After two years, Senator Christopher Dodd’s financial regulatory reform bill is finally moving out of committee to be brought to a vote on the floor of the Senate. Both the Connecticut senator and the banking committee’s ranking Republican, Richard Shelby of Alabama, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press this Sunday to state their intentions. Dodd […]
Simon Johnson, former chief economist with the International Monetary Fund and currently an MIT professor of entrepreneurship, has been arguing for the forced downsizing of Wall Street’s biggest banks for well over a year. In May 2009 he fiercely criticized what he described as the country’s “financial oligarchy” for creating the 2008 crisis and subsequently […]
Since Senate Republicans announced their intention to filibuster a financial reform bill, their party has come under attack from the left for supposedly being in the pocket of big banks. Even the president suggested this weekend that the GOP is taking its cues from Wall Street. The Democrats may have difficulty understanding that some lawmakers […]
Given that our country is mired in a severe recession, the history of the Great Depression — especially the history of how we got out of it — is rightly regarded as relevant to fixing today’s problems. Some popular accounts would have us believe that the Great Depression ended via a) FDR’s New Deal and/or […]
Arianna Huffington complains about what she calls “the real Wall Street crime” at her online newspaper today in an entry entitled, “Shorting the Middle Class.” According to Huffington, big banks, for decades, have been “selling” the American people a promise of unending prosperity while in truth, they facilitated the transfer of wealth from America’s middle […]
Europe and Japan sit safely under America’s defense umbrella.
President Barack Obama was unusually defiant in his weekly televised address this Saturday, attacking special interests and “their allies in Washington” for resisting financial reform. The recession, according to the president, was caused by the financial industry. Indeed, it could have been avoided “if Wall Street firms were more accountable, if financial dealings were more […]
Note to the left: not everything is about race.
The Obama Administration’s Middle East policy appears to have swung from the slightly idealistic to the definitively realistic in recent weeks, with the opposition continuing to denounce the supposed naiveté of the president’s intentions. Barack Obama began his offensive in Cairo, Egypt last year where he called upon the Muslim world to end “the cycle […]
There was some troubling news coming out of Kabul last week. Afghan President Hamid Karzai not only invited his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to come visit; he supposedly told guests at the presidential palace recently that the Americans had invaded his country in order to dominate the region and that as such, they pose an […]
Ayn Rand described as the proudest distinction of Americans, “because it contains all the others,” she believed, the fact that they were the first to coin the phrase “to make money.” Men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity, she noted in “The Meaning of Money,” published in For the New Intellectual (1961), […]
The president’s former speechwriter doesn’t tell the whole story when he tries to defend his old boss’ record.
The nuclear treaty with Russia is separate from America’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran and North Korea.
In the wake of the release of the Defense Department’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review and President Barack Obama’s signing of a new START treaty with Russia, what will the future American nuclear arsenal look like? Under the latest START agreement, the United States will maintain no more than 1,550 strategic warheads; seven hundred deployed intercontinental […]
The United States Congress may very well rank another pro-capitalist lawmaker among its numbers this fall as Rand Paul is leading in the polls to claim retiring Senator Jim Bunning’s Kentucky seat. Paul is a son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s who is known for his unwavering opposition to “big government.” He officially announced his […]
