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ZachCarter, The Media Consortium:
Tue., Nov 25, 2008
Filed under:
NewsLadder •
Economy •
Uncategorized President-elect Barack Obama announced his economic transition team yesterday–and we’ll get to that–but first let’s take a look at the top economic stories from the week that you might not have heard–but need to know.
With so many recent headlines detailing the government’s policy position on some of the nation’s largest corporations, it’s important to remember that economic policy ought to include people living at the other end of the economic spectrum.
Obama was charged with being a “redistributionist” by conservatives within and without the McCain campaign during the final weeks leading up to the Nov. 4 election. Funny what happened. It turns out people actually find that drastic inequality thing offensive, particularly when they are losing their homes while the nation’s largest banks are getting billions in speedy federal assistance.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson still refuses to allocate one dime of his financial bailout funds to help struggling homeowners, while giving lip service to the idea that the housing market “correction” is at the heart of our current economic woes. Even the modest anti-foreclosure bill Congress passed in July is slow-going. In addition to about $1.7 billion to help underwater homeowners refinance into affordable mortgages, the bill directed an additional $4 billion local governments to help communities rehabilitate foreclosed homes. That sum will barely make a dent in the deepening foreclosure crisis, as Garland McLaurin of American News Project and Mary Kane of the Washington Independent detail in this video, but many cities and counties are yet to see their share of the $4 billion kitty. By contrast, hundreds of billions of dollars have been injected into banks in recent weeks.
At this point in the economic cycle, mortgages are not the only loans causing major problems. Credit card delinquencies are at their highest rate in six years, and many banking industry experts expect them to go higher as laid-off consumers move basic expenses from checkbooks to plastic. What’s worse, credit card companies currently have legal leeway to alter contracts in almost any way they wish, even if borrowers are current on their payments, as Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., details in a blog for The Huffington Post. The Federal Reserve took a step in the right direction earlier this year by addressing some of the most egregious policies in the subprime credit card market, but it is time for Congress to rein in the rest of the predatory consumer lending industry.
Of course, wide swaths of the U.S. population do not worry about debt, but food. Writing for The Progressive, Brian Gilmore makes an impassioned case for swift public action to end poverty, noting that one in eight Americans did not have access to sufficient food in 2007.
When people are going hungry, the Bush administration appears to believe that eight years is an appropriate amount of time to wait for substantive public policy. But when the world’s largest financial institution is up against the wall, it gets what it wants, when it wants it. The Bush team granted Citigroup another $20 billion in bailout funds over the weekend, just days after ponying up $25 billion for company. The best part? The company’s management is still in place, and the government exacted no guarantees concerning how taxpayer money will be used.
Over at the American Prospect, Ezra Klein highlights former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s role in bringing the Wall Street titan to the verge of collapse. During the Clinton administration, Rubin resisted placing government oversight on the credit derivatives market, which after a decade of unregulated growth is wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy. But Citi is one of the biggest losers in the credit market fallout, thanks in part to Rubin’s own advice as a member of the company’s board of directors.
Speaking of Rubin, Obama just named one of his protégés at the Clinton Treasury to succeed Paulson at the Department’s the top spot. Timothy Geithner, who has managed some of the most harrowing moments of the meltdown, including the Bear Stearns rescue in March, will move from the Fed’s New York office to the Treasury Department in January. Unlike Rubin, however, Geithner has spent the last few years sounding the alarm on the very risks to the financial system that have taken such a heavy toll of late, as Andrew Leonard notes at Salon.com.
The Citi debacle reveals that Paulson’s gambit to restore investor confidence in the U.S. financial sector has generated mixed results, at best. Citi shares closed at $3.77 on Friday, down from $18.35 on Oct. 3, the day Congress passed the bailout bill. The sad fact is that without some magical, and probably irrational, restoration of that elusive confidence, the $700 billion allocated by the financial rescue package will not be nearly enough to shore up the American banking sector, much less the auto manufacturing companies and retail stores that have been showing signs of extreme strain of late. William Greider details the state of affairs for The Nation, arguing that it is time to shut down the financial giants that are no longer viable and establish a new order based on smaller companies.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
See more tagged with: agenda, Bush, cabinet, Ezra Klein, mortgage crisis, NewsLadder, Obama, the economy, The Nation, TMC and Washington Independent
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ZachCarter, The Media Consortium:
Tue., Nov 18, 2008
Filed under:
NewsLadder •
Economy •
Green •
Congressional Oversight •
Uncategorized The Bush administration is squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on incompetence, again.
In a House Domestic Policy Subcommittee hearing on Friday, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, took Interim Assistant Treasury Secretary for Fianancial Stability Neel Kashkari (read: bailout chief) to task over the Treasury’s decision to spend every cent of the first $350 billion in bailout funds buying up preferred stock in Wall Street icons and other banks, while allowing troubled borrowers to fend for themselves.
Kashkari did his best to deflect the outrage, but his task would have been easier had the Treasury’s position been defensible. In a Senate Banking Committee hearing the day before, both consumer-protection advocates and banking executives endorsed an anti-foreclosure initiative devised by FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair that would create strong incentives for the private sector to cut borrowers some slack. Despite the plan’s broad appeal, both Paulson and Kashkari refused to devote any Treasury funds to the program, making the bailout chief sound like, well, a chump, when he insisted that Treasury is doing everything in its power to keep people in their homes.
The whole thing is beginning to look a little too much like Iraq. Bush administration officials steamroll both chambers of Congress with warnings of a dire emergency and are rewarded for their efforts with unprecedented authority and funding. Shortly afterwards, it becomes clear that the initiative has been squandered on meaningless giveaways to huge corporations without any corresponding social benefits. Naomi Klein of The Nation details the corruption parallels in an illuminating piece for Rolling Stone.
Laissez-faire lunacy
Most depressing is the bailout’s complete impotence with regard to providing broader economic support. Paulson and Kashkari have succeeded in keeping the U.S. financial sector afloat for the time being, but despite an enormous injection of taxpayer funds, banks are not lending money out into the broader economy. One part of the problem is the fact that President Bush & Co. took years to acknowledge that the country was in fact facing disaster (remember Paulson’s 2007 talking point that the subprime mortgage crisis was “contained”?). Now that the Treasury is finally taking action, it is doing so in an environment where there simply are not many good loans to be made. The other roadblock is Paulson’s refusal to require banks who accept public money to put it to use for the public good, as Joshua Holland explains for Alternet.
That desperate attempt to adhere to some kind of free-market principle—not forcing companies to do anything with billions of dollars allocated to partially nationalize them—was on display Friday at a speech Bush gave in New York. It sounds like a sick joke. After demanding $700 billion to save Wall Street, Bush is still warning against the evils of government intervention, claiming that free-market systems have a monopoly on “social justice and human dignity.”
“The greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market,” he said. “It is too much government involvement in the market.”
Matthew Rothschild skewers this absurdity over at The Progressive.
“You can’t have social justice and human dignity with mass unemployment, rampant foreclosures, high rates of poverty and food insecurity, and a health care system that leaves almost 50 million people uninsured,” Rothschild writes.
Bush did make a few nods to sanity during his speech, arguing that markets need to be “more transparent,” but the claim was a little perplexing amid reports that the Federal Reserve is refusing to disclose who it is granting about $2 trillion in emergency loans.
“Where is the ridicule?” Dean Baker asks in a blog for the American Prospect, arguing that Paulson and Bernanke are looking more like “crony capitalists” every day.
Going green, going global
Bush’s speech was designed to frame the debate surrounding the meeting of leaders from the world’s 20 largest economies to address problems in the global financial architecture. Fortunately, President Bush does not have final authority to sign an agreement for the U.S., that task will be left to Barack Obama in April of next year. Over at oneworld.net, Gary Gardner and Michael Renner note the opportunity not just for a New Deal to refashion the U.S. economy, but to ink a Green Deal that does away with global dependence on fossil fuels and provides for a fairer distribution of wealth across the globe.
At the moment, U.S. economic policy remains dominated by how to handle the bailout. How Democrats seek to proceed with lashing Detroit automakers to that $700 billion debacle will say a great deal about the majority party’s governing intentions heading into the next Congress.
“It’s time to think big,” Andrew Leonard writes for Salon.com. “A Manhattan Project-scale plan to move the U.S. into an energy-sustainable future should start with a complete restructuring of the automotive industry,” according to Leonard.
The sagas of the financial and automobile industries have more in common than meets the eye. Both have lobbied heavily against new regulations for decades, and the lax oversight has left both in dire straits. While conservatives are quick to point to labor union contracts that make workforces at GM, Ford and Chrysler pricier than for foreign manufacturers, the fact is that the Big Three have drastically lost market share in recent years by failing to make cars people actually want to buy. In a video produced for American News Project, Garland McLaurin details how Detroit spent millions lobbying Congress against raising fuel economy standards while failing to develop cars that achieve high gas mileage.
Millions of people could be out of a job if the Big Three go under, but if Democrats hurl money at the companies with no strings attached, they’re no better than the current administration’s set of bailouteers.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit economy.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
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ZachCarter, The Media Consortium:
Tue., Nov 11, 2008
Filed under:
NewsLadder •
Economy •
Uncategorized As Barack Obama readies himself to lead the United States through what appears to be a scathing recession, he faces a choice between feeding the political sphere’s Wall Street addiction and investing in economic progress. Two key former Clinton cabinet officials could determine which course he takes.
It was more than a little startling to hear a U.S. leader who sounded like (gasp!) an economist at the president-elect’s first press conference last week, after years of Bush speeches that treated economic policy as a realm defined exclusively by tax cuts and bailouts. But without policy specifics, we still do not know which voices of the many men and women flanking Obama at the event will impact the next administration’s economic platform. Mother Jones notes that several of the names included on the list of Obama’s economic advisers represent schools of thought that brought us directly to the current crisis. Two of the alleged experts, former Clinton Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, signed off on major financial deregulatory moves in the latter half of the Clinton years. The two sided often with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on policies that included a refusal to place government oversight on the credit derivatives market, which eventually ballooned into the $60 trillion quagmire that destroyed AIG in September (who got another $40 billion from taxpayers on Monday).
Summers has successfully sparked controversy on several occasions, and while some of the scandals haven’t received a fair hearing in the court of public opinion, others are of genuine concern. In 2005, Summers said he believed innate inferiorities were more responsible for the under-representation of women in science and engineering fields than either discrimination or socialization. Writing for the Women’s Media Center, Veronica Arreola demonstrates how advancing gender equality would improve the broader U.S. economy, and expresses well-founded doubts about Summers’ commitment to Obama’s campaign pledge to implement equal pay for equal work legislation.
But not all Clinton cabinet officials are of the same stripe, and hopes for serious economic progress under Obama may rest largely on what position he gives former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Reich feuded frequently with Rubin during Clinton’s first term, urging that more energy be spent addressing inequality than balancing the budget. Sadly, Reich lost that battle and left the administration in 1997, but he remains one of the most impressive economic voices of the day. John Nichols writes in The Nation that it was “reassuring” to see Reich and organized labor ally David Bonior on stage with the president-elect last week.
Reich himself penned a piece that ran in Talking Points Memo this weekend, placing emphasis on one side of the economic equation that has all but disappeared from public discourse amid the Wall Street meltdown: demand. Stretched to their limits by decades of deepening inequality, consumers are cutting back on everything except basic necessities amid a mountain of high-interest debt and the increasing likelihood of losing their jobs. With consumers reeling, Reich says the government needs to step in as the spender of last resort.
There are still people who oppose increasing government spending in a recession. They are called Republicans, because one has to turn to backward political ideology to oppose a measure that has been understood as a basic economic fact for more than 70 years. There simply are no serious economists who disagree. Reich notes that even former Reagan advisor Martin Feldstein now favors adopting government infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy.
But a glance at the Friday edition of The Washington Post reveals that the anti-spending mythology remains popular. House Republican Leader John Boehner charged that “Democrats are proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in new government spending masquerading as ‘economic stimulus.’”
There is no masquerading involved. Reich is quite explicit that it will take hundreds of billions of government dollars to fend off a “Mini Depression.” By singling out socially important projects– a health care overhaul, green energy investments and and new child care programs– that spending can help make the economy even stronger once it rebounds. But consumers simply are not capable of shouldering the burden alone.
Dean Baker hammers the point home for The American Prospect. The housing bubble’s aftermath has hampered the supply of credit, Baker argues, but the more severe economic problem is the massive loss of housing wealth for consumers, who now have less money to spend and invest. The U.S. has encouraged homeownership as means of forced saving for decades. Those savings have now evaporated.
Housing woes are far from over. Mary Kane lays out the mortgage landscape for a piece in the Washington Independent, noting that while the economy has paid a price for the subprime debacle, the Alt-A nightmare is just beginning. Alt-A loans are exotic mortgages that do not require borrowers to document their income or employment information. Many Alt-A loans are adjustable-rate mortgages that allow borrowers to pay nothing but the interest on the loan for a few years before the monthly payments “reset” up to 63% higher, Kane writes. Banks pushed the most reckless of these “option-ARM” loans in the years leading right up to the housing market’s implosion, 2006 and 2007, and the lion’s share of unaffordable rate resets are scheduled for 2009. It’s a dire situation—just check out the stock price of option-ARM lenders in hard-hit housing markets like California.
Obama’s fiscal stimulus package should provide a window into his governing philosophy. After eight years of squandered opportunities, let’s hope he gets us moving in the right direction.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit economy.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
See more tagged with: 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, department of labor, gender gap, health care, media consortium, Mother Jones, NewsLadder, president bush, renewable energy, The American Prospect, the economy and The Nation
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ZachCarter, The Media Consortium:
Tue., Nov 4, 2008
Filed under:
NewsLadder •
Economy •
Uncategorized Welcome to the Media Consortium’s Economy MediaWire project! Check this space every Tuesday for a discussion of the best economic coverage available on the information superhighway.
This Tuesday, of course, is no ordinary Tuesday, but the day of the most important U.S. election in generations. Poll after poll has shown the economy to be the top concern for voters this year, as an epic financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble have ensured that the next president will have his hands full come January.
But while there is plenty of bad news to go around of late, Ezra Klein notes for the American Prospect that economic downturns can be extraordinary opportunities to overhaul national infrastructure, as the government steps in to fund projects that support what the private sector can no longer afford.
“Right now, there’s something damn close to political consensus for a transformational investment package,” Klein writes, arguing that, “the next president should be thinking hard indeed about how to make the most of the opportunity.”
During Congressional hearings over the last two weeks, two influential economists have urged the government to embark on major infrastructure projects as a means to stimulate the economy. Both Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz and NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted nearly every development in the recent Wall Street implosion, argued that the best way to ease economic malaise is to pour money into green energy projects. Preventing a recession appears out of the question, but why not set our sights on something “transformational,” in Klein’s words, that could fend off ecological destruction even more comprehensive than the recent financial hemorrhaging?
David Morris emphasizes the potential for environmentally friendly infrastructure development for Alternet, suggesting that a President Barack Obama may “institute a massive public works program focusing on infrastructure that lends itself to a green orientation.”
Morris notes several frightening parallels between today’s green energy movement and that of the early 1980s, when environmentalist momentum from the Carter administration collapsed under the weight of the most wrenching recession since the Great Depression. We have witnessed a similar drop-off in green interest this fall, according to Morris, as the financial crisis has deepened and gas prices have declined dramatically. But renewable energy industries are a much stronger political force today than they were in the early Reagan years, and Morris believes the sheer efficiency of green projects will give the next president more bang for his outlay bucks than other programs. Environmentally conscious investments can sharply reduce operating costs, while creating armies of new jobs.
Writing for The Nation, James S. Henry and Jim Manzi claim that it is time not only for the government to boost research and development, but to “nurture a national culture that reminds young people of their country’s innovation heritage and encourages them to become engineers, designers and scientists, rather than just lawyers, accountants and bankers.”
Beyond infrastructure, The Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild discusses research from Mark Zandi of Moody’sEconomy.com, which reveals that many traditional lefty priorities are also among the most efficient methods for stimulating economic growth. Expanding food stamps programs and unemployment benefits puts money in the hands of people who will actually spend it, instead of making long-term investments that keep the funds out of the general economy, Rothschild writes. Priorities touted by conservatives this election cycle, like slashing the capital gains tax and lowering income tax rates for the wealthiest corporations, are much less effective.
Speaking of throwing money at big corporations, the Treasury Department is currently funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to banks in an effort to boost lending so other firms can borrow money buy supplies, pay workers and fund research. It’s not a terrible concept, except, as Robert Kuttner notes back at the Prospect, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson isn’t actually requiring banks to lend the money out, and the banks would rather use the cash to finance acquisitions and pay dividends.
This is, of course, an outrage, but it is far from inevitable. Kuttner cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “yardstick competition” programs, where a public entity would compete with the private sector and provide products oriented toward the general social good, creating incentives for industries to offer better products.
Under Roosevelt, the government invented the long-term fixed-rate mortgage, which was so effective that it quickly came to dominate the private marketplace. Taxpayers would get better results from their present bailout burden if the government would actually takeover one institution outright and have it make new loans without wasting money on dividends, Kuttner argues. Other banks would have to boost their own lending activities in order to keep from losing market share to the government, and billions of taxpayer dollars wouldn’t be squandered.
Jim Hightower has an excellent breakdown of the five greatest villains of the current financial crisis here.
With President George W. Bush set to host an economic summit with international leaders on the financial meltdown this month, OneWorld.net carries an excellent story by Jim Lobe on a call from almost 600 non-governmental organizations for fundamental economic reforms aimed at protecting the most vulnerable members of the global economy. Bush is widely expected to oppose reforms to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which many NGOs claim have imposed policies that have benefited Western companies at the expense of the international poor.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit economy.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
See more tagged with: 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama, Ezra Klein, gasoline prices, global warming, media consortium, NewsLadder, the economy and The Nation
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addiestan, The Media Consortium:
Sat., Sep 27, 2008
Filed under:
John McCain Special Debate Edition
Taking a glance at the liveblogging and instant analysis by progressive media outlets of the first presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., one thing stands out: none of our bloggers saw a knockout victory overall, though both Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama each individually scored points on specific questions.
As David Corn of Mother Jones explains it:
In talking policy, both men came across as knowledgeable. McCain truly perked up when he got the chance to discuss the strategic importance (as he sees it) of the Caucasus region. Obama demonstrated confidence in his ability to challenge McCain on the strategic importance of the Iraq war. But, indubitably, many viewers of the debate would score these exchanges in accordance with their preexisting opinions of the two candidates. As for those knotty undecideds, there was no specific assertion that an analyst could point to and say, “This is going to stir them.”
After a lengthy opening discussion of the economic meltdown, the debate stayed true, for the most part, to its stated focus, foreign policy, which brought Iraq back to the campaign stage. John Nichols of The Nation summed it up like this:
A blistering economic crisis may be the all-encompassing issue of the moment. But the war in Iraq still defines the difference between John McCain and Barack Obama.
The Washington Independent’s Ari Melber, writing from the scene, thought it played to Obama’s advantage:
Sen. Barack Obama laced directly into Sen. John McCain during the first presidential debate on Friday, repeatedly telling McCain “you were wrong” on the key foreign policy issues facing the U.S. Obama blasted McCain for supporting President Bush’s “failed” policies against Iraq and Al Qaeda, tweaked Republicans for failing to catch Osama bin Laden, and chastised McCain for saying the U.S. could “muddle through” in Afghanistan. Obama’s tone was mostly cool and wonkish, but his sparring was more aggressive than his performance during the Democratic primary debates.
Tim Fernholz of TAPPED begs to differ:
On Iraq, it seemed that McCain got the better of Obama because the Democratic nominee failed to present some of his best arguments about the future of Iraq, instead choosing to focus on his correct judgment call at the start of the war.
Among the points Obama should have raised, wrote Fernholz, was the fact that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports Obama’s timetable for withdrawal.
In the debate’s second half, McCain claimed that prior to the coup d’etat executed by Pakistan’s former Gen. and President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan was “a failed state.” That was a new one on a lot of commentators — unless what one means by “a failed state” is a democratically elected government prone to corruption, criteria one can now imagine our enemies employing to describe the U.S. as “failed” as well. Obama let this one slide.
At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Hilzoy found others:
Obama, I thought, missed a few opportunities. The most important, I thought, was when McCain said he would never repeat the mistake of abandoning Afghanistan. The response “But John, you did: back in 2003, when you voted to take our focus away from Afghanistan in order to wage a war of choice against a country that had not attacked us” was just begging and pleading to be made. He was also, I thought, a bit tense.
Ezra Klein, whose blog lives on the site of The American Prospect, thought Obama got in a good one when Obama challenged McCain on the latter’s comments, first reported on TPM, to a Miami radio interviewer, where McCain said he might not meet with Spain’s President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose country is a NATO ally. Klein cites CNN commentator Bill Schneider saying that McCain simply misspoke during that interview, then reassesses:
Here’s McCain’s foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann: “The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain’s willingness to meet Zapatero (and id’d him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview.” I agree that McCain misspoke. But then his adviser turned his verbal slip into official policy. That’s actually worse.
Grist’s David Roberts and Kate Sheppard took on the task of fact-checking the candidates’ assertions about energy policy. Here’s Roberts:
McCain just nailed Obama on the 2005 energy bill, using it as an example of Obama’s support for excess pork spending.
Ouch. Thing is, McCain didn’t really vote against the bill because it had pork in it. But Obama did vote for it because of the pork for ethanol and renewable energy. It’s a legitimate point, and it drew blood.
Sheppard looked at their big-picture energy positions, writing, “Obama said that … ‘we can’t drill our way out of the problem.’”
Obama said that our plan should include “wind, solar, yes, nuclear, clean-coal” and hit on McCain for voting against renewables numerous times over his 26 years in office. He also noted that these energy sources “deal with the issue of climate change which is so important.”
[…]
McCain also argued that one of the solutions to energy concerns should be more drilling: “Offshore drilling is also something that’s very important, but it’s a bridge … it will help temporarily help relieve our energy problems.” But economists, the Energy Information Administration, and the American Petroleum Institute all say that any effects are at least 10 years out. That’s one long bridge.
Oh, yeah, and in case you haven’t heard, John McCain has not been elected Miss Congeniality in the Senate, he thinks Barack Obama doesn’t understand anything, he could not manage to look at Barack Obama once during the debate, and Barack Obama “absolutely agree[d] with John” a few times.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
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addiestan, The Media Consortium:
Fri., Sep 26, 2008
Filed under:
John McCain In another wild week in American politics, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain began the week on the losing end of public opinion polls, unscripted comments by his surrogates, more reports of his links to lobbyists and a tanking economy branded, in voters’ minds, with the GOP logo. And looming not far in the background was the specter of tonight’s debate in Oxford, Miss., scheduled to be McCain’s first direct confrontation with Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama.
Examining a tide of factors moving against him, McCain did on Wednesday what he had done successfully the last time trends moved against him: he found a game-changer — not one to merely change the existing game, but rather to create a new game altogether into which he could drag his opponent. Claiming to suspend his campaign, he would ride into the Capitol Building on his white horse, save the nation from economic devastation and and sacrifice the opportunity to confront his opponent face to face in the first presidential debate, urging Democratic nominee to follow on.
It helps to remember what McCain faced on Monday: a New Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed Americans favored Obama over McCain by 14 points as best suited to deal with an economy that is, by nearly all estimates, teetering on the brink of catastrophe, thanks largely to the craze for deregulation led by Republicans in Congress over the course of the last eight years. In a series of articles, the New York Times outlined payments made by the disgraced mortgage enterprises FannieMae and Freddie Mac to the firm owned by McCain’s own campaign manager, Rick Davis.
By Wednesday, more bad news was on its way; an interview by CBS News anchor Katie Couric with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s vice presidential nominee, had gone terribly wrong and video had surfaced of a prayer ceremony showing Palin receiving the hands-on blessing of a witch-hunting preacher during the Alaska gubernatorial race.
Palin’s performance on CBS was so appalling that it led Salon’s Glenn Greenwald to correct his own prediction of Palin’s formidability.
[S]he is either (a) completely ignorant about the most basic political issues — a vacant, ill-informed, incurious know-nothing, or (b) aggressively concealing her actual beliefs about these matters because she’s petrified of deviating from the simple-minded campaign talking points she’s been fed and/or because her actual beliefs are so politically unpalatable, even when taking into account the right-wing extremism that is permitted, even rewarded, in our mainstream. I’m not really sure which is worse, but it doesn’t really matter, because with 40 days left before the election, both options are heinous.
Late last week, The Nation’s John Nichols reported from Alaska that the Alaska state government seemed to have fallen into the hands of the McCain campaign, as campaign advisers sought to effectively shut down the legislature’s investigation of the scandal dubbed Troopergate — Palin’s firing of her chief public safety officer.
And, New America Media’s Earl Ofari Hutchinson reports word was leaking out of Alaska of an April meeting between Palin and 14 black leaders in Alaska at which, alleges Alaska African-American Historical Society President Gwen Alexander, Palin said that, as governor, she didn’t have to hire blacks, and had no plans to do so. Palin spokesperson Sharon Leighow disputed the charge, telling Hutchinson “that Palin did not hire staff persons based on color, but solely on talent and skill.” Hutchinson here quotes Leighgow directly: “Governor Palin is totally color-blind.”
Color-blind, protected from witches and stumped when quizzed on McCain’s record on regulation and her own on Russia, Palin was on the verge of being a two-time game-changer (good change, bad change) when McCain decided that game wasn’t working for him anymore. Though the debate was meant to focus on foreign policy — said to be McCain’s strong suit — questions about the economy were sure to arise. Time for a new game.
Before McCain set foot back in the nation’s capital, reports Greg Sargent of TPM Election Central, Senate Majority Leader asked him not to inject presidential politics into the negotiations under way for a deal to save a raft of financial institutions with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Early on Wednesday, the Democratic chairmen and Republican ranking members of the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee announced they had arrived at an agreement that boded well for a legislative deal. Then McCain arrived, and the deal was off when House Republicans suddenly balked.
Salon’s Joan Walsh questioned the wisdom of McCain’s tactics for the sake of his own campaign.
Clearly McCain’s gambit is political, but I think it’s bad politics. I actually think a foreign-policy debate was the only hope McCain had for taking back momentum after a week in which his lifelong devotion to corporate deregulation caught up with him… it would have…provided McCain with an opportunity to taunt Obama about his opposition to the so-called surge in Iraq, and to change the subject generally — and that could potentially be good news for McCain.
Perhaps McCain reads Walsh, because today came word that he was going back on his original word that he would not debate tonight unless there was a deal on the billions-bailout. (Word!) But that came only after McCain told the cameras after yesterday’s meeting at the White House with President Bush, Barack Obama, and a host of other luminaries that the package needed some work.
Or perhaps McCain never expected Obama to call his bluff, which the Democrat apparently did when, even in the absence of a deal, he flew to Mississippi today for the debate.
Unless he aces tonight’s debate, McCain may find he succeeded in creating only a momentary diversion from his troubles. More lobbyist questions have arisen. Despite McCain’s promise to deliver Washington from the clutches of lobbyists, the numbers of lobbyists associated with his campaign are legend. David Corn of Mother Jones this week broke the story of Wayne Berman and James Jay Baker, “two prominent [McCain campaign] supporters” who, according to Corn, “are lobbyists for the National Rifle Association” which “recently began airing harsh attack-ads against Barack Obama.” Their activities seem to break the McCain campaign’s own rules.
At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Steve Benen comments that revelations of the relationship between McCain transition team leader William Timmons, Sr., and Freddie Mac — one of the companies whose near-failure sent markets spiraling downward — seems troublesome, at best. Timmons “earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac,” Benen writes.
John McCain personally spent most of last week railing against Barack Obama’s associations with former Fannie Mae officials were extremely important, worthy of attack ads and overheated speeches. At one point, about a week ago, McCain told CBS, “[T]he influence that Fannie and Freddie had in the inside-the-beltway, old-boy network, which led to this kind of corruption is unacceptable.”
As it turns out, though, Americans may not be as worried about the global financial meltdown as politicians seem to think. Mother Jones’s Jonathan Stein decided to see how the term “financial crisis” fared among terms on which people conducted Google searches. (See graph in Stein’s post.) “Turns out ‘wizards’, ‘cupcakes’, and ’sex toys’ retain their popularity in times of national emergency,” Stein writes. All outpaced the less alluring “financial crisis.”
Which means, the week could end up being a bust for McCain. If trends in his home state are any clue, he may not have much pull there, either. Writing in Salon, Mike Madden, conceding that McCain will win Arizona’s electoral college votes, writes:
Despite McCain, Democrats in Arizona are very much looking forward to the elections. Come November, McCain will almost certainly win his home state — but he may find he doesn’t bring a lot of Republicans to victory along with him. Instead, Democrats look likely to pick up a House seat, hold on to two others they won in 2006, and at least challenge — if not overturn — Republican control of the state Legislature.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.
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addiestan, The Media Consortium:
Mon., Sep 22, 2008
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John McCain It’s been a tough week for a lot of people, what with the global financial crisis and everything, and the Republican presidential nominee is feeling the heat.
The week kicked off with a New York Times/CBS News poll showing that the Democratic nominee had pulled ahead of Sen. John McCain for the first time since the latter had named the photogenic and iconoclastic Sarah Palin as his running mate. The margin claimed by Sen. Barack Obama may be small — 48 percent of registered voters saying they would vote for him, compared to McCain’s 43 percent — but the trend is in his favor.
Beginning with the news of the meltdown on Wall Street, the McCain campaign became a bit of a gaffe machine, with the presidential candidate telling the nation on Monday that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” — words that echoed those used by President Herbert Hoover to try to reassure a freaked-out public that was running on the banks in 1929. (Hoover’s denial about the economy led to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.)
When the Democratic nominee seized upon McCain’s remarks, the Republican found a novel way to dial back. “Senator, what economy are you talking about?” asked Obama, to which McCain replied that by “fundamentals” he meant American workers, and that by suggesting that the fundamentals of the economy were not strong, Obama must mean that American workers were weak. Yeah, believe that one, and I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you — a Bridge to Nowheresville, formerly known as the financial district of downtown Manhattan.
And speaking of bridges to nowhere, McCain running mate Sarah Palin continued to insist
that she was a pork-fighting refusenik on that very project, even though the record shows
that she supported that multimillion-dollar boondoggle of the ethically challenged Sen.
Ted Stevens before she was against it. In fact, reports David Morris of AlterNet, Alaska is awash in government pork-barrel money:
And when it comes to government pork, Alaska is king. As USA Today noted back in March, Palin’s state ranks number one — no other state is even close. In 2007 Alaska received some 2.5 times as much as runner-up Hawaii and 15 times more than the national average.Alaska has by far the most state government employees per capita as any other state and about five times as many as Obama’s Illinois.
The gaffes continued when Palin seemed to place herself ahead of McCain on the GOP ticket, referring to a potential “Palin and McCain” administration. (The Raw Story has the video.)
However, the deflation of the Palin bubble as shown by the polls could have one upside for McCain: he may find himself less insulted by crowds who come to hear Palin and then split five minutes into McCain’s speech, prompting the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen to ask, who’s the celebrity now?
But let’s not divert ourselves from the fun of gaffe laughs. What McCain operatives
surely expected to be one bright spot blew out the bulb. The defection of former Hillary
Clinton donor Lynn Forester de Rothschild (yes, of those Rothschilds) to the McCain camp, reported by John Byrne of The Raw Story, went terribly awry when she referred to embittered gun owners and religionists by an epithet, saying that Obama was an elitist because he dissed “[t]he people out, you know, who are the rednecks or whoever…” One imagines her playing long games of canasta off-camera with Carly Fiorina, the McCain campaign operative and former Hewlett-Packard CEO who said that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama was equipped to run a large company.
Midway through the week came word, via TPM Election Central, that McCain had given an interview to a Spanish-language radio outlet in Florida in which he appeared not to know that Spain was in the Western hemisphere. He also refused to say that he would welcome a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who leads a nation that is an important NATO ally with a large economy.
Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones begs mercy on McCain’s behalf. The problem isn’t that McCain didn’t know who Zapatero is or the hemispheric location of Spain; it’s that he had a hard time understanding the interviewer because he’s old. I’m sure the McCain camp will pick up that line and run with it.
In truth, McCain did look a little cranky, especially when he called for the firing of Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission, blaming the former California congressman and fellow Republican for the Wall Street failures that set off Monday’s stock-market crash. Really, all Cox did was enforce the anti-regulatory policies of the Bush administration, which McCain was for until he turned against them — last week.
All the crankiness and confusion led Steve Benen to draw a comparison between Bob Dole as the 1996 GOP nominee, and John McCain:
The McCain campaign no doubt hopes to avoid the Dole comparisons, but the parallels are pretty obvious — both were quite old during their campaigns, both were seriously injured during service in a war, both ran for president more than once, both have well-known nasty streaks, both are long-time Washington insiders, and both launched campaigns because they thought it was “their turn” to be president. …if the Dole=McCain meme catches on, it would be very unhelpful to the Republican ticket.
To which one of Benen’s commenters replied: “It beats being compared to Hoover.”
Which may be why McCain has suddenly fallen in love with the New Deal, even though the
centerpiece of Roosevelt’s economic rescue plan was Social Security, which McCain has called a “national disgrace.” The Democratic National Committee responded to McCain’s sudden New Deal romance with a video hosted by James Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of Franklin and Eleanor, which Mother Jones‘ Josh Harkinson walks us through.
The revolution may not be televised, but the anti-change disinformation campaign surely is. This week found the McCain campaign defending two untrue charges: that Obama would raise taxes on “ordinary Americans” and that he used as an adviser the disgraced former chairman of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines.
On the Time magazine blog, Swampland, Karen Tumulty calls the Raines charge a subtle form of race-baiting. Raines is African-American, and it’s in the McCain campaign’s interest to link Obama to figures who feed racial stereotypes.
Then there’s the taxes bugaboo. Despite consistent debunking of his ads that claim Barack Obama will raise your taxes, McCain continues to make that claim and, despite the absence of truth in it, it’s having an effect.
Lagan Sebert of the American News Project took his camera crew to Winchester, Virginia, a working-class town in a pivotal state, to talk to the locals about Obama and taxes. About half of the people he talked to insisted that Obama was out to raise their taxes, bearing out polls taken in other swing states, like this one in New Jersey. “Republicans seem to be scoring points with their attacks on the Obama tax plan,” said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
It’s all in the messaging, says Joan Walsh of Salon.com:
So I was feeling like Obama had new wind at his back politically — until I saw the two ads Obama and McCain released on Wednesday. Wow. McCain, who has absolutely zero plans for solving this problem, depicts himself as a tough guy and a fighter who’ll vanquish the bad guy. It’s a 30-second spot, edited to make McCain look like an action figure. Obama, by contrast, produced a two-minute ad — when what he needs is a two-sentence ad.
Of course, the messaging is easier if you just don’t tell the truth. For instance, reports AlterNet’s Joshua Holland, despite McCain’s insistence that his health care plan will make coverage available to all Americas, the McCain plan will actually remove the regulatory limits that keep sick people from being priced of the market.
Between all the fibbing and flip-flopping, you’d think the McCain camp had enough going on to keep itself busy without taking on the running of an entire state. But that’s what The Nation’s John Nichols finds in Anchorage: the McCain campaign has all but taken over the running of the Alaska state government as the Troopergate investigation of Sarah Palin grinds to a halt, thanks to the refusal of First Dude Todd Palin, speaking through the McCain campaign, to comply with a subpoena to testify before the the Alaska state legislature. “[A]ides to the governor are no longer answering questions about state business,” Nichols reports. “They are directing calls to McCain campaign operatives, who have flooded into then state…,” prompting the Anchorage Daily News to headline an editorial, “Abdication by Palin: When did the McCain campaign take over the governor’s office?”
Seems the campaign has also gotten its hands into the government of yet another state: the hotly contested Wisconsin, where McCain campaign co-chair and Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has filed a lawsuit demanding that “the state Government Accountability Board order election clerks to confirm the identities of potentially tens of thousands of voters — and possibly many more — who have registered since Jan. 1, 2006,” according to the AP. The work would have to be completed by Nov. 4 — a nearly impossible task. Should Van Hollen win, great numbers of voters could be left out in the cold. The Chelsea Green blog looks at this and similar election protection problems in other states. Starting next week, The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series will feature an investigation week focused on election protection.
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