Author: Robert Borosage

“The decisions that are made in the next six months or so are likely to set the economic course of this country for the next 50 years,” says Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the COP, the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with reviewing the banking bailout. “That’s what happened coming out of the Great Depression, and I […]

Tax Day. Fox News is flogging Astroturf “tea parties” underwritten by corporate lobbyists, while its pundits warn that raising the top income tax rate to the level it was under Bill Clinton constitutes “socialism.” The Wall Street Journal editorializes about the evils of the estate tax. Ari Fleischer, Daddy Bush’s old flack, is trotted out […]

Democratic Senator Chris Dodd is in deep trouble. According to Stuart Rothenberg, Dodd is the most vulnerable senator up for re-election in 2010 — despite the fact that he’s coasted to election easily in this deep blue state since his first Senate run in 1980.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has called for “sweeping regulation” of the financial community, beginning a discussion of how we restructure the banking system—in and out of the shadows—as we emerge from what Robert Kuttner calls the Great Collapse. Literally trillions have already been committed in loans, guarantees, swaps, direct equity to stave off a complete […]

Will Obama’s transformative budget survive? As his press conference last night illustrated, it runs a serious risk of drowning in a swamp of cant. The budget is getting strafed by politicians in both parties for its deficits and debt. (The deficit is the annual shortfall between revenue and spending; debt is essentially the accumulation of […]

I discuss with American News Project’s Harry Hanbury and Nick Penniman what’s next for the populist uprising spurred by today’s economic crisis. This video traces how progressives helped shaped the New Deal and the post-World War II recovery, and I talk about the lessons for today. My central point: With Wall Street and the conservative […]

Who stands in the way of the reforms vital to get us out of the deep hole we are in? Republicans, of course, have decided to be the party of “no,” staking their future on President Obama’s failure. But that isn’t a surprise. The entrenched interests whose oxen get gored are suitably enraged, and mobilizing […]

Last year we worried about homes below water; now it is the economy itself that is sinking. Warren Buffett says the U.S. economy has “fallen off a cliff.” And, as bad as the U.S. is, the rest of the world is worse. Germany’s exports have collapsed; Japan is in free fall; much of Eastern Europe […]

It ain’t easy. No use jokin’. Everything’s broken.”-Bob Dylan We can’t go back to the old economy. That economy — marked by booms and busts, Gilded Age inequality, declining wages, growing household debts, and unsustainable trade deficits — didn’t work very well for most Americans. President Obama is faced with the difficult task of creating […]