Today's Stories

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

September 13 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Panic!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Dirk Kempthorne's Closet

Wajahat Ali
Playing with the Constitution

Robert Fantina
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy

Marcus Rediker
Notes on a Visit to the Favelas of Medellín, Colombia

Richard Neville
The Baby Killers

Ed Gaffney
Breaking the Siege of Gaza

Carla Blank
Neglecting a Grand Old Lady

P. Sainath
The Almighty and the U.S. Elections

Lee Sustar
Working Harder; Falling Further Behind

Joshua Frank
Liberalism and Its Bounds

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Guantanamoized Age

Dennis Loo
Shock and Awe Comes Home to Roost

Zach Zill
Squeezed Out in New York City

Omar Barghouti
So You Think You Can Dance? Israeli Profiling of African-American Dancers

Bill Quigley
Social Justice Quiz, 2008

Andy Worthington
Bush's Bitter Legacy

Stephen Dunifer
Free Radio: Liberating the Commons

Seth Sandronsky
Bailing Out Big Auto

David Yearsley
Portabella's Bach: Grim, Trite and Incredibly Boring

Patrick B. Barr
Obama's Punchless Campaign

Rannie Amiri
Tasting Ramadan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Flight Not Taken

Richard Rhames
What, Me Reason?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Large Hadron Collider Powers Up

Poets' Basement
Deer Cloud and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Wasilla Valley PTA?

September 24, 2008

A Long Episode of Free Market Insanity

Wealth Tax Now!

By JOHN HALLE

Most of the debate on the Wall Street bailout revolves around the strings attached to the torrent of cash which is, according to economists, necessary to stabilize credit markets.

True to Bush administration form, the Paulson plan outrageously insists on a virtual blank check made out, essentially, to Paulson himself. The Congressional Democrats, also true to form, are timidly proposing sweetening the bitter pill by making some of the funds available to the millions currently losing their homes while at the same time placing limits on compensation packages available to CEOs who, if past performance is any guide, have no qualms about taking truckloads of government money and driving away to Aspen or Palm Springs.

What is missing from all of the discussion is any mention of how the plan will be payed for, as it is taken for granted that the average taxpayer is sure to be stuck with the ultimate cost of the $700 billion dollar price tag.

But we don't need to pay. And in this case we should not. For very few Americans have benefitted from the giant casino which Wall Street has become over the past generation.

Yes it has spun off enormous wealth but this has gone overwhelmingly to a small number at the top.

And it has been payed for by those at the bottom who have experienced now almost four decades of stagnant real wages, the evisceration of pension plans, degradation of public services and a constant threat of job loss due to corporate outsourcing.

All of these conditions are the result of policies which have been effectively lobbied for by Wall Street and, just as they have destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans, they have worked to produce a new class of what Franklin Roosevelt called economic royalists unprecedented in U.S. history.

It is time to make those who have danced their jigs on our backs pay the fiddler.

And that means that not one dime of the bailout should come from the 99.9% of Americans who are the victims of Wall Street. All of it should come from the enormous store of assets controlled by the upper .1%.

The way to do this is by instituting a Wealth Tax-a tax on accumulated assets above $10 million.

It will, of course, take an economist, or probably a team of economists, to calculate with precision the funds available, as most of these are in "intangible" form (investment vehicles such as bond, stock securties, etc). That said, it is obvious the total is by now almost unimaginably huge after a generation of disgracefully low marginal income tax rates, tax loopholes, high corporate profits and, most notably, stratospheric executive compensation.

Eight-figure salaries have been routine in investment banking firms for two decades with Henry Paulson himself having earned $35 million in 2005 on the road to socking away accumulated assets of more than $700 million (not including stock options). His Democratic Party counterpart and predecessor at Goldman Sachs, key Obama advisor Robert Rubin, received similar compensation before moving to Citibank, where his wealth ballooned still further. Hedge fund operators, who have benefitted from the absurd exemption on capital gains tax, have accumulated wealth beyond their dreams of avarice, one of them, John Paulson, of Paulson & Co. raking in a cool $3.7 billion for one years work.

These are just three of the inhabitants of what the WSJ reporter Robert Frank calls Richistan and are unusual only in that their names have appeared in the press. Most are anonymously sitting on huge piles of investment capital, dutifully passing on the totality of their fortunes to their offspring virtually untouched by inheritances taxes.

Simple arithmetic demonstrates that more than enough is available from these and other charter members of the plutocracy to fully finance the bailout, as well any additional items those with sufficiently resourceful minds would like to make part of the package.

Reasonable add ons would include financing single payer health insurance, a renewable energy research and development, aid to states and localities suffering from withering infrastructure, particularly in depressed urban areas, publicly financed elections, etc.

Pushing for all of this, and more, should be the bottom line of progressives right now and we should be in the streets and in our representative offices demanding it.

Anything short of this is missing a once in a lifetime opportunity to return the country to fiscal and mental health after a three decades long episode of free market insanity.

John Halle teaches music theory at the Bard College Conservatory. He is a former Green Party Alderman from New Haven's ninth ward. He can be reached at: halle@bard.edu

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