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HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives by Tag 'economics'
There is plenty of wealth to go around in the world, but it’s tied up in too few hands for democratic capitalism to operate efficiently for society at large. Thus, in order to maintain civil order, totalitarianism increasingly becomes a byproduct of this conundrum.
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What’s 50 percent of 99 percent?
This isn’t a math quiz. To put the question in non-numerical terms: where are women in the global economic crisis?
The movement of the 99 percent that began in the United States made visible the human beings who suffer th...
Paul Krugman is widely appreciated for his New York Times columns criticizing Republican demands for fiscal austerity. He rightly argues that cutting back public spending will worsen the economic depression into which we are sinking. And despite his partisan Demo...
The excitement over Obama’s acceptance of gay marriage, albeit on a state by state basis, illustrates two often overlooked political points:
• The lesser of two evils occasionally does something right, which, in fact, is what defines his lesserdo...
Last Tuesday, Mayday, 2012, tens of thousands from Occupy Wall Street and a coalition of unions and immigrant rights groups marched in New York, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major cities to protest economic inequality and to celebrate other possi...
After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik.
“There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response. “I thought ...
“A heart that’s full up like a landfill. A job that slowly kills you. Bruises that won’t heal. You look so tired, unhappy. Bring down the government, they don’t speak for us. I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide....
Neoliberalism is the most powerful force in economic history; like a black hole in deep outer space, it consumes everything.
The great prophets of neoliberal economic policies like Milton Friedman claim economic freedom is a necessary condition for political freedo...
Ross Jackson is an interesting guy who has just published a very interesting and timely book entitled ...
I have just returned from Rimini, Italy, where I experienced one of the most amazing spectacles of my academic life. Four of us associated with the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) were invited to lecture for three days on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and...
How did this happen? America, the czar of capitalism, is becoming a third world country!
According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau report 46.2 million Americans are poor. Of course, the naysaying dissenters claim poor families, as defined in the U.S., include...
Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter.
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The Federal Reserve Board issued new projections for the economy last week, and they are not pretty. It projects the unemployment rate will still be 8.2 percent at the end of this year, 7.4 percent at the end of 2013, and 6.7 percent at the end of 2014. To put this in ...
ECB president Mario Draghi’s new lending facility–the Long-Term Refinancing Operation–has helped to pull the financial system back from the brink of another Lehman-type catastrophe, but it doesn’t address the fundamental problems that created the c...
Since the start of the presidential primary campaign, Republican candidates have missed few opportunities to laud the achievements of conservative hero and former president Ronald Reagan, or to portray themselves as his worthy successor. As Michele Bachmann declared after...
The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina.
Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great sta...
The American Economic Association’s annual meetings are a scary sight, with thousands of economists all gathered in the same place – a veritable weapon of mass destruction. Chicago was the lucky city for 2012 this past weekend, and I had just finished participating ...
Eight states and one city (San Francisco) raised their minimum wage this week, providing a pay raise to just over ...
It’s an exciting time for you guys. You know you can beat those hedge fund managers. You’re better educated, you’re ambitious and creative. Go for $10 billion. Or maybe, a few years from now, you’ll be the first trillion dollar man!
HereR...
In 2011, social and political rebellion has re-emerged in the streets and on squares all over the world. It has appeared in new forms and been given new names: the Arab Spring, the Indignados, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The main regions affec...
The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum. Bank strategists learned not to ...
When the book is finally closed on this week’s EU summit, it’ll be interesting to see what people remember the most. Will it be the proposed changes to the Lisbon Treaty, the new steps towards fiscal integration or the disgraceful behavior of David Cameron?...
The crisis is developing exactly as expected. The inability of the authorities to cope with the rising wave of social problems has naturally spilled into the political sphere.
At the same time, the mechanism of ”managed democracy” has yet agai...
The house is on fire and the owners are arguing about what kind of safety regulations should be implemented in the future so as to prevent these types of fires. That is what appears to be going on in the eurozone right now, as European leaders try to reach agreement on ...