The Congressional Budget Office director yesterday told Congress that the proposed bailout may worsen the current financial crisis. “Ironically, the intervention could even trigger additional failures of large institutions, because some institutions may be carrying troubled assets on their books at inflated values,” Peter Orszag said. “Establishing clearer prices might reveal those institutions to be insolvent.”
Lobbyists for the financial industry are engaged in a “feeding frenzy.” Wall Street firms, commercial banks, and insurers are lobbying on an array of issues — “from beating back proposals to make it easier to reduce mortgage debts in bankruptcy courts to fighting, unsuccessfully so far, to retain control over executive pay.”
In a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Condoleezza Rice admitted to discussing torture techniques in the White House in the spring of 2002. In meetings led by Rice and attended by Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, and other administration officials, officials authorized waterboarding and other coercive methods to interrogate al Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah. ABC News first reported the meetings in April.
“Sarah Palin schmoozed with controversial media tycoon Rupert Murdoch at a swanky charity gala” in New York Wednesday night. “He gave her a pat on the back … and said to her, ‘Thank you very much’” as she slid into the back of a waiting SUV wearing “a radiant smile,” Politico reports.
On the trail today: John McCain and Barack Obama will meet with President Bush at 4 pm to discuss the bailout package for the financial industry. Sarah Palin will attend McCain’s speech at the Clinton Global Initiative and then head to Philadelphia. Joe Biden will speak about the economy in Wilkes-Barre, PA.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust study has found that “[w]orkers are shouldering higher health care costs as more employers demand bigger out-of-pocket payments from employees before their insurance kicks in.” Annual deductibles “jumped an average of 29%, to $1,344, for those with family coverage.”
A prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned this week, alleging that the government had denied a defendant access to “potentially exculpatory evidence.” Army Col. Lawrence J. Morris, lead prosecutor for the tribunals, denied the reports and said that Vandeveld resigned for “personal reasons.”
“Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, who shook up the agency when he barred scientists from consulting for drugmakers, announced that he would leave at the end of October “so there is a clear sense that whoever wins the election, N.I.H. has to be a clear priority in their mind.”
Connecticut Democrats, angry that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is campaigning for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and criticizing Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), “agreed Wednesday to circulate a resolution to censure the veteran politician.” The resolution “condemns Lieberman for speaking at the Republicans’ convention and backing McCain.”
And finally: Yesterday, actor Michael Douglas held a news conference “urging the United States and eight other holdout nations to ratify a nuclear test ban treaty.” However, reporters began asking him questions about the current financial crisis, because of his role as fictional banker Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” One reporter asked Douglas, “Are you saying Gordon that greed is not good?” “I’m not saying that,” Douglas replied. “And my name is not Gordon. He’s a character I played 20 years ago.”
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