National

The week of September 29th, 2008 opened with the failure in Congress of the Bush bailout plan. Ongoing opposition to a Wall Street bailout without preconditions may have major repercussions. Read below.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Braving chilly temperatures and the threat of rain, a crowd estimated by local media at 16,000 turned out Thursday morning to hear Barack Obama emphasize the need to bail out working families not just Wall Street.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — At organized labor’s Get Out The Vote mobilization here last week, Ohio AFL-CIO President Joe Rugola announced that he will walk across the state, stopping at shut-down facilities, to publicize the over 122,000 jobs lost in that state due to the policies of the Bush administration. The “Walk for Economic Justice” will kick off Oct. 5 in Youngstown, with a public rally at one of the many closed steel mills in the Mahoning Valley.

John McCain got lucky last week. Less than 24 hours after the New York Times broke a story about McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis’ ties to the Freddie Mac, the big home lender that failed during the Wall Street collapse, the story disappeared from the headlines.

Are you registered to vote? Where should you vote? Do you need ID? Should you vote early? How do you protect your rights?

First time applications for unemployment benefits skyrocketed to a seven year high in September as more workers lost their jobs in an economy that John McCain described, only two weeks ago, as “basically sound.”

WASHINGTON — “A crisis of credit, housing and jobs” is confronting the country today, warned Marc Morial, president of the Urban League, at a Congressional Black Caucus town hall meeting here Sept. 25. Headlined “Foreclosure Crisis: Repercussion, Reasons, and Real Solutions,” the meeting drew several hundred community leaders, officials and members of Congress.

If we were in a medical crisis instead of an economic one, a triage would be set up and this city would be first in line for assistance. The Motor City, whose residents have produced so much wealth for so few, is hurting and in need of help. Since 2000, city officials say, the Detroit metropolitan area has lost 200,000 auto-related jobs and the city itself has gone from the highest rate of home ownership to the highest rate of home foreclosures.

The difficulty in sealing a deal to relieve the financial crisis is no surprise. People on Main Street are fuming over the Bush administration’s $700 billion “cash for trash” proposal to bail out Wall Street at taxpayer expense.

The turmoil in financial markets and the bailout to the tune of $700 billion has turned the public eye and wrath on Wall Street and Washington. While millions are aware of the triggering causes, ranging from predatory lending to deregulation to insatiable greed, what isn’t so obvious is the longer-term process that brought our financial system and economy to the edge of the abyss.