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

How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

The Financial Crisis

By ROBERT WEISSMAN

Here's the situation: Thanks to its own inability to control itself, Wall Street is now facing a crisis unmatched since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, a collapse of the financial sector would not only hurt rich investors, it would devastate the global economy. So, government action is imperative.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke say immediate Congressional legislation is imperative. And Congress is adjourning at the end of this week, with Members eager to get back to their districts and states to campaign.

But there is no way to handle the complexity of a $700 billion bailout in a few days.

There are some really hard questions about how to structure a Wall Street bailout program. Financial firms have to be subsidized, but they also have to feel some serious pain. Figuring out who to subsidize, and how much, is tricky. Determining how to ensure taxpayers get the best and fairest payback from the subsidized financial institutions is complicated. And developing a transparent and accountable structure to administer a $700 billion program buying and selling exotic securities is no easy matter.

Meanwhile, it would be unconscionable to bail out Wall Street but not protect homeowners and renters in homes that may be foreclosed on. Between allegedly super-sophisticated Wall Street hot shots and people who were fooled into taking bad mortgages -- or who have the misfortunate of renting from a landlord who's being foreclosed on -- it's obvious who is more deserving of government assistance. But Congress and the President have not been able to agree on plans anywhere near commensurate with the scale of the problem over the past year-plus. It's very hard to see how a proper and sufficiently scaled system of protection and assistance for homeowners and vulnerable renters is agreed upon in a few days.

The current financial mess is the outgrowth of a quarter-century rollback of regulations that controlled what financial firms could do, and protected financial titans from their own worst instincts. Wall Street is chastened right now, but it is a 100 percent certainty that the speculative culture will reemerge with a vengeance -- and in much shorter order than many now seem to believe -- unless regulatory standards are imposed to prevent a repeat of the current disaster. Legislation affording Wall Street what may be the biggest bailout in history is the time to attach new, robust regulatory rules. There are a lot of good ideas floating around about sound financial regulation, but the details are extraordinarily intricate and convoluted. It's not the kind of thing you can easily handle in a few days, even if you burn the candle at both ends.

Given the time pressure and the realities of the legislative process, is there anything Congress can do, other than make some minor adjustments to the Paulson proposal that asks Congress to give the Treasury Secretary $700 billion and trust him to make good decisions?

Yes. Congress can play for time.

Here are two ways Congress can give itself more time to do justice to the bailout legislation.

Option One: Congressional leadership commits itself publicly to doing bailout legislation. The leaders commit to a hard date -- maybe a week from Friday, maybe two weeks -- and announce that the Congress will reconvene on that date, with a guaranteed vote on the same day. They might even usher through legislation now that limits the length of debate and guarantees an up-or-down vote. The urgency to act now reflects Wall Street's crystallized panic. An assurance of pending action should quiet the panic enough for the economy to continue to function.

A variant of this idea is that Congress commit to adopt bailout legislation in a lame duck session, after the election. Even with a guaranteed vote, this option would enable more extended investigation, hearings and debate. But it would drag the process out longer, and a judgment would have to be made that the financial markets could remain calm enough, for long enough.

Option Two: Congress adopts the Paulson plan this week, with two major modifications. Instead of the requested $700 billion, Congress appropriates $100 billion. Congressional leaders commit to reconvene in a lame duck session, and guarantee a vote on the remaining $600 billion. However, the $600 billion package includes provisions that direct how the bailout is to be conducted, includes protections for homeowners, and imposes meaningful regulatory standards. The second key feature of the initial appropriating legislation is that it specifies firms benefiting from the $100 billion bailout fund agree to accept the terms imposed on the $600 billion bailout fund. That way, only the most troubled firms step up right away for bailouts, and no firm is able to escape the conditions imposed after Congress has more time to think through the implications of the bailout deal.

There is real urgency to act. But Congress still has the ability to dodge the Paulson steamroller and buy some time to do legitimate legislating.

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor and director of Essential Action.

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