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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 'Greece'
Both Europe and the United States confront great crises; while they are different in certain regards they have important similarities too. America’s crisis is both military and economic; they are interrelated because America has a huge deficit, in large part be...
One of the joys of being American is that every new day is a clean slate—no history, no memories, no experiences, a complete blank. This may help explain why our national conversations serve their intended purposes while being entirely content-free. Newsflash to self-de...
At the May 6 polls, the radical left-wing coalition Syriza becomes the second “party” in numbers of voters as it moves from 4.5% at the previous elections (2009) to 16.8% (52 MPs instead of 13). It is the first party...
The countries that are doing very well in Europe are the Scandinavian countries. Denmark is different from Sweden, Sweden is different from Norway – but they all have strong social protection and they are all growing. The argument ...
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?...
Saudi Arabia’s record is no better than Iran’s when it comes to respect for human rights. Yet the international community always manages to overlook the Wahhabi monarchy. Could this be connected with Saudi Arabia’s status as top oil-producing country and trusted all...
Eric Toussaint, a Doctor of Political Science and President of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM), is a member of the Commission for an Integral Auditing of Public Debt in Ecuador (CAIC) whose findings resulted in Ecuador stopping its repaymen...
Maria Svoronou has three jobs and was finishing a twelve hour day as euro zone leaders were finalizing Greece’s rescue package in Brussels. For all her hard work, she earns only Eur 870 a month and says that “if the situation gets any worse, I won’t be able to survi...
“How can one speak of default in the future tense when we’re already bankrupt… Don’t you see the people scouring through garbage and sleeping on sidewalks? Those who led us to bankruptcy – the troika and the government – now cla...
One of the great contradictions of modern day nation-state socio-economics is how and why capitalists continue getting away with sticking average working people with their mistakes. Capitalists receive fees and interests payments for/on issuance of debt by countries a...
I have been following the European sovereign debt crisis since it first developed more than two years ago. It was evident from the beginning that the conditions on the debtor nations being demanded by the “troika” of the European Central Bank, the European Union, and ...
Athens
As Greeks waited for a second eurozone rescue package to finally be agreed in Brussels today, many were blaming Germany and France for encouraging and benefiting from some of the much-criticized profligate spending that reduced Greece to near bankru...
Greeks expect to agree a deal with the Eurozone leaders today, Monday, that will cede much of their country’s independence. Greece will become an economic – and to a large extent a political – colony of Germany and its allies. Berlin will have a say in everythin...
The United States government and its NATO puppets have been killing Muslim men, women and children for a decade in the name of bringing them democracy. But is the West itself a bastion of democracy?
Skeptics point out that President George W. Bush was put in of...
“We are facing destruction. Our country, our home, has become ripe for burning. The centre of Athens is in flames.”
– Costis Hatzidakis, conservative parliamentarian ...
“We are being asked to take even larger doses of a medicine that has proven to be deadly and to undertake commitments that do not solve the problem, but only temporarily postpone the foretold death of our economy.”
– Hieronymos II, hea...
Istanbul
In the tea houses of Istanbul the mood is generally optimistic as customers listen to the news of the European economic crisis. “Turkey doesn’t need Europe,” says one tea drinker.
“Look at Greece – it was inside th...
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...
The hamstrung negotiations over a new Greek bail-out recommence tomorrow with little sign of resolution. As the Greek economy suffers from rapidly rising unemployment and debt levels, and its people experience rises in rates of suicide, murder and HIV, big profits still s...
Imagine if your banker offered to lend you a $150,000 to make up for the money that you’d lost on your home since the housing bubble burst in 2006. And, let’s say, he agreed to lend you this money for 3 years at rock-bottom rates of 1 percent provided that you...
“Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” people ask in Athens, Salonika and right across Greece. There’s a sense of collective imprisonment, individual uncertainty and impending catastrophe. Yet Greece has had a turbulent history, and the Greeks have always...
Former bankers Lucas Papademos and Mario Monti have taken over in Athens and Rome, exploiting the threat of bankruptcy and the fear of chaos. They are not apolitical technicians but men of the right, members of the Trilateral Commission that blamed western societies for b...
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 ...
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...