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$16.00
By Scott Ritter
$11.16
$40
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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It seems that some key officials involved in the negotiations with the Bush administration over the terms of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700-billion bailout proposal for Wall Street aren’t about to make a deal unless it includes specific plans for congressional oversight and help for homeowners on the brink of foreclosure.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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While lawmakers debated exactly how to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at Wall Street, the Dow dropped 372 points on Monday. The price of oil, meanwhile, had a $25 surge that took many analysts by surprise.
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On Monday morning, as the aftershocks from Wall Street’s worst week in decades continued to rock the national and global economy and the Bush administration scrambled to contain the fallout with a bailout plan that could cost American taxpayers over a trillion dollars, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Robert Scheer and Dean Baker joined “Democracy Now!” host Amy Goodman (above) to sort through the rubble and speculate about what might come next.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Chris Hedges — The lobbyists and corporate lawyers, the heads of financial firms and the crooks who control Wall Street, all those who spent the last three decades assuring us that government was part of the problem and should get out of the way, are now busy looting the U.S. treasury.
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Flickr / jurvetson
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Nancy Pelosi isn’t buying into the idea of a $700 billion gift basket for Wall Street without any strings attached. The House speaker is all for a bailout, so long as it’s clear that “the party is over for the Bush administration’s anything goes, failed economic policies.” Update 2
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What to make of the bailouts and sellouts that dominated the past week’s financial headlines? Well, “Left, Right & Center” commentators Matt Miller, Robert Scheer and Tony Blankley (Arianna Huffington was away) have some ideas about what caused the nightmare on Wall Street and what the future holds.
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onechoicehealthcare.com
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Whoops! As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out Friday, presidential nominees Barack Obama and John McCain both have articles in the latest edition of Contingencies magazine about how they would reform America’s health care industry. In light of certain recent events in the banking world, McCain may want to reconsider his position.
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momocrats.typepad.com
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And now, this latest dispatch from the U.S. Department of Unintentional Irony: Sen. John McCain spoke out against the Federal Reserve’s recent bids to give life support (read: gigantic amounts of money) to failing financial institutions. Isn’t he the same guy who has looked to Phil Gramm for economic advice?
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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By Robert Scheer — Has the war on terrorism become the modern equivalent of the Roman Circus, drawing the people’s attention away from the failures of those who rule them? Corporate America is a shambles because deregulation, the mantra of our president and his party, has proved to be a license to steal.
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Turns out that having Phil Gramm on one’s economic advisory team may not be the best way to demonstrate one’s readiness to inherit the gigantic mess that the U.S. economy has become under the Bush administration’s not-so-close watch—or at least that’s what Obama’s camp is pointing out in this ad on the financial debacle.
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By David Sirota — Barack Obama isn’t going to win any arguments about the economy if he keeps winking at the robber barons who helped wreck Wall Street.
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commons.wikimedia.org / Ramy Majouji
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Truthdig’s editor in chief warns against thinking about the economic crisis as an “act of God,” saying “this is man-made” and that the individuals responsible are well known and entirely too influential in the current election.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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President Bush had been laying low over recent days, but it seems his inner circle considered it prudent to trot him out for a brief appearance at the White House. He surfaced on Thursday to speak vaguely about the snowballing economic crisis on Wall Street before disappearing once again.
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By Marie Cocco — Obama shows more promise than McCain, if only because he correctly sees deregulatory zeal as a culprit. But Obama’s economic strategy simply can’t be implemented now: He wants to spend on necessary investments such as health care, but would have no money to do it.
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By Joe Conason — With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government.
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By Amy Goodman — With financial institutions begging for bailouts, taxpayers should be in the driver’s seat. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.
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Whither Lehman Brothers? Et tu, Merrill Lynch? What’s going on on Wall Street? Jon Stewart breaks down the financial meltdown on Tuesday night’s edition of “The Daily Show”—complete with ‘80s monster movie allusions. Sweet!
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listphile.com
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Here we go again: The Federal Reserve is bailing out another tanking financial institution—the insurance behemoth American International Group—by sinking $85 billion into AIG in return for a stake in the company. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a Wall Street investigation following this latest startling agreement between big government and big business.
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AP photo / Douglas Healey
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By Robert Scheer — Gag me with a spoon, as Valley girls used to say. Did you see that McCain-Palin ad promising “tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings, no special interest giveaways”? Just how dumb do they think we are?
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Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com —
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John McCain’s campaign would like to nominate—who else?— John McCain and Sarah Palin as just the ticket to get Americans out of financial crisis, claiming they’ll fight “special interest giveaways” on Wall Street(?!), cut taxes and, of course, drill, baby, drill!
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Bill Boyarsky — With a stunningly vicious pair of blows, the faltering world economy—the Godzilla of this year’s presidential race—has made the candidates look small. Why hasn’t this looming crisis been part of the presidential debate?
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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Finally, some slightly better financial news has hit the wires after months of sobering reports: Oil prices dropped to a three-month low on Tuesday, which may be due to “the softening market,” as one analyst puts it in this NYT account, but whatever the reason it still means a slight reprieve from weeks of punishing prices. Stock markets had their biggest gains in four months.
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Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were always more foul than fish, says Robert Borosage, and the bailout announced by the Treasury secretary over the weekend will mean “private speculators, having driven the stock down, will clean up on the upside.”
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foreclosurewearhouse.com
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Although certain Washington denizens from both sides of the aisle might have been thrown when the two government-backed mortgage finance companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, hit the skids last week, several of their current and former colleagues had long seen the crisis coming.
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Author and columnist David Sirota braves the Colbert treatment to talk about his (Sirota’s) latest book, “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington,” and to brazenly assert that, “People are angry with the status quo—they think the establishment isn’t working for them, and frankly, it’s not.”
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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John McCain joined Hillary Clinton in critiquing Barack Obama’s characterization of small-town Pennsylvania’s (and by extension, perhaps, America’s) “bitter” outlook, telling a crowd of magazine and newspaper editors on Monday that Obama’s description represented “a contradiction from what I believe America is all about.”
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By Marie Cocco — The housing crisis brings to mind Gordon Gekko, that fictitious ambassador of Wall Street whose words, then and now, remind us why uninhibited capitalism just doesn’t work.
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Flickr / epicharmus
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A sense of gloom still hangs over the economy, but there was cause for celebration Monday. Home sales are up for the first time in months, the dollar has regained some ground against the euro, and Wall Street had a triple-digit day. So why aren’t investors smiling?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries, and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.
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Jim Cramer is best known as the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” show, but he’s also a personal friend of Eliot Spitzer. Here, Cramer becomes emotional as he describes losing the “ammo” to take on Spitzer’s Wall Street critics.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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By Robert Scheer — Tell me again: Why should we get all worked up over the revelation that the New York governor paid for sex? Will it bring back to life the eight U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq that same day in a war that makes no sense and has cost this nation trillions in future debt?
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The short month of February was long on economic problems, as 63,000 U.S. jobs were lost over the 29 days. In other words, for those betting that a recession isn’t around the corner, the outlook is dim.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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Winter 2008 is shaping up to be a gloomy season for the American economy, with mounting concerns over subprime mortgage prices and a plunging stock market. Thursday was a particularly dreary day on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones industrial average down 307 points and the Standard & Poor’s 500 falling almost 3 percent.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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Thursday was not a good day on Wall Street, with the Dow dropping over 362 points to close at 13,567.87. Meanwhile, the S&P 500, like the Dow, fell 2.6 percent, and the Nasdaq also took a hit, dipping 2.25 percent by day’s end.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s not surprising in the cutthroat world of Wall Street to see a big-time CEO such as Stanley O’Neal float out of the boardroom with a golden parachute. What is significant is that this grandson of a slave managed to become one of the “Masters of the Universe” in the first place.
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Finally, after months of hanging in the pink slip rumor mill, John Snow can move on. The White House has named Henry M. Paulson as the newest Treasury secretary; here’s what we know according to the Washington Post and NYT:
He was reluctant to accept the job.
He worked in the Pentagon as a young man.
He “has been a Goldman Sachs executive since 1974, pulling down a compensation package in 2005 of $37 million.”
He is “a birdwatcher who can often be found in Central Park with his binoculars.”
Thank you mainstream media for your thorough profile of this very important man.
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By Molly Ivins — “I don’t so much mind that newspapers are dying—it’s watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.”
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