|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By John Crawford
By Melvyn P. Leffler
$13.60
$20
|
|
|
|
Ondrej Kloucek (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
Recession has returned to the eurozone for the second time since the financial crisis began in 2008. The region’s GDP fell by 0.1 percent in 2012’s third quarter, which followed a 0.2 percent contraction in the previous three months.
Posted on Nov 15, 2012
READ MORE 
|
|
By Amy Goodman — Amaia Engana didn’t wait to be evicted from her home. On Nov. 9, in the town of Barakaldo, a suburb of Bilbao in Spain’s Basque Country, officials from the local judiciary were on their way to serve her eviction papers. Amaia stood on a chair and threw herself out of her fifth-floor apartment window, dying instantly on impact on the sidewalk below.
Posted on Nov 15, 2012
READ MORE 
|
|
Millions of Europeans are protesting spending cuts and tax increases during a continent-wide general strike that comes days after a 53-year-old woman in Spain committed suicide as she was about to be evicted.
Posted on Nov 14, 2012
READ MORE 
|
danielle_blue
|
Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo seems to have coined the term last spring. Paul Krugman thinks it’s a better way to talk about the coming budget crisis, as it asserts that too little spending—rather than too much—is the the cause of the danger.
Posted on Nov 14, 2012
READ MORE
|
sorriso-per-te (CC BY-ND 2.0)
|
Rumors of budget cuts have been trickling out for the last four months. Now a 94-page draft memorandum, yet to be officially released, appears to detail Greece’s new austerity measures in full.
Posted on Oct 24, 2012
READ MORE
|
kenteegardin (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
An article by author and economist Jeff Madrick in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine offers an antidote to the view that social spending—not anemic tax revenues—is the cause of America’s deficit problem, and argues that such policies are adopted only out of “political deference to the rich and powerful.”
Posted on Oct 23, 2012
READ MORE
|
jmayrault (CC BY 2.0)
|
On the eve of a eurozone summit that will consider a unified continental budget, French President Francois Hollande said that his half of the Paris-Berlin crisis team will insist on an easing of German leader Angela Merkel’s hard push for “austerity and the surrender of national powers to tighten fiscal discipline,” The Guardian reports.
Posted on Oct 17, 2012
READ MORE
|
Aster-oid (CC BY 2.0)
|
Leftist Greek lawmaker Alexis Tsipras says austerity for his country and other hurting European nations is a form of blackmail intended to build a new Continental economy based on cheap labor, deregulation, reduced public spending and tax benefits for the wealthy.
Posted on Oct 9, 2012
READ MORE
|
Country Bumpkin Cakes (CC BY 2.0)
|
French President Francois Hollande announced a $47 billion economic recovery plan Friday that will raise more than $25 billion from tax increases with the help of a 75 percent “supertax” on incomes of more than $1.3 million a year.
Posted on Sep 29, 2012
READ MORE
|
AP/Nikolas Giakoumidis
|
Up to 200,000 Greeks took to the streets Wednesday during a general strike that paralyzed the country, marking the public’s first major confrontation with Athens’ 3-month-old coalition government.
Posted on Sep 26, 2012
READ MORE
|
SnowViolent (CC BY 2.0)
|
A leaked letter from Greece’s lenders—the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund—orders the country to introduce a six-day workweek as part of a package of austerity demands for a second bailout.
Posted on Sep 5, 2012
READ MORE
|
DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)
|
The eurozone is headed for another recession as its economic output shrinks again in 2012’s third quarter, economists say.
Posted on Aug 23, 2012
READ MORE
|
activefree (CC BY 2.0)
|
Goldman Sachs has announced its intention to invest $9.6 million in a prisoner rehabilitation program at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail in a move that could net the company a $2.1 million return.
Posted on Aug 4, 2012
READ MORE
|
zeevveez (CC BY 2.0)
|
Israeli spending on West Bank settlements has increased 38 percent under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the population of Jewish residents there has doubled in a dozen years.
Posted on Jul 31, 2012
READ MORE
|
megoizzy (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
As public sector jobs, education, health insurance and social welfare programs crumble amid the specter of economic austerity, the British government has spent more than $14 billion on preparations for the 2012 Olympic Games—far more than the $4 billion that was estimated a few years ago.
Posted on Jul 26, 2012
READ MORE
|
heipei (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
Amid a $31-billion budget crisis, thousands of British doctors and nurses will lose their jobs unless they agree to accept lower salaries, longer working hours and other conditions, according to a leaked document obtained by The Sunday Times.
Posted on Jul 18, 2012
READ MORE
|
NASA GSFC/Jacques Descloitres and Ana Pinheiro
|
By Amy Goodman — As Spain’s prime minister announced deep austerity cuts Wednesday in order to secure funds from the European Union to bail out Spain’s failing banks, the people of Spain have taken to the streets once again for what they call “Real Democracy Now.”
Posted on Jul 11, 2012
READ MORE
|
striatic
|
In exchange for a eurozone bailout of $123 billion, Spain’s conservative government Wednesday slashed $80 billion from its budget over the next two and a half years through a combination of sales tax hikes and spending cuts. That’s in addition to $92 billion dropped by the country’s previous administration.
Posted on Jul 11, 2012
READ MORE
|
Irargerich (CC BY 2.0)
|
Stockton, Calif., a city of nearly 300,000, is slated to become the largest U.S. city ever to file for bankruptcy after the City Council approved a new budget that calls for defaulting on debt payments and slashing millions in pay and benefits for employees and retirees.
Posted on Jun 27, 2012
READ MORE
|
|
Bankers are bracing for international financial chaos as Greek voters head to the polls to decide on an austerity plan that could kiss the euro bye-bye. But that’s not the only major world event happening, with Egypt’s military tossing the recent Democratic elections aside as it dissolves the country’s parliament.
Posted on Jun 15, 2012
READ MORE
|
|
Christo Komarnitski, Cagle Cartoons, Bulgaria —
Posted on May 16, 2012
READ MORE 
|
|
Last time on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Scott Tucker disrupts the celebration of Obama’s gay marriage announcement; the Green Party candidate; Robert Scheer and Sergei Plekhanov; austerity check; and the class politics of parking tickets.
|
Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
|
Last time on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Scott Tucker disrupts the celebration of Obama’s gay marriage announcement; the Green Party candidate; Robert Scheer and Sergei Plekhanov; austerity check; and the class politics of parking tickets.
Posted on May 15, 2012
READ MORE 
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Obama administration has chosen a distinctly American path that kept austerity at bay. As a result, the American economy has climbed out of the Great Recession more quickly than most of Europe.
|
|
Christo Komarnitski, Cagle Cartoons, Bulgaria —
Posted on May 8, 2012
READ MORE
|
Photo by (CC-BY-SA)
|
By William Pfaff — The weekend elections in France and Greece seem widely to have been taken, at least on the European and American left, as a solution to the great European economic crisis.
|
|
“When you have high unemployment and a lot of underutilized capacity, the idea is you cut public budgets? That’s insane. Because that leads to a shrinking of the entire economy, when the real problem is … the ratio of debt to the size of the economy overall,” says the former Labor secretary. “If you shrink the economy, that ratio becomes worse and worse.”
|
nosha (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
By Noam Chomsky, TomDispatch —
After the first few years of the Great Depression there was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it.” It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.
|
(CC-BY-SA)
|
By Eugene Robinson — Economic austerity is a dangerous, self-defeating intellectual fad. Perhaps I should say that’s what it was, given Sunday’s election results in Europe.
|
AP/Michel Spingler
|
The austerity regime in Europe took a big hit Sunday, with French voters electing Socialist Francois Hollande, while the Greeks, also voting Sunday, handed out pink slips to the ruling centrist coalition that has slashed government spending on EU orders.
|
401K (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
In the wake of the 2008 crash and the widespread government-imposed austerity that followed, high levels of long-term and youth unemployment across the globe are in danger of becoming fixed, according to an annual report by the International Labor Organization.
|
Wikimedia Commons
|
Remember when austerity sounded more like an obscure SAT word than cause for international economic panic? This time around, it’s the Spaniards who are feeling the pinch, as their government has announced major budget cuts for the year.
|
Glasto_2009 (CC-BY)
|
Following Ireland’s recent slide into recession territory, the OECD, a Paris-based economic think tank, reports that the U.K.’s economic doldrums have returned.
|
Anuska Sampedro (CC-BY)
|
Strikers all but halted road, rail and air services in Spain on Thursday as part of a one-day general strike against austerity measures imposed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s recently elected conservative government.
|
cobalt123 (CC-BY)
|
A 0.2 percent dip in GDP at the end of 2011, which followed a drastic decline in the third quarter, has thrown Ireland back into recession, alongside Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal and Greece, and begs the question of whether austerity is the answer to Europe’s economic woes.
|
AP / Michael Probst
|
Having pulled off the biggest debt restructuring deal ever, Greece is on track for yet another bailout. Meanwhile, the Greek government is also preparing to make yet another round of austerity cuts, which may involve lowering the nation’s minimum wage.
|
AP / Kostas Tsironis
|
By William Pfaff — Denied a referendum on crippling austerity measures, Greeks demonstrated Sunday night that if they couldn’t express their opinions one way, then they would do it in another.
|
violet.blue (CC-BY)
|
Mormonism is not the quintessential “American religion,” to use Tolstoy’s words, just because it got its start in upstate New York. The church has long embodied notions and practices that drive contemporary American capitalism. And those ideas, as author Chris Lehmann demonstrated last October in Harper’s Magazine, remain central to the shaping of national economic policy.
|
AP / Thanassis Stavrakis
|
Angry Greeks tried to torch Athens after parliament passed an austerity package Sunday. While European leaders continue to press for additional cuts, the Greek minister for citizen protection says the Greek people “cannot take any more ... we have reached the limits of the social and economic system.”
|
jamiehladky (CC-BY)
|
Something interesting happens when hardworking, fiscally minded Americans find themselves on the public dole: They resent the government that lends a hand and feel guilty for accepting help. A major article from The New York Times documents the anxiety, frustration and confusion of a growing class of dependent Americans.
|
AP / Margarethe Wichert / dapd
|
By Nomi Prins — The markets weren’t shocked by last week’s wave of pre-broadcast S&P sovereign debt downgrades. For months, the question wasn’t “if” but “when.” And true to form, just as with the U.S. downgrade, S&P’s reasoning skated the surface of prevailing wisdom.
|
|
Barricades in Zuccotti Park have finally come down, causing protesters to immediately reoccupy; in the face of budget cuts, some teachers opt to work for free; meanwhile, Kopimism, a new religion based on file-sharing, emerges. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Jan 10, 2012
READ MORE
|
counsellor (CC-BY)
|
Is anyone in the Obama administration listening to Paul Krugman? Maybe, says the Nobel Prize-winning economist, but only at the end of a year in which political insistence on the need to reduce short-term deficits with spending cuts slid the economy and much of the American public further into ruin.
|
Contando Estrelas (CC-BY)
|
Spain announced a package of spending cuts and tax increases Friday after the new government said the budget shortfall is deeper than the outgoing administration had led it to believe. Meaningful structural reforms have yet to be proposed, and the full extent of the cuts is unlikely to be made known until after regional elections in late March.
|
AP / Geert Vanden Wijngaert
|
At the close of an economic summit that appears to have failed to rescue Italy, Spain and more of Europe from sinking deeper into a mire of recession, Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott prefigures the collapse of the euro as a unifying currency of the European Union. (more)
|
|
Deng Coy Miel, Cagle Cartoons, Singapore —
Posted on Dec 3, 2011
READ MORE
|
AP / Lefteris Pitarakis
|
As many as 2 million British public sector workers went on strike Wednesday to oppose the government’s plans to increase revenue by digging into their hard-earned pensions. Just over one-quarter of the civil service walked out, including members of Prime Minister David Cameron’s staff.
|
DonkeyHotey (CC-BY)
|
Talks between congressional leaders charged with coming up with a plan by Wednesday to cut the national deficit by $1.2 trillion have descended into squabbling and finger-pointing, suggesting that automatic cuts to domestic programs, Medicare and defense spending—rather than a mix of cuts and tax increases—are inevitable. (more)
|
|
This was a big week in international news, with the death of Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi and President Obama’s announcement that U.S. troops will be leaving Iraq before 2012. And let’s not forget the latest unrest in Greece, stemming from the passage of a highly contested austerity bill by that country’s parliament. (more)
|
bbc.co.uk
|
While the international media zoomed in on Libya on Thursday, another important story was unfolding in Athens, where two days of strikes and protests failed to sway parliament members from passing a bill of austerity measures the Greek government insisted was necessary to avoid an even more catastrophic economic mess.
|
View older articles:
< 1 2 3 >
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Terracide and the Terrarists: Destroying the Planet for Record Profits
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
