What the story? Last year Verizon made $12 billion in profits, got $1 billion in government subsidies and paid zippo, zero in taxes. But instead of sharing this windfall with the working people who make the company successful, Verizon has the audacity to demand their workers take pay and benefit cuts of $20,000 a year. This at the same time that Verizon’s four top executives have pocketed over $258 million (a quarter of a billion) in the past four years, which is obscene. Continue reading →
Hey, let’s go into McGlinchey’s, the cheapest bar in Center City. When I first entered this place in 1982, I was only 18, so to make myself look somewhat legal, I wore an old man jacket, bought at a thrift store for 2 bucks. Inside, I was thrilled to discover that a draft of Rolling Rock was only 50 cents, and a hotdog 25. Now they are $1.25 and 75 cents, respectively. This low life bar, my kind, is still dirt cheap, but that’s inflation for you. Continue reading →
The historic Gastonia textile mill strikes are not forgotten
ROME—When in the early part of this millennium I was writing a rather surrealistic novel, ASHEVILLE, about the town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina where I started out my life, I ran into the story of the Asheville-based self-professed Communist writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, of whom I had never heard before. Visiting then her gravesite in the little known Green Hills Cemetery in West Asheville and researching her and her activities I fell into a gossamer review of early 19th century labor struggles in the good old U.S. South. Continue reading →
If Russian prime minister Putin’s recent description of America as “a parasite on the world” was reported by the US media, little doubt but that most Americans were infuriated. We are the virtuous people. Without us good guys to police the world there would be mayhem and wars everywhere, not merely the ones we started in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Without the American white hats people everywhere would be starving and dying from natural disasters. It is us chosen ones who provide the rescue operations and good deeds. How dare the former KGB monster slander our country! Continue reading →
Financial markets show signs that they have lost confidence in politicians both in the U.S. and in Europe. They have reached the conclusion that those presently in charge are not on top of things, and that either they don’t understand the current economic problems their countries face or they lack the will or ability to bring forth the bold economic policies that would be required to solve them. Continue reading →
In an article quoted by fundamentalanalyst.com from Naked Capital back on March 12, 2008, in the middle of the unwinding financial disaster, said article highlighted the ongoing ratings scams that Moody’s and S&P perpetrated back then. So, does S&P have a short memory or does it just enjoy playing the ‘pot calling the kettle black’ when it went ahead and downgraded the US government’s credit rating from AAA to AA+ to create more havoc? Click below for the tale . . . Continue reading →
On Friday, August 5, the credit rating agency, Standard & Poors, downgraded US debt from AAA to AA+. Continue reading →
Just as businesses in some countries keep two sets of books, we in the United States live with two economies, even if we acknowledge only one. One real that few people in the un-fine art of economics, or the press, care to report on; and one imaginary, passed on to the public as real by the US government and Wall Street: the only one that Homo americanus, in his sempiternal gullibility, is supposed to believe. Continue reading →
On Thursday, August 4, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 512 points, the biggest stock market drop since the collapse of September 2008. Why? Weren’t the markets supposed to rebound after the debt ceiling agreement was reached on Monday, avoiding U.S. default and a downgrade of U.S. debt? So we were told, but the market apparently understands what politicians don’t: the debt deal is a death deal for the economy. Reducing government spending by $2.2 trillion over a decade, as Congress just agreed to do, will kill any hopes of economic recovery. We’re looking at a double-dip recession. Continue reading →
I wouldn’t/couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the OpEdNews headline, Rep. Conyers: Obama Demanded Social Security Cuts—Not GOP. Continue reading →
The United States Government and its presstitute media have wasted time and energy creating hysteria over a non-existent “debt ceiling crisis.” Continue reading →
When you read about economic issues in the news, like the crisis in Greece or the Wall Street/banking mortgage shambles are you sometimes left befuddled by the seeming complexity, which no one appears able to untangle or explain to your satisfaction in simple English? Well, I certainly can’t explain it all myself, but I do know that the problem is not necessarily that you and I are economic illiterates. Continue reading →
The game of Russian roulette being played with the U.S. federal debt has been called a “grotesque political carnival” and political blackmail. Continue reading →
Modern industrial civilization weakens the family, which is not necessarily bad, since it allows children to escape tyrannical parents. In such a society, the home is not so much a socializing haven as a motel, where wage earners drive back each evening only to ignore each other. FaceBook has become a hearth and shrine, and independence is having your own flat screen TV. Behind locked doors, the kids chill in solitary confinement, while you and the spouse can have separate finances, night outs and flings, and all is good until everyone grows old, likely alone, which brings us to the question of Social Security. Continue reading →
Washington’s response to a failed economy: More war
As the second decade of the 21st century began, the US economy had not recovered from the Great Recession that began in December 2007. Continue reading →
The grotesque political carnival gripping Washington is being referred to as a “debt crisis.” But the debt and the looming default of the United States are merely symptoms of the wider calamity that remains deliberately unaddressed. Continue reading →
It is self-evident that no sickness can be successfully cured without proper diagnosis of the illness. In their frantic efforts to remedy the plague of national debt and deficit, however, US policy makers tend to shy away from the root causes of the problem and focus, instead, on scapegoats. Continue reading →
With the world concerned about US financial credibility and the poor outlook for the US economy, now is not the time for the Republicans to grandstand on the public debt. The debt ceiling needed to be quietly raised. Instead, the Republicans started a fire and then threw gasoline on it, creating an inferno that could burn up the US social safety net or the US Treasury’s credit rating and the US dollar’s role as reserve currency or what remains of the separation of powers. Continue reading →
The debt ceiling debacle isn’t about debt any more than all the talk about balancing the budget is about the deficit. There is absolutely no need to be in a crisis. The protracted stalemate has only reached crisis proportion because the president has allowed Congress to be diverted from raising the debt ceiling to a distinctly different discussion. Continue reading →
In light of the fact that in the ongoing budget negotiations President Obama and the Republican leaders share the common objective of drastically cutting non-military social spending, all the bickering between the two sides seems somewhat puzzling. Considering that their targeted cuts in social spending are almost identical, why do they squabble so much? Continue reading →
An economy destroyed
Recently, the bond rating agencies that gave junk derivatives triple-A ratings threatened to downgrade US Treasury bonds if the White House and Congress did not reach a deficit reduction deal and debt ceiling increase. The downgrade threat is not credible, and neither is the default threat. Both are make-believe crises that are being hyped in order to force cutbacks in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Continue reading →
Where did all the jobs go? Small and medium-sized businesses are the major source of new job creation, and they are not hiring. Startup businesses, which contribute a fifth of the nation’s new jobs, often can’t even get off the ground. Why? Continue reading →
On the 4th of July, the credit agency Standard & Poor’s called the country of Greece for what it is, i.e. a country in de facto financial bankruptcy. No sleight of hand, no obfuscation, no debt reorganization and no “innovative” bailouts can hide the fact that the defective rules of the 17-member Eurozone have allowed some of its members to succumb to the siren calls of excessive and unproductive indebtedness, to be followed by a default on debt payments accompanied by crushingly higher borrowing costs. Continue reading →
Democrats and Republicans in Washington are emitting much sound and fury on the issue of federal debt and a balanced budget. What they won’t be telling us is that we could have it all: a balanced budget, no national debt, full employment, greatly reduced income taxes and expanded social programs. How this is even remotely possible will never be addressed by our two corporate political parties or the U.S. corporate stream media. Continue reading →
So this is how it is going to be: “After putting controversial cuts to Social Security and Medicare on the table in negotiations with congressional Republicans over a plan to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, President Obama still doesn’t have a deal in the works.” Chris Moody, Yahoo News, July 7. Continue reading →
On June 30, QE2 ended with a whimper. The Fed’s second round of “quantitative easing” involved $600 billion created with a computer keystroke for the purchase of long-term government bonds. But the government never actually got the money, which went straight into the reserve accounts of banks, where it still sits today. Worse, it went into the reserve accounts of FOREIGN banks, on which the Federal Reserve is now paying 0.25 percent interest. Continue reading →
It is no secret that Egypt has put all its faith in the US and Western international institutions since the days of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, contracting a huge foreign debt, a process that was increasingly corrupt, despite being careful watched over by those very agencies. This debt is financed by foreign banks, and must be repaid in dollars—with interest. If much of the money they create and then “lend” is siphoned off into Swiss bank accounts, that is Egypt’s problem. No one is trying to charge the people who gave Mubarak or his henchmen their money and then let them redeposit it with them, but it takes two to tango. Continue reading →
The Wall Street bailout of 2008 has radically altered the banking business. The bailout was supposed to keep credit flowing to Main Street, but it has wound up having the opposite effect. Small and medium-sized businesses have traditionally been the main engines for increasing employment, and they need bank credit for their working capital; but today credit to local businesses has collapsed nearly everywhere. Continue reading →
Although the financial press speculates about a downgrade of the US government’s credit rating and default if political impasse prevents the debt ceiling from being raised in time, I doubt anyone really believes that the debt ceiling will not be raised. It is just all a part of the political theater of the next couple of months. Continue reading →
Washington, DC, is a Potemkin village of alabaster and marble where the perpetually stalled and broken escalators of the city’s subway system are a perfect metaphor for the government’s inability to generate positive, upward movement. Yet with all the calumnies that are committed on an hourly basis behind the facade of our nation’s capitol, what had local media there outraged a few days ago? Lemonade. Continue reading →
Offshoring has destroyed the economy
These are discouraging times, but once in a blue moon a bit of hope appears. I am pleased to report on the bit of hope delivered in March of 2011 by Michael Spence, a Nobel prize-winning economist, assisted by Sandile Hlatshwayo, a researcher at New York University. The two economists have taken a careful empirical look at jobs offshoring and concluded that it has ruined the income and employment prospects for most Americans. Continue reading →
In a Wall Street Journal editorial on June 8 bemoaning the failure of the Obama stimulus package, Martin Feldstein wrote, “Experience shows that the most cost-effective form of temporary fiscal stimulus is direct government spending. The most obvious way to achieve that in 2009 was to repair and replace the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan that would otherwise have to be done in the future. But the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department.” Continue reading →
