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 'debt'
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve and the central banks of Canada, England, Japan, Switzerland, and Europe launched a coordinated monetary intervention aimed at easing interbank lending in the eurozone. While the emergency action sent stocks into the stratosphere, it did ...
The economic news out of the eurozone is getting worse every day, and so is the contagion to the rest of the world. The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), the club of 34 mostly high-income countries, has now lowered its projection for eurozone ...
“In every crisis there’s a point of no return….I’m increasingly convinced we’ve already passed that point of no return in Europe. The banks won’t lend to each other, the Germans won’t do Eurobonds, and the ECB won’t act as a lender of l...
This terrible idea will not die: that the only way to revive the US economy is to reduce mortgages on homes and property purchased at speculative values. The fact that so many homeowners (like me) did not buy more house than they could afford, did not buy into the specula...
In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a ...
On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35 per cent of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private bank...
“We are caught, it seems, in one of those self-reinforcing loops that almost always presage a collapse.”
– Michael Pettis, China Financial Markets
Germany’s “failed” bund auction on Wednesday was a...
Young people in the U.S. now recognize that the university has become part of a ponzi scheme designed to place on students an unconscionable amount of debt while subjecting them under the power of commanding financial institutions for years after they grad...
It’s not exactly “The Gift of the Magi” -the inevitable Black Friday footage that so marvelously serves to reinforce the notion that Americans are simply a cloudy plague of consumer beasts. And in most ways that really is what the country has become. Feeding on ...
“Eurozone banks’ demand for European Central Bank funding surged to a two-year high on Tuesday, as fast spreading sovereign debt worries left lending markets virtually frozen and the ECB the only available funding option for many institutions....
It’s finally become clear to everyone the key problem in the current Eurozone crisis is just too much democracy.
Pesky voters opposed to austerity measures get in the way of efforts to cut government expenditures in order to reduce deficits and make repayment of ...
The markets are again in free-fall and, once again, a lazy Mediterranean profligate is to blame. This time, it’s an Italian, rather than a Greek. No, not Silvio Berlusconi, but his fellow countryman, Mario Draghi, the new head of the increasingly spineless European ...
Some of us have been warning for months about the cri...
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou touched off a firestorm last week when he proposed putting the austerity package designed by the “troika” (the I.M.F, the European Central Bank and the European Union) up for a popular vote. The idea that the Greek people might d...
Of the 55-million families with mortgages, 10.4-million of them “are sliding toward failure and foreclosure”—a tragedy that will depress the U.S. housing market for years to come, a result of too many houses for sale and too few buyers.
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In the struggle against global laissez faire capitalism that has brought the current economic collapse, protesters won an important victory last week in Britain, while stalemate continued in Greece. The alliance between the church, the main financial district called the C...
“Italy’s borrowing costs have spiked higher towards levels that forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to be bailed out. The yield on Italy’s ten-year bond is up another 0.32 percentage point at 6.43 percent, a new euro-era high. A yield above 7...
The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts was launched at the Journalists’ Union 31 October, with a colourful panel of speakers, including Al-Ahram Centre for Political & Strategic Studies Editor-in-Chief Ahmed Al-Naggar, Independent Trade Union head Kamal Abbas,...
“It’s not that we don’t have demands… We speak them with our struggle. Our movement is made up of people fighting for jobs, for schools, for debt relief, equitable housing, and healthcare… We are … democratic, fierce, and unwaveri...
The state of uncertainty…is a joint product of ignorance and impotence—the two dragons which the Enlightenment heirs of St. George promised , resolved and tried hard to kill, or at least to chase away from the...
The sign at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration revealed the struggles of America’s young: “A B.A., $30,000 in student debt and no job.” Young people are graduating from college into the worst jobs market since the 1930s while carrying record levels of student debt...
Jean Claude Trichet will be retiring as head of the European Central Bank at the end of the month. He will step into retirement having wreaked the sort of destruction on the European economy that hostile powers can only dream about. Tens of millions of people across the e...
Athens
Greece last week was paralysed by a 48-hour general strike that began Wednesday and cast doubt on the unpopular government’s ability to implement reforms demanded by the European Union in return for further bailout money.
Black-maske...
Historically, Greeks are very good at constructing myths. The rest of the world? Not so much. Reading the press, one gets the impression of a bunch of lazy Mediterranean scroungers, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in Europe while making the frugal Ge...
Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,
I want to write you about an astonishing year — with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civi...