Your bailout money paid for lobbying campaigns designed to screw you

The top eight spenders in the financial industry spent nearly $30 million to lobby Capitol Hill last year, according to Nathaniel Popper of the Los Angeles Times — a 13 percent increase from 2008. That uptick was fueled…

Growing evidence suggests Wells Fargo targeted blacks for subprime loans

Memphis city officials have filed a lawsuit charging mortgage-loan giant Wells Fargo with discrimination. The New York Times reports:

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Tennessee, marshaled a raft of statistics to argue that Wells Fargo offered

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How to deal retrospectively with Wall Street crash? ‘Cut the taxes; cut the spending’

In a moment that recalls Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry kicking off his gubernatorial campaign by declaring he would have rejected federal stimulus funds even as the state budget was tanking, we have GOP Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in…

Reid trying to speed Udall bill to expedite credit card reforms

Senate leaders are trying to “hotline” a bill that would expedite previously passed credit card reforms to prevent companies from hiking rates and fees before the law takes hold, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

Senate Majority Leader…

Band of Dems blasts Geithner plan

WASHINGTON– Appearing before a House panel on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner made his best pitch for legislation granting the White House broad new powers to seize Wall Street firms when their collapse might torpedo others in the industry. It didn’t go so well.

Bailout watchdog warns of ‘coming collapse of the middle class’

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who chairs the $700 billion financial bailout program oversight panel, offers a sobering view of the prospects for middle class families as they drown in personal debt from housing, health care and other costs attributed to suburban life.

Credit crisis bailout ‘largest outlay in American history,’ author says

It’s enough to make your head spin. Seems like every time we turn around, someone’s proposing another multi-hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out this, shore up that or rebuild something or other. Remember in the distant past of September, when the $700 billion rescue plan shocked everyone from Wall Street to Main Street? That was just the beginning.

Denver think tank refutes Reagan’s ‘government is problem’ meme

That sound you hear isn’t the economy trickling down but what may prove to be the slow drip-drip-drip of a public repudiation of a long-held conservative political belief that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”

CC prof: Meltdown puts ‘decisive constraints’ on Obama foreign policy

A Colorado College political science professor paints a grim picture of the economic crisis facing the Obama administration and the constraints it will put on any attempt to redirect foreign policy. In an interview published Wednesday on the Harper’s Magazine Web site, international politics expert David Hendrickson — who recently wrote “Cause for Depression,” a pictorial guide to the financial crisis — spoke to Ken Silverstein and offered some dire predictions and grim warnings.

Wall Street collapse derails GOP’s domestic-drilling campaign strategy

With energy prices plummeting right along with the rest of the stock market the past two weeks, Republicans may have lost one of their best weapons for attacking Democrats in the energy battleground state of Colorado.