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Taibbi: Mortgage Fraud Settlement is More Like a Bailout Than Justice

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Kristen Gwynne - Feb. 10 (News Analysis) - Tabbi says that as more of the banks' bad behavior is exposed, it will become obvious that they must shut down to pay for their crimes, because the reparations necessary would bleed them dry. This settlement, he says, is a "kewpie doll" for victims of banker greed, and won't "stem the tide or turn the tables for these people."

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Karl Rove ‘offended’ by Clint Eastwood’s Chrysler ad

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Rachel Weiner - Feb. 07 (News Report) - A Chrysler ad aired during the Super Bowl Sunday night has inspired ire among some Republicans and admiration among some Democrats — with both sides seeing a political message that boosts President Obama.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Things Are Not O.K.

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Feb. 05 (Opinion) - The unemployment report was genuinely good, but there’s a downside: the calls to stop focusing on job creation.

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The Austerity Debacle

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Jan. 30 (Opinion) - Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

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Reagan’s Road to Climate Perdition

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Consortiumnews.com - Jan. 30 - Reagan’s Road to Climate Perdition

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Op-Ed Columnist: Jobs, Jobs and Cars

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Jan. 26 (Opinion) - Gov. Mitch Daniels got so much wrong in his reply to the president State of the Union address. To really create jobs, it takes a cluster, not just heroes.

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Ford may post best year since 1998

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Louisville Courier-Journal - By Bloomberg News - Jan. 26 (News Report) - Ford Motor Co., boosted by a one-time tax gain, may report its most profitable year since 1998, while weakness in Europe and Asia cut fourth-quarter earnings.

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The State of Obama’s Facts

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson, D’Angelo Gore, Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, Ben Finley, Lori Robertson - Jan. 25 (Fact Check) - The president’s State of the Union address got the facts right — mostly. Obama said “the Taliban’s momentum has been broken” in Afghanistan. But targeted assassinations continue, and at least one independent foreign policy expert says the enemy may just be waiting until the U.S. leaves. The president said a get-tough tariff on tire imports from China has saved more than 1,000 U.S. jobs. But tire industry officials say Chinese imports have simply been replaced by imports from other countries. He took credit for putting “more boots on the border than ever before.” That’s true, but the big increase was under George W. Bush. And a decrease in illegal border crossings is due mainly to the lack of jobs in the U.S., experts say. Often the president’s facts and figures were accurate — but not the whole story. It’s true (barely) that Bush issued more new regulations than Obama at the same point in their presidencies — but Obama didn’t mention that his cost more. The president pointed proudly to increased oil drilling, increased U.S. oil production, and declining dependence on imports. But understandably he passed over any mention of chronically high gasoline prices, which hit a record of sorts last year. And he boasted of recent increases in jobs — which still number nearly 1.7 million fewer than when he took office.

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Fmr. Obama Adviser: Focus on U.S. Inequality in Election-Year SOTU Has Occupy Wall Street's Imprint

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jan. 25 (News Analysis) - In his last State of the Union speech before the November election, President Obama defended his record addressing the financial crisis and called for greater economic fairness. He warned that Wall Street would no longer be allowed to play by its own set of rules. But the bulk of the speech dealt with the economy. We get reaction from Jared Bernstein, former chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and past member of President Obama’s economic team.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Taxes at the Top

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Jan. 19 (Opinion) - As Mitt Romney dances around calls for him to release his tax returns, a question about U.S. tax policy comes up: Why do the rich bear a startlingly light tax burden?

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Laid-Off Steelworker: Mitt Romney and Bain Capital Profited by Shutting Down Kansas Steel Plant

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jan. 10 (News Report) - As Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney comes under fire in New Hampshire for touting his business experience, we look at how his private equity firm, Bain Capital, drove a Kansas City steel plant into bankruptcy, leading to some 750 layoffs and a federal bailout. Bain still walked away with millions of dollars in profits. We speak with Reuters reporter Andy Sullivan, who covered the story, and with Joe Soptic, a steelworker who lost his job at Kansas City's Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill after 28 years. "The first thing I noticed after the company was bought out ... they became very union non-friendly. They started looking for ways to eliminate jobs," says Soptic. "In my department, they actually offered to buy our jobs out from underneath us. They cut back on safety equipment." Regarding Romney's business acumen, Soptic adds, "If he runs the country the way he ran our business, I would not want him as president." [Rush transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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Editorial: The Republican Contest

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Editorial - Jan. 10 (Opinion) - From Iowa’s social conservative fight to New Hampshire’s economic fantasies, the presidential hopefuls are deluding themselves and trying to delude the voters.

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The economic illiteracy of economists | Mark Weisbrot

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Mark Weisbrot - Jan. 10 - The American Economic Association's annual meeting is red-letter day for 'the dismal science'. And dismal it proved The American Economic Association's annual meetings are a scary sight, with thousands of economists all gathered in the same place – a veritable weapon of mass destruction. Chicago was the lucky city for 2012 this past weekend, and I had just finished participating in an interesting panel on "the economics of regime change" , when I stumbled over to see what the big budget experts had to say about "the political economy of the US debt and deficits". The session was introduced by UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach, who put up a graph of the United States' rising debt-to-GDP ratio, and warned of dire consequences if Congress didn't do something about it. Yawn. But the panelists got off to a good start, with Alan Blinder of Princeton, former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, describing the public discussion of the US national debt as generally ranging from "ludicrous to ...

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Op-Ed Columnist: Bain, Barack and Jobs

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Jan. 05 (Opinion) - Mitt Romney says that President Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. But those claims border on dishonesty.

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U.S. Car Manufacturers Have Record December

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

ABC News - By Susanna Kim - Jan. 04 (News Report) - Chrysler announced its best monthly retail sales in four year years, leading the pack of U.S. car makers who had capped a robust 2011 with strong December sales.

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Keynes Was Right

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Dec. 30 (Opinion) - Once again, when politicians and policy makers decided to focus on deficits, not jobs, they proved Keynes right about a slump being the wrong time for austerity.

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The GOP's Payroll Tax Fiasco

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By WSJ Editorial Board - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest. The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play. Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

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President Obama’s view of fraud “from 40,000 feet” (without an oxygen mask)

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New Economic Perspectives - By William K. Black - Dec. 20 (Fact Check) - Hallucinations occur at high altitude when you become oxygen deprived. Let’s review the bidding on the Bush/Obama record in prosecuting the elite control frauds that drove the ongoing crisis. There are no convictions of the Wall Street elites that made, purchased, packaged, and sold millions of fraudulent liar’s loans. There are no federal prosecutions of the major banks that committed over 100,000 fraudulent foreclosures. There are a few settlements that sound like large dollar amounts, but are merely what even Obama concedes to be the (deeply inadequate) “cost of doing (fraudulent) business.” Fraud pays – it pays enormously and our elites now commit it with impunity as a means of becoming wealthy. We have just witnessed the travesty of Wachovia admitting to criminal conduct in their (grotesquely weak) settlement with the Department of Justice (which has a policy of no longer prosecuting large corporations that commit crimes) – and having the SEC refuse to require Wachovia to make similar admissions in its settlement. All this, the President implicitly or even explicitly concedes.

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Our leadership is dire, but we mustn't despise government | Jeffrey Sachs

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Jeffrey Sachs, The Guardian - Dec. 17 - Our leaderships, in thrall to big business, are failing in so many places all at the same time. But we can't give up on them The year 2011 will be remembered as the year of failed summits. Governments proved themselves time and again to be failures at addressing the growing crises engulfing the world, whether the eurozone debacle, climate change, or budget politics in the US and Europe. Next year is likely to be worse, as electoral politics will further impede decision-making in the US, France and several other countries. Why should governance be so poor in so many places at the same time? There are several factors at play. Globalisation has undermined the manufacturing base of most of the high-income economies, costing millions of jobs and leading to stagnant or falling living standards for a large part of the workforce, especially those with basic skills and modest education attainment. The US has lost around 8-9 million manufacturing jobs since the peak in that sector in 1979, just as ...

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Fed Report Finds Speculators Played Big Role in Housing Collapse

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

consumeraffairs.com - Dec. 17 (News) -

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SEC sues 6 former executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, including Richard Syron

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

bostonglobe.com - Dec. 16 (News) -

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Suspect Claims from Obama’s ’60 Minutes’ Interview

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By D'Angelo Gore - Dec. 13 (Fact Check) - President Barack Obama made a couple of questionable claims during a recent interview with Steve Kroft of CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Obama said that “John McCain’s former economist” said that the stimulus “created or saved 3 millions jobs.” Mark Zandi did say that the stimulus created about that many jobs, but … More >>

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Op-Ed Columnist: All the G.O.P.’s Gekkos

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Dec. 08 (Opinion) - In getting to the truth about those wealthy “job creators” the Republicans aim to protect, the ’80s film “Wall Street” seems more relevant than ever.

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The Most Important Speech of His Presidency

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Robert Reich's Blog - By Robert Reich - Dec. 07 (Opinion) - The President’s speech today in Osawatomie, Kansas — where Teddy Roosevelt gave his “New Nationalism” speech in 1910 — is the most important economic speech of his presidency in terms of connecting the dots, laying out the reasons behind our economic and political crises, and asserting a willingness to take on the powerful and the privileged that have gamed the system to their advantage.

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Bachmann’s Bad Economics

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Eugene Kiely, Dave Bloom - Dec. 07 (Fact Check) - Michele Bachmann wrongly claims there is “not one shred of evidence that lowering the payroll tax rate created jobs.” Actually, the economy has gained more than 1.4 million jobs in the 11 months since the payroll tax holiday began. That’s 84 percent more jobs than were added in the same … More >>

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