- Guests:
- Michael Kirk, Producer of Frontline's "The Warning".
- Stephen Lerner, spokesperson for the SEIU (Service Employees International Union).
- Ricky Macoy, unemployed electrician.
- Floyd Brown, President of the National Campaign Fund.
- Topics:
- The results of Milton Friedman's economic policies.
- Terrorist Wall Street banks.
- Extend unemployment benefits.
- Will Obama's repeating the mistakes of the Clinton administration lead to financial disaster?
- Labor segment: SEIU day of action in Chicago for Am. Banker's Assn. meeting next Monday 10/26.
- Impeach Obama?! Why do conservatives have to resort to lies and exaggerations?
- Bumper Music:
- Voices Carry, 'Til Tuesday.
- Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Allan Sherman.
- Some Kind Of Trouble, Tanya Tucker.
- Say Hello, Deep Dish. (video)
- Crazy, Gnarls Barkley.
- World Hold On, Bob Sinclar (video).
- Trouble, Lindsey Buckingham.
- Hello, Sugarbomb.
- Democracy, Leonard Cohen.
- Today's newsletter has details of today's guests and links to the major stories and alerts that Thom covered in the show, plus lots more. If you haven't signed up for the free newsletter yet, please do. If you missed today's newsletter, it is in the archive.
- Quote: "Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment." -- Benjamin Franklin.
- Article: "The Danger of American Fascism" by Henry A. Wallace, April 9, 1944.
"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
- Article: "Countdown to the next crisis is already under way" by Wolfgang Münchau.
"We did not need to wait until the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 10,000. It has been clear for some time that global equity markets are bubbling again. On the surface, this looks like 2003 and 2004 when the previous housing, credit, commodity and equity bubbles started to inflate, helped by low nominal interest rates and a lack of inflation. There is one big difference, though. This bubble will burst sooner.
So how do we know this is a bubble? My two favourite metrics of stock market valuation are Cape, which stands for the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio, and Q. Cape was invented by Robert Shiller, professor of economics and finance at Yale University. It measures the 10-year moving average of the inflation-adjusted p/e ratio. Q is a metric of market capitalisation divided by net worth. Andrew Smithers* has collected the data on Q, a concept invented by the economist James Tobin."
- Article: Nazi gnomes cause outcry in Germany by Kate Connolly.
