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By Garry Wills
$16.27
By Amy Goodman, David Goodman
$9.58
$40
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White House/Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary.
Posted on Jan 11, 2013
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AP/Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — Reports in the business press tout a prime participant in the great banking hustle as a possible candidate to be the next Treasury secretary.
Posted on Dec 7, 2012
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By Ralph Nader —
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new tour de force book “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder” is a frame-of-reference altering work that a Wall Street Journal reviewer confessed he would have to read “again and again”
Posted on Dec 6, 2012
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Robert Reich — If “pragmatic deal maker,” as The Wall Street Journal describes Geithner, means someone who believes any deal with Republicans is better than no deal, and deficit reduction is more important than job creation, we could be in for a difficult December.
Posted on Nov 27, 2012
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AP/Dima Gavrysh
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By Robert Scheer — The men most responsible for the collapse of the American dream are heaped with honors at the highest levels of society.
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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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Composite image: Handout / Mary Altaffer, AP
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There are those occasions when the choice for Truthdigger of the Week is so clear that our tribute practically writes itself. This is one of those times.
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AP / Damian Dovarganes
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By Robert Scheer — There is no three-strikes law for crooked bankers, who usually get off with a fine and a promise not to do it again, and again and again.
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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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AP / Carolyn Kaster
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By Fred Branfman — Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more than the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama has left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected.
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AP / Jacquelyn Martin
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By Robert Scheer — Endorsing the Republican agenda of financial industry deregulation, reversing New Deal safeguards, President Clinton pursued policies that in the long run created more damage to the American economy than any other president since Herbert Hoover.
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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 / Louis Lanzano
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By Robert Scheer — Rejoice, the housing market is back. Sandy Weill just picked up a humdinger of a wine vineyard estate in Sonoma, Calif., for a record $31 million, so the foreclosure crisis must be over.
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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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democracynow.org
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We’ve heard about the robber barons on Wall Street who brought on our current economic crisis, but they couldn’t have done it without the help of key political players like Bill Clinton, for one, as Robert Scheer tells Amy Goodman in this “Democracy Now!” interview about his new book.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — The corruptions of journalism were on full display when CNN’s Fareed Zakaria turned to Robert Rubin this past Sunday for advice on how to fix the financial crisis that he, as much as anyone, caused.
Did you miss the live Q & A session? Listen to the podcast here.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — It was the Perry Mason moment in the unraveling of what was left of Goldman Sachs’ reputation. Only in this case, it involved a grizzled former prosecutor, Sen. Carl Levin, rather than a genial defense attorney.
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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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What Noam Chomsky has to say about globalization, why older is wiser, and proof that at least two of the three bozos who most wrecked the economy still don’t get it.
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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 / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — Most Americans now know that Wall Street bankers are so greedy as to never be trusted, and I suppose it is a sign of progress that our president finally seems to grasp the obvious.
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Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi walks through Barack Obama’s banking sellout, beginning with the president’s transition team. According to Taibbi, Obama’s transformation from populist to Wall Street’s best friend started on day one.
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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 / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — Who are these people? I am not referring to the pathetic parents of “Balloon Boy,” whose fake drama I have been unable to escape while on the treadmill this week, thanks to my gym’s insistence on tuning its flat-screen TVs to Wolf Blitzer’s nonstop self-parody.
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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 / 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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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 / 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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treas.gov
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Almost a year ago, Citigroup’s then-director Robert Rubin downplayed the enormity of the economic catastrophe headed our way and made a pre-emptive move to shift any potential blame to politicians instead of financial experts such as himself. Fast-forward to the present and the picture changes considerably.
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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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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 / 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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AP photo / Henny Ray Abrams
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By Robert Scheer — How dare you throw that tea into Boston Harbor! Such is the anti-democratic arrogance of the fear-mongering pundits and politicians who tell us if we taxpayers don’t instantly give the Wall Street banking bandits a $700-billion bailout, we are destroying America.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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