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'
If you’re having political déjà vu as Obama’s second term in the White House gets underway, you’re not alone.
The supposedly populist candidate — who won re-election promising to tax the rich, protect Social Security, and make the econom...
From the Guardian:
‘[Senator Jeff] Sessions appea...
They were created and feted to make witchdoctors respectable. The harm and extent that economists can produce, while still not quite in the vicinity of those of doctors, can be extensive. Errors are tolerated, fictions propagated. Dangerous doctrines become impenetr...
Few things in American life are as reliable as the perpetual “crisis” facing Social Security.
Although it has been artfully re-branded as “the problem of entitlements”—a change that couples it with spiraling Medicare costs and implies that the “entitled...
The all-out assault on Social Security has begun.
The set-up for the big battle was the Fiscal Cliff charade. That hyped drama in the last days of December was a moment of truth for the Democratic Party and for President Barack Obama to make it clear whether they w...
An event that has received far too little attention in the United States was the election of a new prime minister in Japan. Last month the people of Japan voted overwhelmingly to throw out the governing party and to support the return of the Liberal Democrats headed by Sh...
Washington’s foreign policy establishment is wringing its hands over the deficit. They voice fears that America’s dominant position in the world will be jeopardized by tight budgets and lingering austerity that lowers its influence on all manner of global economic mat...
A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were...
The financial sector promises that privatizing roads and ports, water and sewer systems, bus and railroad lines (on credit, of course) is more efficient and will lower the prices charged for their services. The reality is that the new buyers put up rent-extracting toll...
Last night, Congress passed a watered down fiscal cliff package that will raise taxes on everyone, but the worst is yet to come, and this “deficit cutting” measure contains some surprises.
Economist Jack Rasmus highlights Obama’s comments after passage which ...
When World War I broke out in August 1914, economists on both sides forecast that hostilities could not last more than about six months. Wars had grown so expensive that governments quickly would run out of money. It seemed that if...
Washington policy debates are chock full of rich people telling poor and middle-class people that they will have to tighten their belts. In fact, in the crazy upside down world of Washington this passes for “courage.”
Cutting back Medicare is one of the favorit...
Dublin.
Targeting young families, the elderly and the sick, as the government slashes child benefits, triples prescription charges and rubber-stamps controversial property tax.
Another political party is selflessly sacrificing itself to the ‘preyi...
In Quentin Tarantino’s movie ‘Jackie Brown’ the illegal arms dealer played by Samuel L. Jackson laughs as he recounts the sales slogan used by the manufacturer of the ‘Tech Nine’ semi-automatic weapon—“the most popular gun in American crime, like they p...
Most progressives have long embraced a clear alternative to the conservative story that prosperity flows best from a “free market” unfettered by government regulation and taxes. The standard progressive response: government incentives and spending are essenti...
Whether we are left with the Fiscal Cliff or a Grand Bargain, workers in the U.S. face massive cuts to programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance, Food Stamp assistance and other needed social safety nets. This is an example of “aus...
Into the fifth year of the Great Recession our nation’s scarcity of jobs continues to condemn tens of millions of us to suffer a hard life of involuntary unemployment, underemployment, and insufficient wages. One would hope that any future political agreements made to m...
Washington elites have spent much of the last three decades getting hysterical about budget deficits; however they are outdoing themselves in the current budget standoff which they labeled as “the fiscal cliff.” Their story is that scheduled increases in taxes at the ...
Two storylines long in the making are converging in a manner that would be hilarious were they not so radically egregious. In the first, President re-elect Barack Obama is joining his supporters in urging that they, his supporters, ‘make’ him do right by their expecta...
Imagine Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 and our political leaders responded by debating the best way to deal with the deficits projected for 1960. This is pretty much the way that Washington works these days.
The political leadership, including t...
Dublin.
Despite the fact that the Irish people are currently enduring endless austerity and cutbacks, ...
In coming weeks the recently re-elected Barack Obama will propose trimming the vestiges of the New Deal—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in the decades long effort of bi-partisan Washington to consolidate total control of Western economies in the hands of a corpo...
I don’t have a television, so I didn’t get to see President Obama deliver his reelection speech last night. Like millions of Americans, the day after the election was much the same as every other day. I spent my first day after Obama’s victory moving for...
It is remarkable that Social Security hasn’t been a more prominent issue in the presidential race. After all, Governor Romney has proposed ...
Our two fathers would have much to say to today’s presidential and Senate candidates who are pandering for middle class votes? As if tens of millions of economically struggling families, like the ones in which we were raised, did not even exist. In the face of such ...