the list of hedge fund managers who beat the odds in 2008.
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By Marie Cocco — Well, that didn’t work out. In pushing for a new financial industry bailout, Treasury Secretary Geithner came across like a banker trying to do a politician’s job. Obama owes us some hands-on involvement.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Let the record show that it was George W. Bush, the rich Texas Republican, who brought socialism to America, so don’t blame it on that African-American Chicago Democrat community organizer who made it into the White House.
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 Wikimedia Commons / mlb.com
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By Stanley Kutler — The U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for more than $300 billion of Citigroup’s junk investments, so where did the ailing bank find $400 million to put its name on the New York Mets’ new stadium?
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 whatpricejusticeblog.com
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While it’s great that it has finally been acknowledged, the National Bureau of Economic Research’s announcement on Monday that the U.S. is officially in a recession is old news—even by the bureau’s own estimation. Updated
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 White House / Paul Morse (altered)
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By Eugene Robinson — Having two presidents is starting to feel like having no president, and that’s the situation we’ll face until Inauguration Day. Heaven help us.
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Getting a grip on the economic catastrophe that rocked the country during the fall of 2008 is no easy feat, what with so many players, back-room deals, bills, upswings and meltdowns to consider. Updated
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 Flickr / LoopZilla
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What’s a hundred billion dollars between capitalists? The Fed and the Treasury are once again throwing good cash after bad business. This time the culprit is Citigroup, which could get bailed out—courtesy of you—to the tune of $100 billion. And with that, we’d like to announce that Truthdig is officially too big to fail. Update: Done deal.
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Mike Keefe, The Denver Post —
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 Collage: Meutia Chaerani / Indradi Soemardjan and Shealah Craighead / White House
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“I will never apologize for changing a strategy or an approach if the facts change,” explained Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who has retreated from his original plan of buying up near-worthless mortgage securities with taxpayer funds. Instead, Paulson will continue to pump money into troubled banks in exchange for equity, a scheme that has proved more expeditious and popular.
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By William Pfaff — “What am I going to tell the public,” one French official asked, “when there are 3 million people marching in the streets of Paris? That ‘we all made mistakes’? That no one was really responsible?”
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By William Pfaff — Military and economic disasters have caused Europeans and European governments to view the United States in a new, unflattering light.
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 listphile.com
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It would seem imprudent, given the government’s recent and unprecedented bailout of companies such as insurance giant AIG, for the likes of AIG to even entertain the idea of hefty executive payouts.
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 AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Titus Levi — Wall Street has yet to recover after the economic shocks of recent weeks. Why? Two problems. One we already know: The “plan,” even with revisions, is deeply flawed. The second problem has not been mentioned all that much because it’s pretty scary: Put simply, we have no idea what we’re doing.
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 Flickr / soggydan
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John McCain has laid out his plan for how he would help Americans recover from the recent shocks to the domestic and international markets. He took the action on Tuesday, a day later than he initially said he would and a day after Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama released his own economic plan—and McCain’s timing was not lost on the Obama campaign.
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 Wikimedia Commons / Asymptote Architecture
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The Dow shot up more than 900 points Monday after nations around the world pitched into the effort to resuscitate the dangerously flagging global marketplace by announcing their own rescue plans.
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 White House / Shealah Craighead
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, with much prodding from Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, is thinking about using some of that $700 billion to buy ownership stakes in shaky banks. The scheme would ostensibly give taxpayers a share in the fortunes of the bailed-out institutions.
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During a sit-down interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson that aired on Wednesday, Barack Obama talked about the economy and how he’d lead differently from President Bush before addressing the McCain-Palin campaign’s ramped-up attacks of late. “All these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points,” Obama told Gibson.
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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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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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 youtube.com
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Despite House Minority Leader John Boehner’s claim, backed up by other Republicans in Congress, that the bailout bill might have passed were it not for meddling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bombastic speech on Monday, others from within GOP ranks beg to differ.
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 montage: White House / Wikimedia Commons
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The Dow dropped more than 777 points on the news that the House had voted down the $700-billion bailout proposal, so why does our editor think it’s “a great moment for American democracy”?
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 flickr.com/mindfrieze
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By Chalmers Johnson — There has been much moaning, air-sucking and outrage about the U.S. government’s $700-billion bailout deal, but in fact we dole out similar amounts of money every year in the form of payoffs to the armed services, the military-industrial complex, and powerful senators and representatives allied with the Pentagon.
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 AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Early Sunday morning brought word that the end of the drawn-out bailout negotiations between warring factions of the federal government might finally be at hand, although the House and Senate had not yet officially approved terms of the proposed plan. Updated
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 house.gov
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Just a day after negotiations seemed to break down, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck a confident tone. So did Rep. Barney Frank, who threw in some of his patented sass: “Now that Sen. McCain is safely in Mississippi, we can get to serious work.”
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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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 finfacts.ie
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Following days of hype-work by the Bush administration to scare taxpayers into paying for Wall Street’s failures, support for the $700-billion bailout seems to be gaining steam. Analysts believe the final bailout plan, expected in a day or two, may look eerily similar to Bush’s initial proposal, with some slight changes.
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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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Was this the plan all along? CNN reports that Team McCain wants the first presidential debate to “take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday” if there’s no bailout deal by Friday.
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s proposed bailout carries a price tag of $700 billion, a staggering figure that CNN has helpfully translated into terms that every American can understand by consulting the McDonald’s (apple) pie chart.
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 AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — Does it really matter which party is in charge when it comes to bailing out the Wall Street hustlers whose shenanigans have bankrupted so many ordinary folks? Not if the Democrats roll over and cede power to the former head of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank at the center of our economic meltdown.
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By Eugene Robinson — Let’s be clear about why we’re facing a crisis that could pull down the global financial system. The irresponsibility of individuals who bought houses they couldn’t quite afford pales in comparison to the irresponsibility of the financial wizards who built on those shaky mortgages a towering edifice of irrational faith.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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It seems that some key officials involved in the negotiations with the Bush administration over the terms of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700-billion bailout proposal for Wall Street aren’t about to make a deal unless it includes specific plans for congressional oversight and help for homeowners on the brink of foreclosure.
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 onechoicehealthcare.com
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Whoops! As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out Friday, presidential nominees Barack Obama and John McCain both have articles in the latest edition of Contingencies magazine about how they would reform America’s health care industry. In light of certain recent events in the banking world, McCain may want to reconsider his position.
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 momocrats.typepad.com
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And now, this latest dispatch from the U.S. Department of Unintentional Irony: Sen. John McCain spoke out against the Federal Reserve’s recent bids to give life support (read: gigantic amounts of money) to failing financial institutions. Isn’t he the same guy who has looked to Phil Gramm for economic advice?
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 AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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If you thought the Iraq war was expensive, the Bush administration is also throwing an estimated $1-trillion bailout of major finance firms to prevent a meltdown of the U.S. economy. President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined such a “bold approach” Friday morning, yet detailed plans still remain forthcoming.
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 Flickr / epicharmus
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President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. attempted to head off mounting market woes and investor freak-outs at the pass on Monday as Wall Street suffered its worst losses since right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
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 Flickr / tshein
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While John McCain took heat for reasserting that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” two of the five biggest American investment banks folded on Monday. Bank of America bought out troubled Merrill Lynch while Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. Update: Another big one stumbles
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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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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has announced what the media are calling a “massive overhaul” of America’s regulatory agencies, but columnist and liberal economist Paul Krugman isn’t impressed. Krugman doesn’t think the administration’s cosmetic solutions will mitigate our current economic crisis or prevent the next one.
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 news.google.com
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House Democrats, Republicans and President Bush have tentatively agreed on the broad outlines of a $150-billion stimulus package. Most of that money will come in the form of payouts ranging between $300 and $1,200 for individuals and households.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The president’s proposed cuts in children’s health insurance are so shameful that even Bush’s treasury secretary appeared to distance himself from them.
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 From turkishdailynews.com.tr
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Bush’s new secretary of the Treasury, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, said in his first public remarks since taking office that he recognized the economy was not benefitting all Americans.
That’s quite an understatement—as Paul Krugman made abundantly clear in a 2002 N.Y. Times Magazine essay—but for a Bush appointee, it was a hell of an admission.
Posted on Aug 1, 2006
READ MORE
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Finally, after months of hanging in the pink slip rumor mill, John Snow can move on. The White House has named Henry M. Paulson as the newest Treasury secretary; here’s what we know according to the Washington Post and NYT:
He was reluctant to accept the job.
He worked in the Pentagon as a young man.
He “has been a Goldman Sachs executive since 1974, pulling down a compensation package in 2005 of $37 million.”
He is “a birdwatcher who can often be found in Central Park with his binoculars.”
Thank you mainstream media for your thorough profile of this very important man.
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