The Johns Hopkins economist Christopher Carroll has an interesting blog entry describing rescue plan which has been proposed by economists  which is better than Paulson's, and expressing puzzlement about why this alternate plan has been completely ignored in Washington. This plan involves temporary nationalization, something that was done by Sweden when it had a financial crisis in 1992.

In talking to people involved in the inside-baseball political side of the discussion on Capitol Hill, I get the impression that they are very unhappy about being asked to sign on to this bill, but are planning to do it because they have been told that if they don't sign on the dotted line then the apocalypse is around the corner.

The KEY point that I think is not penetrating from the economists to the Congress is that what sticks in our craw is ONE SPECIFIC ASPECT of the Paulson/Frank plan: Its focus on having the government buy up the toxic subprime securities. This is close to a pure bailout for Wall Street, and there is NO REASON that any of us sees that this has to be the core of the rescue plan. I think you could get near-unanimity from economists, from across the political spectrum, in FAVOR of a simple, easy-to-do alternative that would be both more economically sound and more politically palatable: The Federal government should do, with respect to the banking sector as a whole, what Warren Buffett did last week in his investment in Goldman Sachs.

"Our ads have been pretty tough. I just have different philosophy: I'm going to respond with the truth," Mr. Obama told a voter on Friday, responding to a question about whether Democrats would suffer the same fate they have in previous presidential campaigns. "I know there are a lot of Democrats and some independents and some Republicans who really want change and are getting really nervous because they have seen this movie before." (link)

The truth has stopped playing a significant role in American politics some time ago. It's disquieting that Democrats still do not appear to have realized that. Democrats have still not learned that if Republicans run their election campaigns using highly effective marketing techniques, Democrats must be able to effectively wield such techniques themselves. Appealing to voters' rationality alone is not going to win you elections.

George Lakoff has a good post laying out what Obama and Biden are doing wrong.

It is no secret that Barak Obama, in presenting himself as the candidate of "change" while failing to give a single example of where he would break decisively with the policies of Bush/Cheney, is being the quintessential politician. (And no, things like failing to make Bush's tax cuts permanent do not constitute decisive change. As for what to do about the occupation of Iraq, Obama bases his candidacy more on his having been against the invasion in the first place than on explaining how he will actually get us out.)

Like many others, I have been persuaded to support Obama by BooMan's sensible argument that if Obama actually advocated progressive policies, the media would have quickly destroyed his candidacy, as it did Edwards'. In my opinion, two positions of Obama's provide fairly convincing evidence, however, that Obama simply is not a progressive, and the reason that he does not express progressive ideas is simply that he does not believe in them, as opposed to keeping quiet for tactical political reasons.

Thus, what we have with Obama is Kerry in 2004 all over again. The difference between Obama and Kerry is that (1) Obama is younger; (2) he is more articulate and charismatic; (3) he has darker skin, subliminally suggesting to people that he must be more progressive than Kerry. (Sure, Obama was a community organizer, but then, Kerry famously spoke against the Vietnam war.) Another difference between 2004 and 2008 is that John McCain is a much weaker candidate than Bush was in 2004. But my concern here is not whether Obama has a good chance of beating McCain, but whether it is likely that Obama will institute the policies we want, as opposed to policies that would match more closely the "compassionate conservatism" which Bush promised in his 2000 campaign that he would give us.

There was recently a post at the EuropeanTribune about "the average American journalist's cluelessness about what they are writing about, their generally carefree attitude towards this cluelessness, and why this is the case." Since the mainstream media is one of our main problems, and since I don't think most BoomanTribers follow the EuropeanTribune closely, I thought it would be worth reproducing that whole post after the fold. (Here I am following the example of Jerome a Paris, who did the same thing at EuropeanTribune, his blog.)

There is a remarkable disconnect at the moment at BT with what is happening in Washington. Booman has consistently advocated impeachment, but there is no mention on the front page that yesterday, John Conyers had activists demanding that he initiate impeachment proceedings—who were engaged in a sit-in in his office—arrested.

Rep. John Conyers, venerable member of Congress, finally chair of the House Judiciary Committee,is a man who worked with Rosa Parks in Alabama and who hired her on his staff after he won election to Congress in Detroit. Years in Washington DC change a man. Yesterday Conyers had 48 impeachment activists, including Gold Star Families for Peace founder Cindy Sheehan, Iraq Veteran Against the War activist Lennox Yearwood and Intelligence Veterans for Sanity founder Ray McGovern, arrested for conducting a sit-in in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. The three, together with several hundred other impeachment activists who packed the fourth floor hallway outside Rep. Conyers' office, had come to press Conyers to take action on impeachment...

After nearly an hour of talking with Conyers, a clearly angry Sheehan emerged together with Yearwood and McGovern, and announced to the waiting throng in the hall that Conyers had told them "impeachment isn't going to happen because we don't have the votes." Sheehan said Conyers had insisted that the best thing was for Democrats to focus on "winning big in 2008." To volleys of boos and hisses, the three went back inside Conyers' office suite, where they were joined by some thirty other supporters, and all were subsequently arrested, at Conyers' request, by Capitol police, who cuffed them and walked them off for booking. Several of those who sat in refused to walk and were carried or dragged out of the Rayburn Office Building, as the activists in the hall chanted "Shame on Conyers! Shame onConyers!" and "Arrest Bush, Not the People!" It was a disgraceful scene wholly unworthy of a dean of the Congressional Black Caucus. (David Lindorff)

NY Times: How Battles at Bank Ended `Second Chance' at a Career

Another official who left [to protest how Wolfowitz was running the Bank] was Shengman Zhang, the top deputy to James D. Wolfensohn, Mr. Wolfowitz's predecessor. Mr. Wolfowitz charged that it was hypocritical for bank officials to allow Mr. Zhang's wife to work at the bank but to banish Ms. Riza.

Mr. Zhang, now a senior vice president at Citigroup in Hong Kong, was furious, several associates say, because bank rules permit husbands and wives to work at the bank under circumscribed conditions, which Mr. Zhang said he followed, but they bar bank employees from having a sexual relationship with a top bank official outside of marriage. A Bush administration official said Mr. Wolfowitz did not understand that a World bank president can be successful only if he can form alliances with the bank's many fiefs, something he failed to do.

Of the top three Dem candidates, it's clear that John Edwards is the most progressive. The two main reasons I have had reservations about him up until now is that he has not come out in favor of single-payer health insurance, and that he panders to the Israel lobby. Now I have a third reason. It turns out that because he was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the lead up to the war, Edwards knew that the Bush administration was lying when it claimed that Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Therefore, there is no excuse for his voting to authorize the war.

Senator Dick Durbin was also on the committee, and he explained on the Senate floor last Saturday that he voted against authorizing the war because of classified intelligence that he was briefed on as a member of the committee.

I believe that Edwards owes us an explanation for why he voted for the war, given that he knew that the argument for it was based on lies. Simply admitting that he made a mistake is not enough.

There's a diary by Russ Feingold over at dKos: Ratcheting up the Pressure. It' pretty much a pep talk. He writes:

I happened to watch Senator Reid's Nevada press conference on CSPAN and I encourage all of you to watch it too.  It is worth spending a few minutes to see how deeply felt Senator Reid's opposition to the Iraq war really is.

Well, we'll see.

Meanwhile, Hillary is betraying the American people yet again, as we learn from a report from Bob Geiger.

Labor markets in America continue to become ever more flexible. The electronics retailer Circuit City—second only to Best Buy—has "fired 3,400 of its highest-paid hourly workers and will hire replacements willing to work for less" (Bloomberg). Circuit City felt pressured to cut costs because it has been making losses recently, due to being undercut in flat panel TV sales by Wal-Mart and Target. Workers that were fired made around $19 an hour, with healthcare benefits. Their replacements "will earn less than half that amount, without benefits. The company will graciously allow its allegedly overpaid former workers to reapply for their old jobs at starting wages after they endure 10 weeks of grueling unemployment. Fired Los Angeles worker Richard O'Neal was told he could eventually reapply for his job if he is willing to work for $7.50 per hour, California's minimum wage."

The 3,400 fired Circuit City workers are the guinea pigs of the latest experiment in aggressive wage reduction. Corporate America has become impatient with two-tier wages, which reduce the salaries of the newest generations of employees but still allow veteran workers to maintain higher wages until they retire. If Circuit City increases its profits by firing its highest-paid workers, this will become yet the latest corporate trend in slashing working-class living standards. If not, perhaps Wal-Mart's more subtle method will do. Last summer, Wal-Mart simply stopped granting wage increases for its long-standing employees, sending the clear message that their services are no longer wanted. These days, management prefers a revolving door of "entry-level" workers to a loyal workforce. (Counterpunch)

When will America's elites realize that unless they drop their neoliberal ways, which prevent unions from resisting pressure from management to keep down wages, America will end up like a third world country, with only a lucky few being able maintain an acceptable standard of living?

(Cross-posted at the European Tribune)

First, I should establish my anti-Hillary credentials. On Booman's Hillary Clinton Thread, I emerged as anti-Hillary as anyone. I said that I found her insenscere and inauthentic and that I hated her, characterized her as a Lady Macbeth, and said that I would vote for a Republican that is more against the occupation of Iraq than she is instead of her for president.

A main problem with her that I have had is that she has always struck me as inauthentic, as I noted in that thread. But now I am getting the sense that she might be finding her voice.

As Mike Whitney wrote yesterday in Counterpunch, it's pretty clear that Rove is behind the firing of the "Gonzales 8": no one in the Justice Department had a motive for that, but it fits in perfectly with Rove's program to turn America into a one-party state.

Today, the White House has offered for Rove and others to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

"Such interviews would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony, or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas," [White House counsel] Fielding said in a letter to the chairman of the House and Senate judiciary committees. (CNN)

This is good. This shows that the White House is negotiating from a position of weakness. I think they made a mistake here: they should have treated the principle of executive privelege as absolute, and so not offered for Rove to testify under any circumstances. Now the issue should be: if executive privilege does not prevent Rove from testifying, why can't he do so under oath? Dems must insist upon this. Otherwise the whole exercise is pointless.

Today in TomDispatch, Steve Fraser considers whether the election last November was a turning point, the way the elections in which Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan were elected were turning points. It makes for an interesting read, and allows one to gaze upon long-term political trends, instead of focusing on day-to-day battles with the Republicans and DLC Dems.

Of course, as the examples of those other elections suggest, turning-point elections are usually presidential elections. So if 2006 was a turning point, perhaps that turning point is not over, and will only be completed with the 2008 election. Perhaps that partly explains why Hillary Clinton raises so much animosity from progressives. As Fraser points out, in the same way that Eisenhower did not challenge the New Deal, Bill Clinton continued the pro-big business, anti-New Deal policies of Reagan. Similarly, a Hillary presidency would not involve a real change in direction. That is why what is strategically critical about the 2008 election is not simply winning the White House and keeping control of Congress, but getting a Democrat into Congress who will have the resourcefulness to abandon the failed policies that his country has been following since Reagan—that is, getting a Democrat into the White House other than Hillary Clinton.

Michael Schwartz has periodically produced assessments of the occupation of Iraq for TomDispatch. It is now a month since Bush gave his speech announcing the "new" "surge" strategy, and the escalation was actually initiated the day before, in an offensive on Baghdad's Haifa Street. So it is already possible to assess the results of the surge policy, and Schwartz does that in a new piece.

The results are the same as they were with earlier offensives: an increase in sectarian violence, as militias are prevented from policing areas under their control; and residents fleeing their neighborhoods. Only now there are two new developments: heavier use of air power, and the Shia-dominated Iraq army ethnically cleansing Sunnis from Sunni neighborhoods.

There is a post today at CounterPunch that points out that Dems could stop the war in Iraq right now, by employing the same tactic that the Republicans used to block the non-binding anti-surge resolution:

We hear over and over again that it "takes 60 votes to get something serious done in the Senate." That is a lot of malarkey. It takes only one senator to begin a filibuster against any bill. And then it takes only 41 votes to uphold that filibuster and prevent any proposed law from coming to the floor.

Thus, the present authorization for defense funding in the coming fiscal year can be stopped cold if it contains funds for the war on Iraq. And this can be done by just one courageous Senator, backed by 40 colleagues.