CNBC reported that the bill for taxpayers is $145 billion, but that could be only a mere appetizer at an all you can eat buffet of misery from losses in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans.  The Congressional Budget Office estimates the losses may reach $400 billion.

But they want new stimulus measures—which is convincing evidence that they too recognize that the earlier measures failed. And so the U.S. was odd-man out at the G-20 meeting over the weekend, continuing to call for more government spending in the face of European resistance.

There has been much outrage over the past few days about the way police behaved against G20 protesters in Toronto, a place where we don’t usually see such violent behaviour. I’ve been invited to join a Facebook page demanding a public inquiry, and I’ve read a lot of pointed comments about police making random arrests.

I’m having a hard time sorting out the claims and counterclaims.
One thing I do understand, though: The G20 protesters failed to get their message(s) across.

The board chairperson, Hery Rakotomanana, explained that the transitional administration’s electoral code stipulates that the referendum campaign should last 45 days.

With the vote on a new constitution initially slated for August 12 by the Indian Ocean island’s leader, Andry Rajoelina, the campaign needed to have started on June 28, he said.

“Since the government’s going to want to unwind them at some point anyway, why not do it at the best levels ever?” Scott Simon, the mortgage-bond head at Newport Beach, California-based Pimco, manager of the world’s biggest fixed- income fund, said in a telephone interview. “It’s good for taxpayers, good for stakeholders, good for everybody.”

... SEIU, which has donated more money to ACORN than any other union organization going back to 2005, is applying a similar technique with the Change to Win coalition, which came together in 2005. Although it was sold as a launching pad for innovative organizing strategies that would benefit the labor movement as a whole, Change to Win has evolved into a front group for the SEIU.

“Despite being a coalition of several unions, Change to Win has been of material benefit to one union only, and that is the SEIU,” Glenn Spencer, the executive director of the Workforce Freedom Initiative with the Chamber of Commerce has observed. “SEIU still views Change to Win as a useful mouthpiece and it can use it as a pathway to funnel money to shady groups like ACORN without putting its own name on the check.”

... Britain has just announced eye-watering public spending cuts and tax increases. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy have all imposed stiff deficit-reduction measures. Even Germany, with the biggest and most creditworthy economy in Europe, is planning measures to save €80 billion, or $99 billion, over the next four years.

But Mr. Sarkozy rejects any talk of “rigueur” — the French word for austerity — refusing to let ministers even utter the term or to spell out how Paris plans to bring down its swollen deficit.

Rigueur has been a dirty word ever since then-President François Mitterrand, a Socialist, had to make a humiliating U-turn in 1983 after two years of free spending ended in devaluation, capital flight and large trade and current-account deficits.

In this rebellious nation, mere talk of an austerity plan can bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. Conservative politicians are haunted by memories of mass protests that felled the pension and welfare overhaul plans of then-Prime Minister Alain Juppé in 1995 and defeated subsequent attempts to overhaul rigid labor laws.

The General Confederation of Labor, or GSEE, Greece’s largest union group for workers at private companies, and ADEDY, the civil servants’ organization, are holding a rally and march on parliament in Athens. The 24-hour stoppage includes maritime engineers at Piraeus, Greece’s largest port.

“We are faced with almost the totaling of Greece’s social security and labor system,” ADEDY Chairman Spyros Papaspyrou said by telephone. “We want the overturn of the harsh and anti- social measures and remain committed to this struggle.”