Barack Obama is one of three nominees I voted for with enthusiasm. The
first, Lyndon Johnson (then in his 1964 civil-rights and anti-poverty
phase), self-destructed over Vietnam. The second, George McGovern, lost
49 states. For the next three decades, Republican presidents pulled the
country and the prevailing ideology far right, while Democratic
interludes moved it only to the center.
On October 3rd, as the spreading economic meltdown threatened to topple
financial behemoths like American International Group (AIG) and Bank of
America and plunged global markets into freefall, the U.S. government
responded with the largest bailout
in American history. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,
better known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), authorized
the use of $700 billion to stabilize the nation's failing financial
systems and restore the flow of credit in the economy.
The calamari salad was world-class. Still, my friend the
CPA's face screwed up. "You know what still has me pissed off? The
bailouts. All wasted on CEO bonuses. But nobody cares!"
I told him I thought people cared, but they didn't know what they could do about it.
"I'll tell you what we should do," he fumed. "Stop paying our taxes. And our mortgages. They can't throw us all in jail! They can't evict us all!"
What should we demand?
"The bailout money. Make 'em give back every cent to us, the people who need it."
So many of us know in detail about all the false warnings and exaggerated claims that were used to justify the war in Iraq. By now, six years later, and after many books, reports, news stories and films (hopefully including my two books and film, Weapons of Mass Deception), we see the pattern of lies and deception. We realize that a fraud was committed against the American people and see what its consequences have been for the people of this country, Iraq and Afghanistan.
How much do you know about the BlackRock
hedge fund? Better bone up fast, now that the folks at BlackRock are
calling the shots in the government's trillion-dollar bailout program.
As both The New York Times and The Wall Street journal reported on
Tuesday, BlackRock execs are now directing key elements of the
government program at a time when they stand to reap great profits from
the fallout of a problem they helped create.
Today we are caught in a global economic crash and depression, a calamity
affecting every nation connected to the global economy, especially poor nations
lacking economic reserves. But this crisis also puts into play new possibilities
for a democratic surge, perhaps toward economic democracy.
A few - and only a few - prescient commentators have questioned whether
the U.S. can sustain its informal global empire in the wake of the most
severe economic crisis since World War II. And the simultaneous
quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan are leading more and more opinion
leaders and taxpayers to this question.
But the U.S. Empire helped cause the meltdown in the first place.
In most parts of the world, mass unemployment
brings the specter of mass social unrest. Not in the U.S., though,
where 13 million people have accepted joblessness with nary a peep
of protest.
Many reasons -- from Prozac to Pentecostalism -- have been cited to
explain American passivity in the face of economic violence. But
the truth might be far simpler: In America, being unemployed
doesn't mean you have nothing to do but run around burning police
cars. Unemployment has been reconfigured as a new form of work.
