Wall Street
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Smithfield, Pilgrim’s Pride, and other meat giants get credit-crunched
As I’ve written so many times before, a very few companies essentially control U.S. meat production. Their business model is crude, but for years has been effective: You place lots of animals in a tight space (or "contract" with farmers to do so), stuff them with corn and soy (made cheap chronic overproduction mandated by […]
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New data: Green investment would produce about twice the jobs of Wall Street bailout
There’s been a bit of extremely stupid chatter in D.C. lately suggesting that somehow the financial storm could get in the way of action to combat the climate crisis. So I picked up my phone at Greenpeace and asked Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the University of Massachusetts to compare the economic effects of […]
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Could reducing homeowner costs through efficiency help meliorate the housing crisis?
I am far from an expert on the world of finance (he said, wildly understating the case). So I’d be interested to hear what smarter folks think of the following wild speculation. The root of the current financial crisis is housing. Lots of people were extended credit to buy houses they couldn’t really afford, and […]
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An alternative bailout proposal
Jerome a Paris suggests a different bailout idea: a National Investment Bank that would focus on helping people rather than banks. It would serve the following functions: • allow bankrupt institutions in the existing financial sector to go bust without damaging the real economy by creating an entity able to step in to fund the […]
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Galbraith argues against the bailout and in favor of public investement
I cited James Galbraith last night while arguing that the financial mess should not deter us from making substantial investments in our future. (By the by, you should read Galbraith’s new book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.) Today, Galbraith has a kick-ass op-ed in the Washington […]
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Obama says he will postpone some spending programs in light of financial bailout
Obama says he’ll have to delay some of his spending initiatives in light of the mega-bailout in the works. But not the tax cuts! He didn’t say what proposals might be delayed first … [but!] he said a bailout would not bar him from pushing for middle-class tax cuts, a central proposal in his campaign. […]
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Debate debate
John McCain said he wants to postpone Friday’s presidential debate in light of the financial crisis. Obama says: no. Lots of political commentators are saying lots of things about this, and it’s outside my bailiwick, so I won’t add much except to say: it’s telling that McCain thinks electoral politics is something silly and distracting, […]
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Al Gore on the climate and financial crises
In this morning’s first panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative, former President Bill Clinton and his VP, Al Gore, talked about how the nation’s financial situation might have played out differently if we’d dealt intelligently with energy issues years ago — a theme Clinton has sounded several times this week. Gore said that the […]
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Reviving national service in a big way
This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. —– Lately, our news has focused on tropical depressions maturing into monster hurricanes that leave devastation in their wake — and I’m not just talking about Gustav and Ike. Today, we face a perfect storm of financial devastation, notable for […]
