From Tom Dispatch
By Mike Davis

America’s “Futurama” is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century’s equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain’s high-speed rail network will become the world’s largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: “For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America.” Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His “Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class” vows to “create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we’ll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.”

Read more Shock and Awe

From The S.F. Chronicle
By Robert Scheer

This is not change we can believe in. Not if Robert Rubin or his protégé, Lawrence Summers, get to call the shots on the economy in President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration. Both Clinton-era treasury secretaries deserve a great deal of the blame for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that has derailed the world economy. They both should, along with former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, perform rites of contrition and be kept at a safe distance from the leadership of our nation.

Yet Rubin and Summers are highly visible in the Obama transition team, with Summers widely touted as Obama’s pick for secretary of the treasury. New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, who also worked in the treasury department under Rubin and Summers, is the other leading candidate. But it was Summers who most vehemently pushed for congressional passage of that drastic deregulation measure, the Financial Services Modernization Act, which eliminated the New Deal barriers against mergers of commercial and investment banks as well as insurance companies and stock brokers. Standing at his side as President Bill Clinton signed the legislation, Summers heralded it as “a major step forward to the 21st century” - and what a wonderful century it’s proving to be.

It was also Summers who worked in cahoots with Enron and banking lobbyists, and who backed Republican Sen. Phil Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned any effective government regulation of the newly unleashed derivatives market. The result was not only a temporary boon to Enron, which soon collapsed under its unbridled greed, but also to the entire Wall Street financial community.

Read more Change

From The Boston Globe
By Robert Kuttner

All the economic signs point to a deep and prolonged recession - unless Congress and the new administration act promptly and boldly.

Some of what’s needed is genuinely difficult to accomplish. How to recapitalize and re-regulate the financial system? How to unscramble the mess of securitized mortgages to prevent a worse epidemic of home foreclosures? How to save the auto industry? All this, and more, will fall to the new administration.

But one important policy tool can be done immediately: spending large sums of federal money to offset collapsing demand from households, businesses, and state and local governments.

Retail sales in October suffered their worst one-month slide since statistics have been kept. Households, according to economist Alan Sinai, have suffered a loss of $7 trillion of asset-wealth, reflecting declining housing values and plummeting stock prices. Unemployment is heading toward double digits, and is already there if you count people involuntarily working part time. And state and local governments, facing declining tax receipts, are ordering steep budget cuts, layoffs, and deferrals of public projects.

New York Governor David Paterson just announced $5.2 billion in budget cuts, to fall heavily on education and health. California faces a $17 billion shortfall. Unlike the federal government, states, cities, and towns may not run deficits. So they are forced to make cuts at the worst time in the economic cycle.

Read more Recession

From The Dissident Voice
By Mike Whitney

As expected, the G-20 Economic Summit in Washington turned out to be a total bust. None of the problems that have pushed the global economy to the brink of disaster were resolved and none of the main players who gamed the system with their toxic securities were held accountable. Instead, the visiting dignitaries gorged themselves on stuffed quail and roast rack of lamb before settling on a toothless “Statement on Financial Markets” which accomplished absolutely nothing. The one noteworthy clause in the entire document is a two-paragraph indictment of the United States as the perpetrator of the financial crisis. At least they got that right.

From the text:

Root Causes of the Current Crisis: During a period of strong global growth, growing capital flows, and prolonged stability earlier this decade, market participants sought higher yields without an adequate appreciation of the risks and failed to exercise proper due diligence. At the same time, weak underwriting standards, unsound risk management practices, increasingly complex and opaque financial products, and consequent excessive leverage combined to create vulnerabilities in the system. Policy-makers, regulators and supervisors, in some advanced countries, did not adequately appreciate and address the risks building up in financial markets, keep pace with financial innovation, or take into account the systemic ramifications of domestic regulatory actions.

Major underlying factors to the current situation were, among others, inconsistent and insufficiently coordinated macroeconomic policies, inadequate structural reforms, which led to unsustainable global macroeconomic outcomes. These developments, together, contributed to excesses and ultimately resulted in severe market disruption.

Read more Washout

From The Baltimore Sun
By Ron Smith

Here’s one example of how “progressive” ideas fall victim to tough times: The City Council in Atlantic City has reversed the smoking ban inside the city’s casinos, enacted just this year. The anti-smoking movement has suffered this surprising setback because gaming revenues are falling and a lot of casino employees are losing their jobs. It is hoped this will spark some upturn in business, and offset a competitive disadvantage with slots parlors in New Jersey’s neighboring states that allow smokers to shorten their lives while gambling.

If one wants to know the way the wind is blowing, it’s much better to pay attention to this kind of development than to listen to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. explain another of his changes in strategy in bailing out/rescuing/investing in or otherwise trying to stem the relentless deleveraging of the world’s economies.

Just to cheer myself up the last few days, I’ve been reading through the latest edition of Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, by Charles P. Kindleberger. I’ve always enjoyed looking at the history of man’s economic pathologies and how they all resemble one another. Mr. Kindleberger was amplifying and updating the timeless work of the dour Scot Charles Mackay, who published his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds way back in 1841. One famous quote from the book that has great explanatory value is, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!”

As the prophet explained, “There is nothing new under the sun.” It’s good to have this in mind as the politicians keep trying to figure out how we can possibly save ourselves from ourselves when things have deteriorated to this extent. Judging from the response last Friday to local Congressman C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger’s appearance on my show, a lot of people don’t think the politicians in Washington have any answers the people can believe in.

Read more Bills

From AlterNet
By Dean Baker

Politicians often prefer complex solutions to simple problems. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the long list of complicated and convoluted proposals to address the country’s foreclosure crisis.

Millions of people face the loss of their homes over the next few years. While the politicians in Congress have developed a wide variety of complex schemes in order to hold back this flood of foreclosures, including one passed into law last summer that provided up to $300 billion guarantees for new mortgages on homes facing foreclosure, none have had much impact thus far.

The unavoidable problem with these schemes is that it is difficult to design a plan that aids families facing foreclosure without giving an incentive to other homeowners to also default on their mortgage. In addition, it is hard to justify taxing the people who are struggling to keep up with their own mortgages in order to help those who default. It is even harder to justify taxing ordinary people to help out the bank executives, who issued hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans.

As a result, to date these programs have not prevented a tidal wave of foreclosures and evictions. The number of foreclosure filings (there are typically two or more filing for every actual foreclosure) is now approaching 300,000 per month.

For those not offended by simplicity, there is an easy solution. Congress can temporarily modify the rules on foreclosure to give families facing foreclosure the right to rent their homes at the market rate for a substantial period of time. Rep. Raul Grijalva proposed such a change in the Saving Family Homes Act, which would allow homeowners the option to remain as renters for up to 20 years following a foreclosure.

Read more Foreclosure Crisis

From The NY Times
By Maureen Dowd

Bill Clinton was feeling grumpy toward Barack Obama.

Let me rephrase that.

Bill Clinton was feeling grumpier toward Barack Obama.

The ex-president was irritated, friends said, at all the unflattering comparisons between his slow, stumbling transition and Obama’s smooth, swift one.

As Karen Tumulty wrote in Time, “Obama has been quicker off the blocks in setting up his government than any of his recent predecessors were, particularly Bill Clinton, who did not announce a single major appointment until mid-December.”

And as John Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff who’s now the chief of Obama’s transition team, told NPR: “President Clinton recognizes that, I think, he struggled at the beginning because he waited and named his White House staff quite late.”

Just as Bill elevated his sprawling, chaotic personality into a management style, so Barry is elevating his spare, calm personality into a management style.

But then Obama surprised Bill and Hillary by offering her a chance at the secretary of state job. Maybe because the Clintonian perspective on anyone who opposes them tends to be paranoid, the couple wasn’t expecting such a magnanimous move and they were pleased to be drawn back in from the margins.

Read more Take Two

From The Red Tractor

In an exclusive interview with this reporter, both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity agreed to answer my questions about the dysfunctional Republican party and what became a kick-ass defeat for the McCain/Palin campaign on November 4. Limbaugh and Hannity say they have officially resigned from the GOP ranks and will convene their new political party, the CCCP or Central Conservative Cigar Party.

They feel that the election was lost, and lost big-time, because all the lobbyists on the GOP payroll strayed from the true conservative creed — outsource government, stop taxing the rich, send the f-ing immigrants home — then rally the new troops and put Gingrich and Wasilla Barbie in the White House in 2012.

“After all,” said Sean Hannity, “at the end of the day, its the conservative core ideas that work. Ignore the issues, paint the opposition as Commie pinkos or fags — whichever works, and plunder the hell out of the budget for personal gain.” Limbaugh nodded in agreement.

As the most prominent voices of what used to be the alliance of The Old Guard, they were visibly pleased that the election wiped out the last dregs of the GOP’s creepy moderates. “Tell Dubya not to let that door knob hit him on the way out,” said Rush, as he choked partly from laughing and partly from inhaling his cigar smoke. “Damn, I gotta quit breathin’ in when I got this in my mouth.” Then he grinned knowingly at Hannity who was playing with the zipper on his corduroys.

“Fuck reform,” said Sean. “Who cares that some American voters don’t want a party whose main idea is slashing government? Fuck ‘em if they think the country has changed. They all think global warming is serious. Who cares about younger voters? Who the hell wants to live on the East or West Coast anyway?”

Red more Cigar Party

From The Washington Post
By Juliet Eilperin

The Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing new air-quality rules that would make it easier to build coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and other major polluters near national parks and wilderness areas, even though half of the EPA’s 10 regional administrators formally dissented from the decision and four others criticized the move in writing.

Documents obtained by The Washington Post show that the administration’s push to weaken Clean Air Act protections for “Class 1 areas” nationwide has sparked fierce resistance from senior agency officials. All but two of the regional administrators objecting to the proposed rule are political appointees.

The proposal would change the practice of measuring pollution levels near national parks, which is currently done over three-hour and 24-hour increments to capture emission spikes during periods of peak energy demand; instead, the levels would be averaged over a year. Under this system, spikes in pollution would no longer violate the law.

In written submissions, EPA regional administrators have argued that this switch would undermine critical air-quality protections for parks such as Virginia’s Shenandoah, which is frequently plagued by smog and poor visibility.

Read more Air Quality

From The Black Agenda Report
By Bruce Dixon

No presidential administration keeps its promises without relentless pressure from below. It’s never happened before, and there’s no reason to expect any different. The popular demand for jobs, peace and justice are the concrete “change” Democratic voters believe in, and what swept Obama and his party to power. The self-made crisis of the US auto industry is the perfect opportunity to make good on two of those promises. It’s not just the first test of whether an Obama administration intends to serve its voters or its wealthy corporate campaign contributers. It’s the first test of whether Obama’s popular base can or will hold the new president and his party accountable for producing the “change” they promised.

The US auto industry is in deep trouble. There’s no room for doubt about that. But there are plenty of reasons to disbelieve the explanations of and doubt the possible solutions to the crisis put forth by our bipartisan political elite, their mouthpieces in the corporate media and public office.

The media and politicians have exhibited amazing discipline in that few of the analyses and none of the solutions advanced in the mainstream media take into account the competitive advantage of universal free health care enjoyed by auto makers in Canada, Japan and Western Europe. The biggest difference between US and foreign auto production is that only US automakers are saddled with the burden of paying the health care costs of current workers and retirees.

To make matters worse, beginning in the Reagan administration, federal laws allowed automakers to spend their employee pension funds on executive bonuses and bad investments and not repay them. After three decades of executive raids on the money that should pay for pensions and medical care, there is nothing left. GM alone has at least $5 billion in unpayable pension and medical liabilities, money it deducted from worker paychecks for decades and promised to prudently invest and safeguard but instead spent.

Read more Health Care