Bush Passes Bailout Buck to Obama
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 21st, 2008 5:38 am by HL
Bush Passes Bailout Buck to Obama
Although President Bush has kicked off the auto industry bailout process before leaving office, some would call Bush’s strategy more of a punt to his presidential successor, Barack Obama.
ABC News:
In a sternly worded radio address today, President Bush issued a dire warning to the Big Three automakers: Restructure—fast—or you’re on your own.
“The time to make the hard decisions to become viable is now – or the only option will be bankruptcy,” Bush said.
But he will be long gone before the March 31 deadline for General Motors and Chrysler to be in the black or pay back the $17 billion in loans, and it is Obama – along with a new and more Democratic Congress – who will have to make the decision about how to proceed then.
“Bush is punting this problem to the next administration,” said Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Obama can catch it or let it bounce into the end zone and let the parties work it out.”
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Some needy denizens of Milan will be served a rare delicacy this holiday season, after Italian customs officials seized about 88 pounds of beluga caviar from smugglers trying to sneak it in from Poland. The loot—worth over half a million dollars—was donated to feed the Milanese poor.
BBC:
Beluga caviar is the most expensive variety of the delicacy.
Countries have tried to crack down on illegal trading of caviar after more than 600 tonnes of it were traded in the EU between 1998 and 2004.
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A new study mirroring the infamous 1963 Milgram experiment has suggested that humans will still follow authority’s beckon, even to the point of killing another person. The new report, timely considering the current debate around torture in the U.S., argues that it’s not that humans are bad, but that “a massive social influence [is] going on.”
The Milgram experiment, considered a monumental but notorious study in psychological research, showed that volunteers would shock, at supposedly lethal voltages, a subject (played by an actor) who had answered a question incorrectly—all at the behest of an authoritative “scientist.”
The BBC:
Decades after a notorious experiment, scientists have found test subjects are still willing to inflict pain on others – if told to by an authority figure.
US researchers repeated the famous “Milgram test”, with volunteers told to deliver electrical shocks to another volunteer – played by an actor.
Even after faked screams of pain, 70% were prepared to increase the voltage, the American Psychology study found.
Both may help explain why apparently ordinary people can commit atrocities.
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