The Sunlight Foundation has put together a fascinating animated graph that tracks the political donations from the finance, insurance and real estate sectors and to which party the money has gone. Utilizing Google Motion Chart and 20…
The media keeps getting Rep. Michele Bachmann’s home state wrong. Last week it was New Mexico and today it’s Florida — this time courtesy of Human Events, which reports that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson couldn’t assure Bachmann that his bailout plan would avert (in her words) “economic Armageddon.”
The Internet threw its collective weight around and led a public rejection of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s proposed $700 billion blank-check Wall Street bailout. The online petitions, open sources and…
Purely as a question of self-interest, John McCain’s exit-the-stage gambit makes sense. With cries of impending doom filling the air, he had nothing to gain by sticking around to discuss a subject he ill understands, all the while being pelted with quotations of the Hoover-like things he’s already said and done during his long tenure as a cheerleader of financial deregulation. On Monday of last week, McCain proclaimed the economy “fundamentally strong” even as Wall Street’s latest and gaudiest blowup was unfolding. Since then he’s faced erosion in the polls day after day.
Kevin Phillips, the former Nixon hand turned Wall Street/GOP critic, appeared on Bill Moyers Journal last Friday. It’s the best thing I’ve seen on television about the financial debacle unfolding this week–just as Phillips’ most recent book, Bad Money, is the best introduction to the perils of America’s financialized economy.
Crisis got you down? Spend all of your home equity now! And take out another mortgage while you’re at it. Cash is king! A press release this week from the CMPS Institute, an organization responsible for training and certifying mortgage bankers and brokers, reveals the lengths the industry’s heavyweights will go to in order to get a sale and keep Americans in debt, even after it’s common knowledge that years of reckless practices brought us here today.
Every hour of every day brings reams of fresh news reports and commentaries on the Wall Street crisis and the competing bailout proposals wending their way through Congress, but that doesn’t mean you can learn anything from most of them. Here’s a guide to the best, most comprehensible commentaries on the present mess.
A few weeks ago the Republican Party adopted the latest iteration of its party platform during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The platform embodies the ideals and vision…
Minnesota home prices have declined by as much as 20 percent. More than 27,000 will have their homes foreclosed on in the next year. Twenty-five percent of ARMS in the state have yet to adjust. And thousands of more homeowners are struggling with negative equity in their homes as the housing market continues to be hit with serious aftershocks.
So how will homeowners caught up in the crisis fare under the Bush Administration’s Wall Street bailout? U of M law professor and former assistant attorney general Prentiss Cox says the bailout is “like a reverse criminal action where you give restitution to the criminals and put the victims in jail.” He talks to MnIndy about how we got here and why the bailout needs to change.
As Congress, Wall Street and the American public debate the merits of using $700 billion in taxpayer money to shore up a crumbling banking industry, many people have offered putative solutions. Rep. Michele Bachmann–stop her if you’ve heard this one before–wants to open up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Bachmann has been on a months-long crusade to open more oil drilling around the United States, a crusade critics say would have little practical impact on gas prices at the pump.
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