Steve Fine: While the Occupy Movement has been busy targeting the dominance and corruption of the 1% on the domestic side, it has inadvertently given those same people a massive free pass on the foreign policy side. This needs to change.
What Will the Democratic Left Do in 2012?
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Lawrence Wittner: Contrasting the administration’s all-out effort to save Wall Street with its indifference to Main Street, many progressives wonder if they have gained anything worthwhile with Obama’s election.
The Two Stories of This Terrible Economy, Yet Obama and the Dems Won’t Tell Theirs
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Robert Reich: Republicans lack specific policies but they have a story. Obama and the Democrats have lots of specific policies but don’t have a story. That spells even more trouble for Democrats.
Does the Obama Plan for Reforming Wall Street Measure Up?
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In a word: No. The plan doesn’t stop stop bankers from making huge, risky bets with other peoples’ money. It does increase capital requirements and oversight, but it doesn’t require bankers to take their pay in long-term stock options or warrants, and it doesn’t even hint that banks should go back to being partnerships instead [...]
The Great Debt Scare: Why Has It Returned?
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It’s the kind of thing I expect to hear from deficit hawks and chicken littles — from the self-described “fiscally responsible” right, from the scolds Ross Perot and Pete Peterson, from my former cabinet colleague Bob Rubin. But yesterday I was shown slides developed by the putatively liberal Center for American Progress intended to make [...]
Sorry Folks: Happy Days Are Not Here Again
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“Demonizing the bankers as if they and they alone created the financial meltdown is both inaccurate and short-sighted,” Citigroup chairman Richard Parsons told reporters recently. “Everybody participated in pumping up this balloon and now that the balloon has deflated, everybody has some part in the blame.” Oh no we don’t. Talk about dissembling. The truth [...]
The President’s American Recovery & Reinvestment Act: What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us
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One of the first things President Barack Obama did as our nation’s Chief Executive was to urge Congress to pass, then sign, the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA), better known as the nation’s “economic stimulus” package. The $787 billion bill, the largest taxpayer footed bill ever passed, was viewed as the primary vehicle to [...]
Will Ken Lewis Get Canned, and Will Americans Have a Say in the Corporations We Now Own?
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I don’t know whether Bank of America shareholders will oust Ken Lewis from his chairmanship this week. I don’t know if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will eventually do it, either. What really worries me is I don’t know who would actually be responsible for doing the deed, or by what criteria. When it comes to [...]
Why the Automakers Won’t Make Fuel-Efficient Cars, Even as the Price of Being Bailed Out
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by Robert Reich – Telling automakers to make more fuel-efficient cars as a condition of being bailed out is like telling Citigroup or any other big bank to issue more affordable loans to Main Street as a condition of being bailed out. It won’t happen.
Now Greenspan Tells Us!
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Whoops! My bad. Sorry. In effect, this is what former Fed chair Alan Greenspan is telling members of the House Committee of Government Oversight and Reform today by admitting he was wrong about unfettered free markets regulating themselves.
We’ve Invested in Wall Street, Now It’s Time to Invest in the Rest of America
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The global economy has been put into the economic equivalent of a full nelson by a financial system threatening to collapse under the weight of a complicated pyramid scheme. The Bush administration sounded dire warnings and cobbled together a vaguely flushed-out rescue plan promising the injection of up to $700 billion of taxpayers’ dollars into [...]
The New Deal, and the Era of Angry Populism
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The Senate voted Wednesday night; the House is scheduled to vote today. Will the deal fly? Probably. Wall Street’s gyrations since Monday have scared the hell out of a number of holdouts, notwithstanding all the negative emails and phone calls they continue to receive from constituents.
Senate Plot-Plop, Fizz-Fizz
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$700,000,000,000… oh what a relief, it is! With apologies to Alka-Seltzer, one chamber crawled out of the sandbox and reached an unpopular but bipartisan decision to save global credit markets last night as banks held a Russian Roulette pistol with six chambers full to our heads and yelled, “Stop me before I shoot.” Crisis over? [...]
7-7-7 Jackpot! Whoops, Slot Machine’s Empty
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$9,897,708,003,650.45 is the current national debt jackpot and we all lose! Our country’s real owners the Congress said to its pretend owners, the voters, then the one’s propping up the economy, the Chinese, Saudis and Japanese investors buying up our debt and the those controlling the purse strings, the bankers lending to our businesses to [...]
Paulson, Bernanke, Try Hustling Congress
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Here we go again. As the Bush administration did with the Patriot Act and Iraq War resolution, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke spent today trying to hustle Congress into new territory using the familiar administration tactic of hysteria. Fortunately, this time it looks as if more than a few members have read the fine print [...]
Go Ahead — Spend It, We’ll Print More
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In a stunning deregulation reversal, President Bush in a one-minute statement before retreating back into his sealed White House bunker, called for the creation of a massive $700 billion dollar toxic mortgage bailout RTC-like organization to allow ‘business as usual’ for his Wall Street, white tie base. When you can print your own money you [...]
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