Final Piece in Our Economic Collapse

Final Piece in Our Economic Collapse
Having campaigned on a broadly sketched platform of hope for those on the fringes of economic and physical viability, President Obama is watching the ticker line expand to the point where half of the U.S. population considers itself either underemployed or underserved.

An expanding percentage of this group -- 43.6 million by the Centers for Disease Control's 2006 pre-recession count -- are without health care.

This number has certainly burgeoned well beyond the 50 million mark given the fresh round of layoffs, financial failures and re-budgeting by the recently unemployed.

My concern, and the concern of many, surrounds the disappearance of Obama's commitment to health care provision for the uninsured and underserved members of our population.

We are about to ignore our single functional economic engine -- that of the health care sector -- by prioritizing long-dead sectors of finance and auto manufacturing.

FACING A FISCAL TROUGH

If we fail to rescue health care and public health itself as we move forward, we will be entering a fiscal trough that may take decades to rebuild.

Now would be the perfect time to pick the sector with most viability to fuel our recovery. Later will be far too late.

As we pour countless, and lightly accounted for, billions into bailouts and tax cuts for those having sufficient income to avail themselves of such stimulus measures, we are leaving an ever larger proportion of our country behind, and in the most dire state of need.

Health has been largely commoditized and subjected to profit-focused market efficiencies for the past quarter century, leaving more and more Americans behind in the eternal rush to the margin.

As this process unfolded, and despite the loss of millions on the health care coverage rolls, there were ample dollars to ensure the profitability of health as a commodity.

This will not be the case moving into the near and distant future. Health care is, like so much else, heading into its own meltdown, and it will make the financial collapse of 2008 look like a mere blip on the Bloomberg screen.

With the U.S. economy claiming more and more members of the middle class for transition toward the poverty line, we are about to enter a period in our history defined by a statistical majority in the U.S. population having little or no access to health care - at a time when health care is acting as one of the few profit-making sectors in our economy.

With a spiking unemployment rate in the health care sector and a dilapidated pharmaceutical industry that continues its merger mentality to control costs no longer borne by a viable financial sector, we are heading into an uncharted abyss of social disaster.

TURN THE TIDE AROUND

The only way to stem the tide on this decline -- and its accompanying fiscal and public health consequences -- is to fund health care as the fiscal engine it has recently become amidst the financial sector collapse.

Had the health care sector been given half of the recent financial and auto manufacturing bailout funding, we would have been able to expand and extend health care coverage.

We would thereby be capturing the remaining stability of this sector as an engine of economic and public health recovery.

It surprises me that the economists and health care consultants working in the Obama administration have not taken this opportunity to the bank.

They could have made a difference by diverting meaningless cash dumps from non-functional industries into the single most viable and necessary industry in the country.

I am sad to say that the crash of the health care economy will be heard in a very different way than the crashes that recently preceded it.

It will take our final breath economically, and literally with the disappearance of greatly diminished health care services to all economic classes in the United States.

John Rockefeller of Camden is CEO of a management consulting firm, Zero Consult Ltd., based in Boston

One Justice For Average Americans Another for the Elite

The Definition of A "Two-Tiered Justice System" by Glenn Greenwald
Aside from the intrinsic dangers and injustices of arguing for immunity for high-level government officials who commit felonies (such as illegal eavesdropping, obstruction of justice, torture and other war crimes), it's the total selectivity of the rationale underlying that case which makes it so corrupt. Defenders of Bush officials sing in unison: We shouldn't get caught up in the past. We shouldn't be driven by vengeance and retribution. We shouldn't punish people whose motives in committing crimes weren't really that bad.

There are countries in the world which actually embrace those premises for all of their citizens, and whose justice system consequently reflects a lenient approach to crime and punishment. The United States is not one of those countries. In fact, for ordinary citizens (the ones invisible and irrelevant to Ruth Marcus, Stuart Taylor, Jon Barry and David Broder), the exact opposite is true:

Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100

A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Roy Brown, 54, robbed the Capital One bank in Shreveport, Louisiana in December 2007. He approached the teller with one of his hands under his jacket and told her that it was a robbery.

The teller handed Brown three stacks of bill but he only took a single $100 bill and returned the remaining money back to her. He said that he was homeless and hungry and left the bank.

The next day he surrendered to the police voluntarily and told them that his mother didn't raise him that way.

Brown told the police he needed the money to stay at the detox center and had no other place to stay and was hungry.

In Caddo District Court, he pleaded guilty. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison for first degree robbery.

Under federal law, "the simple possession of just 5 grams of crack cocaine, the weight of about two sugar packets, subjects a defendant to a mandatory five-year prison term." In Alabama, the average sentence for marijuana possession -- an offense for which most Western countries almost never imprison their citizens -- is 8.4 years. Until recently, the state of Florida "impose[d] mandatory-minimum sentences of 25 years for illegally carrying a pillbox-worth of drugs such as Oxycontin" and still imposes shockingly Draconian mandatory sentences even for marijuana offenses.

Our political class has embraced mandatory minimum sentencing schemes as a way to eliminate mercy and sentencing flexibility for ordinary people who break the law (as opposed to Bush officials who do). The advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums details just some of the grotesque injustices here, including decades of imprisonment for petty drug dealing which even many judges who are forced to impose the sentences find disgraceful. Currently in the U.S., close to 7,000 people are serving sentences of 25 years to life under our merciless "three-strikes-and-out" laws -- which the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional in a 5-4 ruling -- including half for nonviolent offenses and many for petty theft.

As I've noted many times before, the United States imprisons more of its population than any other country on the planet, and most astoundingly, we account for less than 5% of the world's population yet close to 25% of the world's prisoners are located in American prisons. As The New York Times' Adam Liptak put it in an excellent and thorough April, 2008 article, revealing how self-absorbed and hypocritical are the cries for mercy, understanding and "moving on" being made by media stars and political elites on behalf of lawbreaking Bush officials:

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes - from writing bad checks to using drugs - that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. . . .

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

"In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America."

No more.

"Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons."

Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment."

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach" . . . .

The American character - self-reliant, independent, judgmental - also plays a role.

"America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility," Whitman of Yale wrote. "That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years."

And that's to say nothing of the brutal and excessive tactics used by our increasingly militarized police state (Digby's writing on the use of tasers is indispensable) and the inhumane conditions that characterize our highly profitable prison state.

Under all circumstances, arguing that high political officials should be immunized from prosecution when they commit felonies such as illegal eavesdropping and torture would be both destructive and wrong [not to mention, in the case of the latter crimes, a clear violation of a treaty which the U.S. (under Ronald Reagan) signed and thereafter ratified]. But what makes it so much worse, so much more corrupted, is the fact that this "ignore-the-past-and-forget-retribution" rationale is invoked by our media elites only for a tiny, special class of people -- our political leaders -- while the exact opposite rationale ("ignore their lame excuses, lock them up and throw away the key") is applied to everyone else. That, by definition, is what a "two-tiered system of justice" means and that, more than anything else, is what characterizes (and sustains) deeply corrupt political systems. That's the two-tiered system which, for obvious reasons, our political and media elites are now vehemently arguing must be preserved.

‘Would You Want A Guy Like This Living In Your Backyard?

‘Would You Want A Guy Like This Living In Your Backyard?
Since President Obama’s announcement last week that he would shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center within on year, Fox News has done its best to frighten its viewers about the rule:

SEAN HANNITY: That’s somewhat frightening, you’re going to close Guantanamo Bay, you don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know where you’re going to put these people. [1/23/09]

GLENN BECK: Somebody told me that if this goes through and we put 200 people into this system, that it will shut down our justice system. Our justice system just won’t be able to do it.[1/20/09]

BRIAN KILMEADE: You’re talking about the worst of the Taliban, the worst of al Qaeda, and we have to let them go, give them trials? Why do we need to do this and compromise the CIA and our intelligence bureau — a lot of the intelligence was built on these guys, was done using our clandestine operations. So we have to expose that for these trials? [1/22/09]

Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) said last week that the U.S. could hold the detainees in federal prisons, just like we hold thousands of other dangerous inmates. This morning, Fox and Friends responded by sending a reporter to Murtha’s district to flash photos of suspected terrorists — their only identification being Muslim headgear — and ask residents, “Would you want a guy like this living in your backyard?” Watch it:

Despite Fox’s suggestion that detainees could be pitching a tent in your backyard, Guantanamo detainees transferred to the U.S. for trials would be housed in federal prisons — where dozens of dangerous terrorists are already held. In fact, the United States has already successfully prosecuted 145 terrorism cases in federal court, a sharp contrast to the series of debacles in Guantanamo prosecutions.

Republicans and Responsibility

Taking Responsibility
Since the Republican Conference of the U.S. House of Representatives is largely made up of individuals who believe their party lost the 2008 elections because they did not run far enough to the right, it is not surprising that their leaders are now attempting to block efforts to clean up the mess their far right philosophy created. There appears to be no factoid or morsel of misinformation they are unwilling to utilize to make the case to do nothing other than provide still more tax cuts to their business friends.

The recent editorial by the senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, the so-called “King of Pork” from California’s Inland Empire, is a good case in point. Rep. Jerry Lewis’s argument is that spending in other people’s districts doesn’t create jobs, but he attempts to make it appear that he has factual support for that argument by making assertions that are flatly untrue.

His first argument is that estimates of job creation under the package do not calculate the impact of government borrowing as well as the impact of the spending. That is simply not the case. Projections by economist Christine Romer—now head of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors—as well as those of other macroeconomic forecasters include the overall impact of the proposal measuring the effect on credit markets, prices, consumer demand, and job creation.

Rep. Lewis apparently unwittingly puts his finger precisely on the problem that the U.S. economy now faces. The government is being forced into the role of borrower of last resort because the economic mismanagement of recent years has left so much of our private sector in such tatters that the rest of the private sector will not extend the credit necessary for the economy to function. It is regrettable that we are where we now find ourselves, but we should have thought of that a few years ago.

Lewis also makes totally false arguments about the cost of job creation. He claims that if the package creates only 3 million jobs, the cost per job of an $825 billion package would be $275,000. The Romer analysis, however, indicates that by the fourth quarter of 2010 the smaller package first put forward by the White House would have created 3.6 million jobs. That analysis also shows that in addition to the jobs created in 2010 the package would create substantial additional numbers of jobs in 2009, 2011, and 2012, making the annual cost per job a small fraction of the figure used by Lewis.

While Romer and Jared Bernstein—now Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economic advisor—used very conservatives estimates of job creation, another estimate by Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist at Moody’s Economy.Com, projects that a somewhat smaller package than the one now under consideration by Congress would produce nearly than 15 million additional man years of employment between now and the end of 2012. That works out to about $50,000 per man year of work. It should also be noted that the plan will produce a substantial number of additional jobs beyond 2012.

It is unfortunate that government cannot turn on the spigots of job creation more rapidly, and that the damage already done to households and businesses cannot be repaired more quickly. Those were facts that Rep. Lewis and his House Republican colleagues should have weighed more thoughtfully when they blocked a smaller stimulus package in September. Had it been passed and implemented then, money would now be flowing and the precipitous drops in monthly employment that we are now enduring might have been significantly softened.

What seems to be the real message being put forward by House Republicans is that government should hand out additional tax cuts to businesses and then sit on the sidelines. It is time for the loyal opposition to recognize their responsibility for the mess in which we now find ourselves and begin to find ways to be part of the solution rather than prolonging the agony in which millions of jobless Americans and at-risk families are now suffering.

Righting wrongs

The top Bush executive orders that Obama should scrap immediately
No. 9: The Alternative-Fuel Fix-All
Executive Order 13423 (PDF)
Jan. 26, 2007

What the order says: Shortly after his 2007 State of the Union address, in which he devoted significant time to environmental proposals, Bush signed Executive Order 13423. Among other things, the order requires federal agencies to cut petroleum-based-fuel usage by 2 percent annually through 2015 while increasing alternative-fuel use by 10 percent each year. The order also requires agencies to reduce overall energy consumption and purchase more hybrid vehicles.

Why it should go: On the face of it, Bush's directive seems like a step in the right direction. Officials in California, however, were quick to question the policy's ecological bottom line. Producing alternative fuels, they argued, can result in a large spike in greenhouse-gas emissions, particularly when harvesting resources like oil shale and coal. There's also doubt that the alternative-fuel industry simply has the capacity to meet the order's requirements. As the Washington Post editorialized, "Where might 20 billion alternative-fuel gallons come from?" To complicate matters, the Supreme Court ruled two months later that the Environmental Protection Agency does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, prompting Bush to issue another executive order directing several agencies to draft guidelines for reducing emissions from cars and trucks. The sound, responsible energy policy that should be at the top of the list for the next president—and Congress—will need realistic goals and a big-picture understanding of costs and benefits of alternative fuels.

Historical Mystery of Bush's Presidency

Historical Mystery of Bush's Presidency by Robert Parry
After little more than two years of the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon resigned and his successor, Gerald Ford, famously declared, "our long national nightmare is over." But the painful end game of Nixon's presidency was nothing compared to the eight excruciating years of George W. Bush.

Even on Inauguration Day 2009, as most Americans rejoice that Bush's disastrous presidency is finally heading into the history books, there should be reflection on how this catastrophe could have befallen the United States - and on who else was responsible.

Indeed, it may become one of the great historical mysteries, leaving future scholars to scratch their heads over how a leader with as few qualifications as George W. Bush came to lead the world's most powerful nation at the start of the 21st century.

How could a significant number of American voters have thought that an enterprise as vast and complicated as the U.S. government could be guided by a person who had failed at nearly every job he ever had, whose principal qualification was that his father, George H.W. Bush, was fondly remembered as having greater personal morality than Bill Clinton?

Why did so many Americans think that a little-traveled, incurious and inarticulate man of privilege could lead the United States in a world of daunting challenges, shifting dangers and sharpening competition?

What had transformed American politics so much that, for many Americans, personal trivia, like Al Gore's earth-tone sweaters, trumped serious policy debates, like global warming, health care for citizens, prudent fiscal policies and a responsible foreign policy? How could George W. Bush, who was born with a shiny silver spoon in his mouth, sell himself as a populist everyman?

Even taking into account the controversial outcome of Election 2000 - which saw Gore win more votes than Bush - why was the margin close enough so Bush could snatch the White House away with the help of five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court?

And why did the nation - after the 9/11 attacks - so willingly follow Bush into a radical divergence from traditional U.S. foreign policy and into violations of longstanding national principles of inalienable rights and the rule of law?

Why did the institutions designed to protect U.S. constitutional liberties, including the press and Congress, crumble so readily, allowing Bush to seize so much power that he could entangle the United States in an aggressive - and costly - war in Iraq with few questions asked?

Perceptions of Reality

Part of the answer to this historical mystery can be found in the complex relationship between the American people and mass media. The multi-billion-dollar stakes involved in selling commercial products to the world's richest market also made the American people the most analyzed population on earth.

Controlling their perceptions of reality and eliciting their emotions became more than just art forms; they were economic imperatives.

Just as Madison Avenue ad executives got rich selling products to American consumers, K Street political consultants earned tidy sums for using the false intimacy of TV to make their candidates appear more "down-to-earth" or "authentic" and their opponents seem "weird" or "dirty."

By 2000, the Republicans also had pulled far ahead of the Democrats in the machinery of political messaging, both in the technological sophistication of the party apparatus and the emergence of an overtly conservative media that stretched from print forms of newspapers, magazines and books to electronic outlets of radio, TV and the Internet.

Nothing remotely as advanced existed on the liberal side of American political life. Conservatives liked to call the mainstream news media "liberal," but in reality, its outlook was either corporate with a strong sympathy for many Republican positions or consciously "centrist" with a goal of positioning the news content somewhere in the "middle."

In Campaign 2000, the Republican advantages in media guaranteed a rosier glow around George W. Bush's attributes and a harsher light on Al Gore's shortcomings. Many voters said they found Bush a more likeable fellow - "a regular guy" - while viewing Gore as a wonky know-it-all, who "thinks he's smarter than we are."

That was, at least in part, a reflection of how the two candidates were presented by the dominant news media, from Fox News to The New York Times. [For details on this media imbalance, see our book, Neck Deep.]

The talented Republican image-makers portrayed Bush as a refreshing alternative to the endless parade of consultant-driven, poll-tested candidates - though, in reality, Bush's image was as consultant-driven and poll-tested as anybody's, down to his purchase of a 1,600-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas, in 1999, just before running for the White House.....continued at link

Bush Helped Recruit Terrorists and Get Our Troops Killed

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.

I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.

Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi's forces (members of Iraq's Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq's majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi's death wasn't enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Bush Lies About His Response to Hurricane Katrina

Bush On Katrina: ‘Don’t Tell Me The Federal Response Was Slow’ via Thinkprogress
During his final press conference this morning, Bush defended his response to Katrina. He said he has “thought long and hard about Katrina” and admitted that “things [could] have been done better” but denied any problem with the federal response to the disaster, insisting, “Don’t tell me the federal response was slow!”:

BUSH: You know, people said that the federal response was slow. Don’t tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed. … 30,000 people were pulled off roofs right after the storm moved through. That’s a pretty quick response. Could things have been done better? Absolutely, absolutely. But when I hear people say the federal response was slow, then what are they gonna say to those chopper drivers? Or to the 30,000 that got pulled off the roofs?

Watch it:

The federal response to Katrina was nothing short of a disaster. A 2006 report compiled by House Republicans slammed what it called “a failure of leadership,” saying that the federal government’s “blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina’s horror.” The report specifically blamed Bush, noting that “earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response” because the president alone could have cut through bureaucratic resistance.

There is no question that the federal response was slow — deadly slow. Katrina made landfall on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, and the New Orleans levees were breached that morning. Despite the numerous warnings he had received about the storm’s severity, Bush spent that Monday traveling to Arizona and California to promote his Medicare drug bill. It was characteristic of the entire federal response:

– National Guard troops did not arrive in the area until two full days after the levees were breached.

– Bush did not leave his vacation home or assemble a task force until Wednesday, two days after the hurricane made landfall and the levees were breached.

– By Thursday, three days after landfall, FEMA had yet to set up a command and control center.

– FEMA Director Michael Brown said he had not heard about the more than 3,000 evacuees stranded in the convention center until Thursday. Many evacuees had been there since Tuesday morning.

– On Friday morning, Bush praised Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” He also said he was “satisfied with the response.”

– FEMA did not finalize its request for evacuation buses until Sunday, six days after Katrina hit. The buses “trickled into New Orleans, with only a dozen or so arriving the first day,” noted the Wall Street Journal.

– The Superdome was finally evacuated on Sunday, a full seven days after 30,000 evacuees had arrived there.

“Despite a FEMA official’s eyewitness accounts of breaches starting at 7 p.m. on Aug. 29,” the Bush administration “did not consider them confirmed” until 11 hours later. In fact, FEMA did not order the evacuation of New Orleans until 1:30 a.m. on Aug. 31, two full days after Katrina made landfall.

In one area, however, the Bush administration did move quickly: pinning the blame for Katrina on its political opponents.
Update: Following today's press conference, Karl Rove appeared on Fox News to join in absolving the Bush administration of any blame regarding the Katrina response. "The federal government is in charge of writing checks. It's not in charge of the action itself," Rove said.

10 Absurd Conservative Myths About Obama's Recovery Plan

10 Absurd Conservative Myths About Obama's Recovery Plan
As usual, the conservatives have absolutely no conscience about what they did to create this mess. If they did, they'd all be holed up in their gated communities or on their private islands, embarrassed into silence at best and terrified of peasant uprisings at worst. Instead, they're jetting into D.C. en masse in a last-ditch attempt to head the country off -- or at least make sure that any money that does get spent ends up, as it always has, in their pockets.

To that end, the self-serving myths are starting to fly so thick and fast that the staff here at CAF has been working full-time to keep ahead of them. Here's some of what they're flinging in this latest B.S. storm -- and what you need to know to fire back.
1. The proposed recovery package is too big.

False. Most progressive economists agree (and Paul Krugman is downright emphatic) that it's going to take a minimum of a trillion dollars of well-placed investment to pull our economy out of this ditch. This is no time for half-measures, blue-ribbon committees, pilot projects, or trial balloons: this is a life-or-death crisis that requires immediate and massive intervention.

CAF Senior Fellow Bernie Horn puts it this way: "The American economy is huge and it’s at a standstill. It’s like a motionless 100-car freight train -- or one going backwards slowly. A small locomotive simply can’t pull it forward. We need an engine large enough to work, one that can create millions of jobs. If anything, a $775 billion 2-year plan may be too small rather than too big."

Dean Baker of the Economic Policy Institute echoed this same thing on MSNBC's "Countdown" last Tuesday night. It's got to be big. And it's got to be now. Anything too small -- or too late -- and the American economy will be at serious risk of stagnating the same way Japan's did in the 1990s.
2. If we can't afford (insert pet project here), we certainly can't afford this.

Yes, we can. What we really can't afford is a huge recession that undercuts the tax base. That's a vicious cycle that will make it increasingly harder to dig out the longer this goes on. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the current slowdown will cost the federal government $166 billion in lost tax revenues in 2009 -- a number that could easily get even larger in coming years if we fall into a real depression. If we get on that trendline, we could lose a trillion dollars in government revenues by the end of Obama's first term. We need to invest what we have while we still have it if we hope to have a strong economy going forward.

This argument is based on the limited view that wealth is mainly generated by loaning or borrowing at interest -- a common enough assumption among financial people over the past 30 years. A more progressive view is that real wealth is generated by labor, combined with access to resources required for production. Putting people to work creates wealth. So does ensuring that our current failing energy regime is replaced as rapidly as possible with one that's infinitely renewable and that we will finally be in full control of. And so do other kinds of infrastructure investments, which form the footing on which a new round of businesses can rise and thrive.

Businesses have always invested their capital to create more capital. The best parts of Obama's proposal involve getting the government to do the same thing. Conservatives are resisting this because don't believe that there's such a thing as the common wealth -- which is how they've rationalized their plundering of our common assets. We need to make it absolutely clear that we do believe in the common wealth -- and that their assaults on everything that allows America to generate national wealth are going stop, right here and right now.
3. It's more important to balance the budget. Fix that, and the rest will take care of itself.

Read history much? Herbert Hoover is history's poster boy for the idea that balancing the budget during a recession is the best way known to turn it into a full-on depression. And that wasn't a one-off: FDR repeated the lesson in 1937, when he succumbed to the pleas of budget-hawk conservatives and tried to balance the budget -- a move that put the brakes on what had, until then, been a solid recovery.

Looking forward, this year's numbers also show the case clearly. Economists are already estimating that spending by individuals and businesses will be off by $300 to $500 billion in 2009. The upshot of this will be millions of lost jobs, which in turn will mean even lower spending and more job losses next year as the country accelerates toward depression.

The only way to halt this slide is for the government to step in and fill the hole with an additional $300 billion-$500 billion of its own spending -- and to spend that money on investments that will create as many jobs as possible. The longer we wait, the more government spending it will ultimately take to pull us out of this -- and the less able we'll be to muster that much cash.

Balanced budgets are important, but not as important right now as making sure every American has a paycheck they can count on. We can't afford to sacrifice the fate of the entire country to this one economic ideal.
4. The worst thing we can possibly do is raise taxes. Or borrow the money, God forbid.

More misplaced priorities.

As for taxes: Obama's already told us, without apologies to anyone, that he plans to raise taxes on people making over $250,000 a year -- the people who've profited most from our current high levels of inequality. Practically, it makes sense to raise taxes on the affluent, since they're increasingly the only ones left who actually have any money. And morally, it's only fair that those who've gained the most from conservative mismanagement of the economy (regardless of their own political leanings) should be the first to pay the bills for it.

As for borrowing: Don't look now, but the whole planet is reeling from financial problems as least as big as ours. Even in the midst of this colossal fiscal mess we're in, if you're an individual, business, or government with excess capital to store somewhere, the USA is still the safest place on earth to park it.

They're so eager for our American brand of low-risk investment that they're even willing to lend their cash to us at interest rates that are very close to zero (and may actually turn out to be less than zero, once you add in inflation). If someone offered you the chance to borrow massive amounts of money without paying interest, you'd do it, right? Well, that money's already sitting on the table, just waiting for us to put it to work jump-starting our economy again. We'd be fools not to take it.
5. When you want to stimulate the economy, tax cuts always beat government spending hands-down.

Another conservative fantasy that disintegrates on contact with reality.

The chart that shows the effectiveness of various forms of government stimulus, based on recent attempts, is here. (Conservatives will be infuriated to learn that food stamps come out on top, generating $1.73 for every dollar spent. Infrastructure investments come in a respectable third. The bottom half of the chart is wall-to-wall tax cut schemes.)

The problem with tax cuts is that people don't spend them in ways that get the economy moving. The Wall Street Journal reports that only 10 to 20 percent of the money remanded to taxpayers in the 2008 tax rebate actually got spent. The other 80 to 90 percent ended up in people's personal savings, were used to pay off creditors, or were simply absorbed by inflation and higher living costs.

Knowing this, we're a bit dismayed Obama is proposing to sink as much as 40 percent of his stimulus package into tax cuts. That's too much, if you ask us. But at least they're targeted at the middle class -- people who are more likely to spend that money here in the U.S., rather than ship it off to investments abroad. ********the rest at link

Obama Economic Speech Warns Of Dire Consequences Without Stimulus

Obama Economic Speech Warns Of Dire Consequences Without Stimulus
President-elect Barack Obama warned of dire and lasting consequences if Congress doesn't pump unprecedented dollars into the economy, making an urgent pitch for his mammoth spending proposal in his first speech since his election.

"In short, a bad situation could become dramatically worse" if Washington doesn't go far enough to address the spreading crisis, Obama said as fresh economic reports showed an outlook growing increasingly grim.

Since his November election, he has deferred to President George W. Bush on foreign policy matters such as the Middle East. But, with the urgency of the economic crisis, Obama has waded deeply into domestic issues as he works to generate support for his plan to create jobs, jolt the economy and make long-term investments in other areas.

Obama laid out goals of doubling the production of alternative energy over three years, updating most federal buildings to improve energy efficiency, making medical records electronic, expanding broadband networks and updating schools and universities.

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WASHINGTON (AP) _ President-elect Barack Obama said Thursday the recession could "linger for years" unless Congress pumps unprecedented sums from Washington into the economy, making his highest-profile case yet on an issue certain to define and dominate his early presidency.

"I don't believe it's too late to change course, but it will be if we don't take dramatic action as soon as possible," Obama said in a speech set to be delivered at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., outside Washington. Excerpts from his prepared text were released in advance by his transition team.
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It was the fourth day in a row that Obama has made a pitch for a huge infusion of taxpayer dollars to revive the sinking economy he will inherit from President George W. Bush.

Obama's events have increasingly taken on the trappings and air of the presidency, with the speech _ coming a full 12 days before he takes over at the White House _ a particularly showy move. Presidents-elect typically stick to naming administration appointments and otherwise staying in the background during the transition period between Election Day and Inauguration Day, but Obama has clearly made the calculation that a nation anxious about its economic outlook and eager to bid farewell to Bush needs to hear from him differently and more frequently.

"A bad situation could become dramatically worse," Obama said, painting a dire picture _ including double-digit unemployment and $1 trillion in lost economic activity _ that recalled the days of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Indeed, the economic news is grim.

Consumers and companies are folding under the negative forces of a collapsed housing market, a global credit crunch and the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. The recession, which started in December 2007, already is the longest in a quarter-century.

A report that came out the same day as Obama's speech showed that the number of people continuing to draw jobless benefits unexpectedly rose sharply to the highest level since November 1982, demonstrating the troubles the unemployed are having in finding new jobs.

And unemployment figures due out Friday are expected to show that the U.S. lost a net total of 500,000 jobs in December. If accurate, that would bring 2008's total job losses to 2.4 million, the first annual job loss since 2001 and the highest since 1945, though the number of jobs has more than tripled since then.

Speaking a day after the release of a stunning new estimate _ that the federal budget deficit will reach an unprecedented $1.2 trillion this year, nearly three times last year's record _ Obama acknowledged some sympathy with those who "might be skeptical" of the stimulus. Vast sums already have been spent or committed by Washington in an attempt _ largely unsuccessful so far _ to get credit, the lifeblood of the American economy, flowing freely once again.

Such statements are coded to appeal to budget hawks in both parties, whom Obama wants to win over so that approval of a package draws wide, bipartisan support in the Democratic-led Congress.

To answer their concerns, he promised to allow funding only for what works. He also pledged a new level of transparency about where the money is going. A day earlier, he promised to tackle the out-of-control fiscal problem posed by Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs and named a special watchdog to clamp down on all federal programs.

Obama made broader arguments, too, saying that the private sector, typically the answer, cannot do what is needed now.

"At this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe," he said.

Obama's transition team and Democratic congressional leaders are working daily to hammer out the still-evolving package, expected to total nearly $800 billion. The initial hope had been to have a new stimulus package approved by Congress in time for Obama to sign it upon taking office on Jan. 20. That timeline has slipped considerably, into at least mid-February if not later.

The Ponzi Scheme Presidency - Bush's Legacy of Destruction

The Ponzi Scheme Presidency - Bush's Legacy of Destruction
Prejudiced Toward War

If you need an epitaph for the Bush administration, here's one to test out: They tried. They really tried. But they couldn't help it. They just had to count.

In a sense, George W. Bush did the Assyrians proud. With his secret prisons, his outsourced torture chambers, his officially approved kidnappings, the murders committed by his interrogators, the massacres committed by his troops and mercenaries, and the shock-and-awe slaughter he ordered from the air, it's easy enough to imagine what those Assyrian scribes would have counted, had they somehow been teleported into his world. True, his White House didn't have friezes of his victories (one problem being that there were none to glorify); all it had was Saddam Hussein's captured pistol proudly stored in a small study off the Oval Office. Almost 3,000 years later, however, Bush's "scribes," still traveling with the imperial forces, continued to count the bodies as they piled ever higher in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere.

Many of those body counts were duly made public. This record of American "success" was visible to anyone who visited the Pentagon's website and viewed its upbeat news articles complete with enumerations of "Taliban fighters" or, in Iraq, "terrorists," the Air Force's news feed listing the number of bombs dropped on "anti-Afghan forces," or the U.S. Central Command's stories of killing "Taliban militants."

On the other hand, history, as we know, doesn't repeat itself and -- unlike the Assyrians -- the Bush administration would have preferred not to count, or at least not to make its body counts public. One of its small but tellingly unsuccessful struggles, a sign of the depth of its failure on its own terms, was to avoid the release of those counts.

Its aversion to the body count made some sense. After all, since the 1950s, body counting for the U.S. military has invariably signaled not impending victory, but disaster, and even defeat. In fact, one of the strangest things about the American empire has been this: Between 1945 and George W. Bush's second term, the U.S. economy, American corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable sway over much of the rest of the world. New York City has been the planet's financial capital and Washington its war capital. (Moscow, even at the height of the Cold War, always came in a provincial second.)

In the same period, the U.S. military effectively garrisoned much of the globe from the Horn of Africa to Greenland, from South Korea to Qatar, while its Navy controlled the seven seas, its Air Force dominated the global skies, its nuclear command stood ready to unleash the powers of planetary death, and its space command watched the heavens. In the wake of the Cold War, its various military commands (including Northcom, set up by the Bush administration in 2002, and Africom, set up in 2007) divided the greater part of the planet into what were essentially military satrapies. And yet, the U.S. military, post-1945, simply could not win the wars that mattered.

Because the neocons of the Bush administration brushed aside this counterintuitive fact, they believed themselves faced in 2000 with an unparalleled opportunity (whose frenetic exploitation would be triggered by the attacks of 9/11, the "Pearl Harbor" of the new century). With the highest-tech military on the planet, funded at levels no other set of nations could cumulatively match, the United States, they were convinced, was uniquely situated to give the phrase "sole superpower" historically unprecedented meaning. Even the Assyrians at their height, the Romans in their Pax Romana centuries, the British in the endless decades when the sun could never set on its empire, would prove pikers by comparison.

In this sense, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and the various neocons in the administration were fundamentalist idolaters -- and what they worshipped was the staggering power of the U.S. military. They were believers in a church whose first tenet was the efficacy of force above all else. Though few of them had the slightest military experience, they gave real meaning to the word bellicose. They were prejudiced towards war.

With awesome military power at their command, they were also convinced that they could go it alone as the dominating force on the planet. As with true believers everywhere, they had only contempt for those they couldn't convert to their worldview. That contempt made "unilateralism" their strategy of choice, and a global Pax Americana their goal (along with, of course, a Pax Republicana at home).

If All Else Fails, Count the Bodies

It was in this context that they were not about to count the enemy dead. In their wars, as these fervent, inside-the-Beltway utopians saw it, there would be no need to do so. With the "shock and awe" forces at their command, they would refocus American attention on the real metric of victory, the taking of territory and of enemy capitals. At the same time, they were preparing to disarm the only enemy that truly scared them, the American people, by making none of the mistakes of the Vietnam era, including -- as the President later admitted -- counting bodies.

Of course, both the Pax Americana and the Pax Republicana would prove will-o'-the-wisps. As it turned out, the Bush administration, blind to the actual world it faced, disastrously miscalculated the nature of American power -- especially military power -- and what it was capable of doing. And yet, had they taken a clear-eyed look at what American military power had actually achieved in action since 1945, they might have been sobered. In the major wars (and even some minor actions) the U.S. military fought in those decades, it had been massively destructive but never victorious, nor even particularly successful. In many ways, in the classic phrase of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, it had been a "paper tiger."

Yes, it had "won" largely meaningless victories -- in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Operation Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against Saddam Hussein's helpless military in 1990 (in a war that settled nothing); in NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially defenseless Serbian military in 1995 (while meeting disaster in operations in Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993). On the other hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early 1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically, and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster, and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least, should not have been able to stand up to American power.

It was in the context of defeat and then frustration in Korea that the counting of enemy bodies began. Once Chinese communist armies had entered that war in massive numbers in late 1950 and inflicted a terrible series of defeats on American forces but could not sweep them off the peninsula, that conflict settled into a "meatgrinder" of a stalemate in which the hope of taking significant territory faded; yet some measure of success was needed as public frustration mounted in the United States: thus began the infamous body count of enemy dead.

The body count reappeared quite early in the Vietnam War, again as a shorthand way of measuring success in a conflict in which the taking of territory was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the enemy hard to distinguish from the general population, and our own in-country allies weak and largely unable to strengthen themselves. Those tallies of dead bodies, announced daily by military spokesmen to increasingly dubious reporters in Saigon, were the public face of American "success" in the Vietnam era. Each body was to be further evidence of what General William Westmoreland called "the light at the end of the tunnel." When those dead bodies and any sense of success began to part ways, however, when, in the terminology of the times, a "credibility gap" opened between the metrics of victory and reality, the body count morphed into a symbol of barbarism as well as of defeat. It helped stoke an antiwar movement.

This was why, in choosing to take on Saddam Hussein's hapless military in 2003 -- the administration was looking for a "cakewalk" campaign that would "shock and awe" enemies throughout the Middle East -- they officially chose not to release any counts of enemy dead. General Tommy Franks, commander of the administration's Afghan operation in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq thereafter, put the party line succinctly, "We don't do body counts."

As the President finally admitted in some frustration to a group of conservative columnists in October 2006, his administration had "made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team." Not intending to repeat the 1960s experience, he and his advisors had planned out an opposites war on the home front -- anything done in Vietnam would not be done this time around -- and that meant not offering official counts of the dead which might stoke an antiwar movement... until, as in Korea and Vietnam, frustration truly set in.

When the taking of Baghdad in April 2003 proved no more of a capstone on American victory than the taking of Kabul in November 2001, when everything began to go disastrously wrong and the carefully enumerated count of the American dead in Iraq rose precipitously, when "victory" (a word which the President still invoked 15 times in a single speech in November 2005) adamantly refused to make an appearance, the moment for the body count had arrived. Despite all the planning, they just couldn't stop themselves. A frustrated President expressed it this way: "We don't get to say that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it."

Soon enough the Pentagon was regularly releasing such figures in reports on its operations and, in December 2006, the President, too, first slipped such a tally into a press briefing. ("Our commanders report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy.")

It wasn't, of course, that no one had been counting. The President, as we know from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, had long been keeping "'his own personal scorecard for the [global] war [on terror]' in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists -- each ready to be crossed out by the President as his forces took them down." And the military had been counting bodies as well, but as the possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and the president finally gave in. While this did not stoke an antiwar movement, it represented a tacit admission of policy collapse, a kind of surrender. It was as close as an administration which never owned up to error could come to admitting that two more disastrous wars had been added to a string of military failures in the truncated American Century.

Bush Administration Trying To Make It Easier To Turn Forests Into Housing Subdivisions

Bush Administration Trying To Make It Easier To Turn Forests Into Housing Subdivisions
In yet another potential last minute rule change, “the Bush administration appears poised to push through a change in U.S. Forest Service agreements that would make it far easier for mountain forests to be converted to housing subdivisions.” Though President-elect Obama has opposed the move, Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who heads the Forest Service, has signaled that he intends to finalize the plan before Obama’s inauguration. As a presidential candidate, Obama vocally criticized Rey’s plan while campaigning in Montana, calling it “outrageous.”

Rey is pushing a technical change that it will have “large implications“:

The shift is technical but with large implications. It would allow Plum Creek Timber to pave roads passing through Forest Service land. For decades, such roads were little more than trails used by logging trucks to reach timber stands.

But as Plum Creek has moved into the real estate business, paving those roads became a necessary prelude to opening vast tracts of the company’s 8 million acres to the vacation homes that are transforming landscapes across the West.

Scenic western Montana, where Plum Creek owns 1.2 million acres, would be most affected, placing fresh burdens on county governments to provide services, and undoing efforts to cluster housing near towns.

After Rey first proposed the rule last summer, Sen. Jon Tester (D-MN) requested a Government Accountability Office report that eventually found “considerable internal disagreement” within the Forest Service about the proposed change. The GAO concluded that 900 miles of logging roads could be paved in Montana and that amending the long-held easements “could have a nationwide impact.” Rey told the Washington Post on Wednesday that he plans to push his plan forward “in the next week or so” after he holds courtesy meetings with lawmakers. Tester says no meetings have been arranged yet.

Throughout his tenure heading the Forest Service, Rey has regularly tried to avoid public scrutiny of his anti-environmental policies, such as when he “waited until late on December 23, 2003 to announce the removal of roadless protections to allow logging” in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. When Rey testified before the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health in 2001, he said that wanted the Forest Service to be able to “use categorical exclusions more often” because he believed that environmental assessments wasted “the time of resource managers and taxpayer dollars.”

For more on Bush’s last-minute regulations and proposals, read ThinkProgress’s report, “Bush’s Backward Sprint To The Finish.”

College Loan Slavery

College Loan Slavery
Raya Golden thought she was handling college in a responsible way. She didn't apply until she felt ready to dedicate herself to her studies. She spread her schooling across five years so she could work part-time throughout. She checked that her school, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, had a high post-graduate employment rate. But there were two things she hadn't counted on. The first was the $75,000 in nonsubsidized federal student loans she'd have to take out for tuition and those living expenses her part-time jobs selling hotdogs and making lattes couldn't cover. The second was that she'd graduate into a workforce teetering on the edge of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

"All of a sudden the work just dried up," says Golden, who got her degree in traditional illustration. "I've sent out probably a hundred resumes from L.A. to Canada, but I haven't had a single response. Experienced people are getting laid off, so why would anyone take a chance on a college grad?"

Shortly after graduating this past January, Golden moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles hoping there would be more work available, only to find hiring freezes at most of the production studios and animation houses. She has looked into fields ranging from children's book publishing to T-shirt design, but no one is hiring. For now, she's doing her best to get by working part-time as a barista at Starbucks and sleeping on a friend's couch.

Golden has taken a three-month hardship deference on her student loans but is well aware that the longer she pushes off payments, the higher the interest will climb. She had hoped to consolidate her loans, which are now at $112,000, but every place she called either no longer handles consolidations or turned down Golden because she was not employed full-time. Since there's no way Golden could possibly make her $1,400-a-month payments on a part-time barista's salary, she brokered a temporarily reduced payment of $650.

"It doesn't even cover the interest," says Golden, "If I pay that for two years I'll wind up owing $150,000. But I can't see that I have any other choice."

As for her career future, Golden admits things look bleak.

"I'll probably have to go back to school to learn computer illustration," she says, acknowledging that this means racking up even more debt with still no guarantee of a job. She is wary given that so far, despite her work ethic and excellent grades, the higher education path hasn't paid off at all.

"My timing couldn't have been worse," she says, voice brimming with frustration. "I'm doing the exact same thing I was doing before I went to school, only now I have all this debt to carry around, too."

The economy these days looks frightening for just about everyone. Who would want to be a retiree with little to no earning potential, or a young family grappling with mortgage and child care payments while facing the possibility, or reality, of job loss? But imagine trying to enter the labor force right now, making career choices that could affect your entire earning future. How are college graduates supposed to juggle student loan payments with the realities of an imploding job market and family members too caught up in their own financial turmoil to help out? With all the attention focused on failing banks and government bailouts, the very legitimate panic felt by such graduates risks getting lost in the shuffle.

"Most of the recent graduates I hear from are petrified," says Alan Collinge, founder of Student Loan Justice, an organization that fights for student loan reform, and author of an upcoming book about the student loan industry. "They have yet to find real jobs in their field, so they're out there slinging hash to make ends meet. And then their loan payments come due."

Graduates like Golden are right to feel petrified. According to a recent College Board report, about 60 percent of 2007 college graduates had student debt, each taking out an average of $22,700 in loans. Graduates are expected to begin repaying within six months, healthy job market or no. Loans can be deferred, but never erased (unless you die or are permanently disabled). And when those payments do come due, many will face the prospect of paying back not only fixed-rate federal loans but also high-interest private loans. The private loan industry is now responsible for 24 percent of student lending. Before the economic crisis hit, it was the fastest-growing sector of the student loan industry. And though the $700 billion bailout bill includes provisions to enable the U.S. Treasury to buy troubled assets, including private loans, from student loan providers, it provides no relief for the students who have taken out such high-interest loans.

Collinge sees the proliferation of costly private loans and the abysmal job market as a potentially toxic mix, one that could result in a wave of bad loans echoing what has already happened in the housing industry.