So many things have collapsed in recent months (the auto industry, the stock market, a growing list of daily newspapers) that the announcement of an impending disaster has ceased to qualify as news. Maybe this explains why so few people paid attention when Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, predicted not long ago that at least 100,000 nonprofit organizations would disappear over the next two years. Light made his prognostication at a public forum in New York City back in November, before the Madoff Ponzi scheme wiped out institutions such as the JEHT foundation, a leading funder of criminal justice reform; before museums started canceling exhibits they cannot afford to put up; before a coalition of thousands of nonprofit organizations signed a manifesto calling on political leaders to boost support for their beleaguered sector.

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The lead story in today's Washington Post foretells of the impending disaster should either the Bush or Obama administrations seek access to the second $350 billion tranche of the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) "despite intense opposition in Congress," sources familiar with the discussions said.

House and Senate leaders, senior Bush administration officials, and Obama transition staff regard TARP II funds as essential in combating the worst depredations of the deepening recession. As the Post reports, "without the money, [they know] it would be nearly impossible to offer significant help for homeowners facing foreclosure, stabilize the financial system or jump-start the credit markets so more consumers and companies can get loans."

But without reforms substantially improving funding procedures and transparency, TARP 2.0 may be dead on arrival in Congress.

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Two months after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expended practically every last penny of the Bush administration's political capital to pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Treasury Department itself has spent a quarter of a trillion taxpayer dollars on TARP transactions, the entire undertaking seems to have had little to no affect on the macro-economy... and has raised more questions than it has resolved.

The banking sector is buffeted weekly by reports of some venerable financial institution brought to its knees, its market capitalization all but evaporated. Hundred of billions of TARP dollars have been spent on re-capitalization, with no sustained improvement in the credit markets. Implementation of the TARP oversight process has been delayed to the point where statutory reporting deadlines are being missed. The legally-mandated public accounting of TARP transactions conflicts with private and nonprofit accounts and redactions in contract disclosures are far from a model of transparency. For better or worse, not a cent has been spent on the purchase of a troubled asset of a single bank.

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When we have a moment to reflect in the coming days on this week's election, we might pause to consider and appreciate what the people living among the farms and cornfields of Indiana, in the old textile towns of North Carolina, and in the hollows of West Virginia said when they stood and voted this week. What they said, whatever else they have have thought or felt, was that we have overcome.

If this is true, such a statement comes closer than anything else can to fulfilling the ancient hopes of our nation's founders, when they sought, in establishing our republic, to form a more perfect union.

Having trouble staying on top of the various programs and initiatives the federal government has embarked on to combat the economic crisis? You are not alone. The plans, an evolving ad hoc amalgam comprising an alphabet soup are almost impossible even for close observers to sort out. Here is a review of major efforts undertaken to date.

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Like many Americans, Sen. John McCain is caught in the vortex of the rapidly downward-spiraling American economy. Like them, he is being pushed in directions he doesn't want to go. McCain's campaign has openly wished that something would "turn the page" away from economic issues. But yesterday, a day after Sen. Barack Obama announced a four-point program to address the nation's economic problems, Sen. McCain, slow to react in the first place but not to be outdone, did likewise.

McCain's set of proposals revolves around - you saw this coming, didn't you? - tax cuts. Tax cuts for capital losses, tax cuts for capital gains, tax cuts for corporations, tax cuts for early withdrawals from retirement accounts. His other major proposals, for mortgage refinancing, cleansing banks of distressed assets, restricting executive compensation, have all been approved by Congress and signed by the President already.

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Almost exactly three weeks after he pronounced the fundamentals of the American economy strong, Sen. John McCain now comes forward with his first proposal to address what he concedes is the nation's worst economic crisis of his lengthy lifetime. He rightly focuses on an economic demographic uniquely imperiled by the crisis: U.S. homeowners.

Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com estimates that one-sixth of all mortgage holders now owe more than their houses are worth. That's a looming catastrophe for them, their neighbors and communities, and the economy at large.

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This evening at 7:30 p.m., the United States Senate is scheduled to vote on its own version of the economic rescue plan that the House voted down on Monday.

The new version comprises virtually all the provisions of the House plan, but with the following key add-ons:

• FDIC: an increase in the ceiling on bank deposits insured by the FDIC from $100,000 to $250,000

• The Extenders: an extension of tax breaks - known as the "extenders" - for renewable energy, research and development, the state sales and college tuition deductions, and numerous other provisions

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The failure of the $700 billion financial bailout package in the House yesterday (228-205) set off immediate tremors in Washington, New York, and throughout the U.S., followed by aftershocks in capital markets around the world. Never in its history has the Dow suffered a worse single-day point drop. Credit markets have ground to a complete halt. Over one trillion dollars of national wealth was lost. by the time the markets closed on Monday. Retirement plans and nest eggs are shrinking. Americans seeking mortgages, student and car loans, or bank credit are being turned away regardless of their ability to repay. If we didn't have a crisis before, we have one now. What are the next steps to take?

Yes, congressional negotiators deserved tremendous credit for their tireless efforts to reach a compromise on an economic rescue package this past weekend. But, following the bill's defeat yesterday, the rescue plan now faces a major uphill struggle in the court of public opinion and, therefore, in Congress as it prepares to reconsider the package and vote on Thursday. Vast improvements in both the legislation and the sales pitch both can and must be made.

Here is a five-point rescue plan to save the rescue plan:

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The Imperial three-page bill that the Bush Administration gave Congress 10 days ago, giving it unreviewable power over $700 billion, has not morphed into a 106-page compromise bill. And oh is it ever a complex piece of compromise.
The bill establishes a Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP.
A quick review of the bill shows that:

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There is a question journalists ought to be asking members of Congress, in good part because of a new study (pdf) by two economists that say they generally do not, that they encourage bad banking practices and they mostly just transfer wealth from people to bankers.

The study, a work in progress known as a working paper, is by two economists at the International Monetary Fund who studied 42 banking crisis in Britain, Japan and the rest of the world over the last 37 years.

The study, the IMF notes, is not official policy. OK. But the findings of economists Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia should give us all pause about out government moving with all deliberate speed to borrow $700 billion.

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For a week now I have been urging fellow journalists to be skeptical of the assertion that we have a huge crisis and, secondly, that the bailout proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs) is the ONLY solution.

Journalists should be insisting that officials make the case that there is a crisis, do not just accept that there is one because they say so. And then reporters should ask hard questions about who benefits from the bailout, whether there are alternative solutions that would be less costly or more effective.
Journalists, and specially Washington journalists, are generally behaving like lapdogs and generally only asking detail questions around the central premise. This should concern us all. This is the same kind of behavior that we saw during the run up to the War in Iraq, when there was no shortage of critical facts and skeptical sources, but only the usual stalwarts in journalism reported skeptically.

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The frame has been set, the die cast. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, presumably representing the Bush administration but indirectly representing Wall Street, and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke, want a blank check from Congress for $700 billion or possibly a trillion dollars or more to take bad debt off Wall Street's balance sheets. Never before in the history of American capitalism has so much been asked of so many for (at least in the first instance) so few.

Put yourself in the shoes of a member of Congress, including our two presidential candidates. The Treasury Secretary and Fed Chair have told you this is necessary to save the economy. If you don't agree, you risk a meltdown of the entire global financial system. Your own constituents' savings could go down with it. An election is six weeks away. Besides, in the last two days of trading, since rumors spread that the Treasury and the Fed were planning something of this sort, stock prices revived.

Now - quick -- what do you do? You have no choice but to say yes.

But you might also set some conditions on Wall Street.

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As you can tell simply by scanning the headlines of any major newspaper in the United States these days, something is gravely amiss in the current political debate in this country.

You see - along with the presidential palaver and front-page pieces about pigs and lipstick - stories about a metastasizing financial crisis facing the country. The U.S. government just bought a huge pig in a big poke this week - it's not a joke, and it should not be on the U.S. taxpayer.

Whatever the outcome of the country's mortgage and broader credit crisis, this much is now clear: American taxpayers and voters need to know what is at stake for them in the government seizure of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, what risks they face, and what the policy choices are.

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I just got back from giving a speech this morning at the Center for American Progress where I tried to lay down a baseline about how you actually win the struggle against radical extremism and terrorism -- and the new mindset required to do it. I wanted to continue the conversation, and TPM graciously agreed to host it here.

Here's the deal -- we don't need a rebranding -- this isn't a semantics game -- we need a wholesale rethinking. Instead of a military-dominated "war on terror," we should be fighting the global counterinsurgency campaign it always should have been. We need to fold our military efforts to capture and kill today's terrorists into a larger "information war" designed to prevent tomorrow's from ever being recruited.

I start from the premise that our current strategy is not working. Five years ago, Donald Rumsfeld famously asked: "Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?" So where are we today? Attacks -- historic highs; Al Qaeda -- reconstituted along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Taliban -- resurgent. Hamas -- tightening its grip on Gaza. Hezbollah -- running a state within a state in Lebanon. The answer to Rumsfeld's question, I'm afraid, is no -- not by a longshot.

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Just how daunting the challenge Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey faces in restoring the reputation of a Department of Justice (DOJ) severely tarnished by political scandals was again demonstrated by a recent government report documenting that senior DOJ officials had based hiring decisions for non-political career positions on the applicants' political and ideological affiliations in violation of Department policy and federal law. This politicization of the Department's hiring process for career employees harms the Department's credibility and effectiveness, and sends the wrong message to lawyers of all political stripes who seek to engage in public service, as a lawsuit filed by one of the students discriminated against suggests.

The report, issued jointly by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General (IG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), shows that highly qualified attorneys and law students who applied for the Department's summer intern and career honors program -- the exclusive means by which DOJ hires recent law school graduates and judicial law clerks without prior experience -- were "deselected" because of their association with "liberal" organizations.

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As a young African American woman and the first lawyer in my family, I find Justice Thurgood Marshall's life both professionally and personally inspiring. But today, which would have been Marshall's 100th birthday, is not just personally significant. It is a day where everyone who is passionate about fairness and equality should pause and reflect on what we must learn from his legacy.

Thurgood Marshall, the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was a pioneer for legal equality who used the civil court system as a tool for change. Born in 1908 in the segregated South, Marshall experienced all the obstacles and indignities that young people today only see in documentaries and textbooks. But by the time he died in 1993, he had not only witnessed the dismantling of formal legal racism, he had actually played an integral role in achieving it.

As a young lawyer he worked to chip away at Jim Crow, combining sophisticated litigation strategies that earned him respect among colleagues, with a unique wit and humor that warmed even those most staunchly hostile to his anti-racist agenda. At the end of his tenure as a civil rights trial lawyer he had won 29 of his 32 Supreme Court cases. But speaking at his alma mater, Howard Law School, in 1978, he warned graduates against believing that the struggle for social justice would end with a few, or even many, courtroom victories:

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Last summer, when I left the Republican Party, I did so because I believed it was incapable of change--even in the face of the electoral defeats that led to minority status in the House and Senate. In my book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President, I wrote that "the Republican base is strong and rallying behind its ramparts. It is kicking out moderates and vowing never to change. It will crawl over broken glass to support the extreme Republican agenda."

Given its history on clean air standards, I expected a deafening silence from the GOP when in my May 16th post I decried the EPA's weakening of rules on building power plants near national parks. In the piece, I called on Republican Senators Alexander, Warner and Gregg, among others, to speak out on behalf of the national parks and forests in their states and protest what I called "the continuing Bush lunacy" on this issue.

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According to Charlie Black, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an "unfortunate event," but it was a turning point in John McCain's primary campaign. McCain's "knowledge and ability to talk about it re-emphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be commander in chief. And it helped us."

Senator McCain's general election campaign depends even more on his national security and foreign policy experience, his claim that he's ready to be commander in chief. McCain has traveled the world, he knows the leaders.

When Bhutto was assassinated, McCain said he knew Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf personally, and could get him on the telephone. The United States picks up the tab for more than a quarter of Pakistan's total military spending. The president of Pakistan is probably going to take our president's call.

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I appreciate your thoughtful responses. We clearly agree that this is an important issue. As many of you noted, it is vital that we get this legislation right. The passage last August of the "Protect America Act" - hastily passed in the context of a relentless drumbeat of propaganda and disinformation orchestrated by the administration - was an illustration of exactly how not to pass a bill.

In reviewing the FISA legislation now under consideration, it is clear to me that it does not meet the criteria or the principles I shared with you earlier.

The bill lacks the very specific "reverse targeting" protections I secured in the two previous House FISA bills we've passed. This goes to the issue of not being precise in who we are targeting. It appears to me that innocent Americans who are not "targeted" still may have their communications intercepted with ultimately damaging results.

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Congress on Friday will debate legislation that would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This is the fourth or fifth iteration since last year that Congress has addressed this issue in the face of baseless claims and propaganda by the Administration and its allies that the intelligence community is unable to do its job.

Fundamentally, this debate is about how we can protect the American people in every respect - by giving the intelligence community the flexibility and tools it needs to identify and stop those out to harm us and by protecting individual Americans from harmful suspicions, intrusions, and interference. Such protections were not contained in the so-called "Protect American Act" that the President signed last August. That law has expired and the surveillance ordered under it still stands. Some of those orders will begin to expire after August and the Administration is demanding that Congress act.

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The leaders of the Cult of the Cut, whose axiomatic belief is "tax cuts, spending cuts good; any other fiscal policy bad, deficits be damned" warned darkly last week about an ominous, imminent tax increase. Cult leaders - a small band of administration royloyalists - took the unprecedented step of alerting the nation to this prospect by issuing a White House press release entitled "The Largest Tax Increase in History Is Looming."

The urgent tone of the press release reflects their belief that "In this time of economic uncertainty, one of the worst things we could do to our economy is raise taxes on the American people. Thanks in part to the President's tax relief, our economy continues to grow." [Emph. theirs]. Let us set aside the prescience behind the assertion that, after a contraction of GDP growth from 4.6 percent in the last quarter of 2007 to less than one percent in the first quarter of 2008, the nation's economy is in fact growing.

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Most press reports on President Bush's tour of the Middle East note that he kept talking about peace between Israel and the Palestinians but could cite "no concrete steps" aimed at achieving it.

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations' Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Subcommittee, I saw first-hand how the Bush administration not only failed to help bring peace to Israel and the occupied territories in 2001-2007, but seemed actively interested in thwarting the Palestinian dream of achieving an independent homeland in the West Bank and Gaza.

Faced with that glaring difference between what the administration says and what it does, I could only conclude that the president is quietly allied with the Jim Inhofes and Tom DeLays of the world, whose fundamentalist interpretation of the Old Testament leads them to believe that the God of the Bible does not want Palestinians governing any part of the Promised Land.

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