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America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs.
It’s the military doctrine of lightning force — fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage — applied to the campaign for economic recovery.
With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion.
President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works.
Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years.
The idea: fast cash, and lots of it, but with a strategic view to the future.
Some dollars will flow quickly into wallets — and right out again.
The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs.
The success of the stimulus package may be measured less by visible achievements than by what does not happen — the home that is not foreclosed, the family that doesn’t slip into poverty, the disease that does not go undiagnosed.
“The one thing we’ll never know is what would have happened if we didn’t do it,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight.
It’s not FDR’s deal and these aren’t his times.
No federally subsidized artists will paint murals glorifying the muscle of American workers or the progress belching from smokestacks, as they did in Roosevelt’s day.
No grand compact is to be formed between generations like the one that promised everyone a federal pension. No institutions will rise to try something brand new.
“We’re not reinventing government,” said historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the best-selling “Don’t Know Much About” series. “We’re modifying things that exist.”
Yet as the share of the economy taken up by federal spending rises to an anticipated 30 percent, the nation is grappling again with big questions about Washington’s place in people’s lives.
“The stakes are so high now, this is such a big bill, average Americans are following it,” says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. “It’s become a bill that is an argument about what government can or can’t do.
“If there is no effect and in six months we are talking about the same economy or a worse economy, I think it would be a devastating blow to the president, Democrats, and to liberal claims about what government can do.”
To critics such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the package is the “Europeanization of America.” Others call it “Rooseveltian” or “generational theft” in reference to the debt passed on to the future.
They might envision murals glorifying little more than filled potholes, insulated windows, depreciated computers.
Obama said it’s about more than that, and drew parallels with FDR in speaking Friday to the Business Council, formed by corporate leaders in the 1930s to advise Roosevelt’s administration.
“We adapted, we changed,” he said about those days — and these. “President Roosevelt understood the new role of government in this new world, that while extraordinary actions on its part might be the source of recovery, no action on the part of government, no matter how extraordinary, would alone be the source of our prosperity.”
Democrats and just enough Republicans in Congress — three — saw the package as the best chance to tamp down the economic wildfires breaking out across the landscape.
Obama came into office saying he wished to be judged on his first 1,000 days instead of the usual benchmark of 100. In some ways he will be judged on his first 10 or 20.
Not even Roosevelt, fast off the mark to deal with a bank crisis, was as fast as this in achieving something so sweeping, so early.
The enormity of the package left politicians grasping for concrete ways to convey its size.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., spoke of a stack of hundred-dollar bills 689 miles high, and of bills wrapped side-by-side that would encircle the Earth nearly 39 times. House Republicans predicted that the package’s costs — with interest on the necessary borrowing — could total more than a trillion dollars, enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every American.
It was enough to prompt comic Jon Stewart to riff that if you sewed the $100 bills together, “you would make a blanket for Jupiter.”
The stimulus wasn’t just about throwing cash at the economy, though.
The package is filled with billions for some of the same goals that Obama preached about on the presidential campaign trail — renewable energy and green jobs, computerized medical records, broadband Internet service for underserved areas.
“There are seeds in this bill for long-term change,” says Zelizer. “There are things that can develop out of the research that can change our lives.”
Obama sounded a drumbeat of warnings about the consequences of failing to act. But Americans didn’t need their president to tell them how grim the economic situation was — and could become.
Forty percent of Americans already have been affected by some sort of job problem in the past year, be it unemployment, underemployment, layoffs, reductions in pay or hours, or job losses by members of their households, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-six percent expect things to be worse or about the same a year from now — and they’ve got solid grounds for their pessimism.
The country could well suffer a net loss of 2 million to 3 million or more jobs this year, economists believe. And the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, could top 9 percent by spring of 2010.
The stimulus pull-together was a colossal game of winners and losers shaped and reshaped by the latest set of hands on the package. The fortunes of people, schools, towns and other varied interests rose and fell in blinks of time.
Ready to buy another home?
Poof — you just lost $15,000 that legislators had considered providing.
Buying a first home? You’re still in luck — the government plans to give you an $8,000 credit if you buy by the end of November.
A new car? You’ll be able to deduct the thousands in sales taxes from your income tax but not — as was initially proposed — your loan interest as well.
One day, the government proposed to pay 65 percent of the cost of health coverage for a year for jobless people who lose their workplace insurance. Days later, it was down to half. Ultimately, the subsidy zigzagged back up to 65 percent, but it expires before the end of the year.
Obama declared an end to pork-barrel politics, but legislators still managed to look out for favorite projects.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was quick to point out that a big chunk of the $8 billion set aside to construct high-speed rail lines could go to a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., helped make sure $10 billion was set aside for the National Institutes of Health, a priority of his.
Long after the dust has settled from the horse trading, the government will be seen to have moved with unaccustomed speed on policies normally subjected to years of deliberation and gridlock.
Deficit hawks found their wings clipped as both parties reached for the treasury. Democrats mainly wished to spend; Republicans, mainly to cut taxes.
After last November, guess who got their way?
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said flatly: “We won the election; we wrote the bill.”
The debate was both large and small. Negotiators considered the proper role of government — and how fast a business can depreciate its equipment.
Entering the 1930s, Americans mainly saw the national government as the entity that fought wars, ran post offices and enforced a ban on liquor. Federal spending was only 3.4 percent of the economy.
That more than tripled during the New Deal, topping 10 percent, because of the explosion of public works and other labor programs, rural modernization, bank support, and farm and industrial aid.
“It was a transformation of society in a way that hadn’t been done since the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery,” Davis said.
The government became the entity that guaranteed a minimum wage, controlled farm production, supported artists, set workplace standards, insured deposits in regulated banks and cast the first national safety net for the elderly and handicapped under Social Security.
“The whole scope of what Roosevelt was trying to do is different but the intent is clearly the same: relief and recovery during a time of economic stress,” said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The package won by Obama offers “very important but more subterranean changes in the way the economy works,” he said.
Federal spending as a share of the economy shot above 40 percent during World War II and has hovered around 20 percent most of the years since. That share was already projected to approach 25 percent before Obama’s stimulus plan.
To be sure, there’s still considerable disagreement about how much the New Deal helped to end a depression finally crushed by the humming factories of World War II.
Even FDR’s transformation of the federal government was not universally recognized at the time for what it was. It may be years before the full measure of Obama’s efforts are taken, too.
In 1936, The Economist magazine pronounced the New Deal a “striking success” in improving conditions that existed when FDR took office three years earlier.
But what of the legacy?
What legacy?
“If the criterion be Utopian, the achievements of the New Deal appear to be small,” the editors sniffed. “The great problems of the country are hardly touched.”

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Trump Organization Given ‘Corporate Death Penalty’ and Ordered Dissolved by Judge After ‘Persistent Fraud’: Legal Experts

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A New York judge has ordered Donald Trump’s business entities in the state of New York, including The Trump Organization, dissolved, and his business certificates canceled, according to legal experts, after ruling that the ex-president for years committed fraud and deceived banks and insurers by inflating the value of his assets.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron “has ordered cancellation of all [NYS] business [certificates] of ‘any entity controlled or beneficially owned by Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Jr, Eric Trump, Alan Weisselberg, & Jeffrey McConney. An independent receiver will manage the dissolutions,” writes former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega.

The Messenger reports Judge Engoron’s “blockbuster ruling found that the former president and his business leaders failed to correct course after warned of a ‘propensity to engage in persistent fraud,'” and ordered “a quick timeline to dissolve the Trump Organization and other corporate entities.”

READ MORE: House GOP Shutdown Demands Include Gutting Billions From Dept. of Education, Costing Over 200,000 Teachers Their Jobs

MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin explains that the “New York trial court judge has found that Trump, his adult sons, and Allen Weisselberg engaged in a persistent, years-long fraud through ‘fantasy world’ valuations of core Trump assets, including his own residence and various golf courses and office buildings.”

“His decision not only eliminates the need for trial on that claim, but also orders fairly dramatic relief: the cancellation of New York business certificates for all of the entities named as defendants, ‘as well as any other entity controlled or beneficially owned by the individual defendants found liable,'” she adds.

“In addition to finding that Trump committed fraud, the judge canceled the certificates of various Trump businesses, appointed a former judge as an independent monitor of the Trump Organization, and will appoint receivers to manage the canceled LLCs,” writes former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti.

“This is a pretty big deal,” he adds.

Professor of law Ryan Goodman, the former Dept. of Defense Special Counsel says Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered the “corporate death penalty” for the Trump organization. Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance also used the term “corporate death penalty.”

READ MORE: ‘Careening’ Toward ‘Risk of Political Violence’: Experts Sound Alarm After Trump Floats Executing His Former General

“The leading Republican candidate has been found liable for sexual assault and fraud, his companies found guilty of fraud, and he’s charged with 91 OTHER felony counts. That he is not dismissed politically out of hand says much more about us, than about him,” observes MSNBC’s Andrew Weissmann, the well-known former lead prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office and former FBI General Counsel.

Attorney, retired U.S. Air Force colonel, and former administrative law judge Moe Davis responding to the news, writes: “Trump is the eponymous fraudster. The name Trump is to fraud what Campell’s is to soup, Kleenex is to tissue, and ping is to pong.”

 

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Trump Committed Fraud and Deceived Banks While Growing His Real Estate Empire, Judge Says: Report

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Donald Trump committed fraud, deceived banks, and inflated the value of his real estate holdings a judge said Tuesday, granting New York Attorney General Letitia James partial summary judgment in her civil case against the ex-president.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron “has ruled that Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and the White House,” The Associated Press reports. Judge Engoron “found that the former president and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing financing.”

“The decision, days before the start of a non-jury trial in Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit, is the strongest repudiation yet of Trump’s carefully coiffed image as a wealthy and shrewd real estate mogul turned political powerhouse,” The AP adds.

Attorney General James “is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York, his home state. The trial could last into December, Engoron has said.”

READ MORE: McCarthy Now Blaming Likely Shutdown on Fentanyl, President Biden, and His Own House Republicans
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McCarthy Now Blaming Likely Shutdown on Fentanyl, President Biden, and His Own House Republicans

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Speaker Kevin McCarthy during a raucous gaggle with reporters Tuesday afternoon blamed the increasingly likely shutdown of the federal government on fentanyl, President Joe Biden, and his own House Republicans.

Political experts have said the Republican Speaker could avoid a government shutdown, which will happen at midnight on Friday if legislation is not passed, by making a deal with Democrats and a small number of House Republicans. Doing so would likely cost him his job.

Asked on Tuesday by CNN’s Manu Raju, “Are you ruling out a clean CR without any border security?” McCarthy immediately launched in to a diatribe.

“You know what’s so concerning here? What do you tell to the families that tomorrow morning are gonna wake up and their child’s dead? Because fentanyl came across?” he asked the CNN reporter (video below). “What do you tell to that border agent that you saw the other day? Now his network doesn’t believe it but he’s all in blood. Or the cartels, the billions of dollars that they’re making. Or to the young girls that get raped?”

READ MORE: House GOP Shutdown Demands Include Gutting Billions From Dept. of Education, Costing Over 200,000 Teachers Their Jobs

Another reporter, seemingly frustrated, interjected and asked, “But what do you tell the workers who are concerned they’re gonna get furloughed next week because there is no agreement in your chamber, sir?”

“Well, I know. It’s easy,” McCarthy claimed. “All the President has to do is say, ‘You know what, as one of my fundamental jobs as the President of the United States is to secure our border.'”

Another reporter, ignoring the Speaker’s apparent obfuscation, loudly asked, “Speaker McCarthy if we see the rule votes fail later today, is it possible to even move on to a CR [continuing resolution] for you?”

“Oh, yeah, I never give up,” McCarthy said smiling.

“I know that,” she replied, “but do you think you have the votes?”

Again, not delivering a straight answer, McCarthy smiled and replied, “Oh, I’ve got a lot of things I can try.”

READ MORE: ‘Height of Irresponsibility’: Top LGBTQ Civil Rights Group Slams House Republicans Over Shutdown and ‘Politics of Hate’

CNN’s Raju reported that McCarthy, when asked about the “math,” meaning if he has the votes to keep the government open, said: “What’s concerning to me is that there are people in the Republican Party who will take the position of President Biden against what the rest of Americans want.”

That could suggest some Republicans have indicated they would vote with Democrats on a bill to keep the government from shutting down.

Raju also reported he asked “Speaker McCarthy if he believes he could survive a vote to oust him from the speakership, as [Rep. Matt] Gaetz has threatened, and he said: ‘I don’t count that vote.'”

NPR’s Joel Rose has reported, “Close to 90% of … fentanyl is seized at ports of entry. Immigration authorities say it is smuggled mostly by U.S. citizens, as well as other travelers who are legally authorized to cross. Virtually none is seized from migrants who are seeking asylum.”

On Monday The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “The U.S. government will almost certainly shut down on Oct. 1, the work of ultraconservative holdouts who want to ‘burn the whole place down,’ as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) put it. Yet, for now, Mr. McCarthy does not appear willing to take away the matches. He could sideline the objectors by calling House Democrats and agreeing to pass bipartisan legislation to fund the government.”

Watch McCarthy below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Careening’ Toward ‘Risk of Political Violence’: Experts Sound Alarm After Trump Floats Executing His Former General

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