Of course the title is misleading and deliberately so... its late and I shamelessly wanted to get you attention.
John Edwards has stopped his campaigning Wednesday to make a major policy address speech from where he started his campaign in New Orleans... maybe.
More below the fold...
Edwards nixes campaign stops for speech
Excerpts:
WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards canceled campaign events in Alabama and North Dakota to make a "major policy address on poverty" Wednesday in New Orleans, where he launched his presidential bid 13 months ago.
Campaign officials said Edwards, who has trailed Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama in recent primaries, does not plan to end his candidacy and will reschedule the two dropped trips. Nonetheless, people close to the campaign said Tuesday's announcement caught them off guard, and some found it perplexing.
In a news release, the Edwards campaign called poverty "the great moral issue of our time." In recent days, it said, "national discussion of important issues like ending poverty has given way to sniping and personal attacks between the two front-runner candidates. Ending poverty and fighting for the middle class is the cause of John Edwards' life — and he will urge the nation to refocus on this important issue."
Democratic activists have openly speculated that the former North Carolina senator may have to leave the race soon because he has been unable to keep pace with Obama and Clinton in gaining votes, media attention and fundraising. After narrowly edging Clinton for second place in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, Edwards has fared poorly. On Saturday, he finished a distant third in his native South Carolina, whose primary he won in 2004.
Some people close to the campaign said Edwards was disappointed that poverty got little mention in Democratic reactions to President Bush's State of the Union address Monday, and he sees the New Orleans speech as a chance to refocus attention on the problem. These people, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said they had no indication that Edwards planned to leave the race.
The insiders said Edwards continues to raise money at a respectable pace, although not at the level of Clinton and Obama.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
As the whole country buzzes about the primaries the undercurrent of the state of the economy continues to grow as our recession fears worsen... and with good reason... the news keeps getting worse by the hour it seems.
Todays articles of interest tell the tale:
US home foreclosures surge
Published: Tuesday January 29, 2008
Excerpt:
Home repossessions spiked across the United States during 2007 leaving over one percent of all households in some stage of foreclosure, an industry report showed Tuesday.
RealtyTrac, a California-based company which tracks foreclosure activity, said 2.2 million foreclosure filings were lodged during 2007, marking a 75 percent increase compared with the prior year.
The percentage of households in foreclosure almost doubled from 0.58 percent in 2006, signalling the slump in the US housing market has yet to abate.
SNIP!
The foreclosure report followed a government survey a day earlier which showed that sales of newly built homes across the country plunged by a record 26.4 percent during 2007, compared with the prior year, to an estimated 774,000 properties.
The foreclosure snapshot was released as Federal Reserve policymakers gathered in Washington for a two-day meeting to mull interest rates. Most economists expect the central bank to cut interest rates again.
The Fed launched a rate-cutting drive in September to underpin economic momentum which has been threatened by the housing downturn. It cut its key federal funds rate by an historic three quarters of a percentage point to 3.50 percent in a surprise move last Tuesday.
http://rawstory.com/...
So like a man in row boat at sea who realizes that his boat has sprung a serious leak and begins bailing like a mad man... the Fed just can't seem to keep cutting the rates fast enough!
And what do my enron/global crossings/tyco weary eye behold next???
Enter our own federales... complete with festive task force attire to investigate our financial institutions!
FBI investigates 14 firms in subprime crackdown
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI has opened criminal investigations into 14 corporations as part of a crackdown on improper subprime lending, agency officials said on Tuesday.
FBI officials told reporters the probes involved potential violations, including accounting fraud and insider trading.
They did not identify the companies. But the probes reached across the industry to include developers, subprime lenders, companies that securitized loans and investment banks that held them, said Neil Power, head of the FBI's economic crimes unit.
"Currently there are ... 14 investigations, inquiries open right now," he said.
Cases involving individual loans have also risen sharply in a crackdown on subprime lending irregularities, officials said.
"We anticipate in the next year that another wave of adjustable rate mortgages will reset and with that we anticipate that the mortgage corporate fraud potential cases to increase," said Sharon Ormsby, head of the FBI's financial crimes section.
The FBI is investigating the corporate cases in parallel with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has opened about three dozen civil investigations into the subprime market collapse. Some of the probes overlap, an official said.
Targets of the SEC probe include Swiss bank UBS AG and U.S investment banks Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, as well as bond insurer MBIA.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
And while President Bush and the democratic leadership pose for photo-Ops on the new stimulus package that was rushed through congress... economist evaluating the plan point to once again the deck is stacked in the favor of those who need the tax breaks the least... the Dems having folded to Bush once again!
Stimulus Gone Bad
by Paul Krugman
Excerpt:
House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon.
Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.
snip
We don’t know for sure how deep the coming slump will be, or even whether it will meet the technical definition of a recession. But there’s a real chance not just that it will be a major downturn, but that the usual response to recession — interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve — won’t be sufficient to turn the economy around. (For more on this, see my blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.)
And if that happens, we’ll deeply regret the fact that the Bush administration insisted on, and Democrats accepted, a so-called stimulus plan that just won’t do the job.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
No one knows for sure as Krugman points out but lets face it folks there is a whole lot of Deja vu going on here and the really bad stuff in this picture hasn't even really surfaced yet.
While most of us have been focused on the Primaries and their various intrigues... will he... won't she... he did it first... no she did... etc. etc. etc. ad absurdum. The shit has been really hitting the fan.
If things keep going at the pace that they are going, by the time the conventions roll around they may be an after thought in our minds. The reality is that it may take the collective wisdom and skill of all of the candidates pulling together to pull us out of this mess.
Each of the candidates bring real strengths to the table and as that poverty in the US has increased by 13% since the year 2000 and it seems a pretty safe bet that it is going to increase dramtically, we're probably going to really need a good poverty plan.
John Edwards has called this the calling of his life and has once again led the pack in drafting a poverty plan. Whether you support him or not, I would urge you to familiarize yourself with its salient points and add them to the national discussion.
Sarah Lane has written an outstanding diary summarizing the plan and adds a great historical perspective and it is deep into the core values of the Democratic party. It is well worth the read.
I Want a New Deal with Edwards
by Sarah Lane
http://www.dailykos.com/...