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Presidential contenders Barack Obama and John McCain gingerly are embracing the bailout deal, with McCain calling it "something that all of us will swallow hard and go forward with."
With the country's attention focused on bailout negotiations at the Capitol, McCain and Obama largely have been sticking to the topic at hand.
The McCain campaign allowed cameras to capture him "working the phones" from his condo in suburban Virginia.
Obama had three rallies this weekend centered on the economy, at which he repeatedly declared, "I think John McCain doesn't get it." At one event, he even accused McCain of a "Katrina-like response" to the financial crisis.
The past few days have been rough for McCain.
He declared Wednesday that he was suspending his campaign to get involved in the bailout talks, a move Democrats and even some Republicans have derided as grandstanding
Presidential contenders Barack Obama and John McCain gingerly are embracing the... more
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An end to the debates in Washington over the proposed bailout of financial institutions on Wall Street is in sight. Leaders in Congress gave an update on the status of the $700 billion economic-rescue package early Sunday evening.
“The era of Wall Street recklessness is over,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of the bill, which promises more regulation as well as future limits to be imposed upon executive compensation.
Pelosi, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) each spoke in support of the bill that will be presented to the House for a vote sometime Monday.
Now, even some of the more reluctant House Republicans are supporting the rescue plan.
Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.), Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), House Republican Whip, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) gave their support of the revised plan in a press conference Sunday evening.
“When we stood up and blocked the ‘so-called’ deal last week we did so because we thought taxpayers weren’t being protected,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) Sunday evening. “It’s a bill that does entail risk; taxpayer risk. But I think what you see is we’ve reduced the amount of taxpayer risk in this bill considerably.”
If passed by the House, the bill will then move to the Senate, which will likely consider it Wednesday, after the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah ends.
President Bush lent his support to the revised bill in a press release following the press conference, stating, “I appreciate the leadership shown by Members on both sides of the aisle, who came together to write a very good bill. This bill provides the necessary tools and funding to help protect our economy against a system-wide breakdown.”
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson released a similar statement of support, stating that the bill “provides the necessary tools to deploy up to $700 billion to address the urgent needs in our financial system.”
The bill, which is more than 100 pages long and is called the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,” is meant to resuscitate the U.S. financial system, parts of which have virtually shut down in recent weeks.
An end to the debates in Washington over the proposed bailout of financial... more
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WASHINGTON - In the short run, congressional leaders have achieved their goal of producing an agreement Sunday on a federal bailout of banks and other financial institutions holding bad mortgage debts before the world's stock markets reopened.
But in the long run, the scope and still-unknown effects of the greatest government intervention in the financial markets since the Great Depression and the remaining underlying instability of the nation's economy -- will impose a new political challenge for the next president and Congress elected in November. The situation already has reshaped the election campaign debate.
Congressional leaders face another immediate and uncertain challenge this week with the House expected to vote on the plan as soon as Monday, and the Senate as soon as Wednesday in corralling enough votes to both pass it and present the controversial two-stage bailout as a bipartisan response to a national crisis.
While resistant House Republican leaders have agreed to it, many rank and file members still are balking at the unprecedented bailout of the nation's financial institutions, piling as much as $700 billion of new federal debt on the nation's taxpayers.
Congressional leaders are attempting to frame the measure as their own best compromise on a plan that the Bush administration proposed which they are now calling unacceptable.
This means, in part, dividing the bailout into two phases, starting with $350 billion but requiring congressional approval for a second pay-out. And it includes a demand that if the government does not recoup all the money that it invests in reselling mortgage debt that it purchases, it comes up with a plan to get the financial industry to cover any projected taxpayer losses.
"This is the administration's problem,'' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Sunday, "they sent us their bill, we did our best to improve it, and now we'll see how much support we can get
We will have to have bipartisanship to pass it.''
President Bush, who proposed the Treasury Department rescue and has pushed for it with national television and radio addresses, calls it essential to averting "financial panic' in frozen lending and a "long and painful recession. Congressional leaders agree that it is essential in averting a freeze in credit for everything from home loans and car loans to student loans and credit cards.
"Getting this done soon, promptly, is absolutely critical to the confidence of the markets,'' Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), one of the lead negotiators, said Sunday, predicting the votes to approve it this week. "The option of not passing it is not acceptable.''
WASHINGTON - In the short run, congressional leaders have achieved their goal of... more
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The U.S. dollar rose against the yen and the euro, and US Treasury bond futures slipped on Sunday evening as U.S. lawmakers geared up for a Monday vote on creating a $700 billion government fund to buy bad debt.
U.S. stock futures edged higher, but momentum was held in check as another big U.S. bank appeared in the throes of an emergency takeover and two struggling European banks looked set for nationalization.
And while Washington's bailout package is seen as crucial in tackling the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression, doubts remain as to whether it could immediately thaw the money and credit markets.
"What you hope for is a positive reaction in Asia and Europe overnight and stability in the U.S. financial markets, most particularly the credit markets this week," said Jim Awad, Chairman at W.P. Stewart & Co. Ltd in New York.
"I would view any (stock market) rallies as being transitory because now the real work begins," he added.
Belgian-Dutch financial group Fortis faced nationalisation on Sunday after European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet held emergency talks with Belgian and Dutch ministers on rescuing one of Europe's 20 banks.
Britain's government, meanwhile, will nationalize troubled mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley and were discussing a sale of its savings book and branches, people familiar with the matter said.
In Germany, Hypo Real Estate was in urgent talks with German banking regulator Bafin and the finance ministry about solving a refinancing squeeze at the bank, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
The New York Times reported that Citigroup and Wells Fargo were locked in a bidding war over a possible emergency takeover of Wachovia Corp. The U.S. government, led by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, are also involved in the Wachovia talks, the paper said.
S&P 500 stock index futures rose 2.4 points and were above fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average index futures rose 10 points and Nasdaq 100 index futures were up 3.25 points.
New Zealand's stock market rose 1.1 percent in early trade.
Shortly after 6:30 p.m. New York time (2230 GMT) on Sunday evening, the 10-year Treasury note future opened down about 3/32 in price at 114 and 13/32, as the safe haven bid for government debt faded slightly.
The euro slipped 0.6 percent to $1.4530. Against the yen, the dollar was last up 0.3 percent at 106.26 yen.
Spot gold prices slipped 0.6 percent to $878 an ounce.
Wall Street equities had scratched out a gain Friday as financial stocks rallied late in the session on hope the U.S. Congress could reach agreement on the rescue plan. Still, Friday also featured much the same move to safe-haven assets that have dominated global markets for the past two weeks.
Gold jumped 4.0 percent at one point on Friday and the yen climbed broadly as investors piled into safer assets after news the bailout talks had stalled, while the failure of Washington Mutual, the biggest bank closure in U.S. history on Thursday, eroded confidence.
Oil prices slipped on Sunday night, pressured by concerns the financial market crisis would slow demand. Further pressure came as investors, who flocked into oil and other commodities earlier this year as a hedge against inflation and a weak dollar, shift into safer havens. U.S. crude oil futures settled at $106.89 a barrel on Friday, down $1.13.
Asian stocks ended last week lower. Japan's Nikkei share average shed 0.2 percent for the week, and the MSCI index of Asia-Pacific stocks outside Japan fell 1.5 percent.
MSCI's main world equity index fell 2.8 percent last week week. Central banks injected fresh liquidity into the global banking system, helping lower soaring inter-bank borrowing rates, but money markets remained mostly paralyzed.
The U.S. dollar rose against the yen and the euro, and US Treasury bond futures... more
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Republican John McCain agreed to attend the first presidential debate Friday night even though Congress doesn't have a bailout deal, reversing an earlier decision to delay the event until Washington had taken action to address the crisis.
With less than 10 hours until the debate was scheduled to start, the McCain campaign announced that the Arizona senator would travel to the University of Mississippi. The campaign said that afterward McCain would return to Washington to continue working on the financial crisis.
Obama had always planned to attend the debate and was aboard his plane preparing to take off when McCain's announcement was made. McCain quickly moved to his own private aircraft and headed South with his wife and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his wife, Judith, on board.
The action contradicted the position McCain had taken Wednesday, when he announced, "I'm directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the Commission on Presidential Debates to delay Friday night's debate until we have taken action to address this crisis."
McCain had also said he would suspend all campaign activities, but in reality the campaign just shifted to Washington while the work of trying to win the election went on.
McCain had taken a gamble with the move, trying to appear above politics and as a leader on an issue that had overshadowed the presidential campaign and given him trouble. But Democratic rival Barack Obama had not bowed to McCain's challenge, and instead questioned why the Republican nominee couldn't handle two things at once — the debate and involvement in the bailout negotiations.
An Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll out Friday just before McCain's announcement showed the public overwhelmingly wanted the candidates to debate, 60 percent to 22 percent, with the rest undecided.
By Friday morning, it appeared McCain was looking for a face-saving way to get to the debate even though a deal had not been reached. He met with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, before heading to his campaign headquarters and issuing a statement that blamed others in Washington for the failure to reach an agreement.
"John McCain's decision to suspend his campaign was made in the hopes that politics could be set aside to address our economic crisis," the statement said. "In response, Americans saw a familiar spectacle in Washington. At a moment of crisis that threatened the economic security of American families, Washington played the blame game rather than work together to find a solution that would avert a collapse of financial markets without squandering hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money to bail out bankers and brokers who bet their fortunes on unsafe lending practices."
Summoned by Bush
Both McCain and Obama had returned to Washington on Thursday at the urging of President Bush, who invited them to a meeting with congressional leaders at the White House. But a session aimed at showing unity in resolving the financial crisis broke up with conflicts in plain view.
McCain's campaign said the meeting "devolved into a contentious shouting match" and implied Obama was at fault — on a day when McCain said he was putting politics aside to focus on the nation's financial problems.
Republican John McCain agreed to attend the first presidential debate Friday night... more
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When Sen. Barack Obama was given the floor to speak during White House negotiations, according to White House aides, he did so raising concerns about a House Republican alternative to the Paulson/Bernanke $700 billion bailout. But those concerns weren't necessarily his, as he was not aware of the GOP plan before reviewing notes provided him by Paulson loyalists in Treasury prior to entering the meeting.
According to an Obama campaign source, the notes were passed to Obama via senior aides traveling with him, who had been emailed the document via a current Goldman Sachs employee and Wall Street fundraiser for the Obama campaign. "It was made clear that the memo was from 'friends' and was reliable," says the campaign source.
The memo allowed Obama and his fellow Democrats to box in Republican attendees and essentially took what President Bush had billed as a negotiating meeting off the rails.
"Paulson and his team have not acted in good faith for this President or the administration for which they serve," says a House Republican leader who was not present at the White House meeting, but who instead is part of the team hammering out the House GOP alternative. "We keep hearing about how Secretary Paulson is working with Democrats on this or that, yet he never seems to consider working with the party that essentially hired him. Perhaps he's auditioning for a Democratic administration job. Our proposal didn't just spring forth fully formed; we've been working on this for several days, and Treasury staff has known about it."
When Sen. Barack Obama was given the floor to speak during White House negotiations,... more
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives is expected to vote on Tuesday on a comprehensive energy package that would open most of the U.S. coastline to offshore drilling, a Democratic aide said on Monday.
The package proposed by Democrats would give states the option to allow drilling between 50 and 100 miles (80 and 160 km) off their shores. Areas more than 100 miles from the coast would be completely open to oil exploration.
Until recently, Democratic leaders in Congress strongly opposed lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling, saying drilling would have only a small impact on gasoline prices in the immediate future
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives is expected to vote on Tuesday on... more
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Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.
July 23, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.
While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.
Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.
The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi's and Conyers' offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.
"If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.
"You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse," says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don't know [the extent of] what laws have been violated."
more@urlSalon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents... more
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called President Bush "a total failure" on Thursday, among the California Democrat's harshest assessments to date of the president.
"God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States -- a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject," Pelosi told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an exclusive interview.
The comments came two days after the president sharply criticized Congress over what he described as relative inaction over the course of the legislative term. At the White House on Wednesday, Bush noted that there were only 26 legislative days left in the fiscal year and said Congress would need to pass a spending bill every other day to "get their fundamental job done."
"This is not a record to be proud of, and I think the American people deserve better," Bush said. VideoWatch Pelosi respond to criticism of Congress from the president »
In the interview, Pelosi said the president was in no position to criticize Congress and brushed aside the criticisms as "something to talk about because he has no ideas."
"For him to be challenging Congress when we are trying to sweep up after his mess over and over and over again -- at the end of the day, Congress will have passed its responsibility to pass legislation," she said.
But Pelosi's comments come as a new Gallup poll registers the lowest level of congressional approval among Americans in the polling organization's 30-year history of conducting that survey.
That poll showed that its approval rating had reached an anemic 14 percent, while more than 70 percent of those polled said they disapproved of the job Congress is doing.
The House speaker said she doesn't consider those numbers a negative referendum on the Democrats in charge, saying she thinks they stem largely from Congress' failure to end the war in Iraq.
"Everything I see says this is about ending the war -- 'I disapprove of Congress' performance in terms of ending the war,' " she said. "In the House, we, of course, have over and over, five or six times, sent to the Senate legislation for a time certain to reduce our deployment in Iraq and bring our troops home safely, honorably and soon. We haven't been able to get it past the Senate or the president of the United States.
"So, on the basis of that, count me among the 70-some percent," she continued. "But that is one measure. The other measure that I'm more interested in is the one that talks about what is their view of Democrats. And the generic, who do you prefer to run the country on all of these issues? We're in double digits in any poll that you can take."
Republican National Committee spokesman Alex Conant derided Pelosi's comments as "the sort of partisan politics that Democrats once decried and promised to change."
"Rather than personally critique others, Speaker Pelosi should reconsider her own out-of-touch stance against oil exploration," he said. "With Americans paying record prices at the pump and Congress in gridlock, this is no time for the speaker to only offer personal attacks."
In the wide-ranging interview, the entirety of which will air Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," Pelosi also reiterated her longtime opposition to lifting a congressional ban on offshore drilling as well as opening up areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil exploration. Bush and congressional Republicans have pushed for those two policy changes.
Pelosi has long opposed drilling offshore, a popular policy position among Californians, many of whom fear its environmental consequences along the state's coastline.
But a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll showed that more than 73 percent of Americans polled approved of lifting the 1981 ban, and the move holds support among many in Pelosi's own party, whose constituents are growing increasingly angry over rising gas prices.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called President Bush "a total failure" on... more
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In December of last year, The Washington Post revealed:
Four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
Identically, numerous key Democrats in Congress were told that Bush had ordered the NSA to spy on American without warrants and outside of FISA. None of them did anything to stop it.
In light of this sordid history of active complicity, is it really any wonder that these leading Democrats are desperate to quash any investigations or judicial adjudications of Bush administration actions that they knew about and did nothing to stop, in some cases even actively supporting?
In December of last year, The Washington Post revealed:
Four members of Congress... more
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Subject: Tell Senator Obama: Don't cave on telecom immunity
Dear Friend,
This week, Senators Dodd and Feingold won a battle in the fight to stop the FISA capitulation: they've delayed a vote on the bill until after the July 4th recess, which buys them more time to shore up the votes they need to defeat the bill.
However, it's unlikely they'll succeed without real support from leaders in Congress, most of whom have already abandoned us: Senator Reid caved in long ago, and Speaker Pelosi finally folded last week. There is one major leader left who should support our cause: Senator Barack Obama. Senator Obama said he was "unequivovally opposed" to retroactive telecom immunity last December, but lately, he's started to backpedal. We need to make sure he does what's right.
I just signed a petition calling on Senator Obama to stand up for the Constitution by voting no on FISA -- I hope you will too.
Please have a look and take action.
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/obama_stop_fisa/?r_by=-1409467-5lCkdfx&rc=paste
Thanks!
CredoAction.com
________________________
From TouchArt.net and OneEarthBlog.blogspot.comSubject: Tell Senator Obama: Don't cave on telecom immunity
Dear Friend,... more
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A compromise deal to extend the federal government's domestic spying powers, passed by the House on Friday and expected to sail through the Senate next week, has drawn attacks from both sides of the political spectrum. The right is unhappy at concessions made to protect civil liberties; the left is furious that the Democrats allowed the domestic spying powers to be extended in any form. Much of the latter's rage has been directed against Nancy Pelosi, the liberal House Speaker who was instrumental in negotiating the deal — attacking her on the internet and virtually shutting down her switchboard with complaints. One blogger called Pelosi "disturbingly disoriented" and said the deal she and her allies have cut will "eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, exempt their largest corporate contributors from the rule of law, and endorse the most radical aspects of the Bush lawbreaking regime."
END QUOTEA compromise deal to extend the federal government's domestic spying powers,... more
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"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are saying that Iraq's government needs to spend more of its own money on reconstruction now that the United States has spent more than $45 billion. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., says future U.S. reconstruction payments should be in the form of loans, not grants — resurrecting a proposal that died in the Republican-controlled Congress at the start of the war five years ago.
Nelson, a member of the Senate committee that oversees spending legislation, says it's not fair for the United States to pay for reconstruction when Iraq's oil revenue could be $60 billion or more this year because of record prices. Nelson said he planned to offer an amendment to the Iraq spending bill that would require Iraq to pay back future reconstruction aid as well as money approved by Congress but not yet spent."
I don't know about you, but proposing loans sounds to me like another structural adjustment debt disaster waiting to happen. Whenever the next President decides to withdraw combat forces, we should still be helping Iraq fix the infrastructure that we have been responsible for decades for destroying. I assume at that point congressional oversight on wasteful spending and corrupt or inefficient contracting will still be sorely needed."House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are saying that... more
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China continues to increase security in Tibet, as a leading US lawmaker and others urge international condemnation of its actions. In one town in Gansu, a BBC journalist saw rows of armed soldiers and heard broadcasts telling people to surrender.
On Thursday, China admitted for the first time that troops had shot and injured protesters during the unrest.
A senior US lawmaker, Nancy Pelosi, has called on the international community to denounce China's rule in Tibet. Ms Pelosi is holding talks in northern India with the Dalai Lama, who Chinese authorities accuse of inciting the violence.China continues to increase security in Tibet, as a leading US lawmaker and others... more
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Control of the nation hangs in the balance between Republicans and Democrats. While the mainstream media and political machines focus on the last laps of the horse race, how do ordinary citizens get their voices heard? Control of the nation hangs in the balance between Republicans and Democrats. While... more
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