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By Ellen Goodman, Patricia O'Brien
$18.85
By David Rothkopf
$17.16
$40
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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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By William Pfaff — Many in Britain and the United States are in mourning for what’s taken as the suicide of the American (or Thatcherite, or Chicago-school) model of capitalism, accompanied by the non-interventionist state that hands the national economy over to business and financial leaders to run.
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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 / Evan Vucci
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By Robert Scheer — Has Timothy Geithner ever had lunch with a non-megamillionaire who has lost his job or home because of the banking meltdown? I ask that question after reading the list of the treasury secretary’s luncheon dates when he was head of the New York Federal Reserve, a list that the government was forced to provide in response to a lawsuit.
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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 / 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 / Susan Walsh
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In testifying before Congress on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner asked for what he called “new resolution authority” to grant the federal government the ability to more successfully take on financial institutions like AIG (i.e., non-banks) in the future.
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Flickr / epicharmus
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What a deal! Timothy Geithner’s new plan to save the banks from themselves commits American taxpayers to a massive purchase of the toxic assets that the banks had originally insisted were risk-free investments. Of course, Wall Street loved the news. Update
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White House / Pete Souza
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Although Timothy Geithner is under fire from several directions, especially because he failed to stop the AIG executive bonus train from arriving at its destination, President Obama continues to actively support him. In fact, Obama says he wouldn’t let Geithner quit even if the treasury secretary tried to do so at this point.
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The merger of the entertainment and political spheres is now complete. Witness this lengthy chatfest between President Barack Obama and Jay Leno on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.” During the broadcast Obama cracks jokes about the Secret Service, the Special Olympics (oops) and “American Idol” between more serious discussions about the economy and alternative energy.
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Truthdig’s Robert Scheer appeared on “Democracy Now!” on Thursday to tell host Amy Goodman who exactly sent the U.S. into financial dire straits and to recommend some changes that could put the country on a better track. Here are some hints: One culpable party rhymes with “Shmoldman Shmacks,” and another is at the top of President Obama’s economic team.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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We’ve seen a lot of Timothy Geithner lately in the news—usually looking concerned yet purposeful as he stands behind the president in photos and press conferences—but we haven’t heard a great deal straight from the source. On Thursday, CNN’s Ali Velshi managed to get the treasury secretary talking, but what Geithner had to say is distinctly underwhelming.
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AP photo / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — We’ve already given AIG a total of $170 billion—an amount that dwarfs the $75 billion allocated to helping those millions of homeowners facing foreclosures. And more will be thrown down the AIG rat hole because President Barack Obama is blindly following the misguided advice of his top economic advisers, who insist that AIG is too big to fail.
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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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Wikimedia Commons / federalreserve.gov
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Friday brought more news from purportedly reliable sources close to Barack Obama, this time suggesting that the president-elect was zeroing in on Timothy Geithner as his pick for treasury secretary and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for commerce secretary.
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Truthdigger of the Week: Medea Benjamin
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