Stop Listening to Wall Street

Obama should pay no attention at all to stock prices.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, March 14, 2009, at 7:20 AM ET

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Investment professionals and econo-pundits claiming to speak for Wall Street have been blaming President Obama for the recent run of losses in the stock market. In their view, investors around the world are giving a daily thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the administration's manifold policy initiatives. "Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow," read the headline of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Stanford economist Michael Boskin, a former official of the first Bush administration.

On March 3, Strategas analyst Dan Clifton noted that "with the S&P 500 off close to 8.5 percent since the budget was introduced, it is clear that equity investors remain skeptical of the government's plan to lead us out of this financial crisis." Even CNBC's James Cramer, who supported Obama during the presidential campaign, has turned on the president, calling him a "wealth destroyer."

Europe's way of encouraging solar power arrives in U.S.

By Kate Galbraith
Published: March 13, 2009

Solar cells adorn the roofs of many homes and warehouses across Germany, while the bright white blades of wind turbines are a frequent sight against the sky in Spain.

If one day these machines become as common on the plains and rooftops of the United States as they are abroad, it may be because the financing technique that gave Europe an early lead in renewable energy is starting to cross the Atlantic.

A rare thumbs-up for Geithner, and a big, big hand for Keynes

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Contrary to what circus-barker Republicans are calling everyone to step right up and see as a ghastly economic freak show, there's not a dram of the bizarre in the Obama administration's now coexistent messages of gloom and confidence.

It's neither improper nor novel for the president and his economic team to publicly both brood and beam. You may, for instance, recall from your American history survey course that H. Hoover -- having helped supply-side the economy into a similar depressive condition -- did only the latter, while FDR managed a nicely balanced public relations routine of both "Look out!" and Happy Days.

G20 leaders vow to restore growth

Finance ministers from the G20 group of rich and emerging nations have pledged to make a "sustained effort" to pull the world economy out of recession.

"We are committed to deliver the scale of sustained effort necessary to restore growth," they said in a joint statement after their talks in the UK.

UK Chancellor Alistair Darling said they agreed the International Monetary Fund should be given more money.

The talks were held amid reports of rifts over the best way forward.

Even More than Race, the South Is About Exploiting Workers

By Joseph B. Atkins, Progressive Populist
Posted on March 13, 2009, Printed on March 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/131359/

Cheap labor. Even more than race, it’s the thread that connects all of Southern history—from the ante-bellum South of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis to Tennessee’s Bob Corker, Alabama’s Richard Shelby and the other anti-union Southerners in today’s U.S. Senate.

It’s at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a desperate, poorly educated workforce and a demagogic oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation line stronger than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of the nation.

Glenn Greenwald: There's Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer

Jon Stewart is being widely celebrated today and Jim Cramer/CNBC widely mocked -- both rightfully so -- for Stewart's devastatingly adversarial interview of Cramer (who, just by the way, is a Marty Peretz creation). If you haven't yet seen the interview, you can and should watch it here; if you watch only one segment, watch the middle one and the beginning of the third.

Stewart focuses on the role Cramer and CNBC played in mindlessly disseminating and uncritically amplifying the false claims from the CEOs and banks which spawned the financial crisis with their blatantly untoward and often illegal practices.

Dr. No, But …

Mark Sanford's bizarre rationale for redirecting South Carolina's stimulus money.

By Christopher Beam
Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 7:22 PM ET

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Republican governors are sure they don't want to spend stimulus money. They just can't agree which parts to reject. Or whether they're allowed to. Or why.

Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina announced this week that he wants to redirect $700 million that would be going toward education and health care and use it to pay down the state's debt. "In our opinion," he said, "that will do more to ensure our long-term economic strength, and to avoid our state's structural budget shortcomings, than would other contemplated uses of the funds."

Blitzer let Fleischer falsely claim Obama has a "proposal to eliminate deductions" for charitable donations

Summary: CNN's Wolf Blitzer did not challenge Ari Fleischer's false claim that President Obama has a "proposal to eliminate deductions" for charitable donations and housing-related expenses. In fact, Obama's fiscal year 2010 budget proposal includes a provision to reduce to 28 percent the rate at which families earning more than $250,000 a year can take deductions for charitable donations, housing-related expenses, and other itemized deductions.

During the March 12 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer did not challenge former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer's claim that President Obama "said no tax hikes for anybody who makes less than 250 [thousand dollars] a year, and then we learn that it's really 125,000 a year when you take a look at his proposal to eliminate deductions for charitable deductions and for housing deductions." In fact, Obama does not have a proposal to "eliminate deductions" for charitable donations and housing-related expenses. Rather, Obama's fiscal year 2010 budget proposal includes a provision to reduce to 28 percent the rate at which families earning more than $250,000 a year can take these and other itemized deductions.

'Biochar' goes industrial with giant microwaves to lock carbon in charcoal

Climate expert claims to have developed cleanest way of fixing CO2 in 'biochar' for burial on an industrial scale

• Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 March 2009 12.07 GMT

Burying charcoal produced from microwaved wood could take billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. Photograph: Rex Features

Giant microwave ovens that can "cook" wood into charcoal could become our best tool in the fight against global warming, according to a leading British climate scientist.

Fixing the Fed By William Greider This article appeared in the March 30, 2009 edition of The Nation. March 11, 2009 * Email * Print * Si

By William Greider

March 11, 2009

Congress and the Obama administration face an excruciating dilemma. To restore the crippled financial system, they are told, they must put up still more public money--hundreds of billions more--to rescue the largest banks and investment houses from failure. Even the dimmest politicians realize that this will further inflame the public's anger. People everywhere grasp that there is something morally wrong about bailing out the malefactors who caused this catastrophe. Yet we are told we have no choice. Unless taxpayers assume the losses for the largest financial institutions by buying their rotten assets, the banking industry will not resume normal lending and, therefore, the economy cannot recover.

A dangerous balance

By Henry C K Liu
Part 1: The song stays the same

Since the end of World War II, the issue of China has extended beyond the confines of foreign policy to stay as a prominent bone of contention in US domestic politics.

Until Richard Nixon's opening to China in 1972, the old anti-communist China lobby was in many ways as controversially powerful as the Israeli lobby. This state of affairs first developed after anti-imperialist revolutionary forces led by the Chinese Communist Party liberated China in 1949 after which Republicans in US partisan politics accused the Democrats of having "lost" China, as if China was their's to lose.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes 'executive assassination ring'

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

US Recession Could Last Up to 36 Months: Roubini

By: Jane Wells, Correspondent | 09 Mar 2009 | 03:52 PM ET

The man who predicted the current financial crisis said the US recession could drag on for years without drastic action.

Among his solutions: fix the housing market by breaking "every mortgage contract."

"We are in the 15th month of a recession," said Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, told CNBC in a live interview. "Growth is going to be close to zero and unemployment rate well above 10 percent into next year."

Idiot Wind

Wednesday 11 March 2009

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth,
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.
- Bob Dylan

One thing is certain: martial arts movie star Chuck Norris does not like President Obama. Not at all. Not one little bit. Norris dislikes Obama so much, in fact, that he discussed running for the office of president of Texas, which doesn't exist, as part of a larger move by him and a variety of other right-wing groups to overthrow the American government and return honor and decency to the country.

No, really, he said all that, and more. Read it yourself if you don't believe me. The best part is where he writes, "Remember the Alamo!" Great stuff.

Will Everyone Grab a Bucket? This Thing is Sinking

By Robert Borosage

Created 03/11/2009 - 2:40pm

After slogging through the stimulus, the banking mess and the foreclosure crisis, our besieged president now must turn his attention to organizing global cooperation to lift the world economy. Real commitments have to be made, and we'll see if those around the world who celebrated Obama as a savior will call for his crucifixion.

Last year we worried about homes below water; now it is the economy itself that is sinking.

Warren Buffett says the U.S. economy has "fallen off a cliff." And, as bad as the U.S. is, the rest of the world is worse. Germany's exports have collapsed; Japan is in free fall; much of Eastern Europe may join Iceland in bankruptcy. The Asian Development Bank estimates the loss to financial assets worldwide at $50 trillion dollars —the equivalent of a full year of annual global output. It's not for nothing that National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair announced [1]that the economic collapse trumps terrorism and catastrophic climate change as the greatest threat to U.S. security.

Thomas Frank: Obama Takes On Market-Based Government

The GOP fetish for outsourcing deserved to be repudiated.

• By THOMAS FRANK

In a little-noted passage of a mostly ignored speech, President Barack Obama said last week that the government faced "a real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich."

It was notice, amid all the caterwauling over Mr. Obama's stimulus package, that the president meant to put the kibosh on the GOP's favorite method for spreading the wealth around. A prize ox of the conservative ascendancy was about to be gored.

Susan Lindauer: Secret Charges and The Patriot Act

Tuesday, 10 March 2009, 5:12 pm
Article: Michael Collins

Former Accused Iraqi Agent Susan Lindauer, Secret Charges and The Patriot Act in Action

Susan Lindauer Interviewed by Michael Collins

n March, 2004 Susan Lindauer was arrested for allegedly acting as an "unregistered agent" for prewar Iraq. She challenged the government's assertion and sought the right to prove at Trial that she'd been a United States intelligence asset covering Iraq and Libya from the early 1990's through 2003 (see articles).

In an unprecedented judicial ploy that lasted five years, federal prosecutors blocked Ms. Lindauer's rights to trial or any other sort of evidentiary hearings that would test her story. For 11 months, she was confined at Carswell federal prison on a Texas military base and at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, without a conviction or plea bargain.

Do Green Kitchen Cleaners Work?

Getting rid of infectious bacteria without using too many toxic chemicals.

By Nina Shen Rastogi
Posted Tuesday, March 10, 2009, at 10:05 AM ET

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I've replaced most of my cleaning supplies with eco-friendly versions, but I'm not sure that Dr. Bronner's Sal Suds are strong enough to kill all of the nasty bugs in my kitchen. Do green cleaning products work as disinfectants?

Kitchen cleaning pits two modern bogeymen against each other: infectious bacteria and toxic chemicals. Luckily, you don't need to assuage one worry by ignoring the other—just read labels carefully and exercise some common sense.

There are a number of substances that kill germs, from tea tree oil to the sodium hypochlorite found in household bleach. But not all microbicides are created equal, and their relative effectiveness will depend on a few factors—namely, the kind of organism you're trying to kill, the nature of the surface you're trying to disinfect, the duration of the application, and how much of the stuff you put on.

Pentagon knowingly exposed troops to cancer-causing chemicals, document shows

A newly leaked military document appears to show the Pentagon knowingly exposed US troops to toxic chemicals that cause cancer, while publicly downplaying the risks exposure might cause.

The document, written by an environmental engineering flight commander in December of 2006 and posted on Wikileaks (PDF) on Tuesday, details the risks posed to US troops in Iraq by burning garbage at a US airbase. It enumerates myriad risks posed by the practice and identifies various carcinogens released by incinerating waste in open-air pits.

Regulatory reports show 5 biggest banks face huge losses

By Greg Gordon and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — America's five largest banks, which already have received $145 billion in taxpayer bailout dollars, still face potentially catastrophic losses from exotic investments if economic conditions substantially worsen, their latest financial reports show.

Citibank, Bank of America, HSBC Bank USA, Wells Fargo Bank and J.P. Morgan Chase reported that their "current" net loss risks from derivatives — insurance-like bets tied to a loan or other underlying asset — surged to $587 billion as of Dec. 31. Buried in end-of-the-year regulatory reports that McClatchy has reviewed, the figures reflect a jump of 49 percent in just 90 days.

If Private Insurers Compete with Government, They'll Lose

Competing Views of Government: Universal Medicare or Government-Protected Insurance Companies

by Dean Baker

We all know that people have different ideologies about the proper role of government. Some people, who tend to be left of center, think that the government's role is to try to promote the general good, by providing basic services, protecting the poor and the sick, and ensuring a well-working economy. On the other hand, there are others, who usually place themselves right of center, who believe that the proper role of government is to redistribute as much income as possible to the wealthy.

These competing views of government are coming to a head in the debate over national health care reform. Those who think that the role of government is to serve the public good are likely to favor some form of universal Medicare. Such a system would almost certainly save a huge amount in administrative costs at the level of insurers, providers and government oversight.

Goverment-Funded Health Care? We're Already Two-Thirds There

By Sara Robinson

Created 03/06/2009 - 3:58pm

"Americans don't need socialized medicine!" Uncle Con bellows. You really want to stop Uncle Con in mid-breath? Simple. Recite these statistics concerning who already gets most or all of their health care via some form of government-subsidized system.

My fictitious conservative uncle—let's call him Uncle Con—is at it again.

"Americans don't need socialized medicine!" he bellows, doing his very best Rush Limbaugh impression—which pretty much lets you know where this particular set of talking points came from. (When he whines, you know he's been listening to Bill O'Reilly. If he comes across willfully ignorant and pugnacious, he's been hitting the Hannity hard again. Try it at home: Field ID on right-wing talking points = hours of fun for the whole family!)

The Costs of Empire: Can We Really Afford 1,000 Overseas Bases?

By David Vine, Foreign Policy in Focus
Posted on March 10, 2009, Printed on March 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/130900/

In the midst of an economic crisis that's getting scarier by the day, it's time to ask whether the nation can really afford some 1,000 military bases overseas. For those unfamiliar with the issue, you read that number correctly. One thousand. One thousand U.S. military bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC, representing the largest collection of bases in world history.

Officially the Pentagon counts 865 base sites, but this notoriously unreliable number omits all our bases in Iraq (likely over 100) and Afghanistan (80 and counting), among many other well-known and secretive bases. More than half a century after World War II and the Korean War, we still have 268 bases in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. Others are scattered around the globe in places like Aruba and Australia, Bulgaria and Bahrain, Colombia and Greece, Djibouti, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, and of course, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba -- just to name a few. Among the installations considered critical to our national security are a ski center in the Bavarian Alps, resorts in Seoul and Tokyo, and 234 golf courses the Pentagon runs worldwide.

Work makes a comeback

By Julian Delasantellis

In the dark morning of September 11, 2001, Americans turned not to their proud paratroopers, their pompous prelates, certainly not to their peripatetic president, for solace and security, but to their pundits - who else was there, for hours upon hours, delivering commercial-free wisdom from the box in viewers' living rooms, seeking to explain the unexplainable?

A common refrain from the punditocracy was that, from that moment on, "nothing would ever be the same again". In ways unimaginable at that instant, American life would change, would be rendered unrecognizable from what was existent before. In much the same fashion that Pearl Harbor changed the careless youth of the summer of 1941 into the legionnaires of the great effort to obliterate fascism that was World War II, so it would be here, albeit no one really knew just how.

Who got AIG's bailout billions?

By Toni Reinhold

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Where, oh where, did AIG's bailout billions go? That question may reverberate even louder through the halls of government in the week ahead now that a partial list of beneficiaries has been published.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that about $50 billion of more than $173 billion that the U.S. government has poured into American International Group Inc since last fall has been paid to at least two dozen U.S. and foreign financial institutions.

Paul Krugman: Behind the Curve

President Obama’s plan to stimulate the economy was “massive,” “giant,” “enormous.” So the American people were told, especially by TV news, during the run-up to the stimulus vote. Watching the news, you might have thought that the only question was whether the plan was too big, too ambitious.

Yet many economists, myself included, actually argued that the plan was too small and too cautious. The latest data confirm those worries — and suggest that the Obama administration’s economic policies are already falling behind the curve.

To see how bad the numbers are, consider this: The administration’s budget proposals, released less than two weeks ago, assumed an average unemployment rate of 8.1 percent for the whole of this year. In reality, unemployment hit that level in February — and it’s rising fast.

Obama ends stem cell funding ban

US President Barack Obama has lifted restrictions on federal funding for research on new stem cell lines.

Mr Obama signed an executive order in a major reversal of US policy, pledging to "vigorously support" new research.

Ex-President George W Bush blocked the use of any government money to fund research on human embryonic stem cell lines created after 9 August 2001.

Katha Pollitt: Lifestyles of the Rich and Generous?

The gods of publishing must have had a good laugh when they arranged for the philosopher Peter Singer to bring out The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty in the middle of the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. First Worlders have a moral obligation to give away thousands of dollars--thousands!--a year of personal income to eradicate Third World poverty? Right. Even when Americans had jobs and 401(k)s, they weren't exactly emptying their wallets for the 1.4 billion people who live in absolute destitution--$1.25 a day or less--in the developing world. How much harder to get people to give when money is tight, so many are broke and even those who are doing all right are worried and afraid for their future.

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Even today, though, as Singer would be the first to remind us, an ordinary middle-class American lives like Louis XIV compared to the destitute villagers and slum dwellers of Africa, Asia and elsewhere around the globe. Singer can sound a bit puritanical when he scoffs at our outlays on $4 lattes, restaurant meals, concerts, movies, that second glass of wine we don't really want and the $600 worth of clothes in their closet that women supposedly haven't worn for a year. Bottled water comes in for special scorn. His point, though, isn't that we should forgo all pleasure but that we have more disposable income than we think we do--enough to save the lives of many people. If you put it like that--hmm, do I go out for pie or vaccinate ten children?--the answer is pretty clear.

Singer suggests that those in the bottom half of the top 10 percent--those who make between $105,001 and $148,000--give 5 percent of their income, with graduated increases for those who make more. In other words, a person who made $147,000 would give $7,350, leaving him/her a comfortable $139,650 to live on. If the nearly 15 million people in the top 10 percent followed his proposal, they would generate $471 billion for the Third World poor. If those below gave just 1 percent of their income, the total would increase to $510 billion. If the rest of the developed world followed suit, the total would be eight times what the United Nations estimates is needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals for global health, education, employment, gender equality and so on by 2015.

How Paulson Used AIG To Throw Goldman A Big Old Bone

by boloboffin

Sat Mar 07, 2009 at 12:58:17 AM PST

Among a lot of others, mind you.

It's in the WSJ today and branching out from there -- several of the counterparties receiving par payouts for their toxic CDOs now owned by the taxpayers have been identified. The first name on the list is Goldman Sachs:

Among those institutions are Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Germany's Deutsche Bank AG, each of which received roughly $6 billion in payments between mid-September and December 2008, according to a confidential document and people familiar with the matter.

Other banks that received large payouts from AIG late last year include Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America Corp., and French bank Société Générale SA.

Wall Street on the Tundra

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

by Michael Lewis April 2009

Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectively went bust, I spoke to a man at the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Reykjavík to determine if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation. He’d never been to Iceland, knew nothing about the place, and said he needed a map to find it. He has spent his life dealing with famously distressed countries, usually in Africa, perpetually in one kind of financial trouble or another. Iceland was entirely new to his experience: a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history. “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”

The International Swaps & Derivatives Assocation: A $1.9M Lobbying Team

By Elana Schor - March 6, 2009, 2:11PM

Josh observed earlier that the International Swaps & Derivatives Association was one of the major lobby groups helping to ensure that derivatives contracts got special repayment privileges from creditors under the 2005 bankruptcy bill. Which got me wondering ... the ISDA must be shaking in its loafers over the possibility of stronger regulation passing Congress this year. Which D.C. lobbyists are in their corner?

Here's what I found: a healthy $1.9 million in lobbying spending for 2008, more than twice as much as embattled bank UBS and comparable to the lobby bills of Credit Suisse, one bank heavily tied to derivatives trading and other complex financial instruments.

Frank Rich: Some Things Don’t Change in Grover’s Corners

“WHEREVER you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” says the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Those words were first heard by New York audiences in February 1938, as America continued to reel from hard times. The Times’s front page told of 100,000 auto workers protesting layoffs in Detroit and of a Republican official attacking the New Deal as “fascist.” Though no one was buying cars, F.D.R. had the gall to endorse a mammoth transcontinental highway construction program to put men back to work.

In the 71 years since, Wilder’s drama has become a permanent yet often dormant fixture in our culture, like the breakfront that’s been in the dining room so long you stopped noticing its contents. Requiring no scenery and many players, “Our Town” is the perennial go-to “High School Play.” But according to A. Tappan Wilder, the playwright’s nephew and literary executor, professional productions have doubled since 2005, including two separate hit revivals newly opened in Chicago and New York.

Scholes Advises ‘Blow Up’ Over-the-Counter Contracts

By Christine Harper

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Myron Scholes, the Nobel prize- winning economist who helped invent a model for pricing options, said regulators need to “blow up or burn” over-the-counter derivative trading markets to help solve the financial crisis.

The markets have stopped functioning and are failing to provide pricing signals, Scholes, 67, said today at a panel discussion at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Participants need a way to exit transactions and get a “fresh start,” he said.

The “solution is really to blow up or burn the OTC market, the CDSs and swaps and structured products, and let us start over,” he said, referring to credit-default swaps and other complex securities that are traded off exchanges. “One way to do that, through the auspices of regulators or the banking commissioners, is to try to close all contracts at mid-market prices.”

Are Republicans killing the stock market with their apocalyptic hysteria?

By David Neiwert Saturday Mar 07, 2009 11:30am

The right's second-favorite new talking point -- right behind "Leave Rush Aloooooone!" -- is the claim that the ongoing downward spiral of the stock market is now President Obama's fault.

It's utter nonsense, of course. Indeed, a far more plausible explanation for the continuing lousy psychology of the stock market is that all the hysterical fearmongering, marked by absurd charges that we're descending into "socialism," coming from the mouths of Republicans and various right-wing talkers (most prominently Limbaugh) has created a blanket of groundless fear and suspicion around Obama's recovery program that is keeping the market in freefall.