mcdspot

Great story in Rolling Stone about how the nation’s biggest banks are ripping off American cities with predatory lending.

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff’s precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

I’m sick of hearing people invoke Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations when criticizing Obama’s (or any Democrat’s) economic policies. Yes, Adam Smith felt that self-interest and utility rather than mere benevolence shape the economic landscape, but Smith did not regard governmental regulation as evil and did not object to progressive taxation. As this article points out, Smith in fact favored heavy-handed government regulation to prevent financial and corporate powers from manipulating government policy for their own ends.

Long but good Rolling Stone article on how a scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in early 2008.

Chris Anderson’d book “Free” is available, as expected, for free online.

As the realities of the global economic crisis are becoming more vivid, so too is the reporting on what is happening and why. Read about the math formula that broke Wall Street and the bankers and brokers responsible for the financial crisis – and the officials who let them get away with it. or read about why economic recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And what’s up with these credit default swaps, anyway? Huh? Finally, visualize the geography of a recession. And the stimulus.

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Bailed-out CitiGroup has just purchased a $50 million jet. Does this make you want to scream?

This is the sort of largesse that will (or should) have people rioting in the freaking streets..

Thanks, B. Virdot

What makes a car American? Since “fewer than half of the parts on some Big Three vehicles are made in the U.S.”, I’m not sure why we should bail them out. I’d much rather bail out a fully U.S.-based entity that deserves to be bailed out — LIKE NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.

Found here.