Archive for November, 2008
Crowds trample Wal-Mart worker
This story is beyond words. NEW YORK — A Wal-Mart worker was killed Friday when “out-of-control” shoppers desperate for bargains broke down the doors at a 5 a.m. sale. Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers shouted angrily and kept shopping when store officials said they were closing because ...Read more.
Geithner & Kissinger Associates–pt. 2
From Bob Feldman: Treasury Secretary Designate Geithner’s Kissinger Associates Connection–Part 2 Between 1986 and 1989, U.S. Treasury Secretary-Designate Timothy Geithner was employed at Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger’s Kissinger Associates influence-peddling firm, which also employed George W. Bush’s former special envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, during the early 1990s. Commerce Secretary-Designate Bill ...Read more.
This Just In…
From (I haven’t seen this story reproduced elsewhere yet, even in the British press. This is strange, considering it’s 8.00 pm in the UK as I post) the International Herald Tribune: U.K. takes over Royal Bank of ScotlandBy Julia WerdigierInternational Herald TribuneFriday, November 28, 2008 LONDON: The British government took majority control of Royal Bank ...Read more.
3 Links on Global Demand
Reviving demand in the face of unprecedented deleveraging on the part of consumers and corporations (leaving governments–many already indebted to an at least problematic degree) worldwide was always going to be tough. These articles pinpoint in numerous ways exactly how difficult the process will be. First, from Stephen Roach, who writes in the New York ...Read more.
Why Should We be Surprised? (Yves Smith)
We noticed the article in today’s NY Times that the GAO will be releasing the first audit of the TARP program. Here is what Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has to say about it: The New York Times reports that the General Accounting Office is readying to issue a report that will criticize how Treasury ...Read more.
Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In
By David BaconThe Nation, web edition, November 26, 2008 Since 2001 the Bush administration has deported more than a million people–including 349,041 individuals in the fiscal year ending just prior to the election. It has resurrected the discredited community sweeps and factory raids of earlier eras, and started sending waves of migrants to privately run ...Read more.
Motor City Meltdown (Thomas Palley)
Thomas Palley’s latest policy op-ed. The financial crisis that began in 2007 has been persistently marked by muddled thinking and haphazard policymaking. Now, the United States Treasury is headed for a mistake of historic and catastrophic proportions by refusing to bail out America’s Big Three automakers. Make no mistake, if Detroit’s Big Three go bankrupt, ...Read more.
FDIC: Get Ready for More Bank Failures
Neoliberalism, the IMF, Summers, & Geithner
Interesting post by Ken Hanly on lbo-talk, about Obama’s new economics appointees: Timothy Geithner (to be Treasury Secretary) and Larry Summers (to be head of the National Economics Council, which coordinates economic policy throughout the executive branch): Both Summers and Geithner worked at the IMF and favored the deregulation that caused the financial crisis and ...Read more.
George Monbiot on the 'Other Crisis'
From the fantastic Tuesday morning Guardian columnist’s latest. Note in particular this little item: “This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new ...Read more.
