Making of Hillary Clinton

CounterPunch is re-running its must-read exposé on Hillary Clinton.

For those undecided on the Hillary-Bernie race, Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn's three-part piece will reveal how calculating and callous Hillary Clinton is, over the last 55 years.

Obama's Project: Making Thin Ice Safe

Those with an investment position betting on the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting to say 6,500 (it's at 8,131 now), should read Alexander Cockburn's piece in CounterPunch and be happy.

As for the project facing Obama in saving the world economy: the words gargantuan and humongous come to mind, analogous to constructing a snow fortress on thin ice on a central Wisconsin lake during the early Autumn. [Lots of unknowns and ambiguity.]

Cockburn:
On any rational assessment the popular new president is skating on thin ice.

Pollyanna bulletins about the economy puff up from the White House and Federal Reserve, like auguries of a new Pope through the Vatican chimney. ...

The economic news in the near and medium term is ghastly, as Mike Whitney outlined on this site last Thursday [see his A Bulletin from the Captain of the Titanic]. Retail sales crashed again in March, nowhere worse than in the car market, though electronics and building materials were way off too. They now reckon there’ll be just over two million housing foreclosures in 2009, up 400,000 from 2008. Industrial output is going through the floor at an annual rate of 20 per cent, the biggest quarterly drop since the end of the Second World War. US industry is now running at only 70 per cent of capacity, the worst number since they started tracking this stat in 1967. Job losses are currently running at 650,000 a month.

Round the next corner is credit card delinquency and the long-heralded slump in commercial real estate, where vacancy rates are already running at 15 per cent... .

Half a million new jobless every month and the salesmen of 'free trade' still hawk their credo.

Yikes. As for free trade hawkers, mostly Republicans who we hope, to paraphrase Ralph McGill (1898-1969), are little, white quasi-Christian men (mostly) standing alone in their own diminishing circles.

Concludes Mike Whitney in his piece:

(Fed Chair Ben) Bernanke's financial rescue plan is a disaster. He should have spent a little less time with Milton Friedman and a little more with Karl Marx. It was Marx who uncovered the root of all financial crises. He summed it up like this:

'The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.' (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, New York International publishers, 1967.)

Bingo.

Message to Bernanke: Workers need debt-relief and a raise in pay not bigger bailouts for chiseling fatcat banksters.

Right. And another message that policymakers ought to heed, a message that rarely comes from the mainstream media: Shipping American jobs overseas is bad for the American economy, bad for Americans (duh) though Republicans love the idea, and is in a word unAmerican.

On a related note, from Quote.com News:

(RTTNews) - Wall Street will be busy assessing report cards this week, as the season springs forward. IBM, Coca-Cola, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft are among the conglomerates scheduled to report in the week that lies ahead.

See also It's D-Day, Shiller, Roubini, Stiglitz, Kuttner and Krugman Sound Alarm.

- via mal contends

Cockburn Skewers Geithner and Others

Update: John Judis ask in TNR "Are Banks Controlling Obama?" Sure seems that way. Let's call for an accounting of what went wrong, again. The culprits are greed, political complicity, and no safety net for the great mass of people who comprise our country.

Alexander Cockburn seems to blast everyone in this weekend's posting on CounterPunch (though Cockburn calling Paul Krugman or anyone else stylistically "pompous" is ridiculous).

Worthy of mention is the fact that CounterPunch is among the very few journals that tells the ugly truth about the global financial meltdown, and Cockburn points out that Krugman is almost uniquely positioned in the corporate media to offer ongoing analyses.

...In his official obituary for the bank bail-out scheme, published in the Times on (last) Monday – the same day as the scheme’s official birth -- Krugman announced somberly that 'This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.'

Yes, this does sound a bit pompous, even though Krugman is a crisp columnist. As connoisseurs of the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf and other prominent economic Cassandras down the decades know well, there’s nothing like a widely-read economics column to induce a tone of self-importance in the author. 'I’m concerned about Europe,' Krugman began a column grandly a few weeks ago.

By this week’s end Krugman was conclusive in judgement. 'I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.'

Far more acrid have been CounterPunch’s A-team of economic commentators – starring former assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, Michael Hudson, Pam Martens, Michael Whitney, Peter Morici and other contributors too numerous for individual mention.

McCarthyism at the Harvard Law School in the 1950s

Alexander Cockburn has a great piece in CounterPunch on McCarthyism at the Harvard Law School during the early 1950s.

Cockburn knows well the imperative often ignored through history to piss on the likes of Joseph Poole, HUAC’s last chairman, Joseph McCarthy, Rice, Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, and the whole sorry lot of fear merchants and chickenhawks and those who went along out of political convenience.