Today's Stories

October 3 - 5, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

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

Weekend Edition
October 3 - 5, 2008

"Easy for You to Say..."

The Chutzpah of Hank Paulson

By SAUL LANDAU

The Ultimate Chutzpah (effrontery to the nth degree) Prize goes to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Without even cracking a smile, this flip-flopper demanded Congress trust him with unimaginable sums of money to save the very system he helped steer into collapse. If that’s not chutzpah then the Pope is Jewish.

Paulson ‘s Free Market Uber Alles era crashed in mid September. His dramatic failure as official national financial manager gave Paulson the cojones to demand Congress trust him with $1 trillion of taxpayers’ money. Now he can transfer the bad loans and junky assets of his Wall Street buddies’ to the riff raff (taxpayers).  Indeed, he will hire firms receiving bailout fund to manage the bailout!  Imagine giggles among CEOs of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, ,AIG and other failed high fliers when they get more taxpayers’ money to pay their inflated salaries provide their luxurious perks and then become brokers for the very government they said shouldn’t regulate them!

Congress should not punish the failed financial companies or their executives, insists Paulson. In July, this three decade Wall St. veteran -- Goldman Sachs –assured the world of the soundness of the US financial system’s underpinnings. In September, it collapsed. He vowed to stick with the free market as regulator and not bail out AIG. Within five days, Paulson was equally committed to bailing out the insurance giant. He remains a missionary, but his cause his changed from neo liberalism to socialism for the ultra rich.

Most socialists think that working people sharing wealth is good. My father taught me to worry about a system that produces widespread poverty and esteems Wall Street. “Never trust anyone who makes his fortune gambling with the money of working people,” he instructed me.  Boy, was he right!

75 years after the country had suffered a decade of economic hardship, the virtual grandsons of the scoundrels who played fast and loose with the economy in the 1920s performed the same hanky panky on the modern economy.

Beginning in the summer and moving into September, giant brokerages, mortgage companies and banks began dropping like proverbial flies. Then, one of the largest insurance entities failed. AIG had assets larger than many countries, but even larger liabilities.

The failures had accumulated bad loans and junk assets. Banks, brokerages and insurance companies had bought, sold and borrowed on them. By September 20, according to The Wall St. Journal’s headline, Paulson had been “shocked” into reality. 

Reality meant that the traders – polite word for thieves, speculators and scammers -- shrieked with delight. The government would bail out AIG. Optimism flowed anew among the club of cynics.

The joyful cynics on “The Street” cared little about a California Employment Development Department report of a rise in unemployment to 7.7%. In August, 60,000 fewer Californians had jobs. Officially, almost 1.5 million Californians are unemployed. Unofficially, that figure is considerably higher. Workers in construction and farm work often get paid under the table and thus don’t get listed in official data.

Two years ago, unemployment was 5.5%. And, said Palo Alto based economist Stephen Levy (Center for the Continuing State of the California Economy), the job situation will likely worsen.

Those with jobs also feel the effects of the Wall Street turmoil. “I’m confused and worried,” my neighbor told me. “So I closed my checking and savings accounts at Washington Mutual,” because she had read that the bank teetered on bankruptcy and even though she had far less than the $100,000 ceiling that is insured by the government, she didn’t trust either the bank or the federal officials

“Your checking and savings accounts will be OK,” I tried to reassure her.

“Easy for you to say,” she retorted.

 I didn’t tell her that I, too, had my checking account in Washington Mutual and that I’d also felt anxious when I read about their impending collapse.

Who will buy the bank? Will WAMU also get bailed out? And where does the process stop? Details of the AIG bailout remain sketchy. Goldman Sachs restructured because of its fragility. And Paulson never explained where the government will get $1 trillion to rescue the irresponsible companies run by his friends, the MBA multimillionaires who invested people’s pension money in the home mortgage equivalent of a Ponzi scheme.

“How could Bush have allowed the situation to deteriorate to this point?” asked the neighbor, a long time social worker.

Bush wasn’t paying attention. Aside from his inclination to play video golf and take vacations, Bush has repeatedly declared his faith in the magical market as the mechanism to regulate the economy. So he was wrong – once again – although he didn’t admit it, once again. He wore that “Gosh, what’s happening?” look, similar to the expression that appeared on his face after he heard the reports of the 9/11 attacks. Then, he replaced the dufus look with the “I’m in charge” expression and offered one-line socialist solutions –meaning having his affluent friends and colleagues share the wealth of those worth less.

John McCain, another faith-based economics Republican who reassured us that the free market cures all economic ills, also ate his words. Indeed, if words contained calories, McCain would be obese by now, considering how many times he’s had to disclaim his own remarks!

This truth-telling maverick, or lying conformist, blamed greed and then said he would fire Christopher Cox, the Securities and Exchange Commission chief, a Republican appointee who until recently shared McCain’s market faith.

In 1931, the banking system failed, two years after the stock market crashed (1929) and the world experienced a terrible depression. After FDR won the 1932 election, he introduced measures designed to avoid a repetition of the financial shenanigans that led to the global economic collapse.

By the 1980s, the born-again free market missionaries had risen to prominence again, having learned nothing from past events. Men like Greenspan, and the golden twins of Goldman Sachs, Paulson and Robert Rubin, dismissed even a possibility that analogies to prior history might have relevance. The market, they chanted, as if in religious stupor, will self-regulate.

Indeed, the market will regulate itself when alligators grow wings. But even after Bush on September 25 demanded a government bailout, the Republican National Committee platform still claims: “We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all. We encourage potential buyers to work in concert with the lending community to educate themselves about the responsibilities of purchasing a home, condo, or land.” (Republican Platform, “Rebuilding homeownership,” pg. 28) Who said consistency mattered?

Stick to the neo liberal religion, which demands citizens adopt shopping as the spiritual core of democracy. During the 1930s depression weak willed Americans abandoned shopping as a common spiritual value – just because they couldn’t afford such an expensive religion? They even voted Democrat.

75 years ago, 13 million Americans out of 130 million (total population) were unemployed. Millions were homeless. President Herbert Hoover worried that too much government intervention would lead to socialism or fascism. So, he limited his initiatives to a few meaningless programs. Roosevelt reversed Hoover’s inaction, but even after eight years of government efforts only war production brought economic recovery – post December 1941.

Those memories did not enlighten today’s politicians as they finalized bailout details -- rather than ways to house the homeless. They want to save existing homeowners, but not as much as saving the credit system, whatever that is. Congress did nothing to alleviate the conditions in the new Hoovervilles -- tent colonies. Millions of Americans understand that one or two paychecks away lies the street, their possible future residence; many of the new victims are children.

No bail out or sympathy for them from the President. Indeed, many of the new poor won’t vote and many Members of Congress will also ignore them. Few of the affluent would echo my parents: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Think of the $700 billion spent on wars, weapons and maintaining 761 bases; also, the six figure salaries of the higher officers and the maintenance of their Swiss ski lodges!

Wall Street tycoons and munitions manufacturers share the taxpayers’ wealth.  The CEOs can claim exemptions worth millions of dollars for all kinds of luxuries, but are not exempt from the nasty connotations of their shared deadly sin. “When is enough enough?

“Never!”  John D. Rockefeller sneered, referring to accumulating wealth.

The contemporary greedy set accumulated supposed assets inside their banks, brokerages and insurance companies. Then, inflated to the max with junky loans, these weasels went “pop.”

In 1929, the market crashed.  Some high flying investors jumped off buildings. The malefactors of the current “investment” fraud no longer consider such solutions. They know Congress will save them – well, not as much as their greedy souls desired, but a bailout is a bailout!

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