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Employers Strike—Because They Can
By John Miller | July 28th
Employers are refusing to hire, even though their costs are down and their profits are back to pre-recession levels. Why?
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A Tale of Two Spills
By Antonia Juhasz | July 19th
Want to know how long it will take to clean up the BP spill, and how little BP could end up paying? Take a look at the Exxon Valdez spill, 20+ years on.
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Not Too Big Enough
By Rob Larson | July 12th
How the “too-big-to-fail” banks got that way, and why the current banking reform won’t solve the problem.
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Keep It in the Ground
By Elissa Dennis | June 30th
Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s (sometimes) left-leaning president, has spearheaded a plan to keep some of that country’s oil in the ground, in exchange for international payments to be used for sustainable energy. Read more »
Of Bubbles and Bailouts
By Mary Bottari | June 28th
A new analysis of the dollars disbursed in the bailout of Wall Street graphically illustrates the extraordinary lengths to which the federal government has gone to bail out the financial sector. Read more »
W(h)ither the Dollar?
By Katherine Sciacchitano | June 2nd
The United States has recently faced a vacillating dollar, calls to replace it as the global reserve currency, and a consensus that it should spend less and save more. This all comes at an awkward time given the level of public outlays required to deal with the crisis and the need to attract capital to pay for them. But the pressures also highlight the central role of the dollar in the crisis. Read more »
The True Cost of Oil
By Anita Dancs | May 21st
Oil creates huge costs because of pollution and global warming. But how much more do we, as taxpayers, have to pay for the U.S. military to secure and defend “our” oil? Read more »
“Pressure from the Bond Markets”
By Arthur MacEwan | May 6th
With the crisis in Greece and other countries, commentators have said that governments are “under pressure from the bond market” or that bond markets will “punish” governments. What does this mean? Read more »
Myths of the Deficit
By Marty Wolfson | April 23rd
Why do people think that it is more important for the government to reduce the deficit now, rather than to spend money to create jobs? Read more »
Greece as a Demonstration Project
By Mike-Frank Epitropoulos | April 14th
Will the Black Sheep Bite Back? Will the PIIGS? What about US? Read more »
Bankruptcy as Corporate Makeover
By Mara Kardas-Nelson, Lin Nelson, and Anne Fischel | April 3rd
The recent bankruptcy of ASARCO offers a chilling glimpse into the world of corporate irresponsibility allowable under U.S. bankruptcy provisions and environmental policy. Read more »
Synergy in Security
By Tom Barry | March 17th
The military-industrial complex has morphed into a new type of public-private partnership that might be better called a “national security complex.” Read more »
Is Military Keynesianism the Solution?
By Heidi Garrett-Peltier | March 3rd
At a time when unemployment in the domestic economy remains near 10%, it may seem convenient to fall back on the principle of military Keynesianism: War is good for the economy. But it’s not. Read more »
Arctic Power...with Added Cleansers
By Maurice Dufour | February 17th
All the negative press over Canada’s dirty oil is taking its toll on our national psyche. For years, our self-image as responsible environmental stewards had made us smug; now Canada’s just another carbon thug. Read more »
Haiti’s Fault Lines: Made in the U.S.A.
By Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly | February 4th
Pace Pat Robertson, the devil had little to do with Haiti’s underdevelopment. Instead, the fingerprints of more mundane actors—France and later the United States—are all over the crime scene. Read more »
A Vision of Economic Justice
By Howard Zinn | January 29th
For our 30th-anniversary issue (Nov/Dec 2004), we asked prominent leftists to “describe their vision of a more economically just world 30 years hence, and to outline what they consider the most important steps to take today to move toward that vision.” Here’s the still-timely contribution from Howard Zinn, who died on January 27th. Read more »
Economic Rights, Then and Now
By Susan Feiner | January 11th
What is the state of the economic rights that FDR unveiled in his “Second Bill of Rights” 66 years ago? Read more »
The Developmental Terrorism of the Post-Colonial Indian State
By The Sanhati Collective | December 14th
The Indian government is planning an unprecedented military offensive against alleged Maoist rebels, using paramilitary and counter-insurgency forces, possibly the Indian Armed Forces and even the Indian Air Force. Reportedly, the offensive has been planned in consultation with U.S. counter-insurgency agencies. To put this proposed military offensive in proper perspective one needs to understand three key but often overlooked dimensions of the crisis: (a) the development failure of the post-colonial Indian state, (b) the continued existence and often exacerbation of the structural violence faced by the poor and marginalized, and (c) the full-scale assault on the meager resource base of the peasantry and the tribal (indigenous people) in the name of “development.” Read more »
Land Reform Under Lula
By Chris Tilly, Marie Kennedy,
and Tarso Luís Ramos | September 29th
As Brazil’s president finishes up his second term, land redistribution has stagnated, the government continues to bet on agribusiness as a development strategy, and powerful regional politicians are moving to criminalize the land seizure movement as “terrorist.” Read more »
Keynes, Wage and Price “Stickiness,” and Deflation
By Alejandro Reuss | September 7th
Did Keynes think that ‘sticky’ wages and prices were the cause of depressions? No. Did he think falling wages and prices could be the solution? No again. Keynes argued that in fact deflation is likely to deepen economic depressions. Read more »
The Physical and Economic Devastation of Gaza
By Jennifer Olmsted | July 7th
Israel’s three-week military attack against the Gaza Strip last December came at a time when the Palestinians—on the West Bank and all the more so in Gaza—already faced dire economic circumstances.
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Contours of Crisis III: Systemic Fear and Forward-Looking Finance
Third in a series of articles on the current crisis.
By Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan | June 11th
The rituals of finance condition investors to look forward and price assets based on expected future earnings. But what happens during a systemic crisis, when the future of capitalism itself is in doubt?
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All That Glitters Is Goldman Sachs
By Robert Zevin | May 20th
“When I told a friend who runs a program in community economic development the subtitle of my talk, ‘A Primer on Skullduggery in High Finance,’ he replied, ‘Isn’t that redundant?’” Read more »
Changing the Auto Industry from the Wheels Up
By Alejandro Reuss | May 13th
The problems of the U.S. auto industry call for radical solutions. Read more »
Contours of Crisis II: Fiction and Reality
Second in a series of articles on the current crisis.
By Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan | April 28th
Economists tell us that the current crisis is our punishment for letting the fiction of finance distort the real economy. But what exactly is this “real” economy and how does finance distort it? Do the economists have a clue?
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Shovel-Ready in Canada
By Maurice Dufour | February 19th
Pundits are praising the financial health of the United States’s northern neighbor—but should they? Read more »
Picking Up the Crumbling Pieces
Sixth and Final Installment in a Series on the Subprime/Securitization Panic
By Larry Peterson | February 4th
A look at the medium- and longer-term significance of the crisis, and specifically at what must be dealt with comprehensively to avoid serious long-term economic weakness. Read more »
A New Vision for the Department of Labor
By Kim Bobo | January 28th
Billions of dollars in
wages are stolen from millions of workers every
year. Here’s how the Department of Labor could stop it.
Read more »
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