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 'unemployment'
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 ...
On the morning of October 25, police from nearly twenty law enforcement agencies descended upon the Occupy Oakland encampment located outside city hall. They removed its occupants using chemical weapons, and arrested nearly 100 people before destroying the encampment. The...
I have come to the conclusion that Big Brother’s subjects in George Orwell’s 1984 are better informed than Americans.
Americans have no idea why they have been at war in the Middle East, Asia and Africa for a decade. They don’t realize that their...
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimen...
Several seemingly well meaning pundits have asked: if Occupy Wall Street wants jobs, why don’t they come out and support President Obama’s jobs bill? Answering only for myself, the better question is: why doesn’t Obama support his own jobs bill? The White House is c...
Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,
I want to write you about an astonishing year — with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civi...
I. Hooverville.
Poor Herbert Hoover. A multimillionaire by thirty from the vast profits of gold mining, Hoover went into public service as retirement. His early administrative work was in agriculture, but he spent the longest time of his career in the Depa...
Politicians face a spreading revolt against Wall Street, financial tycoons, banks in general and an insensitive government that ignores people’s needs. The latest poll shows a radical lack of confidence for those running the government
A September 30 Gallup poll ...
Occupy Wall Street protests have now spread to some 800 cities. It’s spreading like a fire on a strong wind over a dry field. The heat is likely to keep on building.
Conservatives have fallen over themselves rushing to side with the top 1% against the rest....
The September jobs report showed that the U.S. economy created just 103,000 jobs in the month, 45,000 of which were the jobs of Verizon workers who were returning from a strike in August. The economy has created 99,000 jobs a month over the last three months, about 9,000 ...
How many stockbrokers, lawyers, bankers, accountants, aluminum siding salesmen, rodeo clowns, etc, would turn down a big, fat pay raise if it came with strings attached? What if accepting that pay raise was contingent upon all future new-hires being denied the opportuni...
In a recent piece in The Nation Thomas Geoghegan argues fiercely that few points were made more emphatically by John Maynard Keynes than his opinion that: “no country, ever, should run up any kind of trade deficit, much less the trade deficit on steroids we a...
Where is Henry Ford when you need him?
You may remember Henry — the ruthless industrialist who nonetheless refused to be hobbled by suicidal ideology when it came to doing business. He realized as his workers cranked thousands of new cars off the assembly lin...