by: John Dunbar, The Associated Press Treasury Secretary Henry Merritt “Hank” Paulson Jr.
(Illustration: Paul Giambarba / t r u t h o u t)
Washington – First, the $700 billion rescue for the economy was about buying devalued mortgage-backed securities from tottering banks to unclog frozen credit markets.
Then it was about using $250 billion of it to buy stakes in banks. The idea was that banks would use the money to start making loans again.
But reports surfaced that bankers might instead use the money to buy other banks, pay dividends, give employees a raise and executives a bonus, or just sit on it. Insurance companies now want a piece; maybe automakers, too, even though Congress has approved $25 billion in low-interest loans for them. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently, the right wing has seized on Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) admission that he wants to “spread the wealth around” as evidence that his tax policies are somehow socialist, communist, or Marxist. Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) compared Obama’s policies to those of Cuba, saying, “Where I come from, where I was raised, they tried wealth redistribution. We don’t need that here, that’s called Socialism, Communism, not Americanism.” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said, “You want to talk about socialism. You put these people in office, it’s batten down the hatches and watch out.” The media have also piled on, with WFTV Orlando’s Barbara West asking Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) during an interview, “How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?” Fox News’ Sean Hannity said Obama has “doubled down on socialism for America,” while Bill O’Reilly admitted that he “wouldn’t have said the Marxism thing” but that Obama nevertheless espouses “quasi-socialism.” All of these conservatives, however, are distorting the Obama plan, which simply makes the American tax system slightly more progressive — an idea that the American public solidly supports. Read the rest of this entry »
Today in an interview with CNBC, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that he wasn’t interested in raising the minimum wage:
BARTIROMO: What about a minimum wage increase? Would you consider?
MCCAIN: As long as we take care of small businesses. Small businesses right now — I see them every day — they say, You increase the minimum wage, I lay off workers. Is that what we want to do right now? Of course not.
Watch it:
Although today he cited concern for “small businesses,” it seems that there’s never a good time for McCain to support a wage increase for working Americans.
McCain has voted against a minimum wage increase 19 times. In the past, his excuse for opposing the increase was that it was “attached to other big-spending pork barrel.” (In most cases, it was not.)
Paulson and Bernanke’s “rescue” have only begun to do their full long-term damage.
The time has come to review how back in 2005-2006 George W. Bush — now increasingly perceived as another Herbert Hoover — picked two top appointees who helped steer him towards his fateful 2008 rendezvous with a second Great Crash.
One of them, a top level financier, insured that Washington’s eventual rescue policies would concentrate on trying to bail-out Wall Street while ignoring the gnawing cancer of its warped ambitions and financial malpractices. The second, a professor, misapplied dogma about how to guard against severe downturns into a disastrous attempt to refight the onset of the 1930s depression — his academic specialty. He did not understand the very different context of our own era of cyber-spatial financial recklessness and gathering global inflation.
Henry Paulson, Bush’s pick as treasury secretary, was not your ordinary gray-flannel investment bank CEO. One 2006 Business Week article spotlighted the new secretary as a high-roller: “Think of Paulson as Mr. Risk. He’s one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in their pursuit of profits.” That, the magazine added, “means taking on more debt … it means placing big bets on all sorts of exotic derivatives and other securities.” That means stuff like collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs), innovations we now know to have spread toxicity, opacity and paralysis. Read the rest of this entry »
When we want to get serious about a long-term bailout strategy, we’ll start dismantling the American empire and Pentagon programs.
Wars, bases, and money. The three are inextricably tied together.
In the 1980s, for example, American support for jihadis like Osama bin Laden waging war on (Soviet) infidels who invaded and constructed bases in Afghanistan, a Muslim land, led to rage by many of the same jihadis at the bases (U.S.) infidels built in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. That, in turn, led to jihadis like bin Laden declaring war on those infidels, which, after September 11, 2001, led the Bush administration to launch, and then prosecute, a Global War on Terror, often from newly built bases in Muslim lands. Over the last seven years, the results of that war have been particularly disastrous for Iraqis and Afghans. Sizable numbers of Americans, however, are now beginning to suffer as well. After all, their hard-earned taxpayer dollars have been poured into wars without end, leaving the country deeply in debt and in a state of economic turmoil.
In his 1988 State of the Union message, President Ronald Reagan called the jihadis in Afghanistan “freedom fighters.” They were, of course, fighting the Soviet Union then. He, too, pledged eternal enmity against the Soviet Union, which he termed an “evil empire.” For years, conservatives have claimed that Reagan not only won his Afghan War, but by launching an all-out arms race, which the economically weaker Soviet Union couldn’t match, bankrupted the Soviets and so brought their empire down. Read the rest of this entry »
BOSTON — On the ninth floor of an office building just off the Boston Common, a group called Health Care for All runs a help line that, not long ago, got 40 calls a month. Today, the calls each month have swelled to 3,000, as people throughout Massachusetts phone in for guidance in navigating a state experiment in health reform that is the most ambitious in the country — and a test of Sen. Barack Obama‘s vision for reshaping health care nationwide.
Kate Bicego, the help line’s manager, slipped on her headset one recent afternoon as a call came in from Travis Lynn, a 26-year-old from Jamaica Plain with asthma and a part-time job at an old movie theater. He wanted to renew his enrollment in Commonwealth Care, government insurance that Massachusetts now offers adults who cannot get coverage through their work or afford it themselves. After a few questions, Bicego told him: “So, it sounds like you will still be eligible . . . premium-free, with vision, dental and medical.” Read the rest of this entry »
MINNEAPOLIS — When Diane Derichs’s husband was retiring from his assembly-line job making fruit bars for ConAgra Foods, the couple invited over an insurance agent to help her find a health plan.
A part-time hairdresser, Derichs, at 58, was too young for the Medicare that her husband, Vernold, could already get. Sitting at their kitchen table in a St. Paul suburb, Derichs told the agent about the back surgery she had once needed for her scoliosis, the bad tendons in her feet, the lupus that causes painful sores on her skin.
Blue Cross Blue Shield, the agent discovered, wouldn’t accept her. Nor would Mutual of Omaha. Or any other company he checked. “It’s like, whammo, don’t get sick,” Derichs said. “As soon as I said ‘lupus,’ it was just like: ‘Red flag. Sorry, can’t do anything.’ ” Read the rest of this entry »
