The seven hundred billion dollar bail out of the financial industry is not US law.  Who helped shape the plan, and who's promising to limit any new regulations? Diane Darsetta and Sari  Williams of PR Watch dot org. report. 

"Spinning the U.S. Financial Crisis"

Who boasted of having "the expertise and experience to help you and your members minimize the punitive effects of any new federal regulations"?  The major PR firm Edelman, in a pitch sent to financial companies in late September.  Though unemployment is up and home foreclosures continue, the financial meltdown has boosted the already-booming business of the lobbying and public relations industries.

• Europe Begins A Round of Financial Bailouts
• How Will the Treasury Use the $700 Billion?
• Civil Libertarians Denounce New FBI Investigation Guidelines
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• Are Florida Vets Being Denied Opportunity to Register to Vote?

• First Monday in October – Supreme Court Opens
• Bank of America Settles Countrywide Predatory Lending
• General Strike in Belgium
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• Farm Workers Target Chipotle

One European government after another is scrambling to pull itself out of the financial crisis that is now global. In Iceland, where the currency is now rated the world's third-worst performing, the financial markets were suspended today while the government comes up with a bailout. In Germany, the government is spending $68 billion to bail out Hypo Real Estate. French Bank BNP Paribas will take over finance group Fortis's operations in Belgium and Luxembourg. Meanwhile governments are raising the amount of personal savings they will guarantee, and the European Central Bank and the Bank of England will hold up some banks through some $74 billion in short-term loans.

As Europeans weigh in on the US bailout, the US stock market is responding to the crisis now gripping Europe: the Dow dipped some 800 points today – but closed down 350.  Meanwhile in the capital today, Congress heard testimony that even as Lehman Brothers was asking the Feds to rescue it from collapse, it was bundling millions of dollars to its executives. A House panel pressed Lehman Brothers CEO in the first Congressional hearing attempting to make sense of the financial crisis. Now that Congress has approved a massive economic recovery package, Treasury officials are getting down to business. But what are they going to do with 700 billion dollars? What are the first concrete steps toward restoring the economy? FSRN's Tanya Snyder has the answers.

The Department of Justice has issued a new set of guidelines for the FBI, which will make it easier to begin investigating people, even if there is no suspicion of an actual crime or a threat to national security. Despite reports of internal abuses at both the FBI and the DOJ, the new guidelines replace current rules for five kinds of investigations: general criminal, national security, foreign intelligence, civil disorders and demonstrations. FSRN spoke with ACLU lawyer and former FBI agent Michael German about the new policies.