Paul Ryan's battle for billionaires

Thanks to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, we’re going to be saved from a negative campaign. Now we’ll be elevated by a campaign about Big Ideas.

At least that’s the latest tripe being peddled by the Big Media, which has spent a lot of time drooling over the insane Ryan budget plan House Republicans passed before it died, only to be joyfully revived by Democrats who sought to pin in to the chests of their Republican opponents in Congressional races, then revived again by a befuddled Mitt Romney, who seems to want to cling to it (for his base) and distance himself from it (for everybody else).

According to the media, Ryan is a cheerful wonk who is the only one brave and bold enough to propose a plan to reduce the federal deficit. Never mind that the numbers don’t add up, or that his budget scheme involves a massive future reductions not only of Medicare but all government services except defense spending.

Ryan has become a top expert at capitalizing on legitimate skepticism about government and economic anxiety in the wake of the 2008 bailout and grafting those feelings on to the austerity agenda of the 1 percent – crushing all government regulation, reducing popular government services like parks and health care for the elderly, and privatizing Social Security while placing the burden of the nation’s fiscal problems on those least able to afford it and keeping tax rates low for the wealthiest Americans.

For our media elite, these are what pass for serious ideas. There’s little scrutiny beyond reporting Ryan’s rhetoric, in which he insists he’s out to save Medicare and merely facing a fiscal reality that others are afraid to confront.

You don’t have to dig very deep to find Ryan’s real motives, and who the winners will be if he wins his fight.

As usual in contemporary politics, the reality can be found in the money that has fueled Ryan’s rise. Among his top campaign contributors: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, UBS bank and Wells-Fargo, along with corporate powerhouses like AT&T, Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Northwestern Mutual. He’s been closely associated with the billionaire Koch Brothers’ Americans For Prosperity.

Once you look into Ryan’s actual record, he looks a lot more like your garden-variety congressional hypocrite: preaching the free-market gospel while he votes for the 2008 no-questions-asked bank bailout, trashing the Obama administration stimulus package while making sure that his congressional district got its share of the spoils.

If the media were doing its job, Ryan would be dismissed for the craven con artist that he is, not lionized. Mitt Romney claims that he chose Ryan to balance out his own inexperience in Washington. But Ryan’s efforts to push through his budget scheme have failed miserably – except at making him a media darling.

If the media were doing its job, the headlines would be describing Ryan’s real, and embarrassingly modest, legislative record since he was elected to Congress in 1998. His first successful piece of legislation renamed his local post office in Janesville, Wisconsin for longtime Wisconsin Democratic congressman and former defense secretary Les Aspin in 2000. His other legislative achievement has been a bill to amend the IRS code to modify the taxation of arrow components. (Ryan uses bows and arrows for sport.)

Along with other fellow Republicans, he signed on to the Bush tax cuts, a partial-birth abortion ban and several efforts to increase sanctions against Iran.

Aside from that, he’s co-sponsored eight pieces of legislation issuing commemorative coins and five resolutions honoring Ronald Reagan.

There must have been some tough choices involved. Just who exactly should get a commemorative coin in their honor? Not just anybody, and you’re bound to make somebody mad. But it’s not exactly a profile of courage. How much courage does it take to do the bidding of the CEOs who keep you in office, against the retirees and the poor who can’t afford fat contributions and lobbyists?

 

 

 

 

 

Congress / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / Social Security - 08/16/2012

That incredible shrinking foreclosure settlement

I checked in with Citibank the other day to see how they were doing on their promise to reduce principal on loans for qualified underwater borrowers.

The bank had made that promise as part of a highly touted national settlement of foreclosure fraud charges with state attorneys general back in February.

One thing the bank did not agree to, apparently, was any sense of urgency.

A bank representative told me they had taken a couple of months to get set up and were now in the process of reviewing their borrowers’ files.

He said he thought they would be done by mid-August.

One thing we know for certain: without a tough independent monitor to track what the banks are doing, and not doing, they’ll take their time to produce little help for troubled borrowers.

We know that from the banks’ past poor performance in the administration’s various foreclosure aid programs.

But now state politicians are threatening to grab the cash that banks paid as part of the settlement – money that was supposed to be used to pay monitors to oversee the banks’ compliance with the settlement, along with hiring more housing counselors that could guide homeowners to assistance where it was available and providing legal advice.

At issue is the relatively small amount of cash penalties the banks actually had to turn over in the $25 billion settlement– about $5 billion– with half of that supposed to go to state attorneys general for new foreclosure assistance.

Another $20 billion consists of a dubious and highly complex system of credits given to the banks for taking actions to help homeowners, some of which they were already supposed to be doing.

The national mortgage settlement has always been mainly a PR stunt for the state attorneys general and the Obama administration, to try to make up for their shameful collective failures to protect homeowners from the bankers’ continuing fraud and sloppiness in the foreclosure process, or to hold bankers accountable.

The investigative outfit Pro Publica delved into what they called the “billion-dollar bait and switch,” with states planning to divert $974 million from the settlement to their general funds to cover serious budge deficits arising, ironically, from the Great Recession, which was caused by the bankers’ out of control speculation.

Among those that are looting money that was supposed to be targeted at helping those facing foreclosure are states that have been particularly hard hit by foreclosures, including California and Arizona. Those states got more money from the settlement to compensate for their residents’ victimization by the biggest banks in the foreclosure process.

In California, Governor Jerry Brown now intends to use the state’s $411 million settlement proceeds to help plug a severe budget gap, in particular to pay for existing housing programs, but no new foreclosure assistance initiatives.

You would think diverting the proceeds of a legal settlement would be illegal. But apparently states have the power to raid the settlement funds, having done so in 2003 with fancy financing schemes to get state officials’ hands on funds that were supposed to be targeted for health care costs from a 1998 settlement with tobacco companies, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

State budget problems brought on by the 2008 financial collapse are enormous, but no more compelling than the continuing failure of our elected officials to grapple with the foreclosure crisis. That failure is now underscored by the hollow ring of the state AGs’ promises, and compounded by governors’ betrayal of  those promises.

 

 

California Attorney General Kamala Harris / Foreclosures / Martin Column - 06/01/2012

Occupy Washington

Emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court, big corporations have been busy exercising their newly granted First Amendment rights. Now a growing number of Americans are exercising theirs, assembling in cities throughout the nation to protest the bailouts, budget cuts and other artifacts of the Wall Street financial debacle three years ago this month.

Americans are notoriously slow to rouse, even when they are hurting. And we are certainly hurting: nine percent of Americans are “officially” unemployed; count those who have given up looking or have taken jobs far beneath their skill and ability, and one in five are struggling to stay afloat. Those fortunate enough to hang on to their jobs have to worry about the cost of health insurance, gas and groceries. 81% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track. The other twenty percent are presumably among those who lay claim to most of the wealth of our country.

Eighteen days ago, a few hundred citizens rallied in New York City, inspired by a call to “Occupy Wall Street” proposed by a magazine article. At first, the protestors – largely young people - got a snide blow-off from the New York Times. But thanks in part to some gratuitous pepper spray from the police, media coverage grew along with the protestors’ numbers. Last weekend, thousands marched in New York, while citizens in Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Denver, Madison, Atlanta and Boston have turned out. The list is growing. Participants defy categorization or caricature: they come from all walks of life, all age groups, all ideologies. All share the view that the country has run off the rails.

Europeans have been protesting for months, their economies suffering severe collateral damage from the economic contagion unleashed by the Great Recession here at home. In Iran, Egypt and other Middle East nations, anger at poverty and political oppression boiled over earlier this year; dictators were overthrown.

But until now, most Americans have occupied nothing more than their living rooms – odd, since America’s own citizen revolution has been the beacon of democracy for the rest of the world. Many no doubt are simply too busy and too tired: two wage earner families, with some parents holding two jobs each. Some have lost so much confidence in government and in themselves that their sense of powerlessness has led to personal paralysis. No one can challenge the decision to stay home.

But the choice to stand in protest is the one singular act of political power left to the silent majority of the American people. A radical United States Supreme Court has concluded that corporate donations to politicians – a.k.a. bribery – are a form of “expression” that is protected by the First Amendment. The multinational conglomerates have used their vast wealth to seize control of our country. This has to change, and it has to be done by an amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifying that the right to support candidates and causes in elections belongs only to human beings - you can start the process right here. In the meantime, powerful as they are, corporations cannot march down our streets. Only human beings can do that.

Inevitably, the defenders of the intolerable status quo try to brand protests and protestors as insubordinate. They know that a citizenry, aroused, is a fearsome force. In recent days, as more Americans stand up to denounce the virulently destructive disparity in incomes and opportunities between the corporate elites and everyone else, the corporate hacks on Capitol Hill and the talk radio commentariat indicted the discussion as “class warfare.” Apparently that’s impermissible in our democracy because it challenges the core concept that “we the people” rule, and “we” is supposed to mean all of us. That’s precisely what’s at stake, of course, and the people demanding that it be addressed are nothing short of patriots.

Warren Buffet, the world’s second richest person according to Forbes, told CNN last week: “Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won.”

As we reported back in 2009, Wall Street has occupied Washington for too long. Now it’s up to us to take it back.

 

Harvey Column - 10/04/2011

Bold Lite

Maybe President Obama's jobs plan will succeed in making congressional Republicans look bad before the 2012 election, especially if they reject it and demonize it as another socialist plot.

But even in the unlikely event that the congressional Republicans pass it whole, would the president's $440 billion grab bag offer significant solutions to Main Street’s most pressing problems – reducing the unemployment rate and halting the foreclosure crisis?

Probably not.

It’s true that the president and his administration did not dig the deep economic hole the country is in. And the president deserves some credit for stepping out of Washington’s deficit obsession bubble just long enough to recognize that nothing the government has done so far has been enough to lift those outside Wall Street out of that hole – the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

But throughout his administration, and again last night, he has not offered big enough shovels, to dig us out of it.

As Paul Krugman [who labels the plan “a lot better than nothing”] points out, the collapse of the housing bubble blew a  $1 trillion a year hole in the economy, a hole that last night’s jobs plan won’t come close to filling.

But a comparison of the jobs plan’s $440 billion price tag with the unsuccessful $16 trillion bank bailout suggests its relative timidity. Remember that the federal government handed over that money to the bankers with no strings attached and no questions asked.

While the administration likes to tout the bank bailout’s success by bragging that most of the money has been repaid, by its most important measure – ensuring that the banking system helped restore the Main Street economy - it remains a costly failure.

Still you have to at least acknowledge that the bank bailout was a bold scheme. The same can’t be said for the American Jobs Act, which as the president stressed, was a collection of non-controversial proposals that even corporate Republicans have endorsed in the past.

Call it Obama’s “bold lite.”

Yes, it was bolder than what the president has suggested since the original $700 billion stimulus. It includes $240 billion of tax cuts and about $200 billion in infrastructure spending and aid to local governments, along with regulatory review, a vague housing scheme, plus a significant new round of budget cuts to pay for it, including unspecified threats to Medicare.

According to an estimate by Economic Policy Institute, the new plan, if passed whole, would create 2.6 million new jobs over the next several years and prevent the loss of another 1.6 million jobs.

That’s not chopped liver – but the country is still staggering under the weight of persistent 9 percent unemployment, with 14 million Americans unemployed, another 8.8 million working part-time but seeking fulltime work, and another 2.6 million who don’t show up in unemployment numbers because they’ve given up looking for work. In addition, we face a continuing foreclosure crisis and the threat of future budget cuts.

While I hope that the congressional Republicans don’t just decide to block the proposal, experience suggests that they are stuck on that strategy as a way to undermine the president. Will “a lot better than nothing” be good enough to help millions of Americans for whom the recovery has only been a mirage? Or is the president setting himself up, and the rest of us, for another round of dashed hopes and failure?

Uncategorized - 09/10/2011

D.C. Disconnect: Geek Squad Edition

Deep within the of bowels of the Defense Department is the secretive agency that invented the Internet, known as the Defense Research Projects Agency, aka DARPA, aka the Mad Scientist agency.

With its $3.2 billion budget, the agency is supposed to come up with wild, innovative ideas. Some of their inventions, like military drones, “work,” while others, like psychic CIA agents, robot hummingbirds and mind-bending wormholes, have earned the agency the reputaion of something of a hare-brained money pit.

One of its recent projects, something called the halfnium bomb, apparently ran into problems getting past the basic laws of physics.

President Obama himself recently showered major love on DARPA, hailing it as a source of cutting-edge technology.

At least one aspect of DARPA retains an infuriatingly old-fashioned quality – the reek of conflict-of-interest and nepotism.

Before she became head of the agency in 2009, Regina Dugan started a high-tech explosive detection company called RedX Defense, with her father and her uncle, the Project on Government Oversight reports. She served as CEO and president. Six months after she took over the DARPA, RedX, where her father now serves as CEO, landed a $400,000 contract with the agency, which was recently extended.

Dugan of course, disqualified herself from any decisions regarding her former company when she took over DARPA. The agency’s media office insisted there were no ethical issues with the contract because Dugan didn’t participate in awarding it.

POGO was less generous, and suggested in its understated way, “it surely must have come as a pleasant surprise to learn that DARPA’s contract management office had chosen the company she founded to do work for DARPA.”

Maybe it was a pleasant surprise for Dugan; it was unfortunately no surprise to taxpayers, who have grown way too accustomed to these kinds of shenanigans.

D.C. Disconnect / Martin Column - 03/05/2011

Obama Visits the Nasty Neighbor

President Obama paid a call on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a few days ago. No organization has done more to obstruct and derail the president's policy agenda: on behalf of the massive industries that fund its $200 million budget, the Chamber fiercely opposed health care reform, financial reform, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, environmental protection, and consumer access to the courts, often at the expense of small businesses.  Last year, it killed a bill in the Senate that would have stripped big business of tax breaks when they outsource American jobs to other countries. Its litigation shop, lavishly supported by a who's who of corporate defendants in civil and criminal matters, has been remarkably successful in protecting big business in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.  The U.S. Chamber is a highly partisan operation that will never cede an inch of ground to the President or his party.

Still, it wasn’t so much that Obama went to Chamber, or what he said when he got there, that bothered me. It was that he walked there from the White House.

The Chamber's headquarters is only three tenths of a mile from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a five minute stroll across Lafayette Park. Most Americans would never consider taking the car (except maybe Angelenos).

But when the President rolls, dozens of vehicles, from ambulances and TV trucks to communications and heavily armed Secret Service vans, go with him. It's spectacle, but, as President Reagan understood, the motorcade is a potent symbol of the power and majesty of the presidency.

Going on foot to the headquarters of corporate America, Obama surrendered not merely the trappings of power but, inescapably, a measure of the dignity of his office.

A year ago, Obama hoofed it back to the White House from a speech at the Chamber. That was right after his annual physical, and Obama joked that he needed to walk off some of his cholesterol. More importantly, that was before the mid-term elections, when the President’s party got walloped, thanks in no small part to the $31.7 million the Chamber spent around the nation, 93% of which went to elect Republicans.

His latest visit wasn't exactly "hat in hand," but by the President's own reckoning it was pretty close: “I'm here in the interest of being more neighborly," Obama told his hosts. "Maybe if we had brought over a fruitcake when I first moved in, we would have gotten off to a better start.”

"I'm going to make up for it," the President promised. Some of us think he's already done plenty for big business, and not quite so much for average Americans, most of whom are struggling to survive the aftermath of the debacle on Wall Street.

Mr. Obama was careful not to completely prostrate himself before the Chamber's bigwigs. But every remark that could be considered a point of disagreement was tempered with a nod to the Chamber’s ideology. The President defended health care reform, but instead of discussing the human toll of the private insurance mess, explained that it “made our entire economy less competitive.” He warned that “the perils of too much regulation are matched by the dangers of too little,” referring to the financial crisis, but did not discuss lost jobs or homes. Instead he said, “the absence of sound rules of the road was hardly good for business.” Invoking one of John F. Kennedy’s most memorable speeches, Obama said, “as we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America.” But the man who appeared before the Chamber conceived of his job far differently than he did when he asked Americans for it in 2008:  “the final responsibility of government,” President Obama told the Chamber audience, is “breaking down barriers that stand in the way of your success.”

This week’s stroll was part of the President’s Chamber charm campaign, which began in earnest with the State of the Union speech in January, when the President seemed to declare the recession over because  “the stock market has come roaring back” and “corporate profits are up.”

For one in five Americans still out of work, for the one in four homeowners whose homes are worth less than the amount they owe on their mortgages, that was a painful moment reminiscent of George Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech back in 2003 about the Iraq War. Obama spent the rest of the State of the Union on a combination of platitudes and pandering to his opponents, pledging among other things to get rid of unnecessary government regulations - one of the Chamber's perennial priorities.

There are plenty of other places the president could have gone if he was in the mood for an outing. The national headquarters of the AFL-CIO is only a few steps away from the Chamber, but he has never made that trip, as the California Nurses Association pointed out. Sadly, that would not be as controversial a venue as the President might fear: the AFL issued a joint press release with the Chamber praising the president’s State of the Union speech. Still, a visit from the president would have made a statement to the nation about the role working women and men play in what is known as the "real" economy (as opposed to Wall Street and the Money Industry). A fairly straightforward jog down Pennsylvania Avenue would have taken Mr. Obama to Consumer Watchdog's office on Capitol Hill.

We'll be watching where the President wanders to next. If you know what you are doing, and are clear about where you want to go, navigating the nation's capital isn't hard. But for newcomers who don't, it's very easy to get lost in D.C.

Harvey Column / Outrage / Uncategorized - 02/11/2011

D.C. Disconnect: Revolving Door Edition

When it comes to shaping the Obama administration’s economic policies, only those with tight connections to the nation’s too big to fail banks need apply.

The latest example is the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Jacob Lew.

He spent most of his career working in government and academia, with one significant exception – a stint as chief operating officer of Citibank’s Alternative Investments Division, which manages about $7 billion in investments in developing countries. Lew was one of those banking executives whose huge post-bailout bonus enraged the public.

In Washington, the issue barely surfaced in Lew’s confirmation hearings. Lew suggested he was too busy running Citibank to notice that the place was drowning in toxic collateralized debt obligations that nobody even understood.

Meanwhile, the guy Lew replaced, Peter Orzag, is headed for a high-paying banking post of his own – at Citibank.

Lew and Orzag were among the large, bipartisan banking-friendly crowd who apparently failed to comprehend or question what was going on around and beneath them in the years immediately preceding the financial crisis.

During that time, one of the places where Orzag and Lew would gather was the Hamilton Project, a high-powered D.C.-based think tank within the Brookings Institute where Democratic Party politicians and bankers could get together to drink in the wisdom of the project’s founder, Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, a major proponent of banking deregulation, mentor to current top Obama financial advisers Tim Geithner and Larry Summers – and then, the president of Citibank.

The Hamilton Project has been described as a “bastion of the fiscally moderate wing of the Democratic Party.” But it would be more precisely described as the home of the increasingly influential too big to fail bank wing of the Democratic Party.

And who showed up to welcome the launch of the project in 2006?

None other than then-Sen. Barack Obama, who told the assembled crowd, “I would love just to sit here with these folks and listen because you have on this panel and in this room some of the most innovative, thoughtful policymakers, people who have both ideas but also ways of implementing them into action. Our country owes a great debt to a number of people who are in this room because they helped put us on a pathway of prosperity that we are still enjoying, despite the best efforts of some.” (Watch it here.)

This door swinging jovially back and forth between Wall Street and Washington is so common that it registers as a non-event, and makes a mockery of the Kabuki theater of the supposed hostility between Obama and the financial titans.

Ira Stoll at The Future of Capitalism reminds us, in case we forgot, of other members of the Obama economic team who cashed in on Wall Street before it melted down and they joined the administration, like top economic adviser Laurence Summers and $5.2 million a year, one day a week job at the D.E. Shaw hedge fund, and former chief of staff and Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel, who got paid $16.2 million for working for a year and a half at the investment banking firm Wasserstein Perella.

As for Orzag, his departure for Citibank created a faint stir in the mainstream media, where Ezra Klein of the Washington Post notes that Orzag doesn’t appear to be in it for the money, since he’s “fairly wealthy” already, and “his lifetime of public service positions does not suggest a man particularly motivated by income.”

But at the Atlantic’s blog, James Fallow viewed Orzag’s move as an example of Washington’s structural corruption. His comments strike me as stating what is blindingly obvious to anyone who lives and works outside the opaque world of Washington. “The idea that someone would help plan, advocate, and carry out an economic policy that played such a crucial role in the survival of a financial institution – and then, less than two years after his administration took office, would take a job that (a) exemplifies the growing disparities the administration says it's trying to correct and (b) unavoidably will call on knowledge and contacts Orszag developed while in recent public service – this says something bad about what is taken for granted in American public life.

For Baseline Scenario’s James Kwak, it’s also more than a straightforward conflict of interest. Why does a young, highly educated energetic member of the elite, who presumably doesn’t need a Wall Street paycheck, want to work at Citibank?

“Orszag wanting to work at a megabank — instead of starting a new company, or joining a foundation, or joining an NGO, or becoming an executive at a struggling manufacturing company that makes things, or even being a consultant to countries with sovereign debt problems — is the same as an engineer from a top school going to Goldman instead of a real company. It’s not his fault, but it’s a symptom of something that’s bad for our country.”

Around the Web / Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Too Big To Fail - 12/22/2010

`Bloodbath' in Taxbreakistan

Welcome to Taxbreakistan, where the same guys who profited from the financial crisis have launched a treacherous two-fisted propaganda campaign: attacking the benefits of the increasingly fragile middle class while protecting the gains the wealthiest accumulated from the bubble economy and the bailout.

The propaganda war is couched in terms of paternal sobriety and facing up to financial realities, making tough choices and sharing sacrifices.

According to the propaganda, the only thing preventing the anemic economy from taking off is that the wealthiest Americans who have an ever-increasing share of the nation’s wealth don’t have enough money yet. Aside from the wealthy not having their permanent tax cuts, the main impediment to the economic recovery, according to the propaganda, is continuing to pay unemployment checks to those out of work.

What a load of twaddle.

While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and right-wing think tanks are leading the propaganda campaign, one of the leading bomb throwers in this war is former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, who President Obama appointed to co-chair a commission to examine options to reduce the federal deficit. A fierce advocate of budget cutting, Simpson, a Republican, said recently that he couldn’t wait for the `bloodbath’ that will ensue when Republicans take a meat cleaver to the federal budget in exchange for raising the federal debt limit.

You may recall Simpson’s earlier colorful quote, in which he compared Social Security to a “milk cow with 310 million teats.”

A couple of weeks ago, Simpson threw down the gauntlet in a draft report he wrote with his co-chair Erskine Bowles, a former Democratic Party honcho and hedge fund partner. They proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare and a host of other sweeteners long sought by big business, such as caps on medical malpractice verdicts, that have little to do with deficit reduction but everything to do with a corporate political agenda. The full commission’s report could be released this week.

Meanwhile, Congress jockeys over how to deliver a sloppy wet kiss to the nation’s wealthiest in the guise of continuing their Bush era tax cuts, supposedly as a means to stimulate the economy, even though the tax cuts themselves add $700 billion to the deficit. While President Obama expresses opposition to extending the tax cuts for those making over $250,000 a year, the president hasn’t been much of a force in the propaganda war over our economic future.

For their part, the Republicans have dug in their heels on behalf of the nation’s gajillionaires.

The whole propaganda campaign is based on the fraudulent notion that tax cuts for the rich help the economy. That’s not how they started out, before the second George Bush was elected president. He intended them as a way to “starve the beast” – giving back the government surplus that had built up during the Clinton era boom as a way to shrink government. His advisers argued that if the government kept that money it was likely to spend it.

Only later, as the economy began to soften, did Bush add the economic stimulus argument. But the evidence that the tax cuts did anything to boost the economy has always been slim at best. Deficit hawks like Simpson and Bowles are trying to jack up the public’s fear about the deficit in a slow-motion version of the fear-mongering that preceded the no-questions asked bank bailout of 2008, and subsequent highly secretive Federal Reserve money giveaway to the nation’s big banks. We shouldn’t fall for it.

A coalition of progressive-leaning nonprofits have offered an alternative, which favors stimulating the economy first, then cutting the deficit. You can check it out here.

Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 11/30/2010

A different kind of bailout

What a striking contrast between the urgency and dramatic action the government mobilized to meet Wall Street’s financial crisis last year and the continuing hand-wringing, half-measures and wishful thinking that have greeted the dire continuing financial crisis on Main Street.

Martin Column / TARP - 10/14/2009