President Barack Obama is poised to ask Congress to agree to $9 billion more in loan guarantees for the nuclear energy industry, a Democratic aide said Thursday, in a renewed push for nuclear power as the growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico highlights the risks of fossil fuel production.

The chances of default on the government-backed loans are "very high-well above 50 percent," according to the Congressional Budget Office. "If they go belly-up, taxpayers get to pay it," said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear. "

As we watch Senator Roland Burris take the lead role in the latest episode of “The Rod Blagojevich Show,” a question arises: Is there a substantive difference between a governor promising a Senate appointment in exchange for campaign contributions, and a member of Congress securing an earmark for the same — aside from a vulgar telephone call discussing the transaction? Perhaps not.

This is your time to beat Buicks into bullet trains, Suburbans into subways, and Hummers into hybrid buses....It is time, Mr. President, to take General Motors and Chrysler off taxpayer life support.

That amounts to swapping taxpayers’ “cash for trash,” Stiglitz said yesterday in a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “You shouldn’t chase good money after bad. We’re talking about a national debt that’s very hard to manage.”

It's called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.

Sign the petition for a Secure Green Future now.

"U.S. arms and military training played a role in 20 of the world's 27 major wars in 2007," said the report, co-authored by New America's Hartung and Frida Berrigan.

What is most revealing about the financial meltdown and economic crisis, however, is that it illustrates that corporations — if left to their own worst instincts — will destroy themselves and the system that nurtures them. It is rare that this lesson is so graphically illustrated. It is one the world must quickly learn, if we are to avoid the most serious existential threat we have yet faced: climate change.

New York Representative Charles Rangel said he's revising his tax overhaul proposal to reduce U.S. corporate tax rates to 28 percent, down from the current rate of 35 percent.

"Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no," said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. "They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks."

The current financial crisis presents an opportunity to scrap the failed policies of neoliberal economics and make America's economic policy both stronger and fairer. By rejecting band-aid solutions, taking decisive action to stop the bleeding, holding the culprits accountable, and reforming our financial system to address the root causes of the crisis, we would do future generations a great service.

Proposals from Washington to fix the financial crisis fall far short of addressing the fundamental problems that led to the crisis. Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of "Globalization and Its Discontents" Joseph Stiglitz outlines an alternative bailout that would benefit the American people instead of the big corporations that made this mess.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States continued spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined. Andrew Bacevich, author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism", questions whether the runaway spending actually makes America safer, and why candidates from both the Democratic and Republican parties are swearing allegiance to the global "war on terror".

[M]uch of what [McCain] detailed was a corporate special pleader's dream: a cut in the corporate income tax rate, from 35 percent to 25 percent, a proposal to allow businesses to write off the cost of new equipment and technology from their taxes, a ban on Internet and new cellphone taxes, and a permanent tax credit for research and development.

Meet Alan Schwartz, welfare recipient. As the chief executive of Bear Stearns, he's getting rather more public assistance than your typical welfare mom -- specifically, $30 billion in federal loan guarantees to help J.P. Morgan Chase take over his firm.