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 'Economy'
The retirement of the baby boom cohorts means that the country’s labor force is likely to be growing far more slowly in the decades ahead than it had in prior decades. The United States is not alone in facing this situation. The rate of growth of the workforce has slowe...
Republicans in Congress have decided to reject economists, the Congressional Research Service, and the International Monetary Fund, in order to argue that the sequestration cuts will be good for the economy.
To do this, they also misstate Keynesian economics, and t...
“The Greek economy is finished. The Greek economy is in a great, great depression… There is no power, no force within the Greek economy, within Greek society that can avert it….Imagine if we were in Ohio in 1931 and we were to ask: What can Ohio poli...
“Those jobs are not coming back.”
The late Steve Jobs to Barack Obama.
Hot on the heels of his State of the Union address with its emphasis on the moribund job market,...
The most telling line from PBS’s Frontline piece ‘The Untouchables,’ on the absence of criminal prosecutions ...
‘Rothschild’ is a household name. It belongs to a family banking dynasty with a two hundred year lineage, reputedly once supremely powerful. Omnipresent historian Niall Ferguson has devoted two volumes to this history.
The Rothschild name is now bestowed on a s...
Morgan Stanley director Erskine ...
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 big picture is clear, from drone warfare as escalation of sought-after global US military hegemony to the trivialization and evisceration of government’s regulatory functions, all pointing to a business-as-usual continuation of policies and practices going back, reg...
One thing you can say about Obama; he never fails to disappoint. Last night’s State of the Union Speech is a perfect example. In his typical lofty rhetoric, the president promised to continue to implement his regressive social and economic policies without pause pro...
It has been more than five years since the onset of the financial crisis.
It will be at least several more years before the economy recovers fully. And the too-big-to-fail banks are ...
Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Economics suggested in 1969 that dro...
“Experts do not seem to think that we are going back to the same boom. There might be ‘cheap talk’ that housing is ‘off to the races again,’ but the people who think about it seriously, doubt it.”
– Robert Schiller,...
The Federal Reserve is supporting and maintaining a system of finance capitalism that by the ‘rules’ of capitalism should have disappeared in 2008. Wall Street, with its outposts now circling the globe, claims its ‘due’ under the premise its system of savage capit...
The corporate media and front groups for big business and political parties leave out what we believe are important details. In this week’s news: the real national security budget is bigger than acknowledged, the growth in GDP before the election seems to be due to ...
The economy operates on a simple principle: When people spend money, the economy grows. That means the goal of economic policy should be to maintain a level of spending that keeps the economy growing and minimizes the unavoidable peaks and valleys of the business cycle. T...
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw multiple discourses on the relationship between concepts of ‘truth’ and power—social, political and economic. The ‘view from nowhere,’ the rhetorical device of science and economics used to claim that truth exists in ...
There have been two momentous events in the last week. Of course President Obama’s swearing in for a second term is a big deal, even if somewhat less historic than his inauguration back in 2009. The other big event was the release of the Federal Reserve Board’s ...
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s departure from the Obama Administration invites comparisons with Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian Empire who engineered the restoration of the old order and the suppression of democracy...
The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s rule defining a “qualified mortgage”, which was announced on Thursday, creates vast new opportunities for the nation’s biggest banks to engage in predatory lending practices with impunity. While the mai...
Just prior to the dust-bowl era, individuals would exit trains from the east; they’d step into the grassland of the southern plains, and they would plot their dreams. But these dreams were of tangible wealth, and these so called “suitcase farmers” pulled...
“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of e...
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...
Despite the dire “fiscal cliff” predictions, stocks ended the year on a high-note led by the Dow Jones crossing the 13K mark with an impressive 166 po...
My colleague Josh Bivens outlined the contours of this weekend’s 11th hour budget deal, concluding that Congress mostly monkeyed around with upper-income taxes—a politically contentious “...