by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect via TomPaine.come, 12-15-08 Imagine if the automakers had been offered the same kind of government assistance as the banks. Detroit's Big Three would each get new government capital totaling many tens of billions to replace their lost equity, as...

by Robert Weissman, CommonDreams.org, 12-15-08...A collapse of the U.S. auto industry would be bad not just for the Big Three, and the supplier networks and auto dealers, but pretty much every sector of the economy, including Wall Street.Earlier this week, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President ...

...What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have been the calling cards of power. Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and...

 In its final days in office, the Bush administration is looking to push through about "about 20 highly contentious rules ," that  weaken health care and workers' rights and degrade the environment . The administration is also making sure to wreck the tax...

Bush Last-Minute Rules Cement Environmental Legacy by Deborah Zabarenko on CommonDreams.org, 12-10-08 In his waning weeks in the White House, U.S. President George W. Bush is drawing more fire than ever as he presides over a steady stream of environmentally unfriendly regulations...

By Michael Brune, AlterNet.org, 12-09-08 After all the bad news about mountaintop removal, how about a little success? Yesterday, Bank of America, a lead financier of coal, announced that it will be phasing out financing for companies that practice mountaintop-removal coal mining, a highly...

A former technician who worked in Iraq for scandal -ridden  contracting company KBR in Iraq has filed a class-action lawsuit saying the company "exposed everyone at Joint Base Balad in Iraq to unsafe water , food and hazardous fumes from the burn pit there." Joshua Eller's suit...

LINK UP WITH THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE by Jim Hightower on jimhightower.com, 12-4-08 If the sweeping vote for change on Election Day is really to bear fruit, We The People must be the ones who nurture it. We can’t just crank back in our La-Z-Boys. That's because...

Nationalize GM -- Or at Least Think About It by Robert Weissman on CommonDreams.org, 12-3-08 With the U.S. government offering trillions of dollars in supports for the financial sector, it is startling to witness the casual way in which many policy makers and opinion leaders...

by: Dean Baker via TomPaine.com, 12-2-08        During the campaign, Barack Obama provoked a media flurry and right-wing outrage over his comment to Joe the Plumber about "spreading the wealth around." They told us that this view was contrary to the American Way, that this...

Obama's thrilling election—something not long ago many wise heads said wasn't possible—also made more imminent the prospect that the dark night of the worst administration in history was ending. The American people had overwhelmingly rejected the Bush regime's stupidity, cupidity, its wars,...

By Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic via ICH 11-30-08 I f you've been following the auto industry's crisis, then you've probably read or heard a lot about overpaid American autoworkers--in particular, the fact that the average hourly employee of the Big Three makes $70 per hour ....

The Obama "Dream Team":  Rubin-clones And Other Fakers By Mike Whitney, ICH , November 27, 2008  ...Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers were central figures in the bubble-driven growth and deregulation mania of the last decade. Their influence factored heavily into the...

Smart Ways to a Bailout -- Step 1: Stop Demonizing the UAW By Art Levine, Huffington Post via alternet.org, 11-27-0 If you've been following mainstream news stories or conservative Republicans, you've probably heard claims about those inefficient UAW members supposedly making $70 an hour,...

All Fall Down by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, 11-26-08 I spent Sunday afternoon brooding over a great piece of Times reporting by Eric Dash and Julie Creswell about Citigroup. Maybe brooding isn’t the right word. The front-page article, entitled “Citigroup Pays for a Rush to...

By Staff, AlterNet, 11-26-08 Barry Ritholtz puts the bailout figure into proper historical perspective , and it ain't pretty folks:

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so...

When President-elect Barack Obama officially introduces his economic team today, he is also expected to lay out his vision for a "massive fiscal stimulus program ." While estimates of its size vary -- from $300 billion to over $700 billion -- the expected stimulus package is now almost...

Poll: Public's Loathing of the GOP Hits All Time High By Melissa McEwan, Shakesville via alternet.org, 11-22-08 In the latest Gallup poll , Americans' antipathy for the GOP has increased yet again, with only 34% saying they view the GOP favorably and 61% saying they view the GOP unfavorably,...

The Lame-Duck Economy by Paul Krugman in The New York Times, 11-20-08 Everyone’s talking about a new New Deal, for obvious reasons. In 2008, as in 1932, a long era of Republican political...

By Robert Parry, Consortium News via alternet.org, 11-21-08 ...Looking back over the past three decades, the cost of the Left’s complacency on media – i.e. its failure to create a reliable way to get important facts to the public and to counter the Right’s propaganda machine – has...