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By Thomas Sowell
$19.77
By Orhan Pamuk
$15.03
$21
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By Eugene Robinson — Slashing bonuses at bailed-out companies is like arresting jaywalkers while ignoring the bank robbery that’s happening in broad daylight down the block.
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By Joe Conason — Anyone infuriated by the grossly inflated compensation of the masters of finance should check out the incredible earnings of the top executives in the health insurance business.
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gawker.com
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The Obama administration, perhaps getting wise to public opinion, is lashing out at Wall Street firms. White House senior adviser David Axelrod called the huge bonuses executives received this year “offensive” in light of the fact that the rest of us are struggling through an economic crisis.
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Wall Street got a boost, as if it needed one, from the Dow’s rise past 10,000 this week—but let’s not confuse that with economic stability. Consider the unemployment rate and the ballooning federal budget deficit, as Arianna Huffington, Bob Scheer, Tony Blankley and Matt Miller do on this week’s “Left, Right and Center.” Just don’t ask Arianna about “Balloon Boy.”
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0-60mag.com
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If you thought last year’s federal budget deficit was pretty big, you were right—and it’s three times as big now! Thanks to the magic of the recession, as well as the government’s attempts to rescue various sectors of the economy (and throw money at others, or so it appeared), the deficit for the 12 months ending last month was a whopping $1.42 trillion.
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Flickr / I.Gouss
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Put down your pitchforks and pick up the champagne. Boom times are here. The Dow is over 10,000 for the first time in a year. What’s that? Real unemployment is at 17 percent, and they’re foreclosing your house? Stop being such a communist and party!
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AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role, and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely secretive government program to bail out Wall Street.
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By David Sirota — Zombies have made a pop culture comeback. It might have something to do with all the undead banks and the bankers whose careers live on after the economic apocalypse they caused.
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infiniteunknown.com
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It’s unsurprising to say the least: A Freedom of Information Act request has discovered that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in daily two-way communication with a small group of Wall Street CEOs—at Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs—while lawmakers like Rep. Xavier Becerra are forced to leave messages for him.
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pagetutor.com
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By Matt Bivens, TomDispatch —
In the 20th century, smallpox killed more people than all of that bloody century’s wars combined. It cost $300 million to eradicate the disease. What might have been achieved with the $4 trillion we gave Wall Street?
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Truthdig editors Robert Scheer, Peter Scheer and Kasia Anderson unchain themselves from their laptops long enough to weigh in about the week’s news, Michael Moore’s economic epic and a new phone made partly from corn. If that’s not eclectic, we don’t know what is.
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AP / Susan Walsh
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Another head of another big bank is rolling ... all the way out the door. On Wednesday, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis made the startling announcement that he was opting to take early retirement, effective the last day of this calendar year.
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AP / Gene J. Puskar
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By Chris Hedges — The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can’t blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly, this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.
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Truthdig editors Robert Scheer, Peter Scheer and Kasia Anderson give their takes on their picks from the week’s crop of news stories, including the rise of radical rhetoric on the right, Obama’s so-called socialism (for Wall Street) and how to shop for new planets to call our future home.
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Mike Keefe, The Denver Post —
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Flickr / freemarketmyass
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Fed Chair Ben Bernanke declared Tuesday that the recession is “very likely over at this point,” but don’t get too excited. The non-investment bankers among us still have a lot to worry about: “[I]t is still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time as many people still find their job security and their employment status is not what they wish it was.”
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By Eugene Robinson — I’m as pleased as anyone else to see a rising Dow, but somebody needs to slap the incipient grin off Wall Street’s face.
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Flickr / Roger@elaws ?
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A year after Lehman Brothers went under—taking a big chunk of the economy with it—the deregulation and lax oversight that enabled the crisis are still a problem. According to this New York Times report, things might even be worse.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Remember President Obama’s reference during his health care address to “Wall Street’s relentless profit expectations”? Well, those expectations were apparently met by that same address. Insurance company stocks got a boost from the speech, which foreshadowed the death of the public option and promised to deliver millions of currently “irresponsible” customers.
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Flickr / Katrina.Tuliao
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The geniuses on Wall Street have found another way to gamble and call it investing. Forget about mortgage-backed securities (wouldn’t that be nice?). Life insurance securitizations are the new hotness on Wall Street. And the fun part is, they make more money when you die faster.
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gawker.com
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Disgraced former Wall Street baron Bernard Madoff might have made millions swindling others for profit during his heyday, but he doesn’t seem to have made much of a literary cottage industry for writers presumably looking to cash in on his downfall. Not even the “I-was-Bernie’s-mistress” angle is tempting book buyers at this point.
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Flickr / nikoretro
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Forget about replicating the success of the surge in Iraq: Whoever came up with “cash for clunkers” should be put in charge of everything. The clunkers program ended Monday—under budget—after moving almost 700,000 new fuel-efficient cars through an auto industry in the grip of rigor mortis. To put things in perspective, the whole program cost less than 2 percent of AIG’s bailout.
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President Obama is gambling on America’s readiness to embrace a larger, more comprehensive form of government, but will it take? “Recovering Republican” Arianna Huffington argues that the system Obama favors is currently working best for oligarchs, not those losing their homes or worried about their health care, while Tony Blankley thinks Big Pharma is pitching camp in the White House.
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AP / Louis Lanzano
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Bernard Madoff’s connection with the New York-based Jewish charity Hadassah has become fraught above and beyond the economic level since the organization’s CFO, Sheryl Weinstein, claimed that she and the fallen financier had an affair, which she details in her upcoming memoir, “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me.”
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AP / Susan Walsh
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By Robert Scheer — “Was there some sort of ghost that performed these actions?” New York federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff demanded to know Monday in rejecting a deal that would let Bank of America off the hook in yet another banker bonus scandal.
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In this installment of Brave New Films’ “Senator Sanders Unfiltered,” the independent federal legislator from Vermont points out what’s becoming hard to dispute or ignore, however much other members of Congress might do both: Wall Street, along with the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, practically runs Washington.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — By now everybody must know that the top banking executives responsible for our economic meltdown have no shame. Otherwise they would not have dared give themselves such hefty bonuses as a deeply perverse reward for actions that caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs and homes.
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Collage: Flickr / david.nikonvscanon and Staples.com
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By Marie Cocco — The arithmetic of this recession still looks pretty dismal and the politics and psychology of it are starting to become disconnected from reality in a scary way.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Chris Hedges — Positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness, is a quack science that justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress.
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Flickr / David Paul Ohmer
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By Mike Elk —
When I heard Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., floating the idea of a tax on health benefits in order to raise revenue for health-care reform, I was baffled; how could this be?
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Flickr / Klearchos Kapoutsis
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By William Pfaff — If one tries to draw an urgently contemporary lesson from Greek myth, the story of Midas is irresistible. It provides a commentary on our global economic and financial crisis, in which the pursuit of wealth has ruined us.
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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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By Amy Goodman — Wendell Potter is the health insurance industry’s worst nightmare. He’s a whistle-blower. Potter, the former chief spokesperson for insurance giant CIGNA, recently testified before Congress, “I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”
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Flickr / antiparticle
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Goldman Sachs is expected to announce a windfall quarter, thanks no doubt to billions in bailout money, but many people at the firm aren’t puffing their chests out. According to the Financial Times, Goldman executives dumped close to $700 million in stock between September 2008 and April 2009—after taxpayers came to the rescue.
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Flickr / eflon
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The closest we’ve come to a pitchfork moment in this whole economic crisis was the last time AIG tried to shower its employees with bonuses. You may recall that the financial giant was rewarded with $180 billion in federal funds after losing more money than any company ever did before and helping to ruin the world economy. Well, they’re at it again.
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highvolumemedia.com
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In the spirit of the poignant critiques of capitalism made popular by Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI has written a scathing letter just in time for the capitalist G-8 economic summit in Italy that demands we find a “profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise.”
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AP photo / Amy Sancetta
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By Chris Hedges — If you have defrauded banks and customers and investment firms of billions of dollars, as AIG or Citibank has, you get taxpayer money. If you are moral scum in America we take care of you. But if you are poor, if you are, say, Tearyan Brown of Trenton, N.J., you are in trouble.
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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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Truthdigger of the Week: Sen. Angus King
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