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By Enrico Coen
$29.95
By John Stauffer
$19.80
$20
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Flickr / aflcio2008
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Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent last month, the highest level in 26 years. Meanwhile, Wall Street payouts are not dropping. Goldman Sachs will be shelling out a whopping $20 billion to its employees this year. As we enter the 20th month of this recession, unemployment is becoming a way of life for many, and the very same people who created this mess are still reaping the profits.
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AP photo / Louis Lanzano
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By Robert Scheer — Bernard Madoff should be exhibit A in why the dark world of totally unregulated private money managers and hedge funds should be opened to the light of systematic government supervision. Instead, he is being treated as an aberrant menace.
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Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in his pajamas in a 1980s-style coup, while the CIA has begun recruiting laid-off Wall Street financial analysts to screw up other economies. Check out Jon Stewart’s take on things in this clip from Monday night’s “Daily Show.”
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Amy Goodman talks with Bethany McLean, pictured, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and one of the journalists responsible for exposing the Enron scandal in 2001, about Bernie Madoff and what his 150-year sentence means on Wall Street. Check out this clip from Tuesday’s “Democracy Now!”
Posted on Jun 30, 2009
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley, pool
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By Robert Scheer — The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.
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White House / Pete Souza
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President Obama compares his “sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system” to FDR’s crackdown on Wall Street, but New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera isn’t buying it. “Everywhere you look in the plan, you see the same thing,” he writes. “Additional regulation on the margin, but nothing that amounts to a true overhaul.”
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — On Monday, two men with considerable responsibility for enabling the banking meltdown confronted the error of their ways. Hopefully Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers’ sudden conversion to common sense indicates the seriousness of the banking regulation plan that their boss, President Obama, will present to Congress today.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Business has been on the ropes since last fall’s financial collapse, but the first glimmerings of recovery are calling forth a capitalist counteroffensive.
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The “Real Time” host has some harsh words for the president, who, he says, is caving to insurance companies, banks and polluters: “This is not getting the job done. And this is not what I voted for.”
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Flickr / The TruthAbout...
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Some of the country’s major banks are prepared to pay back money they borrowed under the TARP program, but don’t get too excited. The initial repayment is expected to be a meager $50 billion, which Timothy Geithner wants to inject right back into other troubled banks.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Marie Cocco — The public face of Congress is angry and outraged at all the bad behavior by banks, but in the other Washington, the financial industry continues to have its way.
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Reagan Library
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By Robert Scheer — It would be nice to blame Ronald Reagan for the economic meltdown, as Paul Krugman did recently, but the facts don’t support it. Unfortunately, the real villains are closer at hand.
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The “Real Time” host takes exception to American exceptionalism, the idea that Americans are unique and superior despite a penchant for poisoning, imprisoning and killing each other just to make a buck.
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Will Nancy Pelosi survive the onslaught of scrutiny and criticism in the wake of recent CIA torture-briefing revelations with her House speaker status intact? Is President Obama in over his head, what with all the hubbub over torture photos and military tribunals?
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Everyone’s favorite client No. 9 is making the rounds of the cable news shows and is actually dropping some interesting takes on the economy and Wall Street regulation. Check out his two-part interview with Rachel Maddow.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Chris Hedges — The Obama brand is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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President Obama gave certain hedge fund manager types who held out for “an unjustified taxpayer bailout,” as he put it, a dressing down in the midst of his comments about Chrysler’s bankruptcy filing on Thursday. Needless to say, that didn’t go over so well with the targeted demographic.
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weblogs.cltv.com
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What would have happened to the likes of Gordon Gekko, the ultra-sharky villain of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” in the current economic climate? We’re about to find out, as Stone and Michael Douglas, who first brought the unabashedly greedy Gekko to life in 1987, are gearing up to make a sequel to the classic financial cautionary tale.
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By Marie Cocco — Once again we may be fooling ourselves into thinking that the buying and selling of paper assets is the same as the buying and selling of tangible goods made by real workers.
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By David Sirota — In the last decade, the financial industry’s $5 billion investment in campaign contributions and lobbyists resulted in deregulation and boatloads of free money. By Bloomberg News’ account, $12.8 trillion worth of taxpayer loans, grants and guarantees—all to Wall Street.
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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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What’s with all these fancy economic algorithms that supposedly explain what goes down (or up) on Wall Street but are unintelligible to the average American? Why not make a new model that everyone can understand—and that’s always on the up-and-up?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The president’s plan to bail out the banks reveals a deference to the existing financial system that puts him at odds with Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.
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By Joe Conason — The story of former AIG executive Joseph Cassano points up once more how tax and regulatory havens across the world encourage nefarious conduct, lack of transparency, evasion of taxes and corporate criminality.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — The good news on the government’s “No Banker Left Behind” program is that, according to the special inspector general’s report on Tuesday, the total handout to date is still less than 3 trillion dollars. It’s only $2.98 trillion, to be precise, an amount six times greater than will be spent by federal, state and local governments this year on educating the 50 million American children in elementary and secondary schools.
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By Eugene Robinson — The president is telling Detroit to shape up or die while at the same time politely asking Wall Street, whose recklessness and greed caused this economic crisis, if it would be so kind as to accept another heaping helping of taxpayer funds.
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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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Flickr/dcJohn
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Faced with the glaring problem of indulgence and intractability on the highest tiers of Wall Street’s corporate behemoths, the Obama administration is putting together a plan to make financial institutions more accountable and more transparent to the government and to the taxpayers who granted them buoyancy.
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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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By Joe Conason — Having long flattered themselves as “masters of the universe,” the creative financiers of Wall Street and London are today exposed as grifters rather than geniuses, yet their arrogance remains intact.
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U.S. Department of Justice
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David Friehling, the accountant of Bernard Madoff (pictured above), was arrested Wednesday on charges of securities fraud. Friehling is the first alleged accomplice to be named by authorities in connection with Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scam, though the accountant was charged with auditing failures, not direct participation in the scheme itself.
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MSNBC’s resident smartypants, Rachel Maddow, paid a visit to “Late Night With David Letterman” on Monday to guesstimate the size of Keith Olbermann’s coconut, describe her rise to the heights of punditry and opine about how Wall Street is like a bumper-car ring.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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AIG’s dishing out $165 million in bonuses to executives who played a part in bringing their company to near ruin is an “outrage,” according to President Barack Obama, who pledged to do whatever he can to stop the payouts at the bailed-out insurance giant. Updated
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Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune —
Posted on Mar 16, 2009
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listphile.com
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The tug of war continues between corporate financial giants and the federal government, and certain members of the former seem to have some trouble adjusting to their post-bailout status. AIG, for example, is still planning to reward its top 400 executives with a whopping $165 million in bonuses this weekend, even after the company was given more than $170 billion from taxpayers to stay afloat. Updated
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Beverly Gage’s new book exhumes a nearly forgotten tale of class warfare—call it 9/16.
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White House / Chuck Kennedy
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The Dow is up another 240 points, gaining 9.5 percent over the last three days, but the president doesn’t want you getting too excited about it—or too distraught when things inevitably swing the other way.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — Newt Gingrich is right: “It is European socialism transplanted to Washington.” How else to describe an economy in which the government controls the entire financial center and is now supplying life support for the auto industry?
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Rob Young
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Despite the apparent reality that it’s not possible to precisely quantify everything under the sun, particularly when it comes to human behavior, the worrisome trend of “quants”—experts from physics and other scientific fields—infiltrating Wall Street firms to apply their skills to the stock market is still in effect.
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truthdig.com
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The renowned filmmaker visited USC’s Annenberg School for Communication on March 3 to talk with Truthdig editors Robert Scheer and Kasia Anderson and their students about “Wall Street,” his 1987 classic—suddenly all too relevant again—and to give a panoramic take on his body of work and what the future holds for the movie industry.
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Wikimedia Commons / Paul Sparkes
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The Dow Jones industrial average fell to 6763.29 Monday. In less than a year and a half, the market has lost more than half of its value. More bad news from the financial sector has some analysts worried that rock bottom is still a long way away.
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Even though this CBS report seems to want to make a feel-good story out of this one, it’s more the stuff of nightmares, despite 90-year-old Ian Thiermann’s good-natured take on his fate. After being retired for 30 years, Thiermann discovered that he’d lost his entire retirement fund due to Bernie Madoff’s shenanigans, and now Thiermann is working for $10 an hour in a California supermarket.
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AP photo / Lefteris Pitarakis
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The troubles of alleged rip-off artist Sir R. Allen Stanford are piling up in a big way: Not only does he stand accused of defrauding some 50,000 customers via his Stanford Financial enterprise, but now it seems that authorities are able to account for only $250 million of the $8.2 billion in assets that Stanford’s bank said it had.
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amnesta.net
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This information should shock no one by this point, but it seems that there are more tales of alleged fraud emerging from the general direction of Wall Street. Move over, Bernie Madoff.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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This just in: Not everything is completely awful in the financial arena. Rejoice—stocks went up a little bit! Even if it’s just because Fed Chair Ben Bernanke assured Wall Street that our nation’s banks won’t be nationalized soon, and even if the 2 percent rise happened a day after the Dow dipped to 12-year lows.
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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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collage: Flickr (epicharmus) / Google
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The Dow hasn’t been this low since “Titanic” won Best Picture, appropriately enough. Investors, apparently convinced the worst is yet to come, sent stocks tumbling to a 12-year low on Monday. The Dow sank to a depth of 7114.78.
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