Republicans' Bizarre Collective Response to Obama's Economic Recovery Plan: We're Out to Lunch

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on January 30, 2009, Printed on January 31, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/123870/

Ed. Note: The following is the transcript of Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman's interview with author William Greider after Barack Obama's stimulus package passed in the House of Congress.

Amy Goodman: The House approved an $819 billion stimulus package Wednesday, marking one of the most expensive pieces of legislation ever to move through Congress. Despite an all-out lobbying push by President Obama, the bill passed without a single Republican vote. Eleven Democrats also opposed the measure.

The Los Angeles Times says the package is “the largest attempt since World War II to use the federal budget to redirect the course of the nation’s economy.” The two-year stimulus plan totals $275 billion in tax cuts and nearly $545 billion in domestic spending. It would provide up to $1,000 per year in tax relief for most families, increase funding for alternative energy production, and direct more than $300 billion in aid to states to help rebuild schools, provide healthcare to the poor and reconstruct highways and bridges.

Senate Democrats promise to change stimulus bill

By ANDREW TAYLOR – 22 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Democrats promised more money for infrastructure projects when an almost $900 billion version of President Barack Obama's stimulus plan hits the Senate floor next week.

That could mean more money for roads, bridges and more traditional public works programs than presently in the measure.

"We're going to be offering some amendments to improve the package and hopefully make it more amenable to some of the Republicans," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who wants to add $3 billion for mass transit programs. He said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chairman of the panel responsible for transportation and housing spending, would propose more infrastructure spending.

Steep Slide in Economy as Unsold Goods Pile Up

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Published: January 30, 2009

The economy shrank at an accelerating pace late last year, the government reported on Friday, adding to the urgency of a stimulus package capable of bringing the country back from a recession that appears to be deepening.

The actual decline in the gross domestic product — at a 3.8 percent annual rate — fell short of the 5 to 6 percent that most economists had expected for the fourth quarter. But that was because consumption collapsed so quickly that goods piled up in inventory, unsold but counted as part of the nation’s output.

Katha Pollitt: Stalling over birth control

It is bewildering that Barack Obama sacrificed women's rights and health in a vain attempt to woo Republican ideologues

Katha Pollitt
guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 January 2009 15.00 GMT

To the outrage of many feminists and family planners, the Democrats heeded President Obama and dropped from the stimulus bill a provision that would have made it easier for states to offer contraception through Medicaid to low-income women not now covered by Medicaid. This followed several days in which Republicans mocked the item as frivolous pork – like Las Vegas's proposed Mob Museum or the reseeding of the national mall. And how dare Nancy Pelosi suggest that women should be helped to avoid unwanted pregnancies in the midst of an economic crisis? It's eugenics and China's one-child policy rolled into one.

You may wonder how it is that giving women more freedom to plan their kids equals forcing them not to have any? Ask Chris Matthews – that noted expert on women – who on his cable TV show, Hardball, seemed to think the United States had narrowly escaped becoming a reproductive gulag: "It turns out the idea of getting people to have fewer children didn't sell as national policy. Maybe people don't like Washington, which has done such a bang-up job regulating the sharpies on Wall Street, to decide it's now time to regulate the number of kids people might be in the mood for."

PowerPoint to the People

The urgent need to fix federal archiving policies.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009, at 1:28 PM ET

---

President Barack Obama's decision last week to revive the Freedom of Information Act was a good first step toward fulfilling his campaign pledge for a "new era of open government."

Here's an idea for a good second step: Force the federal agencies to file and maintain all the records they're creating now, so that in the future when citizens file FOIA requests to declassify documents, they won't receive a form letter that reads, "Sorry, no such documents exist."

A 2005 report by the National Archives and Records Administration—which was declassified just this week under a FOIA suit filed by the National Security Archive, a private research organization at George Washington University—concluded that, in an era when nearly all records are stored on hard drives, rather than typed on paper, the raw bits of history are evaporating.

Demoralized Mortgage Insurer Overlooked Challenge in Crisis

Federal Housing Administration Must Ramp Up, Despite Years of Neglect

By Mary Kane 1/29/09 2:56 PM

With credit remaining tight and banks continuing to restrict lending, it’s been up to the government to keep the mortgage markets moving. And a major player these days is the Federal Housing Administration, a Depression-era insurer of mortgage loans specifically tapped to take on a much larger role as savior of the housing sector and rescuer of homeowners facing foreclosure.

But with the FHA’s share of the mortgage market expected to grow to nearly 50 percent, the agency finds itself facing the same dilemma as its parent, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Both were shunted aside during the Bush Administration. Like HUD, the FHA doesn’t have enough staff or even up-to-date technology to handle its expanded role. It lowered its loan standards to compete with private lenders during the subprime boom, and problems with fraud continue to plague it, just as it backs more loans than ever.

Davos Man, Confused

Why the world's economic leaders blame the catastrophe on the system instead of themselves.

By Daniel GrossPosted Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009, at 12:23 PM ET

The World Economic Forum in DavosFor centuries, historians have debated whether history is propelled by Great Men (and Women), human forces of nature who bend events and systems to their will, or by vast impersonal forces (communism, capitalism, globalization) that render even the most powerful of us a mere reed basket floating in a massive river. There's no session on the subject at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But at least with regard to finance and business, the consensus seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.

Paul Krugman: Health Care Now

The whole world is in recession. But the United States is the only wealthy country in which the economic catastrophe will also be a health care catastrophe — in which millions of people will lose their health insurance along with their jobs, and therefore lose access to essential care.

Which raises a question: Why has the Obama administration been silent, at least so far, about one of President Obama’s key promises during last year’s campaign — the promise of guaranteed health care for all Americans?

Let’s talk about the magnitude of the looming health care disaster.

Economy shrinks, pointing to trying times to come

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — As bad as Friday's grim government report on economic growth was, it points to even worse times ahead. The collapse of exports, industrial production and the inability of companies to sell their products all portend an even deeper contraction as the U.S. and global economies sink further in the weeks and months ahead.

The Commerce Department reported that the U.S. economy contracted 3.8 percent in the final three months of last year, the biggest such quarterly shrinkage in almost 27 years.

Water Plays Surprising Role in Climate Change

By Adriana Bailey, University of Colorado
posted: 30 January 2009 09:26 am ET

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

With its sea turtles and surf shops, the Big Island of Hawaii resembles a tropical, watery world. Yet for climate scientists, it's the ideal place to study low-humidity air and the processes that dehydrate the atmosphere.

From the sprawling dome of Mauna Loa — 11,000 feet above Hawaii's coconut-fringed beaches — climate scientists David Noone and Joe Galewsky can track water vapor that's traveled as far as the equator and the pole. They're the first to try to measure vapor's chemical signature in real-time in order to understand the processes controlling the global water cycle.

DOW DIOXIN DEAL FLYING UNDER EPA RADAR

Contamination Case in Closed-Door Negotiations for “Non-Regulatory” Resolution

Washington, DC — Dow Chemical is in the final stages of “confidential” negotiations with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to secure an “alternative” non-enforcement approach for addressing massive dioxin contamination stemming from the chemical maker’s Midland, Michigan headquarters. If consummated as slated by February 15, the pact would constitute a precedent-setting abdication of public health protection to a polluter, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

At issue is 52 miles of toxic chemical pollution downriver from the Dow headquarters into Huron Lake’s Saginaw Bay. The deadly dioxin plume in one of the Great Lake’s largest watersheds has caused fish and game consumption health advisories and has led to dioxin absorption in local residents. The highest levels of dioxin ever found in a U.S .river system were found 30 miles downriver from the company plant.

Space detectives delve into mystery of missing carbon

By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — For years, scientists have been trying to solve what they call the ``Mystery of the Missing Sinks.''

No, they're not talking about misplaced kitchenware. These ``sinks'' are the world's forests, pastures, crops and soil, which soak up the excess carbon — in the form of carbon dioxide — that's a major driver of global warming. Even golf courses and suburban lawns serve as carbon sinks.

Is ethical capitalism possible?

By Devin T Stewart

I was scheduled to deliver a keynote speech next month to more than 1,000 business executives on the topic of whether ethical capitalism is possible. The event organizers, a Tokyo-based consultancy that specializes in corporate social responsibility, had the foresight to pose this question last autumn. Ironically, the intervening events of the global economic downturn - caused by misguided incentives, greed, and moral lapses - forced the company to cancel the event.

For me, this recession has been defined by frustrating paradoxes. Easy money, overcapacity, and reckless consumption are what got us into this mess, yet governments must react by lowering interest rates and pushing through enormous fiscal stimulus packages with the hope that the housing, retail, and investment markets won't fall much more. Similarly, long-term sensible investments in clean energy and social welfare are hindered by falling oil prices, a lack of funding, and fresh anxiety about corporate bottom lines.

Obama's arc of instability

By Pepe Escobar

WASHINGTON - As money shots go, especially archived under "team of rivals", few surpass the one last week heralding the launch of the new United States State Department.

The photo features President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, new US Middle East envoy George Mitchell and new US Afghanistan/Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke. Washington's chattering classes have genuflected accordingly and burned down their Blackberrys in awe.

Novel technology could produce biofuel for around €0.50 a liter ($2.49 a gallon)

A novel technology for synthesizing chemicals from plant material could produce liquid fuel for just over €0.50 a liter ($2.49 a gallon), say German scientists. But only if the infrastructure is set up in the right way, states the research published in this month's issue of Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining.

Glenn Beck blames bad economy on existence of central banking system

-- by Dave

It's no wonder that Fox's newest conserva-star addition to its Angry White Men lineup, Glenn Beck, has such an emotional affinity for Sarah Palin. Because like Palin, Beck is not just a conservative; he's actually a good old-fashioned right-wing populist.

For those who follow such phenomena, Beck made it explicit Thursday on his Fox News show when he launched into a segment seemingly devoted to the thesis that the whole problem with the economy lies not with capitalism, but boils down to the fact that we rely on a central banking system

Digby: Uriah Heeps On Parade

It's Republican day on the cable networks. They are crawling over every show like fire ants. I presume the Democrats must be too busy combing the bill for what they can take out of it to stop the cacophonous whining. But they really should be out there trying to defend themselves because the conventional wisdom is gelling that Obama is going to fail in his most important mission --- his promise to end partisanship --- because the Democrats are corrupt spendthrifts who want to lard up the stimulus with pet projects and defy their own president's allegedly heartfelt desire that conservative policies be continued.

Ain't post-partisanship grand?

House Panel Approves Cram Downs

by CalculatedRisk on 1/27/2009 07:08:00 PM

From the WSJ: U.S. House Panel Approves Mortgage Measure (hat tip Ken)

A measure to allow judges to reduce the principal amounts of mortgages for troubled borrowers in bankruptcy cleared a key hurdle Tuesday when it was approved by a U.S. House panel.
...
Under the legislation, borrowers would be eligible to have a bankruptcy judge reduce the principal balance on their home loan -- a move known as a "cram down."

HuffPost Breaks Huge Corruption Story -- And We Must Do Something About It

You can't make this stuff up. Breaking news from The Huffington Post:

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Trade Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

PBS: NSA could have prevented 9/11 hijackings

01/27/2009 @ 12:53 pm
Filed by Muriel Kane

The super-secretive National Security Agency has been quietly monitoring, decrypting, and interpreting foreign communications for decades, starting long before it came under criticism as a result of recent revelations about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Now a forthcoming PBS documentary asks whether the NSA could have prevented 9/11 if it had been more willing to share its data with other agencies.

Thomas Frank: Toll Roads Are Paved With Bad Intentions

Conservatives have stoked hostility toward the state.

By THOMAS FRANK

Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.

Private businesses did everything better than the state, we were told. And that meant even tasks as inherently public as maintaining bridges and roads.

Congressional Budget Office compares downturn to Great Depression

By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

The nation's current recession is likely to be the longest since World War II, and by some measures could be the worst since the Great Depression, a new Congressional Budget Office forecast said Tuesday.

Without a major economic stimulus plan, "the shortfall in the nation's output relative to its potential would be the largest – in terms of both length and depth – since the Depression of the 1930s," said new CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf in testimony prepared for the House Budget Committee.

GOP may vote no, but economists back Obama stimulus

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Economists think the stimulus plan that the House of Representatives will vote on Wednesday, while far from perfect, will help stimulate the moribund U.S. economy.

There's no panacea for what ails the economy. A stimulus plan will work only in combination with other actions, such as more aid to the banking system to spark lending and boost consumer confidence, and the implementation of any plan will be as important as what's in it.

The Anti-Stimulus Crowd Blows a Gasket

by Dean Baker

The anti-stimulus crowd is getting desperate. The possibility that a young charismatic new president will push through an ambitious package that begins to set the economy right is truly terrifying to this crew. After all, if the economy begins to turn around and has largely recovered in three or four years, the Republican leadership can look forward to spending most of their careers in the political wilderness.

President Obama will cakewalk to re-election, and even his designated successor will be able to benefit from the glow of his success. If the New Deal serves as precedent, Congress will stay in Democratic hands long past the time that the current leaders of the Republican Party start collecting their pensions.

Pope Benedict reaches out to anti-Semitic Catholics, but liberals still talk to the hand

-- by Dave

A lot of people were concerned when an arch-conservative like Cardinal Ratzinger was named the pope, but I don't think any of us imagined that he would be soon playing footsie with some of Catholicism's most prominent anti-Semites -- namely, the Society of St. Pius X.

From the Catholic Reporter:

Papal reconciliation move will stir controversy

In a gesture billed as an “act of peace,” but one destined both to fire intra-Catholic debate about the meaning of the Second Vatican Council and to open a new front in Jewish/Catholic tensions, the Vatican today formally lifted a twenty-year-old excommunication imposed on four bishops who broke with Rome in protest over the liberalizing reforms of Vatican II (1962-65).

Move to End "Internet Neutrality": Blow to Bloggers. "Ten Pin Strike against Political Freedom"

If the cable and phone companies that transmit Internet data are allowed to charge higher rates to some producers for faster service the result will be “a ten pin strike against political freedom,” a prominent legal authority warns.

That’s because the change will enable the wealthy to “quickly take over the high speed transmissions (for their trash commercial content) just as they completely monopolize radio and TV, and just as their incredibly greedy profit-seeking has had a very deleterious effect on print journalism,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

Back to the woodshed

By Julian Delasantellis

Many explanations were proffered for the 1980 electoral victory of Ronald Reagan that marked the commencement of the conservative era in the United States. My favorite was not from some American political strategist or pundit but from a writer for Pravda, what was then the official house organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

This person was certainly not going to attribute the cause to US concern for the world situation following the previous year's Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; for at that time the party line was that the invasion was a glorious triumph for the whole world, delivering to a primitive nation the blessings of modernity. Also, the explanation was not going to be the national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, whose travails the Soviets viewed with, at the very least, sublime serendipity.

Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years

by Thom Hartmann

This weekend, House Republican leader John Boehner played out the role of Jude Wanniski on NBC's "Meet The Press."

Odds are you've never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.

When Barry Goldwater went down to ignominious defeat in 1964, most Republicans felt doomed (among them the then-28-year-old Wanniski). Goldwater himself, although uncomfortable with the rising religious right within his own party and the calls for more intrusion in people's bedrooms, was a diehard fan of Herbert Hoover's economic worldview.

We Are All Keynesians Again

Why Ben Bernanke isn’t listening to Robert Samuelson.

By James K. Galbraith

The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence
by Robert J. Samuelson
Random House, 299 pp.

The heroes of Robert J. Samuelson’s The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, a reflection on the troubles of the 1970s, are Paul Volcker, Federal Reserve chairman from 1979 to 1987, and Ronald Reagan, U.S. president from 1981 to 1989. The goats are the British economist John Maynard Keynes, dead since 1946, and his followers, especially the late John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), the father of this reviewer. Galbraith père stands in here for a raft of postwar Keynesians whose names appear in the book only briefly, especially Paul Samuelson (no relation to the author), James Tobin, and Robert Solow—all Nobel Prize winners, and the real architects of the Keynesian consensus of those years.

From Here to Retirement

If you have a 401(k) retirement plan at work, you don’t need us to tell you that you’ve taken a hit in the past year. The really bad news is that the damage to your retirement security is likely worse than what the numbers say on your statement.

Many Americans didn’t have enough savings coming into the downturn. And employers are increasingly cutting back or suspending their 401(k) match. FedEx, Eastman Kodak, Motorola, General Motors and Ford, among others, have announced such moves.

There’s also no guarantee that today’s battered 401(k)’s will rebound powerfully. People close to retirement don’t have time for a do-over. Even for those still far from retirement, there’s no telling how stocks will perform in the future.

Bad Reactors

Rethinking your opposition to nuclear power? Rethink again.

By Mariah Blake

Seven years ago, Finland was faced with a daunting energy dilemma. To keep its domestic industries up and running, it needed to double its electricity supply by 2025. At the same time, it had to cut carbon emissions by fourteen million tons a year to comply with its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. The question was how to fill the gap without stifling its flourishing economy or increasing dependence on costly imports.

As it hunted for solutions, the Finnish government decided to consider a controversial option: building another nuclear power plant. It was not a new idea; in fact, the Finns had weighed and rejected it nine years earlier. But since then, officials reasoned, the situation had changed. Besides a new imperative to reduce carbon emissions, a new generation of nuclear reactors had recently come onto the market. None had been built, but the industry claimed that their simple, standardized designs and modular components would make them far easier and less expensive to assemble than their predecessors. In fact, a study by the Lappeenranta University of Technology, which used figures on par with industry estimates for capital costs, found that a new atomic plant could deliver electricity more affordably than any other large-scale energy option. A group of lawmakers appointed by Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen to study the issue also concluded that a single reactor could create a much greater drop in greenhouse gas emissions than the next cheapest option, building more gas-fired plants. This meant there would be less pressure on the government to enact other mechanisms, such as a gasoline tax, that might put a dent in consumer spending and hamper economic growth.

Lost in Their Bloomberg Terminals

The Wall Street wizards who brought on catastrophe by pretending to eliminate risk.

By Brendan I. Koerner

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity
edited by Michael Lewis
W. W. Norton, 352 pp.

For those of us who enjoy watching twenty-two behemoths maul each other on autumn weekends, no figure of speech beats a good football simile. So helmets off to Michael Lewis for coming up with a classic in his 1999 New York Times Magazine account of the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, a tale now anthologized in Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. A hedge fund that specialized in fixed-income arbitrage, LTCM was run by ex-academics who were widely considered too brilliant to lose money, let alone preside over one of history’s greatest financial disasters. Lewis had worked with several of these LTCM eggheads during his days on Salomon Brothers’ bond desk, and he recalls the humbling experience of asking them to elucidate one of their arcane trades. Minutes after receiving a step-by-step explanation, Lewis realized that he had barely understood a word.

Paul Krugman: Bad Faith Economics

As the debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith. Conservatives really, really don’t want to see a second New Deal, and they certainly don’t want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending.

Some of these arguments are obvious cheap shots. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain essential services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand Medicaid family-planning services — and called it a plan to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”

Dramatic expansion of dead zones in the oceans

Unchecked global warming would leave ocean dwellers gasping for breath. Dead zones are low-oxygen areas in the ocean where higher life forms such as fish, crabs and clams are not able to live. In shallow coastal regions, these zones can be caused by runoff of excess fertilizers from farming. A team of Danish researchers have now shown that unchecked global warming would lead to a dramatic expansion of low-oxygen areas zones in the global ocean by a factor of 10 or more.

Whereas some coastal dead zones could be recovered by control of fertilizer usage, expanded low-oxygen areas caused by global warming will remain for thousands of years to come, adversely affecting fisheries and ocean ecosystems far into the future. The findings are reported in a paper 'Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels' published on-line in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

Death agony of Thatcher era

By F William Engdahl

During the end of the 1970s into the 1980s, British Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the City of London financial interests who backed her introduced wholesale measures of privatization, state budget cuts, moves against labor and deregulation of the financial markets.

They did so in parallel with similar moves in the US initiated by advisers around Reagan. The claim was that hard medicine was needed to curb inflation and that the bloated state bureaucracy was a central problem.

How We Were Ruined & What We Can Do

By Jeff Madrick

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
by Charles R. Morris, PublicAffairs, 194 pp., $22.95

Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis
by Mark Zandi, FT Press, 270 pp., $24.99

The Reckoning
a series of articles by Gretchen Morgenson et al.
The New York Times, September 28–December 28, 2008

Some prominent figures in the financial markets insist that unchecked opportunism by financiers was not a root cause of the current credit crisis. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary who has just resigned as a high-level adviser and director at Citigroup, told The Wall Street Journal in November that the near collapse of Citigroup, which was bailed out by the federal government, was caused by the "buckling" financial system, and not any mistakes made at his company. "No one anticipated this," said Rubin, who once ran the investment firm Goldman Sachs. Others such as Harvey Golub, former chairman of American Express, maintain that the fault lies principally with the federal government, which since the 1990s and even earlier has been actively promoting mortgages for low-income Americans. This, he argues, led to the unsustainable frenzy of sub-prime mortgages in the 2000s.

Obama Plans Fast Action to Tighten Financial Rules

By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to move quickly to tighten the nation’s financial regulatory system.

Officials say they will make wide-ranging changes, including stricter federal rules for hedge funds, credit rating agencies and mortgage brokers, and greater oversight of the complex financial instruments that contributed to the economic crisis.

Broad new outlines of the administration’s agenda have begun to emerge in recent interviews with officials, in confirmation proceedings of senior appointees and in a recent report by an international committee led by Paul A. Volcker, a senior member of President Obama’s economic team.

A Revolution in Spirit

by Benjamin R. Barber

As America, recession mired, enters the hope-inspired age of Barack Obama, a silent but fateful struggle for the soul of capitalism is being waged. Can the market system finally be made to serve us? Or will we continue to serve it? George W. Bush argued that the crisis is "not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system." But while it is going too far to declare that capitalism is dead, George Soros is right when he says that "there is something fundamentally wrong" with the market theory that stands behind the global economy, a "defect" that is "inherent in the system."

The issue is not the death of capitalism but what kind of capitalism--standing in which relationship to culture, to democracy and to life? President Obama's Rubinite economic team seems designed to reassure rather than innovate, its members set to fix what they broke. But even if they succeed, will they do more than merely restore capitalism to the status quo ante, resurrecting all the defects that led to the current debacle?

Billmon at Daily Kos: Obama at the Plate

Tue Jan 20, 2009 at 09:51:41 PM PST

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

Barack Obama
Inaugural Address
January 20, 2009

In the end, maybe the speech didn't matter that much. I think he could have read the first 50 names out of the D.C. phone directory and gotten as much applause and as many approving nods from the babbling heads. Once again, although probably for the last time, who he is spoke louder than what he said.

But, to the extent the words today did matter, they weren't the ones I had expected to hear, which I thought was actually an encouraging sign -- although hardly a conclusive one.

Bill Moyers with David Sirota and Thomas Frank

January 23, 2009

President Obama was barely in office a day before the THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES' fact-check Web site posted "The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama's Campaign Promises." Expectations are high for the new president — especially in progressive circles. Bill Moyers sat down with political columnist and blogger David Sirota and WALL STREET JOURNAL columnist Thomas Frank to talk about their expectations for this administration and what they think Obama must accomplish to bring real "change" to Washington.

Sirota and Frank are both happy with the change in administration in Washington. On his blog on inaguraution eve David Sirota wrote — in large type — "Late-Night Re-Realization of the Wonderful...Just a quick, late night re-realization of something downright wonderful: An African American named Barack Hussein Obama is the President of the United States."

The Quitter Economy

Companies are liquidating; homeowners are mailing in the keys. Have we given up?

By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, Jan. 24, 2009, at 7:57 AM ET

"Everything Must Go!" blares a bright-yellow sign at the Circuit City store on Broadway and 80^th St. in Manhattan, N.Y. The revolving doors whir with curious customers looking for bargains. As can be inferred from the huddles of dejected employees wearing bright-red Circuit City polos, this store will soon be closing, along with the other 566 outlets of the nation's second-largest electronics retailer, leaving 34,000 people unemployed. Circuit City must liquidate some $1 billion in merchandise by the end of March.

There was a time, not so long ago, that a company like Circuit City would have stuck it out by filing for Chapter 11. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing gives companies breathing room from creditors in order to regroup and relaunch. Circuit City started down this path in November, but in mid-January it decided that rehab was too tough and threw in the towel. Sharper Image, Linens 'n Things, retailer Steve & Barry's, and the department store Mervyn's all filed for bankruptcy with the intent of reorganizing. And all have wound up liquidating. "The reason we're seeing liquation rather than bankruptcy from so many retailers is because people are hopeless," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute. "We're still looking at a very bad year in 2009 and probably most of 2010, so it's very difficult to be optimistic about reorganizing and coming out of it stronger."

Pentagon's terror 'recidivism' claims blasted as 'propaganda'

01/23/2009 @ 8:47 am
Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster

Ever wonder how many of President Bush's terror war detainees were released, only to "return to the fight"?

"Their numbers have changed from 20, to 12, to seven, to more than five, to two, to a couple, to a few, 25, 29, 12, and then 24," quoted Keith Olbermann on Thursday's edition of Countdown.

The latest figure, 61, which was carried unchallenged by CNN, the MSNBC host noted, appears to be nothing but "propaganda."

Frank Rich: No Time for Poetry

PRESIDENT Obama did not offer his patented poetry in his Inaugural Address. He did not add to his cache of quotations in Bartlett’s. He did not recreate J.F.K.’s inaugural, or Lincoln’s second, or F.D.R.’s first. The great orator was mainly at his best when taking shots at Bush and Cheney, who, in black hat and wheelchair, looked like the misbegotten spawn of the evil Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Such was the judgment of many Washington drama critics. But there’s a reason that this speech was austere, not pretty. Form followed content. Obama wasn’t just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find ourselves now.

Obama tells US of his radical new agenda

President uses his first weekly address to unveil bold plans for economy and the environment

Paul Harris in Washington
The Observer, Sunday 25 January 2009

The delivery of Barack Obama's first weekly presidential address to the nation yesterday was hi-tech, but his message was distinctly resonant of the 1930s.

With a calm voice and serious expression, Obama laid out the details of a massive economic plan aimed at rescuing the US economy, creating millions of jobs and "greening" the country's infrastructure.

In a clear echo of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Obama urged popular support for the plan and published fresh ideas covering billions of dollars of investment in alternative energy and huge construction projects.

How America Embraced Lemon Socialism

by Robert Reich

America has embraced Lemon Socialism.

The federal government -- that is, you and I and every other taxpayer -- has taken ownership of giant home mortgagors Fannie and Freddie, which are by now basket cases. We've also put hundreds of millions into Wall Street banks, which are still flowing red ink and seem everyday to be in worse shape. We've bailed out the giant insurer AIG, which is failing. We've given GM and Chrysler the first installments of what are likely to turn into big bailouts. It's hard to find anyone who will place a big bet on the future of these two.

Media menu: Scrutiny, with a side order of sound judgment

The blogger Digby recently mentioned to me that the media, after years of deference to President Bush, are about to lurch back toward the excessively critical approach they took toward President Clinton:

Just as they treated Bush with extraordinary respect in reaction to their heinous behavior during the Clinton years, the villagers are now preparing to treat Obama with skepticism in reaction to the failures that resulted from their fawning obsequiousness.

Oddly, these lurches always seem to disfavor the Democrats.

Digby's concern is shared by many progressive media critics, this one included.

Risen: I May Have Been A Victim Of The NSA’s Program Spying On Journalists

Earlier this week on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Russell Tice revealed that the agency had “monitored all communications” of Americans — specifically targeting journalists. To discuss this development, Olbermann yesterday hosted Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who famously angered the Bush administration by revealing the government’s domestic wiretapping program and its secret snooping on the financial records of thousands of Americans allegedly linked to terrorists.