Political Economy category archive

Mithras explains.

The Great Orange Satan has more.

Via Susie.

And no accountability for banks either.

Sherrod Brown on the Rachel Maddow Show:

Move along folks. Nothing to see here.

DuPont Co. is slashing jobs and cutting costs as the company navigates through a global recession it expects to continue through much of 2009.

The company said Thursday it plans to cut 2,500 jobs — about 4 percent of its work force — in the next year. DuPont is also cutting 4,000 contract workers by the end of this year, with more contractors expected to be cut next year.

Nothing.

The logical outcome of making the rich richer and the poor poorer–Robert Reich on the “Great Crash of 2008”:

Even more important, investors are starting to fathom the emptiness of American consumers’ wallets. . . . In other words, consumers have gone on strike.

Why have they gone on strike? Not because of the difficulty of getting credit. Most consumers can barely afford to pay the interest charges on the debt they’re already carrying. Consumers have gone on strike because their earnings haven’t kept up. The recovery that officially ended December, 2007 (the National Bureau of Economic Research now tells us) was the first on record in which median earnings declined, adjusted for inflation. Since then, many people have also lost their jobs or are working part time when they’d rather be working full time, or else know they’re in danger of losing their jobs.

John Cole pretty much sums it up.

What have I been saying all along? And I was late to the party because I’m a nobody and this blog is just a hobby:

The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

Follow the link. Read the whole thing. Lots of persons foresaw the logical result of Bushonomics and warned about it.

And King George the Wurst deferred to the bankers. You know, the ones who are now bankrupters.

The Republican Party, in service to privilege since 1868.

The local economy:

Only one sector is booming in this city of nearly 73,000 people, the largest city in the state and the urban hub for New Castle County, with its 525,587 people. The federal bankruptcy court in Wilmington, considered the top forum for big corporate reorganizations, is the busiest since the last recession in the early part of the decade. Bankruptcy lawyers are working long hours to handle the caseload.

Management sucks, the working stiff gets, well, you get the drift.

Walter Brasch lays it out at ASZ.

By screwing up the economy so much that illegals are going home on their own.

But they don’t tell you who’s on it:

The FDIC identified 171 problem banks as of Sept. 30, the most since December 1995, compared with 117 in the second quarter. The agency does not identify the problem banks.

. . . promised Herbert Hoover.

By the end of his administration, not only were there no chickens.

There were no pots.

Sort of like today.

The 200 pantries served by nonprofit Food Bank have seen a 41 percent increase in need this year, Traore said. Shelves are often bare at the Pennsauken warehouse.

Food Bank officials estimated that Burlington, Camden, Gloucester and Salem County residents would require four million pounds of food in 2008, but as of Oct. 31, the warehouse already had distributed 4.2 million pounds.

My daughter worked here. Now it might go dark.

Brandywine School District officials told the school board Monday that the long-running radio station at Mount Pleasant High School might have to sign off for a while as its fate is determined in a district cost-cutting measure.

Looking for ways to save money in a tight economy, the district is giving closer scrutiny to WMPH, a 100-watt radio station at the school that first went on the air in 1969.

I guess WMPH can’t expect a blank check from Uncle Sugar. It needs maybe a few hundred bucks.

But it’s in a school. Not in a mega-bank. And nobody there wears a three-piece suit or has a private jet.

Definitely not bailout material.

Robert Reich on the CitiBank thingee:

If you had any doubt at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street; the utter lack of transparency behind the biggest government giveaway in history to financial executives, and their shareholders, directors, and creditors; and the intimate connections the lie between Administrations — both Republican and Democratic — and the heavyweights on Wall Street, your doubts should be laid to rest.

(snip)

Meanwhile, more than a million workers in the automobile industry, along with six million homeowners in danger of losing their homes, and a millions of Americans who depend on small businesses and retailers for paychecks, are getting nothing at all.

A song, just as much for these times as for those:

Conclusion: We’re not there yet.

Down the hall and to the Left, at Brendan’s.

How it happened (via Digby).

What’s to come.

The Republicans want to buy another bank.

No lick-spittle running dog capitalists here folks.

Move along now. Nothing to see.

(I think it’s called fee enterprise, folks. We pay the fee. They get the enterprise.)

Afterthought:

However necessary this sort of stuff may be in the big picture, it is truly galling to see incompetence, venality, and unconscionable greed excused and rewarded.

Ford, GMAC, and Chrysler.

All the rest will be gone.

Via Atrios.

Truth.

Will Bunch (emphasis added):

. . . The real problem is that the legacy of Ronald Reagan — of deregulating the world of risky finance and leaving a giant mess for all of us to clean up — is betraying the American people, again.

In a way, Reagan was the grandfather of the financial bailout in America. Because it was Reagan who pushed to deregulate the savings-and-loan industry, back when credit default swaps were still a gleam in the eye of the Lehman Brothers.

”All in all, I think we hit the jackpot,” Reagan said on Oct. 15, 1982, when he signed into law a bill that lifted many restrictions on the savings-and-loan industry, giving thrifts the power to make larger real-estate loans and compete with money market funds. Some jackpot. It turned out that the deregulation of the S&L’s unleashed a corrupt rush into risky and often corrupt real-estate dealings, often involving insiders, and the nation’s thrift industry teetered on the edge of collapse just months after the Gipper left the Oval Office in January 1989. Within months, Reagan’s hand-picked GOP successor, George H.W. Bush, was forced to push through a bailout package with a value of $160 billion – which would be a lot of money now but was a huge amount of money 19 years ago. This is what Craig Shirley calls “Reagan’s legacy of small government and deregulation.”

(Gee, sort of sounds familiar, doesn’t it.)

No reconciliation.