tagged w/ dean baker
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Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren’t stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We’ll return to our normal schedule next week.
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
According to official statistics, nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed. Between 2 and 4 million of them are expected to exhaust their state unemployment insurance benefits between now and May. Historically, during times of high unemployment, Congress provides extra cash to extend the benefits. Congress has never failed to do so when unemployment is above 7.2%. Today’s unemployment rate is above 9% and the lame duck session of Congress has so far failed to extend the benefits.
Congress has until November 30 to renew two federal programs to extend unemployment benefits, as David Moberg reports for Working In These Times. Last week, a bill to extend benefits for an additional three months failed to garner the two-thirds majority it needed to pass in the House. The House will probably take up the issue again this session, possibly for a one-year extension, but as Moberg notes, it’s unclear how the bill will fare in the Senate. The implications are dire, as Moberg notes:
The result? Not just huge personal and familial hardships that scars the lives of young and old both economically and psychologically for years to come. But failure to renew extended benefits would also slow the recovery, raise unemployment, and deepen the fiscal crises of state and federal governments.
But wait! There’s more:
* The Paycheck Fairness Act died in the Senate last week, as Denise DiStephan reports in The Nation. The bill would have updated the 1963 Equal Pay Act to close loopholes and protect employees against employer retaliation for discussing wages. All Republican senators and Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson voted not to bring the bill to the floor, killing the legislation for this session of Congress. The House already passed its version of the bill in 2009 and President Barack Obama had pledged to sign it.
* Economist Dean Baker talks with Laura Flanders of GritTV about quantitative easing (a.k.a. the Fed printing more money) and the draft proposal from the co-chairs of the deficit commission. Baker argues that we’re facing an unemployment crisis, not a deficit crisis.
* Charles Ferguson’s documentary “Inside Job” is a must-see, according to Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive. An examination of how Wall Street devastated the U.S. economy, the film details the reckless speculation in housing derivatives, enabled by crooked credit rating schemes, that brought the entire financial system to the brink of collapse. The film is narrated by Brad Pitt and features appearances by former Governor and anti-Wall Street corruption crusader Eliot Spitzer, financier George Soros, and Prof. Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who predicted the collapse of the housing bubble.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we... more
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by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Earlier this month, Bank of America (BOA), the country’s largest bank, announced a moratorium on foreclosures in all 50 states.
The bank promised not to sell any foreclosed homes or take any more delinquent borrowers to court until it had reviewed its potentially defective foreclosure process. Other major lenders soon announced that they too were suspending foreclosures in dozens of states. Why are the biggest banks in the country voluntarily calling for a time-out? It’s a hint that we’re facing a huge problem: The banks aren’t sure if they have the legal right to foreclose on millions of homes.
Here’s what’s new in foreclosuregate since the Audit took up the story last week. The Bank of America announced that it would resume some foreclosures on Oct. 25, having deemed its own methods sound. The stock market begged to differ. BOA’s stock fell over 5% on Thursday and other bank stocks also took a beating, as did mortgage bonds. This pattern indicates that investors are very worried about the effect of the foreclosure crisis on the health of the banks.
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is calling for a foreclosure moratorium under the new Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), as Ellen Brown reports for Truthout. The FSOC has the power to preemptively break up any large financial institution that threatens U.S. economic security. Grayson wants a moratorium on all mortgages securitized between 2005 and 2008 until the FSOC can determine which foreclosures are valid and which are bogus.
The missing link
So, what kind of “defects” in the foreclosure process are we talking about? Fraud, basically.
Zach Carter of the Campaign for America’s Future explains to Chris Hayes of the Nation why Bank of America and other major lenders are in so much trouble: They are just administering loans for other lenders. You make your check out to the Bank of America, but the bank is just babysitting after the loan for the bondholders.
The real creditors are the investors who own bonds made up of pieces of many different mortgages, including yours. The bond gives the bondholder a share of the money that you and other borrowers pay each month. If you don’t pay, BOA initiates foreclosure. If you’re late, BOA charges you fees.
However, the bank can’t just hire a foreclosure company to take your home away on a whim. The bank must first show proof that it is entitled to foreclose because you’ve defaulted on your mortgage in the form of a mortgage note. If you hold one of those toxic asset mortgages, there’s a good chance the bank doesn’t have the note.
As Dean Baker explains in Truthout, in many, if not most, cases, “liar loans” (mortgages issued with no proof of income or assets) have become given way to “liar liens” (foreclosures with no proof of default).
According to Carter, all the big banks have been hiring foreclosure mills to rubber-stamp their claims without checking. Unscrupulous foreclosure companies are admitting to “robo-signing,” i.e., foreclosing without even checking whether the bank’s claims were legit.
Foreclosuregate
According to Andy Kroll of Mother Jones, the Bank of America stands to lose up to $70 billion over what’s come to be known as “foreclosuregate.” A mortgage starts out with an originator, typically a bank or a mortgage broker. In the heyday of mortgage-backed securities, investment banks were buying up hundreds of thousands of mortgages, making them into mortgage-backed bonds, and selling them to investors.
Unfortunately, if the bank doesn’t have the note, who does? The mortgage originator may have gone bankrupt, many were fly-by-night operators that folded when the housing bubble burst. Many mortgages were bought and resold more than once before they found their way into a mortgage-backed bond.
So, the question is whether the bank really owned the mortgages it made into mortgage backed-securities and sold to individuals, pension funds, and other institutions. If not, the banks stand could be on the hook for selling assets they didn’t actually own to investors.
Moratorium now
The scandal affects so many mortgages that some lawmakers are calling for a nationwide moratorium on foreclosures until investigators can sort out who owns what once and for all. Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY) told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! that Congress needs to stop banks from putting people out on the street until there is some way to differentiate between fraudulent foreclosures and justified ones:
And so, I just think that people who are saying that this is going to hurt—I think that it’s going to help, because once people gain confidence in the fact that they’re being treated fairly and that there’s no discrepancies in the records, then people will feel very comfortable in terms of trying to move forward. But until that happens, you’re always going to have these comments about the fact that that was not done right, it was done unfairly. And, of course, I think there’s enough here for us to stop and to pause and to say, let’s take a look here before we move forward. So a moratorium is definitely in order.
The Obama administration opposes the moratorium on the grounds that it would hurt the housing market and thereby slow the economy. Towns counters that what would really be bad for the economy is letting banks take people’s homes away without any semblance of due process. If the government doesn’t act to protect the innocent, foreclosuregate could shatter the confidence of potential home buyers. Would you want to invest in a house if you were afraid the bank could just take it away from you?
In AlterNet, Mike Lux argues that fraudulent foreclosures are one more assault on poor and middle class Americans. He argues that the banks are so used to being coddled by Washington that they’re counting on legislators to retroactively change the rules to protect them from the consequences of their own devious behavior.
At this point we don’t know what percentage of foreclosed-upon homes have simply been stolen by banks to pay bondholders, but we do know the problem is vast and systemic. The Obama administration is content to let the banks seize private property first and ask questions later. We need a moratorium to take stock and restore the rule of law.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Earlier this month, Bank of America... more
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by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Image courtesy of Flickr user Mark Sardella, via Creative Commons LicenseMore than two years after the collapse of Bear Stearns, the House and Senate finally ironed out their differences on Wall Street reform in the wee, small hours of Friday morning. The bill now goes back to both the House and Senate for final approval, but it’s fate in the Senate is uncertain following the defection of Tea Party Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).
The resulting bill has several things going for it, but largely misses the critical structural lessons of the Great Financial Crash of 2008. As Wall Street continues to score epic profits and grotesque bonuses over the coming months, progressives must be committed to continuing the fight for a fair economy.
Megabanks intact
As Andy Kroll explains for Mother Jones, the bill essentially lets too-big-to-fail banks off the hook. Megabanks like J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup will not be broken up into smaller institutions that could fail safely, nor will they be required to exit many of their most reckless business ventures. One of the most promising reforms still on the table as Congress moved on the bill was a plan to ban banks from gambling with taxpayer money—and Congressional leaders sabotaged it at the last minute.
As Tim Ferhnolz notes for The American Prospect, instead of strengthening the bill by negotiating with committed reformists like Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Russ Feingold (D-WI), Senate leadership chose to cut a deal with Tea Party favorite Scott Brown (R-MA). Brown’s price? Allowing banks to gamble by running their own proprietary hedge funds. After Senate negotiators gave Brown what he wanted, he suddenly reversed his support for the bill on Saturday morning.
Derailed by in-fighting
Essentially, petty interpersonal spats overwhelmed the push for real reform. Cantwell and Feingold’s objections to the legislation were correct so far as policy substance were concerned, and Cantwell always made clear that her vote could be won by simply closing a huge loophole in the bill. But after the two Democrats voted against the bill for being unnecessarily weak on the Senate floor, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) simply shut them both out of the negotiation process. This would be funny, if it weren’t true.
Brown had already proved his ability to go back on his word with Senate negotiators just a few weeks prior. He was a committed “yes” vote when the bill went to the Senate floor, but unexpectedly reversed his position at the last minute, causing the legislation to fail the first time it came up for a vote. But instead of trying to cut a deal with progressives, Dodd decided to roll the dice again with Brown, and the legislation now finds itself in limbo, with Senate approval uncertain.
A slight improvement
But despite its unnecessary shortcomings, the Wall Street reform bill is still an improvement over the status quo, as I emphasize for AlterNet. We get a stronger set of consumer protections, along with a thorough audit of the Federal Reserve. The Fed served as the government’s principal bailout engine throughout the crisis, pumping $4 trillion into the nation’s financial system with almost no accountability or oversight. Bringing these massive bailout operations into the light should build momentum for broader reforms, but it’s up to engaged citizens to make that a reality.
There are plenty of major policy battles brewing that directly involve the financial industry. As Dean Baker notes for Truthout, the current economic policy agenda is a Wall Street executive’s dream. Lawmakers are seriously considering slashing Social Security while ignoring an unemployment catastrophe and leaving troubled homeowners out in the lurch. These are all catastrophic economic errors in the making.
Foreclosed again
As Annie Lowrey reports for The Washington Independent, Fannie Mae unveiled a new policy last week to punish borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their home is worth. As home prices have plunged in value over the past three years, huge swaths of borrowers owe their bank hundreds of thousands more than their home is worth. Now many borrowers, realizing that they are pissing away huge amounts of their monthly income to a ruthless bank, are making the perfectly rational decision to walk away from their mortgage.
In cases where borrowers can, in fact, afford to continue making payments, but simply do not want to waste their money, walking away is called a “strategic default,” and there is nothing wrong with it. Both parties knew the terms of the mortgage agreement when it was signed, and a well-paid, professional banker signed off on it. Borrowers are not violating a contract by failing to pay—in a mortgage, the borrower keeps paying the bank, or the bank gets the house. Walking away just means that the bank gets the house.
But, of course, bankers are upset that they didn’t predict the downturn in home prices, even though this is part of their job description, and the reason they get paid big bucks. When borrowers walk away, bankers lose money. So banks putting pressure on the government, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to punish borrowers who walk away, and Fannie Mae has acquiesced by agreeing to shut borrowers out of the mortgage market for seven years, and harassing them in court for unpaid mortgage balances.
Your right to rent
As Greg Kaufmann emphasizes for The Nation, there are much better policy alternatives. Instead of slamming borrowers, the government could encourage bankers to write down their total debt burden to whatever their house is currently worth. Bankers don’t want to do that, because it means taking a loss, and when agencies like Fannie Mae are willing to intimidate borrowers to line bankers’ pockets, why should bankers agree to play ball?
According to Kaufmann, one of the best ways to get banks to negotiate seriously with borrowers is to establish a right-to-rent policy. Borrowers who receive a foreclosure notice would get the right to rent their current home at a fair market rate, determined by a court, for up to five years. Bankers don’t want to be landlords, so the provision would force them to negotiate with borrowers in trouble by imposing an unpleasant new duty on the bank. If bankers still didn’t want to negotiate, borrowers would have five years to find a new place to stay. It’s great policy, and legislation to implement it has already been introduced in the House.
The final version of the Wall Street reform bill is worth supporting, but it won’t fix the foreclosure crisis or prevent bankers from taking outrageous risks that put the entire economy in jeopardy. Many key reforms are still necessary, and it’s up to progressives to keep the pressure on lawmakers to make sure they are enacted in the coming months.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Image courtesy of Flickr user Mark... more
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http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2010/06/08/weekly-audit-deficit-reductionselling-out-to-wall-street/
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
In the fall of 2008, decades of finance-first, bankers-know-best economic policies coalesced to create one of the worst economic crises in history, one that the banks themselves could not survive without staggering levels of government support.
Yet astonishingly, nearly two years after the crash, Wall Street is still setting the economic agenda in Washington. As Congress begins to examine broader economic policy, lawmakers are under heavy Wall Street pressure to reduce the federal budget deficit—even though that could mean deepening the jobs crisis without any substantive economic benefits.
Small-bore reforms
At the same time, the financial reform bill that Congress is on the verge of passing leaves quite a bit to be desired. As the editors of The Nation emphasize, that legislation includes several small-bore fixes to ease the damage caused by Wall Street excess, but almost nothing to actually curb the excesses themselves. The capital markets casinos will largely be left untouched. Congress still has time to improve the bill over the next month as the House and Senate iron out their differences, and many useful reforms remain in play.
Nevertheless, Wall Street’s lobbyists have succeeded in taking the most important reforms off the table. We will not break up the biggest banks this year, nor will we tax reckless financial speculation. We aren’t even banning economically essential banks from participating in risky securities businesses.
Et tu, Buffet?
As Annie Lowrey notes for The Washington Independent, the crisis has even discredited Warren Buffett, one the few financial superstars who previously had a reputation as a “straight-shooter” that invested in responsible enterprises.
Buffett was once a harsh critic of credit rating agencies, the firms who slapped top ratings on toxic mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. But Buffett himself is also a top shareholder in Moody’s, one of the worst ratings agencies. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission had to compel Buffett’s testimony at a recent hearing via subpoena after Buffett turned down multiple requests to appear. At the hearing itself, Buffett did everything he could to pass the buck from himself and Moody’s to any other possible target.
Slashing the deficit
Wall Street’s ugly influence on economic policy extends far beyond the realm of bank regulation itself. Right now, financial elites are pushing hard on a right-wing plan to slash the federal budget deficit, and even many moderate Democrats are coming out in support of reduced government spending.
This strategy is a tremendous political blunder, as Steve Benen emphasizes for The Washington Monthly. It’s true that the deficit does not poll very well—but the deficit is only one side of the issue. Cutting the deficit means slashing federal support for jobs—we can help the economy or we can slash the deficit, but we cannot do both at the same time.
Nearly everyone believes that creating jobs should be a top priority for the government, but if politicians only ask questions about the deficit, they won’t hear answers about the economy. The political imperative is clear, as Benen notes:
This really shouldn’t be complicated: invest in more job creation, help struggling states as they keep laying off workers, and make clear to voters that the economy is more important than the deficit. Do this immediately, without apology.
Replacing Social Security with credit cards?
Wall Street loves cutting social services in the name of deficit reduction. Every public good that can be efficiently provided for by the government can also be inefficiently provided by the private sector—replacing public benefits with corporate profits. The bank lobby would like nothing more than to replace Social Security with credit cards for senior citizens. Wall Street doesn’t make a dime on the government’s Social Security payments—but they can make a killing on a privatized market.
Weak job growth=Weak private sector
Lest there be any question about whether or not the government needs to take strong action to strengthen the labor market, take a look at Friday’s jobs report. As Tim Fernholz notes for The American Prospect, this report was the most disappointing piece of economic news in months. While the economy gained 431,000 new jobs during the month, 411,000 of them were temporary hires by the U.S. Census, meaning the private sector is not able to support much new hiring.
There’s a critical lesson there: The only serious engine of job growth in the month of May was the federal government. Absent government hiring, the economy is not improving at all. There is an almost bottomless supply of critical social needs that require work right now, but no private-sector momentum to meet those needs.
The BP oil catastrophe should underscore how important new, green energy is to the U.S. economy—yet U.S. efforts to develop green energy solutions have fallen far behind those of China and other industrial powerhouse nations. Major federal investment into the research and implementation of green energy would be good for our environment and good for our economy.
Don’t let social services suffer
But astoundingly, the advice on the world economy currently coming from top policymakers at the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and European central banks is echoing the bank lobby line: Slash social programs now, and let the job market fend for itself. As Dean Baker emphasizes for AlterNet, these are the exact same policymakers who missed the housing bubble, made the wrong calls on bank regulation and sent the global economy into freefall.
There has been little change in personnel and no acknowledgment of error at the central banks whose incompetence was responsible for the crisis . . . . their agenda seems to be the same everywhere, cut back retirement benefits, reduce public support for health care, weaken unions and make ordinary workers take pay cuts.
In short, Wall Street and the Wall Street policy agenda remain ascendant, despite economic catastrophe. In the Great Depression, the government actually learned its lesson—we regulated the banks, created Social Security and put millions to work through government hiring programs. That same basic agenda is needed today. Failing to meet it could well mean decades of economic decline.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2010/06/08/weekly-audit-deficit-reductionselling-out-... more
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By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
One year after President Barack Obama secured passage of his critical economic stimulus package, the U.S. Senate is finally taking anther look at how to create jobs and repair the economy. These issues are more important than ever, but absurd Republican obstructionism and timid Democratic negotiation are once again threatening good public policy.
Not really bipartisan, is it?
As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, the Senate Finance Committee reached a “bipartisan” agreement to supposedly spur job creation last week. Republicans demanded billions in tax cuts for wealthy people, but kept on caterwauling about the federal budget deficit. In exchange for $80 billion to dedicate to jobs—an extremely modest figure given the state of the labor market—Republicans asked for hundreds of billions in giveaways for the rich. And that’s just to get the bill through the Finance Committee, much less the full Senate.
In a piece for Working In These Times, Michelle Chen notes that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the plug on the Finance Committee “compromise,” but stripped out a critical extension of unemployment benefits for laid-off workers in the process.
The Republican uproar over such modest job figures is an economically preposterous political ploy, and Democratic cave-ins to their demands are both bad politics and bad economics. Chen notes that 70% of Americans support a $100 billion jobs bill. And we know what kinds of programs help spur employment—many of them were passed in the stimulus bill last year and have saved millions of jobs.
Stopping the Bleeding
In an interview with Christopher Hayes of The Nation, Economic Policy Institute Fellow Josh Bivens explains that Obama’s economic stimulus package has worked well, effectively stopping the job hemorrhaging that the economy was experiencing immediately before Obama took office. Here’s Bivens:
“We haven’t returned to growth on employment … but the rate of contraction has slowed radically. Immediately before the Recovery Act is passed, we’re losing on the order of 700,000 jobs per month … In the past three months, we’re now down to something like between 50 and 75,000 jobs lost per month, on average … it really is a stark before and after.”
Racial inequality and the recession
The trouble is, the stimulus was only big enough to prevent the economy from getting much worse. It was not large enough to return the economy to serious job growth. And the brutal effects of the recession are not being shouldered equally. As LinkTV’s collaboration with ColorLines illustrates (video below), the Great Recession is hitting people of color much harder, but the story of racial inequality is being lost in stories about statistical economic recovery in the financial sector. The special profiles several families of color struggling to make ends meet in the worst recession since the Great Depression, which features Depression-era unemployment rates for African Americans.
“What we don’t see on TV are the [people] who never had a home or a good job to lose in the first place. These are the millions of poor people whose chance to cross the line into middle class has always been cut short by another kind of line, the color line,” says host Chris Rabb, founder of Afro-Netizen.
Rabb, ColorLines and LinkTV describe a social safety net that has been shredded by opportunistic politicians. Instead of focusing on ways to guarantee good jobs, politicians since the Reagan era have demonized black single mothers by exploiting racist stereotypes in an effort to justify slashing federal supports for the poor and unemployed. The result is a fundamentally unstable economy. Our society has weak demand for goods and services in good times, and that demand completely falls apart when economic conditions deteriorate. And while these socially destructive initiatives have been described as “pro-business,” the truth is, businesses don’t like societies where millions of people are impoverished. They don’t have any customers.
Predatory lending strikes again
The recession hasn’t exactly been a picnic for the middle class, either. In an article for Mother Jones, Andy Kroll profiles the mortgage mess that Ocwen Loan Servicing created for borrower Deanna Walters. Unlike millions of other borrowers dealing with mortgage headaches, Walters wasn’t actually behind on her payments. She was making payments regularly, but Ocwen was misplacing them, and charging her thousands of dollars in improper fees. Walters even paid the fees, but Ocwen eventually foreclosed on her home and sold it in an auction without even informing Walters.
As Kroll emphasizes, Ocwen’s antics aren’t unique. There is an entire class of companies known as mortgage servicers that specialize in deceiving and bullying borrowers out of their money. They often use illegal tactics, and as I note for AlterNet, have been systematically exploiting a badly designed foreclosure relief program from the U.S. Treasury Department.
Funding projects that will put people to work
As prominent economist Dean Baker argues for The American Prospect, there are dozens of productive programs that would put millions of people back to work—if they could just get the funding. The government could quickly and easily provide money to improve public transportation, develop open-source software, fund objective clinical drug trials and (my favorite) support writers and artists, whose work would subsequently be available for the public to enjoy for free.
Taxing financial speculation
The federal government can afford these programs right now, especially without any additional tax revenue. But if we’re really worried about the budget deficit, we can always turn to reasonable new sources for taxes. As Sarah Anderson details for Yes!, an obvious place to look is financial speculation. Since excessive and risky trading helped bring down the economy in 2008, a tax discouraging this behavior could make the economy stronger and reap as much as $175 billion a year for the public.
Our economy wouldn’t face troubles of the same order as those it must overcome today if so-called conservatives had not spend decades pursuing a radical agenda to shred the social safety net. The stimulus package has not spurred job growth to date because of cuts demanded by Congressional Republicans, nearly all of whom refused to vote for the bill anyway. Our economy needs a jobs bill now. It’d be nice if Republicans would show some interest in governing, but if they continue to refuse, Democrats must act on their own.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
One year after President Barack Obama... more
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With record numbers of job losses mounting month after month the stimulus plan is being judged on whether it will both create jobs and stop the hemorrhaging. As the Senate wrangles over the details of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the debate has been largely reduced to one of public spending versus private sector tax cuts. But it may not be so simple. According to Dean Baker, the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy, the Obama plan is a good start but it doesn’t go far enough.With record numbers of job losses mounting month after month the stimulus plan is... more
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