Posts tagged with 'NewsLadder'
Weekly Immigration Wire: White House Meeting a First Step to Reform
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by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger
After postponing twice, President Obama finally met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on June 25 to discuss moving immigration reform legislation forward. The meeting was applauded by activists and advocates for immigration reform, as the issue seemed to have stalled, and the acrimonious tone of the debate has proven deadly.
All parties emerged from the meeting with positive feelings about the prospect for progress, as I heard on last Friday’s White House debriefing conference call. A confluence of positive factors are contributing to the momentum: Major labor leaders are united for reform, Democrats are leading much of Washington, and voters in the U.S. clearly want to see reform passed. President Obama made his intention to pass reform very clear and the White House predicts the process will begin late this year or early 2010.
New America Media calls the meeting a hopeful beginning, but makes it clear that nothing is guaranteed this year—despite the pressing need. And we can’t wait too long for reform to begin. 2010 is the beginning of the 2012 Presidential election cycle and the issue could be “too easily politicized” at that time.
Wiretap Mag’s M. Junaid Levesque-Alam writes that, while Obama complimented Senator John McCain for taking risks, he seemed averse to boldly stating what he hoped to see or would stand behind; that “nothing [Obama] said indicated significant political movement” on the issue. But, Levesque-Alam hypothesizes that Obama’s caution is related to tension caused by “core contradictions not simply between but within the political parties.” The immigration issue is contentious, even among members of the same party.
GritTV and The Nation teamed up to present a panel asking Is Immigration Reform Dead or Alive? (video). The panelists discuss a potential future in which immigration reform does not pass. Their predictions make a grim scene, centered around the horrors of a growing detention industry. Children are incarcerated in these facilities. Over 90 people have died in detention and they are damaging families. Guest Ravi Ragbir, now a member of Families for Freedom, spent two years in a detention center. Ragbir’s young daughter was so disturbed by the sight of her father in shackles that Ragbir requested she no longer visit while he was detained.
A Truthdig article titled America’s ICE Backwards Approach to Immigration details the broken legal system that further clouds the immigration process. Over 200,000 immigration cases are backlogged and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has risen by 35%, stressing the court system accordingly. Add a declining number of judges and a sharp increase in the number of border guards and the result is a setting where “the equivalent of death penalty cases” are heard “in a traffic court setting,” according to Judge Dana Leigh Marks, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
New America Media also explores the results of a study that finds a low rate of crimes are committed by the undocumented, which is a stark contrast to the accusations of right-wing pundits. The undocumented population in Utah grew from 70,000 to 110,000 in the last four years, according to a new study released by the Sutherland Instituate, but the number of incarcerated undocumented increased by only 28. That’s 28 people, not percent. In fact, the crime rate for undocumented immigrants in Utah is only 3.9% and dropping.
Finally, RaceWire’s Michelle Chen reports on the impact of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative on Mexican Americans who want to deliver children using a midwife. The Initiative, which went into effect yesterday, “requires Americans passing across the Canadian and Mexican borders to have a valid U.S. passport or passport card.” Previously, only a valid driver’s license was required. This is yet another policy that refuses to recognize the long pattern of movement over the border area, and is culturally antagonistic to Mexican Americans.
Law indicates humankind’s attempt to be just; it is an extension of a civilization’s morality. Immigration reform must come soon; it is a moral duty. It must pass not just for the benefit of the undocumented community, but so we can live up to our national ideals, and also, to decisively stave off a destructive energy made possible by the lack of humane law.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: Progressive Pressure is Repairing the Economy
Progressive media is sounding the alarm on the AIG bonus scandal, demanding that policymakers stop repeating Bush administration mistakes and offering concrete solutions to the dire economic situation those missteps have created.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich describes the bonus insanity in a blog distributed by AlterNet. “Had AIG gone into chapter 11 bankruptcy or been liquidated, as it would have without government aid, no bonuses would ever be paid,” Reich writes, noting that institutions like AIG “are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market.” If AIG is not accountable to the Treasury Secretary of the country that owns an 80% stake in AIG, then the company has unlimited access to taxpayer coffers without being accountable to anyone at all.
The government’s first set of actions after it took control of its AIG stake back in September should have been to identify and renegotiate every important contract the company was tied up in. Whether those contracts were guaranteed bonuses with current employees or complex credit default swap transactions with Goldman Sachs, the extraordinary assistance the government had agreed to provide would have been a perfectly legitimate legal justification to demand new contractual terms. In short, the government should have exercised the benefits of ownership—exactly what progressive economists, columnists and bloggers have been demanding since the bailout debate began.
But while the uproar over AIG’s bonuses vindicates progressive calls for more stringent action to rein in the financial predators, President Barack Obama inherited an economy in very real danger of collapse, with the banking crisis is the epicenter of the economic earthquake.
While most economists are warning of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Robert Kuttner reveals for The American Prospect why this one might actually be worse. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the U.S. financial system was still generally healthy. It took another three years for unemployment and general economic malaise to overwhelm the banking world. Today, the banking system is already broken and could get even worse without swift and dramatic action from the Obama administration. The U.S. is not a major international creditor as it was in 1929, but rather the world’s largest debtor, and today far more Americans have their life savings tied up in the value of their home and in the stock market than in the early years of the Depression. Millions of Americans have already seen their nest eggs decimated in the current recession, a process which took years during the Herbert Hoover administration.
Kuttner emphasizes that the situation is not hopeless—it will simply require a bigger set of policy tools than the Bush administration was willing to wield. “All of these economic calamities have solutions, but each is more radical that what’s currently on offer,” Kuttner writes. Temporarily nationalizing big banks has become inevitable if recovery is going to be taken seriously. We’ll also have to get used to very large federal deficits—World War II deficits were nearly triple the deficit we will see this year. If foreign creditors decide to stop footing the bill, the U.S. may need to finance its economic salvation by selling recovery bonds to our own citizens just as we sold war bonds in the 1940s war bonds.
The key is to keep the progressive pressure on high. In an interview with GritTV’s Laura Flanders, Barbara Ehrenreich emphasizes the importance of the current economic situation for the future of progressive ideals. Ehrenreich identifies as a socialist and is most famous for her book Nickel and Dimed about living on poverty-level wages. The fact that we have allowed Wall Street to drain hundreds of billions of dollars in public sector resources should be terrifying, according to Ehrenreich, and even those who do not share her ideological affiliations can see that the current loot-and-let-die arrangement is not only unfair, but not working.
“[Obama] needs a left on the economic issue,” Ehrenreich argues. “We’ve got to make the pressure real.”
The AIG debacle proves her point. Writing for The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen highlights Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s “I feel your pain” moment during Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview in which he voiced outrage over AIG’s destructive behavior. “If Bernanke thinks that’s going to dissipate the public anger, he’s likely to be disappointed,” according to Benen.
And indeed, a handful of commentators including Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo laid into the government’s bailout engineers over the past couple of weeks for refusing to disclose AIG’s counterparties. The Treasury finally caved on Monday, so despite Geithner’s protests, we now know exactly who AIG paid with its bailout money from 2008, mostly European banks. But as TruthDig’s Ear to the Ground blog notes, even this victory is just a step in the right direction—Treasury is yet to explain how AIG bailout funds have been spent in 2009. Better still, the administration might also stop bestowing taxpayer largesse on Wall Street incorrigibles who, let’s not forget, created the economic problem in the first place.
Political discourse is not the only forum for progressive pressure. To that end, the NAACP has filed class-action lawsuits against subprime behemoths Wells Fargo and HSBC seeking some for discriminatory mortgage lending. As Michelle Chen explains for Colorlines, black Americans routinely pay more for their mortgages than white borrowers with identical qualifications, and are often denied loans entirely based on nothing but the color of their skin.
If you want social justice, this is the economic moment to demand it.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire blogger
The Obama administration may be about to pull the plug on the health czar. The position has gone unfilled since Obama’s appointee-apparent, former Sen. Tom Daschle, withdrew his name from consideration for both czar and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in early February. Several serious candidates are emerging in the unofficial race to lead HHS, but there’s no corresponding shortlist for health czar.
The czar and his Office of Health Reform were initially touted as proof that Obama was really serious about shepherding a health reform package through Congress. But the Obama team may ultimately decide that the Office of Health Reform is an obstacle instead of an asset without Daschle and ditch it altogether.
As Erza Klein explains in the American Prospect, the position was created especially for Daschle and any other candidate might be worse than nothing as far as passing a healthcare reform package goes. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly agrees, and says that nixing the health czar doesn’t necessarily indicate that the Obama administration is any less committed to healthcare reform.
The purpose of the health czar was to create a single emissary to represent President Obama’s healthcare agenda to Congress. When the Clintons tried to reform healthcare in 1993, they discovered that various powerful administration officials were claiming to speak for the president.
The health czar was supposed to prevent future confusion as the president’s spokesperson. Many senior healthcare officials are already close to Obama and a similar situation could arise. Daschle would have been a credible health czar because he’s closer to the president than any of them, and a former congressional heavyweight to boot. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is a front-runner for HHS secretary and she has a very good relationship with Obama. But Gov. Sebelius is a Washington outsider who has never served in the U.S. Congress, which might make her a less compelling candidate for czar.
Ezra Klein, linked above, argues that if nobody can fill Daschle’s shoes, appointing a less compelling czar might just add to the din of executive branch officials vying for the attention of key Congressional leaders.
Maybe it’s a good idea to send as many Obama health officials to Congress as possible. If nothing else, they might cut into time the reps are currently spending with health insurance industry lobbyists, as Talking Points Memo reports.
Speaking of contenders for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Gov. Howard Dean recently published an article on AlterNet defending Obama’s comparative effectiveness research (CER) agenda against right wing critics like Rush Limbaugh. Dean draws on his experience as a doctor and a healthcare policy-maker to argue that CER is a way to put more scientific evidence in the hands of doctors, so they can choose the very best treatment for the money. Right wingers don’t like the idea. They’re literally afraid that if science determines that a treatment is bogus, the government will stop paying for it. Right wingers calls this “rationing.” Taxpayers might call it evidence-based policy. Last we checked, Medicare and Medicaid were not faith-based programs.
As Dean points out, the CER to be funded by the new economic stimulus bill is officially for doctors, not legislators. “Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have you believe that this research will be used to deny needed care to your great Aunt May and be run by the politburo. But the Bill passed by Congress states right up front that the Government can not make coverage decisions based on this research,” Dean wrote. Realistically, though, that’s kind of a hollow assurance. Once the research is done, there’s no way to stop legislators from using publicly available research findings to make healthcare decisions.
In another corner of the healthcare reform-o-sphere, Katrina vanden Heuvel says that time is right to reform New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws in The Nation. These laws have been on the books 35 years. The laws essentially force judges to send drug possessors to jail based on the weight of the drugs they were caught with, whether the judge thinks imprisonment would be a good idea or not. New York’s budget crisis might be a blessing in disguise for drug reform, vanden Heuvel argues, because policy-makers are sick of paying to keep drug offenders locked up whether they need it or not.
And finally, some good news from RH Reality Check. Many people just wouldn’t feel right stepping out without a spritz of perfume, a blast of breath-freshener, or regrettably, a head-to-toe shellacking with Axe Body Spray. As Joe Veix reports for RH, another spray-on product may one day be added to the essential equipment list: contraceptive. An Australian company is currently testing a hormone spritz for women. The product is applied to the forearm. Like the contraceptive patch, the spray is designed to deliver hormones through the skin. Researchers hope that through-the-skin delivery can produce the same results as pills, but with lower doses of hormones and fewer side effects.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit
href=”http://healthcare.newsladder.net/” title=”Healthcare.NewsLadder.net” id=”so75″>Healthcare.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, <a href=”http://economy.newsladder.net/”>Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: A Cry for Change from Coast to Coast
by Nezua
Media Consortium Blogger
All over the nation, communities are clamoring to be heard. In this worsening economic landscape, migrant communities are being terrorized by violent raids, families are destabilized, wage earners are jailed or detained, and xenophobic pundits continue to fuel a rising wave of hate crimes against Latinos. The stakes could not be any higher: Now is the time to make our voices heard, especially after being ignored for so long by those with the power to make a difference.
And so we are gathering in numbers in San Francisco and throughout California:
A coalition of groups that has been working with San Francisco’s supervisors, community leaders, social service providers, and faith groups is gathering at City Hall to call for a halt to the raids and for support of fair and humane immigration reform. We will be joining our voices with thousands of others across California and across our country who found hope in the words of our new President Barack Obama during his inauguration speech [...]
—Choosing Hope Over Fear in Immigration Policy Reform, New America Media, Jan. 21, 2009
And on the same day, marching on Washington, DC (with photos):
Over a thousand people are gathered in DC, a day after inaugurating our new president, to demand A New Day for Immigration.
—Immigrants March for Reform in DC, RaceWire, Jan. 21, 2009
Sending letters from Albequerque, New Mexico:
[C]oncerned New Mexico groups are among thousands of people signed on to a letter to President Obama asking for drastic alterations [in U.S. immigration enforcement policy]. Jo Ann Gutierrez Bejar with the Southwest Organizing Project says even families in Albuquerque neighborhoods feel intimidated by the presence of the Border Patrol.
—NM Groups Push Obama for Immigration Change: “End Worker Raids Now“, Public News Service, January 28, 2009
Immigrant rights groups are organizing across the nation:
On January 27, the National Network of Immigrant and Refugee Rights will be releasing an “Open Letter to President Barack Obama” to establish a new framework for addressing immigration policy. You can help by circulating it to your friends and by signing the petition[.]
—Time to Take Action towards Humane and Sane Immigration Policies, RaceWire
Suing President Obama for relief in Miami, Florida:
The lawyers for over 600 American born children filed a lawsuit against President Obama to suspend the deportation of their undocumented parents until there is immigration law reform.
—U.S. Born Children of Undocumented Parents Sue Obama, New America Media, January 28, 2009
And starting a 100-day Countdown Clock in Arizona:
Arizona activists rallied in Tucson yesterday urging President Obama to keep his campaign promise to address immigration reform in his first 100 days on the job. Immigration rights organization Border Action Network wants a plan that respects human rights and preserves families[...]
—100-Day Countdown Clock Started for Obama Border Reform, Public News Service, January 22, 2009
In essence,
The American people want real solutions, not divisive rhetoric. The new administration and new Congress hold great promise for progress on immigration reform. Now it is up to people of conscience to hold our elected representatives accountable and demand immigration reform that benefits the American people, America’s economic and homeland security, and moves us towards a new era of recognizing that immigration is not a source of weakness for America, it is a sign of our strength.
—Immigration Reform: Yes We Can?, New America Media, January 27, 2009
In the absence of national leadership, we end up with law enforcement so devoid of ethical guidance that it declares racial profiling an “important tool” and propaganda television that omits the horrors of the standing system. The fact is, fearful rhetoric has taken over what could be a sane dialogue and we are all suffering for it. Higher walls are not the solution. Letting our fellow humans move into caves is not the answer. And politicians who think only in terms of punishment and speak divisively will get us nowhere.
The People have spoken. And are speaking. And we will continue speak. Until we are heard.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: Filling FDR’s shoes
The Great Depression permanently changed the government’s role in the U.S economy, and it appears increasingly plausible that the current recession will have an equally lasting policy legacy. The bailouts orchestrated by the Bush administration have been an absolute mess, but they present an opportunity to create new consumer protection-oriented economic programs the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
As Mark Schmitt explains in a piece for The American Prospect, establishing a government entity in any sector—banking, health care, education, etc.—that serves as a gold standard for consumer protection will force the private sector to offer similar services to compete with the attractive government program.
In essence, the goal is to align private sector profits with public benefits, not unlike what FDR did with housing during the Great Depression, when the government started offering people radical new 30-year mortgages at affordable interest rates. In short order, banks switched from five-year loans to long-term loans, and a new class of homeowners was created.
President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus legislation looks to make the same kind of bold economic overhaul, and while the proposal has some real problems, it seems clear that Obama is going to take serious action to reverse the economic slide.
Writing for The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild applauds virtually every policy point Obama has presented in making the case for his first major piece of legislation, from financial regulation to expanded broadband access.
This is not to say that significant hurdles are not ahead. Rothschild echoes economists of varying ideological stripes by expressing concerns that the bill is too small and will not be enacted fast enough. Congressional Democrats are already voicing uneasiness over the potential effectiveness of some of Obama’s proposed tax cuts, and the stimulus bill itself is not likely to tackle every policy priority Obama has advocated (Congress is likely to tackle regulatory affairs in separate legislation, for instance).
But as Steve Benen articulates for The Washington Monthly, the current policy debate is very different from the political bed-wetting among Democrats that we have grown accustomed to over the past eight years. Democrats are actually governing.
“It’s important for policy makers to act as quickly and effectively as possible, but there’s nothing wrong with a collaborative process in which an administration and leading lawmakers engage in some back-and-forth,” Benen writes.
In at least one sense, the stimulus bill has already notched a meaningful victory. Namely, everyone from CNBC to The American Prospect is talking about economics as a realm in which the government can play a constructive role. The victory is not total: there are still nay-sayers on spending over at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and members of the reality-proof economics department at George Mason University will be quoted extensively in AP-style newspaper reports for the next few weeks to give stories illusory ideological “balance.” Nevertheless, there is a general consensus for aggressive government action the economic front, and the public discourse is now focused on which courses of action are appropriate.
Josh Marshall offers one such critique over at Talking Points Memo. Marshall notes that while the debate between Congress and the Obama administration has been constructive in some ways, the negotiating strategy remains something of a gamble. Obama is starting small—Paul Krugman, for instance, believes Obama’s proposed $775 billion bill will only close about one-third of the economy’s output gap. Obama may be hoping to allow the legislative process to build the bill into something large enough to withstand the current economic headwinds. But if that is the case, Marshall contends, Obama also risks loading the package down with politically damaging and economically unproductive pet projects.
“If you get deep into a lot of bidding and horse-trading you get more parochial interests in the mix,” Marshall writes.
Over at The Washington Independent, Mike Lillis details problems with various tax cuts Obama has rolled out for the stimulus. Major losers include a $3,000 incentive for companies not to lay off current employees, which appears unlikely to change any HR habits, and a corporate “net operating loss carryback” extension, which results in a huge giveaway for companies that take losses this year—notably banks who have already been bailed out (at least) once in recent months.
There can be no doubt that the economy is getting worse. The U.S. lost 524,000 jobs in December, bringing total yearly job losses to 3.6 million, and boosting the unemployment rate to 7.2%. New America Media highlights a report by Hispanic Business detailing how minorities have been disproportionately affected by the downturn. The unemployment rate among blacks soared to 11.9% in December, while 9.2% of Hispanics looking for a job didn’t have one.
The unemployment rate covers one of the most damaging aspects of the recession, but it’s also important to remember that Wall Street’s success in pushing workers into the sham 401(k) industry has also decimated the retirement savings of millions of Americans who were about to leave the workforce voluntarily.
In a 401(k) account, a worker pledges a certain amount of his wages every paycheck to a fund managed by an investment manager. Over time, these investment experts are supposed to maximize the returns in this fund, to provide better-than-market growth in the employee’s retirement account.
But 401(k) plans almost never actually work like that–they consistently score lower returns than broad market indexes like the S&P 500. You’d be better off in many cases just betting on the Dow than turning over your money to these guys. What’s worse, you pay them a fee to screw you over. As Dan Solin puts it for The Huffington Post:
“The 401(k) system is a disgrace. Employers get paid off in the form of subsidies to select brokers and advisors who control the investment options in the plan. They, in turn, get paid off by fund families and insurance companies which limit employees’ investment options to costly, under-performing funds.”
None of the major 401(k) managers saw this year’s stock declines coming, and as a result, most people whose retirement is bundled into a 401(k) plan can’t retire any time soon.
The current economic climate leaves very little room for forgiveness on almost any policy, which makes living up to FDR’s economic standard an extremely difficult task. Fortunately, Obama seems to recognize there is no other choice.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: A Year of Bad Decisions
As Congress finally winds down what House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., refers to as “the session that will not die,” most of us have already contracted cases of outrage exhaustion from the barrage of Wall Street-related absurdities that the government has embroiled itself in over the past year.
But do not despair! David Sirota penned two pieces this week vindicating progressive critics of the current regime, one for Salon.com and another for the Campaign for America’s Future, detailing how recent reports from government agencies themselves have revealed the administration’s utter failure to craft a responsible financial rescue package. With the incompetence obvious to everyone, Sirota hopes that, “Maybe, just maybe, our humiliated rulers will start listening,” noting that progressives were right all along about meaningless CEO pay limits and oversight mechanisms in the $700 billion bailout, and overblown rhetoric from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
The oratorical frenzy surrounding too-big-to-fail Wall Street titans and last-ditch government bailouts has also made it easy to forget that the financial sector actually does desperately need some downsizing, as Joshua Holland reports for AlterNet.
Not only is the financial sector burdened with mountains of worthless debt instruments, it has created broader economic inefficiencies over the past decade by gobbling up a disproportionate share of the total economy. Holland presents a host of frightening statistics about the conditions leading up to the current recession, noting an 11% surge in poverty between 2000 and 2007, lower median household incomes and sluggish job growth. Almost everybody except the financiers, it seems, was hurting, and the global economy will not recover from its economic slide until the financial sector owns up to the losses inherent in its chimerical expansion.
But financial policy failures have not been limited to bad rulemaking and pro-Wall Street philosophy. Even basic anti-fraud protections that have been on the books since the 1930s are not being enforced effectively, as evidenced by the massive fraud scheme allegedly perpetrated by fund manager Bernard Madoff. The Securities and Exchange Commission received several warnings about Madoff’s business practices dating back to at least 1999, according to The Wall Street Journal, but chose to ignore them until Madoff’s system finally collapsed on itself this fall. As Truthdig’s Ear to the Ground Blog points out, fallout from the scandal is so broad that many of those hit by the scheme “might not know yet that they’re broke.”
Over at The Nation, Nicholas von Hoffman notes how the risky investment practices that have led investment bankers to the public coffers this year have also dealt a massive blow to funding for U.S. colleges and universities. Harvard University has officially lost $8 billion of its endowment since June, while the University of Virginia—whose president, John Casteen, serves on the board of directors at the collapsed banking giant Wachovia—has hemorrhaged $1 billion. Students obviously did not demand that these funds be spent recklessly, but students will ultimately pay the price.
Of course, there’s another bailout going on, unless Senate Republicans have their way. The faltering Detroit automobile industry is seeking about $14 billion in government funds, or slightly less than 10% of what taxpayers have already poured into insurance icon AIG, which employs few blue-collar workers and mostly produces useless debt insurance for even more useless debt circulating through Wall Street.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., led a Republican attack on auto unions, refusing to back a Detroit rescue package last week unless union laborers take a major pay cut. But the assault on the working class seems a little misguided, given the willingness of Congress to hurl $700 billion at U.S. banks without any strings on executive compensation.
“Citigroup’s CEO is being paid $216 million this year, yet Corker made no demand that he take a whack in pay,” Jim Hightower writes, even though Citi alone has accepted bailout funds worth over three times what the entire auto bailout would cost.
The chief difference between Detroit’s labor costs and those of its Japan-headquartered competitors is several decades of built-up pension plans. But as Hilzoy writes in a post for The Washington Monthly that the package was already so acquiescent to Republican demands that no serious conservative negotiators would have demanded further concessions.
Republicans do not have a monopoly on economic insanity. Over at The American Prospect, Ezra Klein highlights a troubling quote from Larry Summers, who will be the head economic advisor in Barack Obama’s White House next year. The passage appears in the new book Creative Capitalism, edited by lefty journalist Michael Kinsley:
“As for [Milton] Friedman — I’m not so sure he looks bad,” Summers says. “What is most screwed up today? GSEs, Citibank, regional banks. What is most regulated? Same list. What is least screwed up? Hedge funds and the like. What is least regulated?”
Summers’ “most screwed up” list only holds up if you exclude unregulated firms who were so completely decimated over the past year that they have become extinct. There are no major independent Wall Street investment banks anymore. Lehman Brothers died, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch sold to major commercial banks in emergency mergers and both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted to commercial banks to avoid collapse. No regulator has oversight of the entire investment banking corporate structure, and the mega i-banks have simply disappeared.
Same goes for the private subprime mortgage firms like Ameriquest and NovaStar. Wondering why those logos disappeared from NASCAR hoods about a year ago? Those subprime lenders were completely unregulated and they all went bankrupt.
Sadly, the economy is well past the point where government action could fend off a severe recession. At this point, it’s all damage control. The downturn is already hitting demand so hard that even recycling programs are on the ropes, as Air America Media’s Ron Kuby discusses in a radio interview with recycling organizer Meghan McCutcheon. Cash-strapped producers are well aware of consumer pocketbook pressures, and are bunkering down to ride out the recession with as few costs as possible—including cuts in raw materials, recycled or otherwise.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Botching the Bailout
The Bush administration is squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on incompetence again.
In a House Domestic Policy Subcommittee hearing on Friday, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, took Interim Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Stability Neel Kashkari (read: bailout chief) to task over the Treasury’s decision to spend every cent of the first $350 billion in bailout funds buying up preferred stock in Wall Street icons and other banks, while allowing troubled borrowers to fend for themselves.
Kashkari did his best to deflect the outrage, but his task would have been easier had the Treasury’s position been defensible. In a Senate Banking Committee hearing the day before, both consumer-protection advocates and banking executives endorsed an anti-foreclosure initiative devised by FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair that would create strong incentives for the private sector to cut borrowers some slack. Despite the plan’s broad appeal, both Paulson and Kashkari refused to devote any Treasury funds to the program, making the bailout chief sound like, well, a chump, when he insisted that Treasury is doing everything in its power to keep people in their homes.
The whole thing is beginning to look a little too much like Iraq. Bush administration officials steamroll both chambers of Congress with warnings of a dire emergency and are rewarded for their efforts with unprecedented authority and funding. Shortly afterwards, it becomes clear that the initiative has been squandered on meaningless giveaways to huge corporations without any corresponding social benefits. Naomi Klein of The Nation details the corruption parallels in an illuminating piece for Rolling Stone.
Laissez-faire lunacy
Most depressing is the bailout’s complete impotence with regard to providing broader economic support. Paulson and Kashkari have succeeded in keeping the U.S. financial sector afloat for the time being, but despite an enormous injection of taxpayer funds, banks are not lending money out into the broader economy. One part of the problem is the fact that President Bush & Co. took years to acknowledge that the country was in fact facing disaster (remember Paulson’s 2007 talking point that the subprime mortgage crisis was “contained”?). Now that the Treasury is finally taking action, it is doing so in an environment where there simply are not many good loans to be made. The other roadblock is Paulson’s refusal to require banks who accept public money to put it to use for the public good, as Joshua Holland explains for Alternet.
That desperate attempt to adhere to some kind of free-market principle—not forcing companies to do anything with billions of dollars allocated to partially nationalize them—was on display Friday at a speech Bush gave in New York. It sounds like a sick joke. After demanding $700 billion to save Wall Street, Bush is still warning against the evils of government intervention, claiming that free-market systems have a monopoly on “social justice and human dignity.”
“The greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market,” he said. “It is too much government involvement in the market.”
Matthew Rothschild skewers this absurdity over at The Progressive.
“You can’t have social justice and human dignity with mass unemployment, rampant foreclosures, high rates of poverty and food insecurity, and a health care system that leaves almost 50 million people uninsured,” Rothschild writes.
Bush did make a few nods to sanity during his speech, arguing that markets need to be “more transparent,” but the claim was a little perplexing amid reports that the Federal Reserve is refusing to disclose who it is granting about $2 trillion in emergency loans.
“Where is the ridicule?” Dean Baker asks in a blog for the American Prospect, arguing that Paulson and Bernanke are looking more like “crony capitalists” every day.
Going green, going global
Bush’s speech was designed to frame the debate surrounding the meeting of leaders from the world’s 20 largest economies to address problems in the global financial architecture. Fortunately, President Bush does not have final authority to sign an agreement for the U.S., that task will be left to Barack Obama in April of next year. Over at oneworld.net, Gary Gardner and Michael Renner note the opportunity not just for a New Deal to refashion the U.S. economy, but to ink a Green Deal that does away with global dependence on fossil fuels and provides for a fairer distribution of wealth across the globe.
At the moment, U.S. economic policy remains dominated by how to handle the bailout. How Democrats seek to proceed with lashing Detroit automakers to that $700 billion debacle will say a great deal about the majority party’s governing intentions heading into the next Congress.
“It’s time to think big,” Andrew Leonard writes for Salon.com. “A Manhattan Project-scale plan to move the U.S. into an energy-sustainable future should start with a complete restructuring of the automotive industry,” according to Leonard.
The sagas of the financial and automobile industries have more in common than meets the eye. Both have lobbied heavily against new regulations for decades, and the lax oversight has left both in dire straits. While conservatives are quick to point to labor union contracts that make workforces at GM, Ford and Chrysler pricier than for foreign manufacturers, the fact is that the Big Three have drastically lost market share in recent years by failing to make cars people actually want to buy. In a video produced for American News Project, Garland McLaurin details how Detroit spent millions lobbying Congress against raising fuel economy standards while failing to develop cars that achieve high gas mileage.
Millions of people could be out of a job if the Big Three go under, but if Democrats hurl money at the companies with no strings attached, they’re no better than the current administration’s set of bailouteers.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Kicking the Wall Street Habit
As Barack Obama readies himself to lead the United States through what appears to be a scathing recession, he faces a choice between feeding the political sphere’s Wall Street addiction and investing in economic progress. Two key former Clinton cabinet officials could determine which course he takes.
It was more than a little startling to hear a U.S. leader who sounded like (gasp!) an economist at the president-elect’s first press conference last week, after years of Bush speeches that treated economic policy as a realm defined exclusively by tax cuts and bailouts. But without policy specifics, we still do not know which voices of the many men and women flanking Obama at the event will impact the next administration’s economic platform. Mother Jones notes that several of the names included on the list of Obama’s economic advisers represent schools of thought that brought us directly to the current crisis. Two of the alleged experts, former Clinton Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, signed off on major financial deregulatory moves in the latter half of the Clinton years. The two sided often with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on policies that included a refusal to place government oversight on the credit derivatives market, which eventually ballooned into the $60 trillion quagmire that destroyed AIG in September (who got another $40 billion from taxpayers on Monday).
Summers has successfully sparked controversy on several occasions, and while some of the scandals haven’t received a fair hearing in the court of public opinion, others are of genuine concern. In 2005, Summers said he believed innate inferiorities were more responsible for the under-representation of women in science and engineering fields than either discrimination or socialization. Writing for the Women’s Media Center, Veronica Arreola demonstrates how advancing gender equality would improve the broader U.S. economy, and expresses well-founded doubts about Summers’ commitment to Obama’s campaign pledge to implement equal pay for equal work legislation. (more…)
Electing the New Economy
Welcome to the Media Consortium’s Economy MediaWire project! Check this space every Tuesday for a discussion of the best economic coverage available on the information superhighway.
This Tuesday, of course, is no ordinary Tuesday, but the day of the most important U.S. election in generations. Poll after poll has shown the economy to be the top concern for voters this year, as an epic financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble have ensured that the next president will have his hands full come January.
But while there is plenty of bad news to go around of late, Ezra Klein notes for the American Prospect that economic downturns can be extraordinary opportunities to overhaul national infrastructure, as the government steps in to fund projects that support what the private sector can no longer afford.
“Right now, there’s something damn close to political consensus for a transformational investment package,” Klein writes, arguing that, “the next president should be thinking hard indeed about how to make the most of the opportunity.”
During Congressional hearings over the last two weeks, two influential economists have urged the government to embark on major infrastructure projects as a means to stimulate the economy. Both Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz and NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted nearly every development in the recent Wall Street implosion, argued that the best way to ease economic malaise is to pour money into green energy projects. Preventing a recession appears out of the question, but why not set our sights on something “transformational,” in Klein’s words, that could fend off ecological destruction even more comprehensive than the recent financial hemorrhaging?
David Morris emphasizes the potential for environmentally friendly infrastructure development for Alternet, suggesting that a President Barack Obama may “institute a massive public works program focusing on infrastructure that lends itself to a green orientation.”
Morris notes several frightening parallels between today’s green energy movement and that of the early 1980s, when environmentalist momentum from the Carter administration collapsed under the weight of the most wrenching recession since the Great Depression. We have witnessed a similar drop-off in green interest this fall, according to Morris, as the financial crisis has deepened and gas prices have declined dramatically. But renewable energy industries are a much stronger political force today than they were in the early Reagan years, and Morris believes the sheer efficiency of green projects will give the next president more bang for his outlay bucks than other programs. Environmentally conscious investments can sharply reduce operating costs, while creating armies of new jobs.
Writing for The Nation, James S. Henry and Jim Manzi claim that it is time not only for the government to boost research and development, but to “nurture a national culture that reminds young people of their country’s innovation heritage and encourages them to become engineers, designers and scientists, rather than just lawyers, accountants and bankers.”
Beyond infrastructure, The Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild discusses research from Mark Zandi of Moody’sEconomy.com, which reveals that many traditional lefty priorities are also among the most efficient methods for stimulating economic growth. Expanding food stamps programs and unemployment benefits puts money in the hands of people who will actually spend it, instead of making long-term investments that keep the funds out of the general economy, Rothschild writes. Priorities touted by conservatives this election cycle, like slashing the capital gains tax and lowering income tax rates for the wealthiest corporations, are much less effective.
Speaking of throwing money at big corporations, the Treasury Department is currently funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to banks in an effort to boost lending so other firms can borrow money buy supplies, pay workers and fund research. It’s not a terrible concept, except, as Robert Kuttner notes back at the Prospect, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson isn’t actually requiring banks to lend the money out, and the banks would rather use the cash to finance acquisitions and pay dividends.
This is, of course, an outrage, but it is far from inevitable. Kuttner cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “yardstick competition” programs, where a public entity would compete with the private sector and provide products oriented toward the general social good, creating incentives for industries to offer better products.
Under Roosevelt, the government invented the long-term fixed-rate mortgage, which was so effective that it quickly came to dominate the private marketplace. Taxpayers would get better results from their present bailout burden if the government would actually takeover one institution outright and have it make new loans without wasting money on dividends, Kuttner argues. Other banks would have to boost their own lending activities in order to keep from losing market share to the government, and billions of taxpayer dollars wouldn’t be squandered.
Jim Hightower has an excellent breakdown of the five greatest villains of the current financial crisis here.
With President George W. Bush set to host an economic summit with international leaders on the financial meltdown this month, OneWorld.net carries an excellent story by Jim Lobe on a call from almost 600 non-governmental organizations for fundamental economic reforms aimed at protecting the most vulnerable members of the global economy. Bush is widely expected to oppose reforms to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which many NGOs claim have imposed policies that have benefited Western companies at the expense of the international poor.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit economy.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
McCain’s Kitchen Sink Strategy
With less than three weeks to go in the run-up to the presidential election, the McCain campaign, with help from the Republican National Committee, continued to keep its focus on attempts to discredit the Democratic contender, Sen. Barack Obama, more than on the policy goals of G.O.P. standard-bearer Sen. John McCain — or those of either man, for that matter.
In a week that featured RNC-sponsored robo-calls in battleground states alleging all manner of evil from the Democratic nominee, the McCain campaign, apparently with a little help from the Bush Justice Department, continued to demonize the non-profit, community-organizing group, ACORN, which conducts a large-scale voter registration program among low-income citizens. During Wednesday night’s debate, McCain sought to link Obama to ACORN, which he called a threat to “the fabric of our democracy.”
Meanwhile, many issues of interest to major constituencies — issues such as immigration, reproductive health and gender equity — went largely unaddressed. But first, a little levity.
When last we left you, gentle reader, our friend Ezra Klein, in summing up last Wednesday’s final presidential debate, had all but dared some enterprising videohead to do just what our colleagues at The Minnesota Independent have done.
Someone is going to create a vicious video of McCain’s eye roles, neck bulges, sighs, head tilts, death stares, and evident moments of gastrointestinal distress.
Well, perhaps not so vicious; more of a loving tribute: (video link) John McCain, Man of a Thousand Faces
Okay; enough fun. Now let’s take a look at these allegations against ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Among the many things that ACORN does (like organize the survivors of Hurricane Katrina to rebuild their neighborhoods), it registers voters from among the people it serves. It does this by hiring contract workers, a few of whom rip off ACORN by just filling in registration forms with fraudulent information. Many of these bad registrations are even caught by ACORN and flagged for the public officials who will evaluate them. (Some states require that once a registration form is filled out under a group’s aegis, it must be submitted to the state, even if it contains errors.)
These bad registrations form the basis of a widespread campaign to tar ACORN as an agent of voter fraud. Indeed, “ACORN” has become the routine response to documented concerns about voter disenfranchisement at the polls, as occurred in Ohio and elsewhere during presidential election night in 2004.
At Mother Jones, Jonathan Stein writes of one pre-debate salvo in the McCain camp’s war on ACORN:
At a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, the McCain campaign put the chairmen of its “Honest and Open Election Committee,” former Republican Senators John Danforth and Warren Rudman, front and center before the national media.
[...]
The Senators didn’t quite accuse Barack Obama of orchestrating massive voter fraud, but they came close.
The leadership of ACORN, Stein writes, requested a sit-down meeting with Danforth and Rudman, who had, at press time, not taken up the offer. Stein explains:
The McCain campaign has a political interest in declining the invitation. After all, why would it put to bed a controversy that has the ability to energize its base in the final weeks of the election?
McCain himself declared that “voter fraud” could lose him the battleground state of Florida. That’s one way to have blame placed and ready should he actually lose the state on the merits. (Don’t forget that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist seems quite disinterested in campaigning for McCain, telling reporters that he would do so if he has some extra time in his schedule.) Talking Points Memo has the video of McCain’s comments to a local Florida news station.
Last night came word of an F.B.I. investigation of ACORN’s activities, an investigation in which leader of the Obama campaign,according to Zachary Roth of TPM Muckraker, sees links to the U.S. Attorneys scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. And so does David Iglesias, one of the U.S. Attorneys fired during Gonzales’ tenure for refusing to pursue what he saw as baseless allegations against ACORN’s voter registration drive in New Mexico.
All of this makes even more delicious the find by our friends at Truthdig of a 2006 video of McCain addressing an ACORN-sponsored immigration rally in Miami (what state is that again?), at which he lauded the event as being what America is all about.
If the ACORN business doesn’t fulfill your need for distasteful campaign news, how ’bout the latest batch of robocalls from the Republican National Committee? Greg Sargent of TPM Election Central has the audio of a call recently blasted through landlines in North Carolina, a once-safe Republican state that is now in play. A female voice makes the long-ago-discredited accusation that Obama opposes providing medical care to fetuses that survive botched abortions. The call ends thusly:
Please vote — vote for the candidates who share our values. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at 202 863 8500.
Other McCain/RNC robo-calls, Sargent reports, include:
* One that questions Obama’s patriotism by saying he put “Hollywood above America” during the financial crisis.
* One that says that Obama and Dems “aren’t who you think they are” and claims they merely “say” they want to keep us safe.
* One that attaches him to “domestic terrorist Bill Ayers,” whose group “killed Americans.”
McCain’s apparent scorched-earth approach to campaigning led Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wisc.), McCain’s colleague and co-sponsor of the famous campaign-finance legislation to tell The Nation’s John Nichols:
“It won’t seem credible for the John McCain I know to say his campaign should be respectful, while seeming to look the other way as his campaign employs certain tactics and rhetoric which apparently are intended to appeal to the fears of some Americans.”
New America Media’s Andrew Lam, author of Perfume Dreams, sees a parable for McCain in Shakespeare’s MacBeth:
In his desire to be king, Macbeth destroyed the kingdom itself and brought chaos to the moral order. So obsessed is he with his vision to be king, he compromised all that was good about him.
The parallels with senator McCain are striking. Descendant of Navy admirals, and a war hero, his presidential campaign, unlike any in recent memory, has gone over to the dark side by stoking the fire of racism. With ads calling Senator Obama “Dangerous” and “dishonorable” while Sarah Palin, his running mate, went on the offensive, with phrases like, “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” and “palling around with terrorists,” the once veiled racism became overt. As Lady Macbeth, she is full of glee and smiles as she goes about her task of character assassination.
As his campaign has stoked the passions of fearful voters with such attacks on Obama, McCain has been called to account for some of the more unsavory characters that he and his running-mate, Sarah Palin, have trafficked with. According to Max Blumenthal, blogging for The Nation, the McCain campaign “went into full damage control” when David Neiwert, Blumenthal’s co-author on a Salon piece (we reported it in last week’s column), appeared on “CNN Newsroom” to discuss Sarah Palin’s associations with two Alaska secessionists, one who claimed to have enough weaponry in his basement “to raise an army.”
According to Blumenthal, the McCain campaign issued a statement during Niewert’s appearance that read, “CNN is furthering a smear with this report, no different than if your network ran a piece questioning Senator Obama’s religion.” To which Blumental retorts:
By referring to Obama’s “religion,” the McCain-Palin campaign, obviously attempted to provoke the most inflammatory charge leveled against Obama’s character: What religion is he? Is he a crypto-Muslim?The McCain campaign also asserted an equivalency between Obama’s religion and Palin’s political ties to a far right group.
When McCain returned on Thursday to the “Late Show with David Letterman”, he probably didn’t expect an easy time of it. But neither did he likely expect to have to defend his association with and embrace of G. Gordon Liddy, “the “mastermind behind the Watergate burglary,” according to Salon’s Alex Koppelman, who recounts McCain’s Letterman appearance.
Indeed legendary Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein wrote that in 1998, Liddy, who Bernstein says, at one time planned “to firebomb a Washington think tank and assassinate a prominent journalist”, gave a fundraiser in his Arizona home for McCain’s senatorial campaign, and that McCain lauded Liddy during a 2007 appearance on Liddy’s radio show.
At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal, Steve Benen highlighted the revelation by Murray Waas that “William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.”
While many commentators have seen the tactics of the McCain campaign as a reflection of its flagging poll numbers, one potential bright spot appeared this week. Among Asian voters, a group that may prove to be key in this election cycle, 34 percent remain undecided, according the National Asian American Survey. While Obama clearly led McCain, with 43 percent to McCain’s 22, the high numbers of undecided could swing McCain’s way, according to Nguoi-Viet.com, via New America Media.
Perhaps that large number of Asian undecideds has something to do with absence of talk about issues that enthuse them. For instance, reports Jonathan Adams of ColorLines‘ RaceWire, neither McCain nor Obama has had much to say about immigration:
Because of the economy, neither candidate wants to be the one to bring up the issue. Immigrants aren’t coming to the United States as quickly now–historically, this is typical during bad economic times–but the next administration has to come up with a plan to deal with the inevitability of immigration.
Women, too, aren’t hearing much on their issues. Peggy Simpson of Women’s Media Center reports that Lifetime TV is pursuing to the wire a live candidates’ forum on issues important to women. Apparently the McCain camp balked at one proposal because the leaders of several of the women’s groups involved were pro-Obama:
Talks with the campaigns for a more extended forum on women’s issues have gone on since early July. CNN had been brought in as a probable sponsor as well–and CNN then objected to the direct sponsorship by the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) because some of its members had backed Obama.
NCWO’s Kim Otis said only five of the 240 groups had endorsed Obama but they did include some of the heavyweights such as the National Organization for Women. And the candidates had both appeared at African-American and Hispanic forums that included individuals who backed Obama.
On the eve of Wednesday’s debate, a person close to the Lifetime-campaign talks said “they’re still continuing.”
In the meantime, AlterNet has done the service of putting togther a compare-and-contrast accounting of the candidates’ positions on reproductive justice and gender issues. (Another AlterNet guide details “The 10 Biggest Differences Between Obama and McCain That Will Affect Your Daily Life.”)
While some predict that the rash of anti-gay-marriage ballot measures afflicting the presidential campaign may play well for McCain, not everybody agrees, reports Mother Jones‘ Josh Harkinson:
The tacit support for gays by prominent Republicans such as [Florida governor Charlie] Crist and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plus the recent defeat of anti-gay-marriage amendments in Iowa and Indiana suggest that opposition to gay marriage may no longer be a slam dunk for the GOP.
Speaking for another core constituency, veteran investigative journalist James Ridgeway cautions liberals against being too nasty about McCain’s age. Writes Ridgeway:
Every year, despite their purported senility and decrepitude, elderly people like myself somehow manage to hobble to the polls with their canes and walkers, or zip down in their golf carts or aging Cadillacs, and figure out which lever to pull or which little box to fill in.
Another 17 days — not that I’m counting, or anything.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting
about John McCain. Visit JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two
critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.