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$15.64
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By Michael Jerryson (Editor), Mark Juergensmeyer (Editor)
$24
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Lie Louis Périn-Salbreux
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By Eugene Robinson — Earth to Wall Street: It’s over, people. You had a terrific run, better than you deserved, but now you’d be wise to pay attention to those citizens outside, the ones with the pitchforks and the torches.
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The president is famous for his even disposition, but he appears to be flat-out pissed at the news that Wall Street bankers showered themselves with bonuses while helping drive the economy into a ditch.
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Flickr / treehouse1977
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If you’re in a good mood, you may just want to skip this bit of news from The New York Times: “Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York ... collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.” Update
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Well, here he is, our new Mr. President. How did Barack Obama fare in his first few days in office? Meanwhile, Wall Street flounders, and Caroline Kennedy’s Senate bid falls short at the 11th hour. The “Left, Right & Center” team takes a crack at this week’s news. Audio fixed
Posted on Jan 23, 2009
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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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Is President-elect Barack Obama proposing a stimulus package that will actually deliver? What’s going to happen next in the Middle East? These are unanswerable questions, but the “Left, Right & Center” team offers prognostications about what may lie in store on the domestic and international fronts.
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flickr.com / Presidential Inaugural Committee
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While Barack Obama banned corporations and big donors from funding his inauguration so as to not trammel the public celebration, the big event’s multimillion-dollar bill is instead being footed by Wall Street executives and other financial employees acting as fundraisers. Abracadabra—no more special interests.
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AP photo / Jason DeCrow
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It might seem a stretch, but fallen financier Bernard Madoff’s legal team may be “exploring an insanity defense,” according to the New York Daily News.
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The co-founder of one of Bernard Madoff’s biggest corporate clients, Access International Advisers, was found dead of an apparent suicide on Tuesday morning in his New York office.
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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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epws-shanghai.org
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Although the full extent of the damage from broker Bernard Madoff’s alleged super-swindle has yet to be determined, it’s clear by now that the collapse of his vast pyramid scheme may spell utter disaster for several of his top investors—some of whom might not know yet that they’re broke.
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streetinsider.com
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Here’s yet another candidate for the expanding collection of Tales from the Dark Side of Wall Street (is there any other side?): The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Bernard L. Madoff, a top trader for nearly five decades who has served as chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested this week after his sons turned him in for engineering an elaborate “Ponzi scheme.”
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — I do so want to believe that Barack Obama is on the right track. His brain is big, his style fresh, his pronouncements both logical and compelling, and it does feel good to have a president-elect elicit universal respect rather than make the world cringe.
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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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Getting a grip on the economic catastrophe that rocked the country during the fall of 2008 is no easy feat, what with so many players, back-room deals, bills, upswings and meltdowns to consider. Updated
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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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finance.google.com
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In a little over two weeks, the Dow has tumbled more than 2,000 points as bad economic news continues to pile up. Word on Thursday that jobless claims hit a 16-year high, combined with a dreary outlook for Detroit and a lack of confidence in major financial institutions, helped drive the DJIA down to 7,552.29.
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It’s clear from this monologue by Rep. Elijah Cummings that, when he wonders aloud if Neel Kashkari is a “chump” for enabling companies like AIG to hand out huge executive bonuses while seeking federal bailout money, Cummings already knows the answer.
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President-elect Barack Obama made his first weekly video address via YouTube this weekend. What’s it about? “Make no mistake—this is the greatest economic challenge of our times,” he says. Oh. Right.
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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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AP photo / Morry Gash
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By Robert Scheer — It’s time to gush! Later for the analysis of all the hard choices faced by our next president, Barack Obama, but for now, let’s just thrill, unabashedly, to the sound of those words.
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AP photo / Gene J. Puskar
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By Robert Scheer — Let me now defend white males. We can’t possibly be as dumb as the polls showing we are John McCain’s most reliable voting base would indicate.
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tickertapedigest.com
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The Dow shot up 889.35 points on Tuesday, a welcome respite from Wall Street’s month of plunges. Things could still get a lot worse: While some buyers snapped up what looked like bargain stocks, others said they expected a major drop before things get better.
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Flickr / BohPhoto
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This news isn’t going to make certain members of the Republican Party like the Gray Lady any more than they already do, which is not at all: The New York Times’ editorial board has officially endorsed Barack Obama for president.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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The Dow gained 401.35 points Thursday but had volatile swings through most of the day. Investors, The Wall Street Journal reports, are still trying to figure out what stage of suck the economy is in.
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listphile.com
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It would seem imprudent, given the government’s recent and unprecedented bailout of companies such as insurance giant AIG, for the likes of AIG to even entertain the idea of hefty executive payouts.
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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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commons.wikimedia.org
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It seems like only a couple of days ago that the Dow jumped 936 points. The market went back to freaking everyone out on Wednesday, with a sobering drop of 733.08 points. Stimuli and bailouts aside, it appears that we’re in for a substantial recession.
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lasvegasvegas.com
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What would Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider from Oliver Stone’s 1987 classic cautionary tale “Wall Street,” have to say about the current state of the American economy? Well, we just might find out.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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After seven straight drops, the Dow landed at 8579.19 on Thursday, a year to the day after hitting a record of more than 14,000 points. The owners of the national debt clock in New York, meanwhile, announced they will add two digits to the board in order to display a quadrillion—because that’s where we’re headed.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George Bush would stop asking God to bless America. Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president’s evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration?
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AP photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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There will hopefully come a day when the news from Wall Street is actually good (at the moment, anything better than utterly terrifying news would be nice), but Tuesday was not that day, despite Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s intimations that help could soon be on the way.
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0-60mag.com
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Sure, we’ve all heard the stories about Wall Street bigwigs lining their pockets with gold dubloons while the rest of us scramble to save pennies, but The New York Times has drawn out that contrast in graphic detail with a handy series of charts showing the total earnings (including bonuses) of 12 top executives from 2003-2007.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Chris Hedges — The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.
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AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
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With just a month to go before the presidential election, the Obama and McCain campaigns are making some strategy changes in reaction to the seismic shifts that shook the economy over recent weeks. The forecast currently looks better, to some analysts, for Obama than McCain, but McCain’s supporters don’t see it that way.
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youtube.com
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Despite House Minority Leader John Boehner’s claim, backed up by other Republicans in Congress, that the bailout bill might have passed were it not for meddling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bombastic speech on Monday, others from within GOP ranks beg to differ.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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John McCain’s bid to put his campaign on hold in order to wing his way to Washington last week was intended to make him seem ready for action in a crisis but may have resulted in a “political dead end” for the Arizona senator after Monday’s bailout bomb, according to the Associated Press.
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flickr.com/mcoughlin
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By Bill Boyarsky — One of the worst casualties of the Iraq war and the Wall Street failures is the U.S. public school system, which is central to the nation’s economic, intellectual and social health. With financial resources being consumed, education cuts are on the way. Thank you, John McCain and President George W. Bush.
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By Robert Fisk — By grotesque mischance, $700 billion—the cost of George Bush’s Wall Street rescue plan—is about the same figure the president has squandered on his preposterous war in Iraq, the war we have now apparently “won” thanks to the “surge.”
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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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finfacts.ie
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Following days of hype-work by the Bush administration to scare taxpayers into paying for Wall Street’s failures, support for the $700-billion bailout seems to be gaining steam. Analysts believe the final bailout plan, expected in a day or two, may look eerily similar to Bush’s initial proposal, with some slight changes.
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s proposed bailout carries a price tag of $700 billion, a staggering figure that CNN has helpfully translated into terms that every American can understand by consulting the McDonald’s (apple) pie chart.
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AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — Does it really matter which party is in charge when it comes to bailing out the Wall Street hustlers whose shenanigans have bankrupted so many ordinary folks? Not if the Democrats roll over and cede power to the former head of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank at the center of our economic meltdown.
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AP photo / Madalyn Ruggiero
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By Bill Boyarsky — In Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, the fact that he is African-American has seemed to be an obstacle that could be overcome with a good campaign, a few breaks and the issues turning his way. That’s what is happening now.
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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Tab, The Calgary Sun —
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Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued
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