Jan. 27, 2009

Jan. 27, 2009—“In recent days persons in a Western country have said ‘China is manipulating the yuan exchange rate,’” said People’s Bank of China Vice Governor Su Ning... “These remarks are not only inconsistent with the facts, tut they are misleading about the reasons for the financial crisis.” –WSJ A8

--Halliburton to pay $559 Million to Settle Bribery investigation. It is unclear whether the proposed settlement will affect KBR’s ability to land future government contracts. –WSJ B3

—The British government announced Monday that it had launched an investigation into four members of the [House of Lords] after they allegedly told undercover journalists they would be willing to influence legislation in return for money. SBT A4

--Republican lawmakers opposed to expanding the children’s health program insurance program argued that broadening the plan would force 2.4 million children into government sponsored insurance. “We’re going to replace a lot of private insurance with government insurance” Arizona Se. Jon Kyl said. SBT A4

--The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II. The Republican answer to this turmoil?
Tax cuts. They need to go into rehab. The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare. A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.) The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said: “Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.” How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money. Bob Herbert, NYT A29

--The New Life Church, a nationally known evangelical institution that fired its founding pastor, Ted Haggard, in 2006 over accusations that he had had sex with a male prostitute, made payments starting in 2007 to a young male church member who had a relationship with Mr. Haggard before the dismissal, the church’s pastor told worshipers on Sunday.—NYT A17

--A federal judge has ordered that copies of documents related to the investigation into the 2006 firings of nine US attorneys must be made and stored at the White House for use by the incoming Obama administration...NLJ, 1-19-09, p. 3