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, and outside experts who watched the collapse. What they heard amounted to something of a crash course... Read More
Has Teach for America Solved the Teacher Conundrum?
Cross-posted with MotherJones.com The Atlantic has a story in its January/February issue promisingly titled “What Makes a Great Teacher?” What indeed? As someone who follows education reform closely and occasionally writes about it, I clicked through to the article, eager to see what the writer, Amanda Ripley, had to say on one of the most puzzling, beguiling, confounding questions in all of education. What I found was far from inspiring or groundbreaking, and to be... 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 the crisis and instead pointed to lax regulation as the culprit, Leonhardt rightly notes, as many others... Read More
What Afghan Citizens Really Think
Cross-posted with MotherJones.com Flick/rybolov (Creative Commons) In the Western media, the views of Afghanistan’s political leaders and news of their latest political debacles—President Hamid Karzai’s standoff with the Parliament over his 24 cabinet nominations the most recent example—tend to dominate over all else; few and far between are the perspectives of those at the opposite end of the power structure, the Afghan citizens. Which is why the Kabul-based... Read More
Glass-Steagall Resurrected?
Cross-posted with Mother Jones Is the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that blocked commercial banks from participating in riskier investment banking, set for a revival? That’s what a new piece of legislation, introduced yesterday by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), would do, forcing major changes to financial titans like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America. But first, here’s McCain on the new legislation on CNBC: Reestablishing... 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 their closure though arbitration. The measure’s supporters say it will put the brakes on the... Read More
The Illusion of Recovery in Subprime America
That’s the gist of my new piece published today at TomDispatch.com. While there’s plenty of projections and guesses on how long it’ll taking the housing industry to recover, far fewer are the firsthand, boots-on-the-ground reports on how struggling homeowners are faring right now with explosive interest rates, underwater mortgages, and uncooperative servicers or lenders. Today’s piece, I hope, will offer that perspective, a story in three acts set in the... Read More
‘The Things We Do to Make It Home’ — Q & A with novelist Beverly Gologorsky
Originally published at Alternet.org *** ‘The Things We Do to Make It Home’ — Novel Takes Us Back to Soldiers’ Horrors of Vietnam For all the soldiers’ memoirs and non-fiction accounts of war’s lasting impact, few books capture the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and the lasting toll on soldiers and their loved ones, better than Beverly Gologorsky’s novel The Things We Do to Make It Home. Gologorsky’s novel depicts the lives of a group... Read More
‘The Doctor Can’t See You Now’
Here’s my latest story for MotherJones.com on the less-covered, under-the-radar health-care crisis that practically nobody’s talking about. *** THE DOCTOR CAN’T SEE YOU NOW (at MotherJones.com) It’s a year from now, and you wake up with a sore throat. You’re not worried, because not too long ago the Obama administration successfully passed comprehensive health care reform, expanding coverage to you and many of the 46 million Americans previously... Read More
OBAMA vs. THE WASHINGTON INFLUENCE MACHINE
That’s the title of my new piece published at TomDispatch.com, a dive into the onslaught by lobbyists and their special interest clients to derail the Obama administration’s legislative agenda. The piece looks at the vast amount of money being spent on lobbying, the growing numbers of lobbyists working on K Street and Capitol Hill (six health-care lobbyists for every one member of Congress), and the close ties between lawmakers and these lobbyists (see: Max Baucus). The... Read More
