Tag: Financial Crisis

For more than 12 months now we have been working on a new website which will help voters get a handle on the candidates running for national office.

Today the American people, in concert with their brothers and sisters around the world, proclaim the rights to which they are entitled by birth and citizenship, by Constitutional law and Proclamation, and by membership in the collective body of nations that has universalized recognition of these rights for all humanity.

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), incoming G.O.P. chair of the House Financial Services Committee: “y view is that Washington and the regulators are there to...

The U.S. is slipping into a debt-induced recession from which we’re assured that more debt is the remedy. Only when Americans grasp the internalized source...

Mr. Geithner's rhetorical deceptions mask the ineffectiveness of the only two potentially meaningful job-creation initiatives -- aid to the states and the bailout of Detroit -- that he and Summers largely put together, while letting him ignore the several initiatives, including trade reform, which could actually create, relatively quickly, millions of jobs.

Dear Messrs, Tepper, Soros, Simons, Paulson, Cohen, Icahn, Lampert, Griffin, Arnold and Falcone, It's now estimated that about 150,000 teachers will lose their jobs next year because of the financial crisis touched off by your industry.

Exclusive from Talking Points Memo: By Brian Beutler Nearly two years after the Wall Street meltdown drove the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse, and...

Popular opinion drives the elected representatives for a change. By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press WASHINGTON – Republicans set the stage Wednesday to lift their blockade against legislation...

Caught wind of this from the Huffington Post: As homeowners were falling behind on their subprime mortgages, wreaking havoc for investors that owned slices of...

Believe everyone is with Paul Krugman on this one, except for the GOP leadership. Don’t Cry for Wall Street By PAUL KRUGMAN On Thursday, President Obama went...

And why? Because our tax dollars bailed out their butts. The biggest banks would have gone under, and derservedly so, without our largess. Dow 11,000 is primarily a function of the trillions (not billions) of taxpayer dollars that poured into the biggest Wall Street firms in the form of loans, asset gurantees, liquidity programs and other subsidies. Wall Street then used our money to pay themselves lavish bonuses and to lobby against any and all meaningful financial reforms. (See Bob Kuttner's excellent new book, A Presidency in Peril, for the blow by blow of how crony capitalism really works.)

In 2009, the worst economic year for working people since the Great Depression, the top 25 hedge fund managers walked off with an average of $1 billion each. With the money those 25 people "earned," we could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers. (They make about $38,000 a year, including benefits.) Those educators could have brought along over 13 million young people, assuming a class size of 20. That's some value.

Elizabeth Warren, the head of Congressional oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program who is under consideration to head a new federal consumer financial protection agency, accurately predicted the current crisis of the American middle class five years ago. She did so in an interview conducted by Massachusetts School of Law Dean Lawrence Velvel and the solutions she offered to the escalating problem are even more relevant today.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and influential New York Times columnist, says Wall Street institutions have become so big and powerful that they will never be allowed to fail. The only hope he sees is to regulate them thoroughly. He greatly prefers the stricter rules now being offered by Barney Frank in the House to the softer ones coming from Chris Dodd in the Senate. (Neither bill truly tackles the derivatives casino.)

The Jeffersonian anti-federalists feared that a strong national government would lead our fledgling nation back towards monarchy. Instead they wanted government closer to the people where it would better serve their interests rather than interests of the moneyed merchants and traders.

We live in an era of amazing technological advances while our citizens descend ever deeper into the abyss of scientific illiteracy. Nowhere is that made more evident than by curious actions taken by state legislatures in Utah and South Dakota. Congressmen in these two states believe that scientific inquiry can be reduced to the fiats of legislation, and that objective truth can be discovered through the passage of state law.