From AlterNet
By Joshua Holland

Barack Obama has said that there can only be one president at a time. By all appearances, in the midst of an almost unprecedented economic meltdown, it is he.

Obama gave three press conferences this week, aimed at reassuring a jittery nation — and world — that he was preparing to tackle the recession head-on. Even as Bush’s Treasury Department announced an array of new interventions to prop up the moribund economy, Bush himself has been out of sight and out of mind. On Tuesday, while Obama was calling for a massive spending program to boost slacking demand for everything from houses to cars to consumer gadgets, Bush was in Kentucky, “thanking” troops returning from his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush hasn’t held a full presser since August.

Obama hinted that he would adopt an approach that progressives have been urging Washington to take since the economy went into free-fall: spending as much as $800 billion to revive the “nuts and bolts” economy. It’s a marked difference from the Bush administration’s (almost) singular focus — which, in fairness, appears to be changing — on recapitalizing large, teetering financial institutions.

The task the new president will face is daunting. New economic data released this week show an increasing risk of a “deflationary spiral” in which layoffs that follow the massive pile of national wealth that has evaporated in the financial crisis and bursting housing bubble — and the fear of being hurt by the economic mess among those whose jobs are secure — cause people to rein in spending, which causes the supply of just about everything to outstrip demand, which leads to lower prices, which hurts firms’ profits, which leads to even more layoffs and even greater economic insecurity.

The four-week average of new unemployment claims hit its highest mark since the deep recession of 1983; consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of the American economy, dropped by a full percentage point last month — the third consecutive monthly decline — and prices fell by more than a half-point in October.

Read more Taking Charge

From Salon
By David Sirota

Judging by the proliferation of capital letters in the e-mail correspondence I receive, many seem worried that Barack Obama may not deliver the promised “change we can believe in.”

After voters rejected the mantra of free trade and deregulation, some of those contacting me say they are upset that Obama is hiring so many free-trading deregulators who birthed today’s economic mess.

With the president-elect having touted his opposition to the Iraq war, some are bothered “that Obama’s national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views,” as the Los Angeles Times reports.

Others recall Obama’s insistence that “change doesn’t come from Washington; change comes to Washington,” and say they are dismayed that his government will be run by Washington insiders. And still others are confused that Obama championed a progressive platform but, as the Nation’s Chris Hayes notes, “not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive” has been floated for a major Cabinet position.

To my fearful letter writers, I offer three responses.

Read more Trust

From In These Times
By Salim Muwakkil

Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Nov. 4.

What was once a distant possibility — and an audacious hope — has become an extraordinary fact. The election of a black president was considered so unlikely that it seemed silly to even contemplate. I never thought it would happen in my lifetime.

When CNN announced Obama had won, tears unexpectedly welled in my eyes. The election of the nation’s first black president struck some deep psychic chord.

But outside of my psyche, a President Obama has many meanings — some contradictory. I feel strong pride that such a talented black American has accomplished such a towering feat against such overwhelming odds.

I am proud Obama’s team mounted an innovative 21st century campaign that left many of us scratching our heads in 20th century bemusement.

I feel pride that this nation is making bold steps to atone for its original sin. That theme also resonates with many black civil rights activists. Some have likened Obama’s election to the period during the Emancipation Proclamation, and several civil rights groups organized so-called “Emancipation Watch” gatherings to monitor election results.

The notion that this election is a symbol of racial redemption is particularly striking. African Americans have been virtually lockstep in their support for Illinois’ junior senator, after the Iowa primary proved that a black candidate could attract white votes.

Read more Obama

From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

Surprisingly this Thanksgiving, the Washington Establishment had a lot to give thanks for. And its chief mouthpiece – the Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial page – was glowing over its good fortune in the three-plus weeks since Barack Obama’s election.

On Friday, the Post’s lead editorial thanked President-elect Obama for settling on insider favorites for key jobs, especially officials with long records of promoting the neocon foreign policy agenda.

In Post speak, Obama “has so far placed an admirable emphasis on proven competence over personal loyalty or political purity.”

In the frame of the Washington Establishment, “proven competence” means you were a strong supporter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and see any failure there as a matter of Donald Rumsfeld’s tactical mistakes, not fundamental misjudgments. You also must show a manly regard for the brilliant “surge” strategy.

The Post’s sneer about “political purity” refers to someone who either opposed the Iraq War from the start or broke from the Washington consensus early and wants as swift a withdrawal as possible.

Read more Thanks

From The Baltimore Sun
By Kathleen Parker

So much for the wisdom of The People.

A new report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute on the nation’s civic literacy finds that most Americans are too ignorant to vote.

Out of 2,500 American quiz-takers, including college students, elected officials and other randomly selected citizens, nearly 1,800 flunked a 33-question test on basic civics. In fact, elected officials scored slightly lower than the general public with an average score of 44 percent compared to 49 percent.

Only 0.8 percent of all test-takers scored an “A.”

The multiple-choice ISI quiz wouldn’t deepen the creases in most brains, but the questions do require a basic knowledge of how the U.S. government works. Think fast: In what document do the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people” appear? More than twice as many people (56 percent) knew that Paula Abdul was a judge on American Idol than knew that those words come from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (21 percent).

In good news, more than 80 percent of college graduates gave correct answers about Susan B. Anthony, the identity of the commander in chief of the U.S. military, and the content of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

But don’t pop the cork yet. Only 17 percent of college grads understood the difference between free markets and centralized planning

Read more Ignorance

Read more

From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

I was listening to Robert Reich, once the left end of the spectrum in the Clinton cabinet, talking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a few days ago, and Reich, who has in the past sometimes made sense, was talking about how Americans’ incomes had fallen over the last eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration and that it was necessary to get their incomes back on an upward trend, so that they could “start shopping again.”

Now I understand Reich was trying to make the case that the bailout so far has been focused on the banks and the insurance industry, and that none of this will help unless ordinary people start getting some relief, but still, there’s something completely twisted and out of whack when the best we can come up with is that we need to get Americans back into the malls.

In fact, that is a good part of what’s wrong with the US economy: Fully 75 percent of GDP in America is consumer spending.

The problem facing America, and to a great extent the broader world economy, is that we’ve pretty much met basic human needs long ago, and now it’s about creating human wants and then convincing people that they need to buy more stuff and more services.

This is wrong in so many ways and on so many levels.

First of all, we don’t need all this stuff. Is my life any better if I go from a 18-inch TV screen to a 60-inch TV screen? Is it, for that matter, any better if I go from an old cathode-ray tube to a flat screen digital display, or from no TV to a TV?

Read more Stuff

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

One thing I am thankful for on Thanksgiving weekend is having absolutely no desire to go to the mall. I cannot remember the last time I did so, which by extension leaves me utterly out of touch with the national impulse to waddle out of bed at 4 a.m., especially the morning after the biggest collective burp on the American calendar.

It seems that it is not enough for Americans to watch football on turkey day. Obviously inspired by our beloved black-and-blue brutality, otherwise sane Americans treat Black Friday as their day in the NFL, blasting through the hole of the store opening to the 20-, the 30-, the 40-, the 50-percent-off sweater department! Then you chop-block the shopper ahead of you to advance from 53d to 52d in the checkout line.

All this sweat, tears, and occasional blood for the argyle for dear old Dad that becomes moth bait.

This year is, of course, different. Black Friday really turned tragic as a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in New York. This and the economy stinks. President-elect Obama has said for two years the planet is in peril. That originally only referred to global warming. But Americans keep thinking we can pilfer the planet at no peril. SUV sales are already picking up again now that gasoline is back under $2 a gallon, at the very same time we whine like the Wicked Witch of the West, shrinking to our knees screaming that our wallets are “melting! melting!”

Read more Something Different

From The Progressive
By Ruth Conniff

Black Friday is only a day away, and it doesn’t look good for retailers. A front-page story in The New York Times, “To Buy Children’s Gifts, Mothers Do Without,” describes a trend away from shopping responsible for an 18.2 percent drop in women’s clothing sales from a year ago. People are curbing the Christmas binge, buying less, forgoing gifts, and generally avoiding the bottomless pit of consumerism that drives our economy.

That might be good for those of us who care to withdraw voluntarily from the rat race at the mall. Buy Nothing Day also happens to be the Friday after Thanksgiving–a day of nonshopping organized to spread the word that, as Adbusters –http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd–puts it, “There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.”

But it is also a sign of the dire shape of our economy.

Here is the conundrum of the financial meltdown: we are all living in a world fueled by unsustainable spending. Every day there are new stories about the hubris of the last few decades of financial boom. A long profile of Fed chair Ben Bernanke in The New Yorker describes how he and other disciples of Alan Greenspan refused to see the housing bubble even as economists like Dean Baker were warning of an imminent mortgage market collapse. Michael Lewis has spent years documenting corruption and stupidity on Wall Street. In a current piece on portfolio. com, he sums up the reasons for Wall Street’s collapse, in highly readable prose: “To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

Read more Shopping

From The NY Times
By Bob Herbert

If we were interested in making the best possible decisions with regard to the U.S. auto industry, someone like Rich Breen would be seen as the face of the industry, not the chief executives of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Mr. Breen is a 55-year-old member of the Teamsters union, a car hauler who delivers new vehicles for the Big Three automakers. He lives in Clinton Township, a suburb of Detroit, and he is horrified by the steady erosion of the American standard of living that he sees each day as he makes his rounds.

“I see the tool and die industry dying in the light industrial areas,” he told me in an interview just before Thanksgiving. “I see the clientele decreasing in the local barbershops, the hardware stores and the restaurants. That’s all happening from the first phase of the downsizing in the auto industry, the cutbacks and layoffs that have already occurred. It’s not from the current crisis.

“The community around me is deteriorating before my eyes. I hear people saying if G.M., Ford or Chrysler shuts down it wouldn’t affect them. They have no idea. It would have a domino effect that we’ve never had before in the United States.

“The bottom would fall out and the ripple effects would go all over the country.”

The bottom is already falling out. The question for Congress and the incoming Obama administration is whether to risk allowing the industry to collapse completely. The number of people working for the Big Three automakers has already been cut drastically, perhaps in half since 2000, and more cuts are to come, even with a government rescue effort.

Read more Big Auto

From The S.F. Chronicle
Editorial

So many environmental regulations to gut, so little time.

In a surprising show of industriousness, the Bush administration has unleashed a last-minute attack on national environmental regulations. “Midnight regulations,” as these activities are called, are nothing new – the first president to ram through unfinished business before leaving office was Jimmy Carter in 1980. Every president since Carter has done the same thing, and the amount of paper used is staggering: Bill Clinton, for example, published more than 26,000 pages’ worth of rules in the Federal Register during his midnight moment. Every outgoing president does it, and every incoming president complains about it bitterly – the rules, once in place, have proved difficult to change.

We urge President-elect Barack Obama to do his best. Bush’s last-minute rules are particularly egregious because they are focused, like a laser, on destroying the nation’s environmental standards.

How, really, can the Bush administration claim with a straight face that the country as a whole will benefit from a new rule allowing power plants to operate near national parks? Or one that will open public land to commercial oil producers, who will have to use an extraction method that’s notoriously energy and pollution-intensive? Who really benefits from provisions that allow power plants to operate at longer hours and emit more pollution? Why is now the right time to remove Northern Rockies wolves from the Endangered Species list?

Very few Americans, presumably, will reap rewards from any of these policies, which may be why the administration is restricting public comment on many of these regulations to 30 days and claiming that it can read the hundreds of thousands of public comments that it receives on each ruling in laughable time periods, like four days in the case of the endangered-species rule revisions. There’s a process being followed here for sure, but it’s a mockery.

Read more Destructive Path