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Max Fraser, The Nation, February 11, 2008

Last year, forty-three states reported increased home foreclosure rates. Nevada led the way for eleven consecutive months; in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, nearly one in twenty homes is in foreclosure. Whole blocks have been foreclosed in Chicago. Nationwide, rates are nearing Depression-era highs–ravaging working- and middle-class neighborhoods that fell prey to the soft sell and outright chicanery of predatory lenders in the heyday of the housing boom. These lenders have targeted the most vulnerable–black and Latino borrowers have been twice as likely to receive subprime loans as whites; female homeowners, 30 percent more likely than male; black women, five times more likely than white men.

As the subprime mortgage debacle drives a recession that threatens financial markets around the world, the Democratic presidential candidates are pushing plans to address the crisis. John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are pledging substantial federal resources to stabilize the mortgage market and intervene on behalf of borrowers. Barack Obama’s proposal is tepid by comparison, short on aggressive government involvement and infused with conservative rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. As he has done on domestic issues like healthcare, job creation and energy policy, Obama is staking out a position to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.

Edwards’s plan includes a mandatory moratorium on foreclosures, a freeze on rising interest rates for at least seven years, federal subsidies to help homeowners keep up with payments and restructure loans, and explicit measures to rein in predatory lenders and regulate the financial sector. Clinton’s plan is weaker–a voluntary moratorium, a shorter freeze, less commitment to new regulations–but she has promised $30 billion in federal aid to help reeling homeowners and communities.

Only Obama has not called for a moratorium and interest-rate freeze. Though he has been a proponent of mortgage fraud legislation in the Senate, he has remained silent on further financial regulations. And much like his broader economic stimulus package, Obama’s foreclosure plan mostly avoids direct government spending in favor of a tax credit for homeowners, which amounts to about $500 on average, beyond which only certain borrowers would be eligible for help from an additional fund.

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Paul Krugman, The New York Times, February 18, 2008

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.

But progress stalled thereafter: American politics shifted to the right, attention shifted from the suffering of the poor to the alleged abuses of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely abandoned.

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Ted Rall, Google.alt.politics, February 13, 2008

HOUSTON–”The truly undecided voter is rare, say those who study the
psychology of voting,” Joe Garofoli wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle.
“Since neuroscientists say 90 percent of thought is unconscious, an
undecided voter may have already decided–he just hasn’t revealed his pick
to himself yet.”

Whether I’m a rare bird or a typical victim of self-denial, I didn’t know
how I was going to vote until election day–or, to be more precise, a
election minute. Roughly 15 to 20 percent of 2008 primary voters have had
similar trouble getting their unconscious to talk to them.

Most of the electoral procrastinators are conservative Republicans and
liberal Democrats–party loyalists whose influence has been diluted by
independents who vote in their primaries. As has been widely discussed,
conservatives were unhappy with the entire field of Republican presidential
contenders. Less noted but no less significant has been the effect of John
Edwards’ departure from the Democratic field.

Lefties don’t have a candidate.

Like most hardcore liberals, I had planned to vote for Edwards. I’m a
registered Democrat. I live in New York, a “closed primary” state. That left
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

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Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, February 17, 2008

Maybe we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Or maybe we are not.

Perhaps when Barack Obama uses that trippy line, he is just giving false Hopi, since the saying, which he picked up from Maria Shriver’s New Age-y L.A. endorsement speech, is credited to Hopi Indians.

The passionate palaver about Hillary versus Barry rages on, with each side certain it is right about our fate if we end up with a President Obama or another President Clinton.

Hillary says Obama is “all hat and no cattle.” You’d think she’d want to avoid cattle metaphors, so as not to rile up those with a past beef about her sketchy windfall on cattle futures. She could simply say he’s all cage and no bird.

But is she right, that he’d be a callow leader, too trusting of Republicans, dictators and terrorists? Is Bill right, that voters should not be swayed by eloquence and excitement? (Unless he’s running.)

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Frank Rich, The New York Times, February 17, 2008

The curse continues. Regardless of party, it’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama.

Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.

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Contemplating Bush’s $4 trillion dollar budget proposal and his $1 trillion dollar war and the recent AP poll where over half the people said ending the war would be a big stimulus to the US economy, this item is an illustration of just how big one trillion dollars is.

(Note: the figures are out of date (from 1995) but even adjusted for inflation they begin to suggest just what Bush’s five trillion dollars could do in better hands.)

$1,000,000,000,000.00

In an article that appeared in the Denver Post in September 1995, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm wrote:

“We are approaching a five trillion dollar debt. We tire of large numbers. My friend, Dr. William Fifer has figured out a dramatic way to explain $1 trillion. He says that for $1 trillion we could:

Build a $75,000 house, place it on $5,000 worth of land, furnish it with $10,000 worth of furniture, put a $10,000 car in the garage, and give this to every family in KANSAS, MISSOURI, OKLAHOMA, COLORADO, NEBRASKA and IOWA.

Having done this, you would still have enough left to build a $10 million hospital and a $10 million library in each of the 250 cities and towns throughout the six-state region.

After having done that, you would still have enough money left to build 500 schools at $10 million each for the communities in the region.

And after having done that, you would still have enough left from the original $1 trillion to put aside, at 10 percent annual interest, a sum of money that would pay a salary of $25,000 each per year for an army of 10,000 nurses and the same for 10,000 teachers.

You would still have enough for an annual cash allowance of $5,000 for each and every family throughout the six-state region not just for one year, but FOREVER!

This begins to suggest what American society has foregone in favor of Bush’s war.

(Perhaps someone with economics skills could update this and send it to members of Congress. They toss these huge numbers around so casually they seem to have mostly lost sight of economics “on the ground”.)

John Nichols, The Nation, February 14, 2008

JANESVILLE, Wisconsin — When I talked with Russ Feingold last week about what the Democratic candidates for president should do to win Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, he suggested that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should go to the senator’s hometown of Janesville and talk about trade.

Obama got the hint.

On Wednesday, the first full day of a Wisconsin primary campaign that he hopes will solidify his emerging lead over his once “inevitable” rival, the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a rebuke to free-trade policies of the Bill Clinton and George Bush eras that sounded a little like a speech Feingold might have delivered.

“We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control. The fallout from the housing crisis that’s cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington — the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it’s produced,” Obama told workers at the General Motors Assembly Plant in the southern Wisconsin city.

“It’s a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years,” continued the senator, who is suddenly very conscious of the need to appeal to working-class voters in Wisconsin and Ohio who have been battered by trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the decision the Clinton administration to extend permanent most-favored-nation training status to China.

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Joe Conason, Creators Syndicate, February 14, 2008

For the next month or so, the conservative valentines will arrive every day at the headquarters of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Illinois senator’s image will be illuminated by the bipartisan aura of admiration from prominent Republican commentators and strategists, as they savor the promise of his victory over Hillary Clinton, long the object of their hatred. He may well imagine that they really like him – and surely some of them do, at least for now.

Such happy feelings are easily conjured these days, when William Kristol hopes Democratic superdelegates will do “the good deed” of pledging their ballots to Obama, when George Will urges Democrats to choose Obama as “the party’s most potentially potent nominee,” and when Peggy Noonan promises that Obama will be “bulletproof” against Republican attack.

Meanwhile, in the bleaker precincts of the blogosphere, lesser figures prepare to welcome the Democratic front-runner should he secure his party’s nomination. Evidently, they will celebrate his triumph with poison gas and bombshells rather than confetti and champagne.

If you listen closely, you can already hear the test rounds exploding.

The target is Obama’s favorable but hazy persona, which Republican operatives must redefine in negative and even threatening terms. Assuming that the Republican nominee will be Sen. John McCain, they will aim to contrast his tough, aggressive stance against Islamist terrorism with his opponent’s alleged weakness and naivety. But as usual, they will do worse, spreading slurs and smears that depict Obama as a dupe or even a sympathizer of Islamic radicals.

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Robert B. Reich, The New York Times, February 13, 2008

Berkeley, California – We’re sliding into recession, or worse, and Washington is turning to the normal remedies for economic downturns. But the normal remedies are not likely to work this time, because this isn’t a normal downturn.

The problem lies deeper. It is the culmination of three decades during which American consumers have spent beyond their means. That era is now coming to an end. Consumers have run out of ways to keep the spending binge going.

The only lasting remedy, other than for Americans to accept a lower standard of living and for businesses to adjust to a smaller economy, is to give middle-and lower-income Americans more buying power – and not just temporarily.

Much of the current debate is irrelevant. Even with more tax breaks for business like accelerated depreciation, companies won’t invest in more factories or equipment when demand is dropping for products and services across the board, as it is now. And temporary fixes like a stimulus package that would give households a one-time cash infusion won’t get consumers back to the malls, because consumers know the assistance is temporary. The problems most consumers face are permanent, so they are likely to pocket the extra money instead of spending it.

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Paul Krugman, The New York Times, February 15, 2008

A decade ago, during the last global financial crisis, the word on everyone’s lips was “contagion.” Troubles that began in a far-away country of which most people knew nothing (Thailand) eventually spread to much bigger countries with no obvious connection to Southeast Asia, like Russia and Brazil.

Today, we’re witnessing another kind of contagion, not so much across countries as across markets. Troubles that began a little over a year ago in an obscure corner of the financial system, BBB-minus subprime-mortgage-backed securities, have spread to corporate bonds, auto loans, credit cards and now — the latest casualty — student loans.

Indeed, this week the state of Michigan suspended a major student-loan program because of the sudden collapse of another $300 billion market you’ve never heard of, the market for auction-rate securities.

Why has a crisis that began with loans to a limited group of home buyers ended up disrupting so much of the financial system? Because, ultimately, it’s more than a subprime crisis; indeed, it’s more than a housing crisis. It’s a crisis of faith.

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Sam Stein, The Huffington Post, February 14, 2008

Even as Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was blasting Sen. Barack Obama for his ties to the Exelon Corporation, Clinton’s chief strategist Mark Penn was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars through his firm from the very same nuclear energy giant.

This past week, Burson Marsteller, Penn’s powerhouse consulting agency, was paid more than $230,000 by Exelon to help renew a nuclear energy license in New Jersey, the Huffington Post has learned. The payment was for work that took place over several months, and Burson is still employed by the company.

“They did some work for us in New Jersey between June and November,” said Craig Nesbit, vice president of communications for Exelon Generation, a subsidiary. “That bill was invoiced on December 12 and it just took that long to pay these things… We still are paying them a little bit but it is ramping down.”

It has been public knowledge that Exelon is a client of Burson. But news of the recent payment comes less than two weeks after the Clinton campaign, and Penn himself, took Obama to task for what they implied was preferential treatment for the company.

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Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, February 13, 2008

Russell Berman, a young reporter for The New York Sun, trailed Bill Clinton around Maryland all day Sunday. The former president was on his best behavior, irritating the smattering of press.

After Bill’s last speech at Leisure World retirement community in Silver Spring, Berman interviewed two women in the audience.

Elaine Sirkis, 77, an Obama supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a woman president. Betty Conway, 83, a Hillary supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a black president.

As Conway walked away, Sirkis smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry,” she told Berman sweetly about her friend. “She’s a bigot.”

We’re not just in the most vertiginous election of our lives. We’re in another national seminar on gender and race that is teaching us about who we are as we figure out what we want America to be.

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