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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 'Wall Street'
Whether or not you’re an investor, it’s important to grasp the significance of what’s happened with the Facebook initial public offering (IPO).
In the few days since its IPO, Facebook’s stock price has fallen almost 20 percent amidst news th...
Of all the street actions leading up to the NATO summit, the one that might seem most perplexing is a nurses’ rally for a tax on securities trades. Financial markets are pretty remote from hospital bedsides, you might think.
Why would nurses get mixed up in an is...
Among the more laughable features of commentaries on Jamie Dimon’s recently revealed $2 billion (at least) gambling losses are earnest pronouncements that the debacle will stymie the efforts by Dimon and Wall Street in general to further deregulate the financial ind...
The power suits making billions off the stock market are always trying to assure us that their trading serves a socially redeeming purpose. They steer money to companies and industries that make our economy more productive, they claim.
In reality, the majority of s...
“Rising stock prices have long since ceased to provide any real barometer of the underlying health of the economy. Over three decades in which financial speculation has increasingly come to dominate the economic activity of the ruling elite, the financia...
It’s about time Congress focuses attention on jobs for Wall Street, and it appears they are going overboard to help in the new JOBS Act that recently passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 380-to-41. After all, last year Wall Street cash bonuses fell 14% to $1...
Stetson J. Bradford III met up with his fellow CEO F. Reginald Lawless for a brow-to-brow lunch at the Penthouse Reverie Room high above Wall and Broad Streets in New York. As charter members of the 40-year Corporate Supremes Club, they had serious business to discuss bef...
“Despite the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and its directive to address this issue, the problem of bank runs in the shadow system has not yet been solved.”
–Mark Thoma, Professor of Economics, University of Oregon, F...
Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith’s very public resignation, replete with...
What’s worse: to be persecuted and indicted for trying to expose an act of wrongdoing — or to be ignored for doing so?
Whistleblowers have been under intense scrutiny in Washington lately, at least when it comes to the national security state. In recent y...
Amsterdam protesters occupied Beursplein (Exchange Square – a modest-sized piazza in front of the building that houses Wall Street-based NYSE Euronext’s Amsterdam stock exchange AEX) on October 15 2011 – four weeks after Occupy Wall Street took off ...
Ever since the first tent was pitched in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, the Occupy protests have been giving life to a “99 percent movement.” Expect to hear a lot more from them: plans for a ...
Blanche Lincoln, once a senator for Arkansas (1998-2010) noted for her fealty to Wall Street, has had one hope for immortality: Section 716 of the Dodd Frank Financial Reform Act, known to history as the Lincoln Amendment.
Though larded with loopholes, the amendmen...
A week or so ago, we read in The New York Times about what in the Gilded Age of the Roman Empire was known as a bacchanal – a big blowout at which the imperial swells got together and whooped it up.
...
The financial capital of the U.S. empire cannot function without its subway system, which is the savior and curse of every New Yorker’s existence.
More than 5 million people ride it on an average weekday. Though it can be maddeningly packed, filthy, delayed or su...
It’s an exciting time for you guys. You know you can beat those hedge fund managers. You’re better educated, you’re ambitious and creative. Go for $10 billion. Or maybe, a few years from now, you’ll be the first trillion dollar man!
HereR...
It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action. It begets a calamitous necessity of going on.
–Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
A number of people have begun wondering what the difference is between Jon Corzine and Berni...
“In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country…There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were pl...
As a kid, Matt Taibbi’s favorite writer was Nikolai Gogol.
So, straight out of college, Taibbi headed to Russia, where he spent ten years playing baseball in th...
As protesters have refused to yield in their “occupations” of public places, they have gained momentum and support throughout the country. Yet for Congress it has been business as usual. Elected representatives there have virtually ignored the outrage expresse...
Last March I reviewed Matt Taibbi’s important book Griftopia, an entertaining account of...
The calls for repealing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill are more than a little bizarre. It was only three years ago that the whole financial system was at the brink of collapse, with President Bush warning us of a second Great Depression if Congress didn’t quic...
Massive buildings tower over Wall Street, making the sidewalks feel like valleys in an urban mountain range. The incense, drum beats and chants of Occupy Wall Street echo down New York City’s financial district from Liberty Plaza, where thousands of activists have conve...
Videos are springing up across the internet showing uniformed members of the New York Police Department in white shirts (as opposed to the typical NYPD blue uniforms) pepper spraying and brutalizing peaceful, nonthreatening protestors attempting to take part in the Occupy...
I hear that in the canyons of Mannahatta those occupied in the walls look at those occupying the streets and profess ignorance of their motives, as if there were some difficulty in understanding the historically recent transfer of billions of dollars from street level to ...