Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
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 'Economy'
Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center.
1. If P...
A recent op-ed by NY Times columnist, David Brooks, asserts that “Forty years ago, corporate America was bloated, sluggish, and losing ground to competitors in Japan and beyond.” However, the rise of private equity firms and “bare-knuckled corporate executives” ...
The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose.
In the US the police have proven themselves to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled “...
The phrase “brain drain” used to mean, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the flight of professionally-trained people from dictatorships to find opportunity in the U.S. and other Western countries. Now “brain drain” is used in American media to mean an active U.S. governmen...
The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory...
“We emphatically view present conditions as being among the most negative subset we’ve observed in the historical record.”
– John Hussman Ph.D., Hussman Funds
The weakest recovery in the post-war period, is ge...
Have housing prices hit bottom?
Many analysts are saying, “Yes”.
Economist Bill McBride is one of the yea-sayers. Bill runs Calculated Risk, the Number 1 economics’s blog on the Internet. Here’s what McBride said in a post on Febr...
It was nearly half a century ago that Noam Chomsky, in his book “American Power and the New Mandarins...
Twenty-nine years ago, billionaire hotel magnate Leona Helmsley told one of her housekeepers: “We don’t pay taxes; taxes are what the little people pay.”
Her words set off a firestorm that spanned the political spectrum.
Today, our tax syst...
In the build-up to World War II, the French military created the Maginot Line. This barrier, which utilized state of the art military defenses, was intended to defend France from a ferocious assault by Hitler’s armies. When the attack ultimately came, the Germans made q...
A poor jobs report, higher than expected inflation in China, and another flare-up in the Eurozone sent stocks tumbling on Monday. US Treasuries rallied on news from the Labor Department that employers added just 120,000 non-farm payrolls in March, far below analysts most ...
Behind the political crisis that saw the recent fall of powerful Communist Party leader Bo Xiali is an internal battle over how to handle China’s slowing economy and growing income disparity, while shifting from a cheap labor export driven model to one built around inte...
The crisis that began in 2008 has brought the deindustrialization of the US and Europe, at the center of the global economic system, to the forefront of the debate. President Barack Obama has made it a key issue of his re-election campaign. There is a new word, “insourc...
Politicians in the United States must ritualistically assert that the United States is and always will be the world’s leading economic, military and political power. This chant may help win elections in a country where respectable people deny global warming and evolutio...
I have enormous respect for Simon Johnson. I first recall seeing him one late evening on a Bill Moyers segment in the middle of the financial crisis. I couldn’t quite believe that the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund was complaining about th...
Last week, the experts were sure that, “The recovery is finally here”. This week, not so much.
The optimists pointed to manufacturing, retail sales and employment as signs of a strengthening economy, but what they were really jazzed about were the moves...
In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, one of the arguments you heard Republican economists and Wall Street executives repeatedly use to defend the amounts of money being paid investment bankers and hedge fund managers was that if these guys didn’t receive exorbita...
In ways that will have long-term consequences for most Americans, the policies of economic and political subjugation of the last forty years, particularly of the 2000s, are being carried forward into this decade by an economic and political elite protected and supported b...
One of the great economic myths is that markets are rational. Not a day passes without this myth being disproved scores of times, but the myth persists.
For example, on March 14 Bank of America/Merrill Lynch reported that “yesterday US markets started the day off...
Morning after morning, New York City based casino capitalists trade with Greece and the latest rumors from Western Europe on their minds.
What will affluent Germany do to bail out the collapsing, debt-ridden country of Greece? Will France go along with those plans?...
It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book ...
There are some misconceptions that exist about Spain among large sectors of the progressive community in the United States. Partially this is a result of the very poor coverage that exists about Europe in general and about Spain in particular in the press in the U.S. ...
Those who thought we have seen as much financial craziness as possible from this small island-country are in for a big surprise. The nuttiness is just beginning. Iceland is apparently considering adopting the Canadian dollar as its official currency.It is hard to know w...
Last Tuesday, the Dow Jones finished above 13,000 for the first time since 2008. The DJIA has nearly doubled since March 9, 2009 when it touched bottom at 6,547. The index is now (roughly) 1,200 points from its all time high of 14,164. (The S&P 500 is presently 102...
“The national housing market took a hit in the latter half of 2011, falling to new lows not seen since the housing crisis began six years ago, according to data out Tuesday by S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices……The index is down 33.6 pe...