By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

By Dave Lindorff

If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and
on the tube, you’d think things had finally turned a corner. The
economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter ended
September 30. “The Economy is Back in Gear” shouted the headline on an
article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. “The recession ended
unofficially in September,” said a reporter on NPR.

Regulating And Monitoring Financial Businesses: An Essential Key To Your Life

By Dave Lindorff

So now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief Program
(TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets
had locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he
extorted out of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new
President Barack Obama justifying the spending of the second half of
the money because we needed to “get the banks lending again”?

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

By Dave Lindorff

The “happy talk” campaign in the US media and coming from the White House is just that: Happy Talk.

To get a real picture of what is happening with this economy, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Yes, the rate of decline in economic activity has slowed. But that
is to be expected. When an economy is going at full tilt, as the US
economy was doing in early 2007, a slowdown of any significance yields
huge numbers, in terms of falling production, falling factory
utilization, falling car sales, or, this time around, falling housing
prices.

By Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or
underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing
patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic
stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the
growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce,
at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and
early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this
year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of
the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending
package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were
promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

By Dave Lindorff

My bank, a small regional institution that was not involved in sub-prime lending, and that was not a recipient of any TARP bailout money, cut off my home equity line of credit two weeks ago. They did it abruptly, with no notice—I only discovered it had happened when I tried to get a $500 advance from it to cover a payment I was making on my credit card. When I asked what was going on, the local branch manager informed me that “we are closing out a lot of credit lines while we reassess the value of houses in this region, which have been falling.”

By David Swanson

Every year in Washington, D.C., the Campaign for America's Future (CAF) convenes the largest conference of activists positioned anywhere to the left of wherever the center has drifted off to. Labor and community groups and civil rights groups play a big role, most of them strictly loyal to the Democratic Party. The focus is on domestic issues, and the approach is an inside strategy of nudging and honoring those in power. You can sense my cynicism, and yet this year I was very pleasantly surprised.

In past years the peace movement has protested, agitated, and self-organized, as the CAF has declined to include any panel discussions of war. It's been as if the conference planners had never heard of Iraq or Afghanistan, even while strategizing for elections and lamenting the lack of funds for non-military projects. Also in the past any panels on "accountability" have been extremely weak.