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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 'unemployment'
Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country ravaged by a war that between 1992 and the beginning of 1996 caused 100.000 deaths (exact figures are unavailable), is certainly looking a lot better but the social situation is dramatic. One statistic says it all: ...
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But asBusiness Week ...
On April 22, 1968, the National Welfare Rights Organization held a vigil on Capitol Hill in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been murdered eighteen days earlier. This was to have been the day that King presented the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign to Co...
Would a young Martin Luther King Jr. be able to get a job in America today? Would one of the thousands who went to jail in support of Nelson Mandela? Or the brilliant kids at the center of Occupy Wall Street? Unless we begin to enforce the Civil Rights Act, m...
For all the shameful sucking up to multi-millionaire mom Ann Romney after Democratic pundit Hilary Rosen accused her of never having worked “a day in her life,” the reality is neither Republicans nor Democrats treat most parenting as work, and thousands of poor women ...
One of the businesses of Wall Street in the 1980s was the “bucket shop;” firms with networks of stockbrokers who defrauded senior citizens with phony stories about the businesses and prospects of the companies whose stocks they were selling. The companies for the most...
On March 9th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true?
No. Statistician John Williams (...
The US stock market jumped up today on word that the number of new unemployment applications fell to the lowest level in four years.
Sounds good, right? It’s meant to sound good, but if you look at the number, and if you think about what it really means, it&#...
How inert can the Democratic Party be? Do they really want to defeat the Congressional Republicans in the fall by doing the right thing?
A winning issue is to raise the federal minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 since 2007. If it was adjusted for inflation since 1968, no...
Americans are living on borrowed time, economically. Like air conditioners, copper pipes and aluminum siding of a foreclosed home, what remains of our prosperity will be violently stripped away. There is no economic recovery because the foundations for such are simply not...
This week, Congress passed the Middle Class Tax Relief a...
As President Obama’s re-election campaign heats up, there are several new accounts of his track record finding their way into print. One item for which he is undeservedly given credit is saving the country from a second Great Depression.
The political elites beli...
President Obama’s proposed budget has a few interesting proposals for reforms over the next dec...
It’s budget time, and that means that we can expect to hear the Washington elite wailing about the budget deficit for the next several weeks. When hearing the cries about out-of-control deficits, people would be best advised to turn off their television sets, put do...
I know the areas of Philadelphia that Charles Murray refers to in his new book Coming Apart and I...
The January jobs numbers brought joy and cork popping, but official unemployment’s fall to 8.3 per cent from 9.1 per cent a year earlier seems a bit over-celebrated, especially if you happen to be young, old, a person of color or a woman.
First, on those official...
Last Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this new year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate (U.3) fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/dea...
In a helpful review and constructive critique of the current status of the Occupy movement, Ismael Hossein-Zadeh makes several good suggestions. And I’ve seen some other comments more recently that seem worth sharing with you, in case you haven’t seen them. Hossei...
The U.S. recession officially ended in June of 2009, but most Americans don’t feel like we are in a recovery. That’s because it’s been a weak recovery, with the ...
“A study of the struggle waged by the English working class reveals that, in order to oppose their workers, the employers either bring in workers from abroad or else transfer manufacture to countries where there is a cheap labor force. Given this state of af...
In Ron Suskind’s book “Confidence Men” Barack Obama is reported in 2008 to have argued to his...
In an October 9 article for the website Truthdig.com, Chris Hedges, the former New York Times bureau chief turned dissident journalist, gives us a...
The performance of the US economy from the mid-1970s to the present was no match for its relatively robust performance during what economists call the Golden Age – 1949 to 1973. This was in fact the longest period of sustained growth in US history, when most (whit...
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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Beat-up little seagull
On a marble stair
Tryin’ to find the ocean
Lookin’ everywhere
Hard times in the city
In a hard town by the sea
Ain’t nowhere to run to
There ain’t nothin’ here for ...