Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'austerity'
In 1933, the writer Arna Bontemps, a fellow member with Langston Hughes of a collection of writers, artists, and musicians that history has dubbed “the Harlem Renaissance,” in recognition of the creative contributions they offered to the world, penned a moving...
By now almost everyone knows of the famous Excel spreadsheet err...
The first part of 2013 has been something of a confessional period for the economic managerial class. The IMF’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, ...
The big talk in Washington this month is the sequester cuts. These cuts are roughly 8 percent of most areas of discretionary spending, both military and domestic. While the cuts became effective at the start of March, many will first begin to pinch this month since govern...
The media is calling it a “Spring swoon”, but it’s really just the next phase of the long slump.
After a strong showing in the first quarter (Q1), the economy is starting to lose steam for the forth year in a row. The main cause for the slow...
With Barack Obama putting his plan to cut Social Security and Medicare expenditures into writing in his Federal budget proposal the ability of those who voted for him to credibly deny his years of publicly stating he would do so disappeared. The pathetic pleas from libera...
We typically honor the convention to refrain from speaking ill of the recently departed. But Margaret Thatcher probably would not object to an epitaph focusing on how her political legacy was to achieve her professed aim of “irreversibly” dismantling Britain’s publi...
Recent events in Cyprus, the seizure of bank deposits to affect bailouts of large private banks and the implementation of capital controls to limit the rate at which remaining bank deposits can be moved out of the country, suggest the global banking crisis widely presente...
Nicosia.
The municipal theatre of Nicosia sits directly behind the Cypriot parliament. Its prominence within the capital suggests the importance of such civic buildings to a population seeing itself as the inheritors to the grand heritage of Greek traditio...
Nightmare and insanity are akin.
Mysterious and involuntary states that skew
and distort objective reality
One wakens from nightmare.
From insanity there is no awakening.
“Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machin...
Lansing has it out for Detroiters. That’s William Scott’s estimation, at least. “The politicians in state government, in my opinion, care more about the suburbs than here in Detroit,” the retired auto worker told me a few years ago, sitting in a lawn chair perched...
This week House Budget Committee Paul Ryan (R-Wis) released his Fiscal Year 2014 House Budget Resolution, ...
Democrats are masters of illusion – especially self-delusion. Their abject performance over the past few decades has shorn them of identity and conviction. They have lost on every front against a Republican opponent that has abandoned the mainstream for cloud cuckoo lan...
Two events coincided this week that illustrate the crisis of political economy in the capitalist West—the premature and intensely sad death of Hugo Chavez and the trite idiocy symbolizing the class warfare declared by the rich against the rest of us as the Dow Jones sto...
In democracies, the demos rules. According to the original meaning of the term, that means the popular masses, as distinct from social or economic elites. More usually nowadays, the term has no class content; “demos” denotes an undifferentiated citizenry....
Since the rosy fingered dawn of austerity in America, the liberal media have consistently proclaimed that the Republicans are a deluded gang of filibustering rejectionists. By contrast, they make the rather more strident claim that, for all their faults, Democrats at leas...
It’s no secret that most cities, counties, states and school districts in the U.S. are facing big deficits. What is less understood is the extent to which austerity cuts have become politicians’ bi-partisan response to the situation. The dramatic measures bein...
The soup is seldom eaten as hot as it is served.
Swiss expression, quoted by Philip Mosimann, CEO of Bucher Industries AG, Mar 5, 2013
They surprise and stun wi...
U.S. politicians have cried wolf over austerity long enough for the public to ignore them. A perfect time, then, for politicians to actually unleash the wolves. Barring an unlikely last minute deal, here’s a short list of some of the massive, national bi-partisan-cr...
The latest fad in Washington economic policy debates is arguing over the level at which the government should stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio. The doves are okay with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 73 percent or even 76 percent. The hawks want 60 percent or even less. This is the...
The Great Recession has quietly devastated public services on a state-by-state basis, with Republican and Democratic governors taking turns leading the charge. Public education has been decimated, as well as health care, welfare, and the wages and benefits of public secto...
Back in the 1960s, the U.S. peace movement came up with a catchy phrase: “What if the schools got all the money they needed and the Navy had to hold a bake sale to buy an aircraft carrier?” Well, the Italian Navy has a line of clothing, and is taking a cut from a so...
“A spectre is haunting Europe.” Thus began the famous opening passages of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Today, once again, Europe is haunted by a spectre. But, unlike back in 1848 when Marx and Engels wrote those passages,...
Via Ezra Klein comes a ...
French employers have called for ...