Auto Bailouts: A Success Story?
Flickr/illuminea (Creative Commons) What began as the ugliest of government bailouts—the rescue of General Motors, Chrysler, and the financing company GMAC/Ally—is now shaping up to be one of the success stories of financial crisis. In its latest report, released on Thursday, the bipartisan Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) revisits the $60-billion dollar bailout of two of... Read More
Obama, rhetorical fisticuffs, and the new “jobs surge”
Flickr/phil dokas Below is a new, short piece of mine—an introduction, to be precise, to Steve Fraser’s most recent piece for TomDispatch.com, “The New Deal in Reverse: How the Obama Administration Ended Up Where Franklin Roosevelt Began.” Fraser’s piece compares the first years of Obama and FDR, and unlike any other historian, he describes how the first... Read More
A Crash Course on the Financial Meltdown — Pecora Part II Begins
Cross-posted from MotherJones.com. The 10 members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the modern heir to the famous Pecora Commission convened in the wake of Wall Street’s 1929 crash, kicked off a marathon set of hearings on Wednesday and Thursday by grilling some of Wall Street’s most powerful executives, the regulators supposedly tasked with reining them in,... Read More
Blind Ben and the Fed
Cross-posted with MotherJones.com In his column today, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt takes to task the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Ben Bernanke, for not acknowledging that they inexplicably missed the housing bubble, and questions the Fed’s ability to spot future bubbles. In the wake of Bernanke’s speech this weekend in which he deflected blame for... Read More
Dispatch from Foreclosureland
Cross-posted with Mother Jones In August, I wrote about the Obama administration’s flawed $75 billion homeowner rescue effort, the Home Affordable Modification Program, and therein introduced readers to Florida homeowner Kristina Page. Page’s mortgage company, Saxon Mortgage Services, first told her it hadn’t heard of HAMP. Then, when Saxon finally admitted Page... Read More
A New Lease on Life for Detroit’s Auto Dealers?
Cross-posted with Mother Jones Buried way down in the fine print of the Congress’ $1.1 trillion spending bill, passed Thursday by the House, is a lifeline for an endangered species—the American car dealer. A clause inside the the 1,088-page bill would give thousands of General Motors and Chrysler dealerships that have been put on the chopping block the chance to challenge... Read More
VIDEO: Where’s my economic recovery?
Here’s a recent video piece of mine at MotherJones.com on the continuing woes for homeowners on the West Coast, one of the hardest hit areas in the country in the housing crisis. While there may be talk of economic recovery on a macro level, the homeowners I met in the video certainly haven’t seen their recovery yet. (Here’s the original link at MotherJones.com.) Read More
The Government’s Foreclosure Rescue Mirage
Mother Jones published a new investigative story of mine today on the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program, its $75 billion, largely taxpayer funded foreclosure prevention program. The one that’s been one big bust. I’ve excerpted the piece below, and you can check the full thing out and comment on it here, at MotherJones.com. (Which you should do!)... Read More
Four Reasons to Foil the Fed
Like oil and water, the Federal Reserve and transparency do not mix. Or, as the incisive Bill Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, wrote in a recent cover story for The Nation: “The Federal Reserve is the black hole of our democracy—the crucial contradiction that keeps the people and their representatives from having any voice... Read More
The ‘Greatest Swindle Ever Sold’ Swindles On and On and On…
I’ve been blogging quite a bit at MotherJones.com, where I’m now working, on the ever-growing swindle that is the government bailout. It’s at around $13 trillion dollars now, and as I show, it’s painfully clear that the bailout has nothing to do with taxpayers or small-business owners or normal citizens. Instead, this has been a bailout of the banks, by the... Read More
