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By Richard Seymour
$16.95
By Martin Amis
$16.32
$35
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By David Sirota — Only months after the 2008 primaries, most Americans probably don’t remember Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. But that doesn’t mean the conservative populism they championed during their campaigns is as fleeting as their dark-horse candidacies.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s reaching the point where desperate measures—brutal honesty and complete transparency—may be the only way to bring the economy out of its kamikaze dive. If so, this won’t be pretty.
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By Eugene Robinson — Obama must deal with a new presidential role that he did not seek but cannot avoid: managing big chunks of the private-sector economy.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama senses that fate has handed him opportunities few presidents ever get, and that his test will be whether he makes good use of his chance to bend history at one of its “inflection points.”
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How stimulating is the stimulus, really? Did Obama bite off more than he could chew? Who wears the pants at the Treasury Department? Answers to these questions and more in this week’s episode.
Posted on Feb 15, 2009
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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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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Obama administration keeps having to learn that bland centrism is not pragmatic, it’s not helpful in resolving a big crisis, and it certainly doesn’t buy you any love.
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By David Sirota — Only weeks ago, the political world was buzzing about a “team of rivals,” but instead President Obama has populated his administration with Bush yes-men and Wall Street kleptocrats whose discredited theologies cannot be killed.
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama in Washington reminds one of Diogenes in Athens, with his lantern in search of an honest man.
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Wikimedia Commons / Presidencia de la Nación Argentina
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Timothy Geithner may be a tax dodger who helped funnel taxpayer funds to his banking buddies, but we need that kind of cunning right now. That’s the thinking on Capitol Hill, anyway. The Senate confirmed President Obama’s pick to head Treasury on Monday, over the grumbles of 34 senators.
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Flickr / hthg1983
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The vice president let it slip Sunday that the $700 billion TARP bailout bill could have a sequel. Also, Nancy Pelosi indicated that Congress might dole out more funds to financial institutions. Let’s see, that’s $700 billion on TARP, $850 billion for the still-pending stimulus package, plus the mysterious billions they’re tossing around at the Federal Reserve. ... Here’s hoping China doesn’t cut up our national credit card.
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AP photo
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By Robert Scheer — Tuesday was welcome theater, as profound as it gets—but today, as Obama has declared, begins a new era of responsibility and accountability.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Want to know where the $350 billion banking bailout went and why it hasn’t done a bit of good? Read, and weep over, this little-noticed report from the congressional panel set up to monitor the Treasury Department’s distribution of our taxpayer funds.
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0-60mag.com
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So, the government forks over a ton of money to flailing banks and, naturally, their customers (i.e., taxpayers) might expect to gain something from this helpful transaction as well, right? Guess again, customers.
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By David Sirota — Somehow, immediately releasing more bailout funds is being portrayed as a self-evident necessity. Amid Barack Obama’s paeans to “new politics,” we’re watching old-school paybacks from a politician who raised more Wall Street dough than any other.
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marcelinopena.files.wordpress.com
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Forget that business with the maid whose work papers expired. The real scandal with Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama’s choice to head the Treasury Department, is his history of lax regulation—at least where his friends at Citigroup were concerned. ProPublica did some digging and found that Geithner’s New York Fed “eased the reins as the company blew billions. ...”
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AP photo / Jose Luis Magana
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By Bill Boyarsky — Like many other people, I’d like to party all week when Barack Obama is sworn in as president. But this isn’t the year for it, not with unemployment rising and fear spreading through the land.
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amazon.com
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There was a time when Russia was an economic power on the rise. Sean McMeekin’s new book, “History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks,” explains what nipped that growth in the bud.
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AP photo / Craig Ruttle
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By Chris Hedges — The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite.
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The Treasury Department’s inspector general has been looking into the failure of IndyMac, which set the taxpayers back $8.9 billion, and what he found isn’t pretty. It seems a certain regulator let the bank present itself as “well-capitalized” when the truth was something entirely different.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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On Thursday, President-elect Barack Obama introduced three top financial appointees who will help him with the unenviable task of revamping the government’s economic regulatory system and “crack[ing] down on this culture of greed and scheming that has led us to this day of reckoning,” as Obama put it.
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By Amy Goodman — Bernard Madoff’s criminal pyramid scheme, in which losses are expected to be $50 billion, paints a grim picture—unless you are a corporate executive. Read the fine print. Of the TARP bailout funds, only those that were technically spent “in an auction” carry limits on executive pay.
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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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Brian Fairrington, Cagle Cartoons —
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By Joe Conason — Barack Obama’s appointees will implement the Obama program, not only because that is what he tells them to do but because that is what they have come to believe is best for the country.
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my.barackobama.com
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Not only is Barack Obama packing his inner circle with neo-liberal Clinton stalwarts, he’s also avoiding the question of labor by not including any representative of workers in the economic policy team he announced Monday. What gives?
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After a series of depressing announcements, Barack Obama will finally turn to an economic adviser who wasn’t directly responsible for the current crisis or mentored by someone who was. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the president-elect wants former Fed Chair Paul Volcker to lead a new presidential advisory board focused on saving America from financial ruin. Update
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s selection of a team of highly skilled pragmatists has already been described as a move to the political center, but Obama advisers and longtime acquaintances say that this is a misreading of the incoming president and his approach.
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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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change.gov
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To fix the ailing economy, Barack Obama has turned to two men who helped break it. On Monday, the president-elect announced Timothy Geithner as his choice for treasury secretary, and Giethner’s former mentor in the Clinton Treasury Department, Lawrence Summers, as his pick to head the White House Economic Council.
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AP photo / Kiichiro Sato, file
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By Chris Hedges — The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess, if he does not radically redirect the nation’s resources to assist the working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country.
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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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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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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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During his first press conference as president-elect, Sen. Barack Obama stressed that he’s not in the Oval Office yet but offered a few specifics about how he plans to handle the economic crisis once he moves in.
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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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World Economic Forum
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While many of us are still celebrating Barack Obama’s historic victory, rumors of a major buzzkill are flying: Lawrence Summers, a Clinton-era treasury secretary and deregulation enthusiast, is said to be the front-runner to take over the Treasury Department.
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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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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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By Eugene Robinson — Here’s a question I’d like to ask Barack Obama and John McCain: Is the United States destined to look and feel increasingly like a “developing country”? Is this the way it’s going to be?
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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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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 David Sirota — The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair—stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror.
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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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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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