Best of the Web

“Lobbyists for financial institutions—the people responsible for the collapse of our economy—-have been scheming and wrangling to gut the reforms that could stop another economic breakdown” says Mediachannel News Director Danny Schechter. He further informs that many observers see a deeper crash still coming with a depression quietly deepening, “even if most us cling to our perennial optimism and trust in the changemaker we can believe in.”

• Who Can We Bank On, Who Can We Trust, As Crisis Sharpens? by Danny Schechter — Zcommunications

Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer says that “the Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.” And, “aside from a tight mortgage market, the problem in preventing foreclosures has to do with homeowners losing their jobs. Although President Obama was wise enough to at least launch a job stimulus program, a far greater amount of federal funding benefits Wall Street as opposed to Main Street.”

Further, with state and local governments beingforced into draconian budget cuts, firing workers who are among the most reliable in making their mortgage payments, the Obama administration won’t spend even a small fraction of what it has wasted on the banks to cover state shortfalls.

• Foreclosure Fiasco by Robert Scheer — Truthdig

New research by economic historians Eichengreen and O’Rourke, Financial Times Editor compare the current economic crisis with the early phase of the Great Depression, in terms of the stock market crash and the collapse of world trade: “Globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression … This is a Depression-sized event.”

Financial Times editor Martin Wolf, quotes approvingly from their work which also predicts that because current governments are applying the lessons taken from the Great Depression, that the thirties disaster need not be repeated. Two opposing dangers arise, he writes. One is that the stimulus is withdrawn too soon, as happened in the 1930s. The other danger is that stimulus is withdrawn too late resulting in unsustainable government funding and continued deficits.

• The recession tracks the Great Depression — by Martin Wolf — Financial Times

• A Tale of Two Depressionsby Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke — VOX

“Marxism has been out of favour so long, even its jargon sounds refreshing,” writes Ian Brown as he surveys and interviews well known Marxists Leo Panitch, Paul Street and Doug Henwood about how they interpret the collapse of the world’s largest corporations and the state’s decision to take them into partial public ownership.

• The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama by Ian Brown — Globe and Mail

Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich surveys the perennially poor and the working poor to determine how the economic crisis is affecting them.

• Too Poor to Make the News by Barbara Ehrenreich — New York Times

• Imagine: Prosperity without growth by Murray Dobbin — Rabble.ca

Canadian journalist Murray Dobbin argues that the dual economic and climate crises “have arrived just in time to wake us up, just in time for us to choose to save the planet and ourselves from a truly grim future. Not just rising oceans and the loss of coastal communities — but a nightmarish dystopia characterized by global social unrest, the rise of fascism, mass starvation and wars over energy and water”.