Speaking in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on September 19, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said he would create a new federal agency, called the Mortgage and Financial Institutions Trust (MFI), that would work to head off the financial crisis.

In a major restructuring of its operations, USA Today, published by Gannet Co., Inc., has announced that it will lay off 130 employees in an effort to reorient itself and publish more content in digital form, as opposed to print.

On the heels of dismal second quarter results, mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac is asking for more taxpayer money to continue operations.

Years of big spending by politicians at all levels have left the nation vulnerable to economic turmoil. While at the federal level this is masked to a degree by manipulation and inflation of the money supply, among other factors, local and state governments have no such luxury, and many are struggling to find ways to pay increasingly high expenses. Increasingly, the onus is falling on taxpayers in the form of increased and burdensome taxes, and on public-sector employees who face reductions in benefits, and possibly layoffs.

In a move heralding the Obama administration’s most aggressive intervention in the business sector to date, the federal government has forced GM CEO Rick Wagoner to step down. The change in leadership was announced by GM in a statement released in Wagoner’s name on Monday. In it, the former CEO said the government asked him to leave. “On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with administration officials,” Wagoner begins. “In the course of that meeting, they requested that I ‘step aside’ as CEO of GM, and so I have.”

It's no surprise that U.S. automakers are in trouble. Facing massive costs for health insurance, falling demand for mainstay products like trucks and SUVs, and skittish consumers worried about the economy, the Big Three face an uncertain future.

As the deepening financial crisis worsened yesterday, the Federal Reserve sought socialism as a cure and gobbled up another formerly private entity, the huge American International Group (AIG) insurance company, in an $85 billion bailout. The move was undertaken to prevent the bankruptcy of the nation's largest insurance company in what would have been, according to Bloomberg.com, "the worst financial collapse in history."

For decades, the health of General Motors has been equated, rhetorically at least, with the health of the U.S. economy. In the early 1950's when the company had more employees than the combined populations of Delaware and Nevada, GM President Charlie Wilson remarked, in a closed congressional hearing: "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."

From the moment State Department planners in the Roosevelt administration began crafting plans for the United Nations, their goal was always the same: world government.