Posts tagged with 'truthdig'
Weekly Audit: A Year of Bad Decisions
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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.
Weekly Audit: It’s a recession, stupid (and what that means)
The gurus at the National Bureau of Economic Research have finally acknowledged the obvious: the U.S. economy is in a recession, and has been since December 2007. With Wall Street still on life support and unemployment statistics reaching levels unseen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the news was far from shocking, as Truthdig’s Ear to the Ground notes, but still enough to help push the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 700 points on Monday.
More frightening than the belated use of the r-word– Kevin Drum of Mother Jones called the December start-date all the way back in February in a piece for the Washington Monthly– is the fact that drastic government action to right the nation’s faltering economic ship does not appear to be working. The current crisis has delivered a blow not just to investors and homeowners, but to the work of economist Milton Friedman, a thinker granted almost sacred status in conservative circles. Over at Salon.com, Andrew Leonard highlights a New York Times column by economist Paul Krugman on how Friedman’s monetarist economic theory has taken a hit over the past year. Friedman’s doctrine calls for restricting government relief in times of economic strain to the arena of monetary policy—that is, central banks should increase the supply of money in the economy, but governments should not directly undertake spending initiatives to boost demand.
But while the Federal Reserve has pumped liquidity into the financial sector at every conceivable opportunity over the past year, but the crisis has continued to grind on, spreading from one troubled sector to another. We are clearly out of options that match up with Friedman’s monetarism, indicating that public policy has nowhere left to turn except direct government spending on economic support, as Ezra Klein argues for The American Prospect.
President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to deliver a major fiscal stimulus package as soon as possible after taking up his new job on January 20. Joshua Holland notes for AlterNet that Obama does not have to radically overhaul the economy to implement short-term stimulus that will have long-term economic benefits. Rebuilding our infrastructure with sustainable designs and materials and revitalizing our outdated health care system would both create jobs quickly and prevent other problems looming down the road.
The past week, of course, included the Thanksgiving holiday, and no coverage of the U.S. economy for the period would be complete without a discussion of Black Friday. It appears that the retail sector is about to follow Wall Street and the auto industry into disaster over the next month, as consumer confidence remains at dismally low levels. In a report for The Colorado Independent, Mary Kane explains how the massive loss of housing wealth over the past two years and decades of expensive consumer debt have made people much less eager to pull out the plastic for holiday gifts.
But while one industry after another steadily succumbs to economic reality, some of the people hardest hit by the downturn are not involved in any industry at all. With retirement savings devastated by the financial earthquake, many elderly retired people are now going back to work just to make ends meet, as Leslie Casimir details in a harrowing report for New America Media.
One of the most striking public policy disparities over the past year has been the rabid push from global governments to salvage financial institutions without devoting any serious attention to ordinary people, particularly the poor. The Bush administration has repeatedly argued that allowing major firms to fail would cause significant harm to vulnerable individuals well outside the financial system, but has done almost nothing to directly address the concerns of those people, who do not simply stop being poor once Citigroup gets its groove back. Oneworld.net notes an analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies that reveals the U.S. and Europe have dedicated $4.1 trillion to rescue the financial industry—roughly 40 times what they have spent to fight climate and poverty in the developing world.
The incongruity is reflected not only in the sheer size of the bailout packages compared to the poverty programs, but in the speed of implementation. Literally hundreds of millions of people have been unable to afford to eat for literally decades, but when Bear Stearns hits a liquidity logjam, a solution is in place by the end of the weekend.
Part of this is probably due to the U.S. psychological obsession with both Wall Street and homeownership. Writing for The Nation, Max Fraser discusses the development of pervasive and fundamentally irrational beliefs among bankers and borrowers alike over the past decade, beliefs that have ultimately eroded access to affordable housing despite an explosion in lending between 2004 and 2007. The current crisis proves that we cannot rely on private-sector initiatives or pseudo-public entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to responsibly expand access to homeownership.
Until the government steps in with a meaningful commitment to affordable housing, check out the tips Jane Goetze offers at High Country News on how to survive by living out of your car.
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.