LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Winner 2013 Webby Awards for Best Political Website
May 21, 2013

 Choose a size
Text Size

Trending:     chris hedges     economy     elizabeth warren     politics     robert scheer
Most Read

Rise Up or Die

Revenge of the Bear: Russia Strikes Back in Syria

Tumblr Is Worth $1.1 Billion to Yahoo for One Reason: You

Real American Boy: How Our Byzantine Immigration System and Failed Economy May Have Made a Terrorist

DOJ Allegedly Spied on Fox News Correspondent, the FBI Investigates Bachmann, and More

Most Comments
Most Emailed

Reports
 * NEW! * Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued
 * NEW! * Warming Climate Endangers U.K. Farming

Ear to the Ground

A/V Booth

Arts & Culture
Act of Congress
Daily Rituals
The Girls of Atomic City

Digs

Truthdig Bazaar
Van Gogh: The Life

Van Gogh: The Life

By Steven Naifeh (Author), Gregory White Smith (Author)

more items

 
Tags

Tag: Capitalism


Image via Shutterstock

Global Capital and the Nation State

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom, while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Posted on May 20, 2013 READ MORE



BBC

Factory Collapse Kills Two Workers in Cambodia

Two people are dead after part of the concrete roof of a factory that manufactures Asics shoes in Cambodia collapsed on workers, officials say. Police report at least six people were injured.

Posted on May 17, 2013 READ MORE



Kheel Center, Cornell University (CC BY 2.0)

Recurring Nightmares? Wake Up and Take Action

The weekly news is like a recurring bad dream that is becoming an even worse nightmare. While the investor class cheers a rising stock market, the rest of us sink. The headline that jumped out at us this week came from Bloomberg News: “CEO Pay 1,795-to-1 Multiple of Wages Skirts U.S. Law.”

Posted on May 17, 2013 READ MORE



State Farm (CC BY 2.0)

Student Loans a Drag on Graduates and the Economy

Crippling student debt is keeping hundreds of thousands of Americans from spending money on goods and services in the real economy, which is constraining the nation’s recovery.

Posted on May 11, 2013 READ MORE


Markets Rise to Record Highs

Share
Posted on May 8, 2013 READ MORE



::carlos:capote:: (CC BY 2.0)

Suit Alleges Drug Company Paid Doctors to Shill

Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer Novartis paid doctors to push three of its products by holding “educational events” on fishing trips and at Hooters restaurants that amounted to little more than parties, according to the federal government.

Posted on May 1, 2013 READ MORE


Have You Met This Man?

Ronald Davis is a Chicago resident who has been homeless for about a year and a half. In a heartbreaking interview filmed on the street, he talks about what it’s like to be one of the millions of Americans in his situation.

Posted on Apr 26, 2013 READ MORE


Death Penalty

Share
Posted on Apr 26, 2013 READ MORE



[ Quique ] (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Samsung Comes Clean About Blood Metal

The world’s best-selling smartphone manufacturer has acknowledged using tin sourced from Indonesia’s controversial Bangka Island, where an investigation last year found that unregulated mining employs child laborers and kills an estimated 150 miners every year while destroying the local environment.

Posted on Apr 25, 2013 READ MORE



How the News Is Killing You

Reading mass media news articles is unhealthy and causes unhappiness, so stop it; Americans want to know more about socialism, as evidenced by Merriam-Webster’s two most searched entries in 2012; meanwhile the Swedes were dissatisfied with gendered pronouns and have officially incorporated a third, gender-neutral one into their language. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Posted on Apr 15, 2013 READ MORE



Henry Giroux

Angela Davis: Education and the Meaning of Freedom

Occasionally we meet the unsullied images, history and legacy of intellectuals who symbolize a rare combination of civic courage, political commitment and rigorous scholarship. Angela Davis is one of those exemplary individuals.

Posted on Apr 11, 2013 READ MORE



Shutterstock illustration of robot hands

Permanent Unemployment for Everyone, Brought to You by Vulture Capitalism

Bosses everywhere are trying to get rid of my job—and yours, I suspect.

Posted on Apr 10, 2013 READ MORE



R_SH (CC BY 2.0)

Michael Hudson Remembers What Margaret Thatcher Did

The deceased prime minister’s 11-year rule over the U.K. “was historic mainly by posing the conundrum that has shaped neoliberal politics since 1980: How can governments nurture and endow financial kleptocrats” with the consent of the people?

Posted on Apr 9, 2013 READ MORE


Shopping Meter

Share
Posted on Apr 7, 2013 READ MORE



healthy lunch ideas (CC BY-ND 2.0)

School Cafeteria Denies Lunch to Preteen Debtors

Twenty-five students at a Massachusetts middle school went home hungry this week when the private contractor that runs the school’s cafeteria denied them lunch because the students’ accounts were a few cents overcharged.

Posted on Apr 5, 2013 READ MORE



© Ahmed Amir (CC BY 2.0)

Exposed: A Global Offshore Money Matrix of Up to $32 Trillion

A cache of 2.5 million secret files offers the chance to peek behind the curtain of the world’s offshore money market, detailing the involvement of more than 120,000 companies and trusts doing business with politicians, con men and scores of the mega-rich.

Posted on Apr 4, 2013 READ MORE



H.Adam (CC BY 2.0)

How Capitalism Stacks the Deck on Disaster

We think of the financial crisis as a man-made calamity, and Hurricane Sandy as the malignant innocence of nature. But neither the notion of a man-made nor natural disaster quite captures how the power of a few and the vulnerability of the many determine what is really going on at ground level.

Posted on Apr 4, 2013 READ MORE


Supreme Confusion

Share
Posted on Mar 31, 2013 READ MORE



LINUZ90 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Violence of Neoliberalism and the Attack on Higher Education

Higher education must be understood as a democratic public sphere—a space in which education enables students to develop a keen sense of prophetic justice, claim their moral and political agency, utilize critical analytical skills, and cultivate an ethical sensibility through which they learn to respect the rights of others.

Posted on Mar 27, 2013 READ MORE



Sony Pictures Classics

The Chilean Mad Men of ‘No’

How did Gael García Bernal, an outspoken leftist who has played Che Guevara not once, but twice, end up starring in a film that would appear, on the surface at least, to be a celebration of 20th century free-market economics?

Posted on Mar 23, 2013 READ MORE


Economic Recovery

Share
Posted on Mar 19, 2013 READ MORE



Andrea_44 (CC BY 2.0)

Elderly Man Facing Foreclosure Commits Suicide

A West Virginia man became one of the latest fatalities of the American economy when he shot and killed himself this month after authorities arrived at his home with an eviction notice.

Posted on Mar 15, 2013 READ MORE



kenteegardin (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Debt Is the Problem

It’s not the kind created by government spending on social programs, however, economist Michael Hudson says.

Posted on Mar 15, 2013 READ MORE


Disposable Youth in Dark Times

Neoliberal capitalism values young people only as commodities, social philosopher Henry Giroux says, and teachers, whose work is to encourage the growth of minds, have some of the best opportunities to defend them.

Posted on Mar 13, 2013 READ MORE



AP/Mark Lennihan

If Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes, Why Should You?

The U.S. government exists primarily to make the world safe for multinational corporations, but those firms feel no obligation to pay for that protection in return.

Posted on Mar 12, 2013 READ MORE



banspy (CC BY 2.0)

The Free Market That Isn’t

“Since 1980, the U.S. government has reduced its intervention in the U.S. economy, which has become much more of a free market.” True or false?

Posted on Mar 9, 2013 READ MORE


Dow Jones

Share
Posted on Mar 7, 2013 READ MORE



AP/Ismael Francisco

Castro Brothers’ Reign to End by 2018

Raul Castro announced Sunday that his new presidential term would be his last as the “founding generation” of Cuba’s 1959 revolution gives “new generations the responsibility to continue building socialism.”

Posted on Feb 26, 2013 READ MORE


Watch ‘Obey’: Film Based on Chris Hedges’ ‘Death of the Liberal Class’

The movie explores the rise of the corporate state and the future of obedience in a world filled with unfettered capitalism, worsening inequality and environmental changes.

Posted on Feb 21, 2013 READ MORE



land_camera_land_camera (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Minimum Wage Should Be More Than $20

If the federal minimum wage had kept pace with changes in worker productivity, busboys and baristas would be making at least $21.72 an hour today, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Posted on Feb 14, 2013 READ MORE


Going Postal

Share
Posted on Feb 11, 2013 READ MORE



ISLET

Productivity, Compound Interest and Poverty

“Today’s economy is based on theft under the euphemism of ‘free enterprise,’ ” writes Michael Hudson in the first chapter of his new book “Finance Capitalism and its Discontents.” “It’s sometimes called ‘socialism for the rich’ because they receive most government subsidy. But it’s not the kind of socialism that people talked about a hundred years ago. It is a travesty of social democracy and socialism. In a word, it’s oligarchy.”

Posted on Feb 9, 2013 READ MORE


Globalization

Share
Posted on Feb 1, 2013 READ MORE



Flickr/Tax Credits

An Economic Alternative to Exploitative Free Market Capitalism

The commons movement protects large resources from privatization and allows collectives to regulate extraction. Exploitation is avoided because no one individual has more of a right to the source than any other.

Posted on Jan 31, 2013 READ MORE



Verso Books

The Making of Global Capitalism

Although Karl Marx discerned in the middle of the 19th century that a new class of capitalists was creating “a world after its own image,” it took until the beginning of the 21st century before “a constantly expanding market” could be said to have fully spread capitalist social relations “over the entire surface of the globe,” write Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin in their new book, “The Making of Global Capitalism.”

Posted on Jan 31, 2013 READ MORE


Herbert Unaware

Share
Posted on Jan 29, 2013 READ MORE        



Randy Son of Robert (CC BY 2.0)

The Anti-Economist: Misleading American History

By ignoring the historic role government played in enabling economic growth, the prevailing myths about how the U.S. became prosperous allow lawmakers, officials and lobbyists to craft policies that prevent the majority of Americans from taking their rightful share of the national wealth, Jeff Madrick writes in Harper’s Magazine.

Posted on Jan 29, 2013 READ MORE



CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Economist Stern: ‘I Got It Wrong on Climate Change—It’s Far, Far Worse’

Lord Nicholas Stern, the widely respected author of a landmark 2006 government-commissioned report on global warming’s effect on the world economy, says he underestimated the risks and should have been more “blunt” about the dangers posed by rising temperatures.

Posted on Jan 27, 2013 READ MORE



ms.akr (CC BY 2.0)

Karl Marx Is More Relevant Than Ever

“For many in my generation, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism have been undermined,” writes Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara at The Guardian. “That a higher percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 have a more favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism … signals that the cold war era conflation of socialism with Stalinism no longer holds sway.”

Posted on Jan 25, 2013 READ MORE



pixelasso (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The New Extremism

The debate in both Washington and the mainstream media over austerity measures, the alleged fiscal cliff and the looming debt crisis not only function to render anti-democratic pressures invisible, but also produce what the late sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “a politics of organized irresponsibility.”

Posted on Jan 25, 2013 READ MORE


Ishmael Reed

Share
Posted on Jan 21, 2013 READ MORE        


Krugman on Why Jobs Come First

New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman drew on 20th century U.S. history to explain to Bill Moyers how a Washington that was willing to spend could end the present American depression.

Posted on Jan 15, 2013 READ MORE


Holocost of Production

Share
Posted on Jan 14, 2013 READ MORE        



walknboston (CC BY 2.0)

How the Rentier Class Cannibalizes the Economy

Rather than mobilizing savings to fund new industries, the banking system that comprises the financial, insurance and real estate sectors merely loads the economy down with debt.

Posted on Jan 11, 2013 READ MORE



Nicholas_T (CC BY 2.0)

The Problem With ‘Public-Private Partnerships’

When a plan to construct the first modern privatized highway in the United States did little to ease congestion, blocked residents from making further improvements and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, Californians had the opportunity to learn a lesson about the folly of privatizing transportation projects.

Posted on Jan 5, 2013 READ MORE



mikecogh (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Bestiary: The American Infidel

Born of the last decade of aggression against theocratic regimes many thousands of miles away, the American infidel “is a rebel for laissez-faire capitalism, an anarchist for the law, an enforcer of the established order,” writes Harper’s Magazine columnist Thomas Frank.

Posted on Jan 2, 2013 READ MORE



Illustration by Mr. Fish

The Idol Smasher

The multifaceted Ishmael Reed has spent half a century destroying myths of the American empire, especially those that cement racism in place.

Posted on Dec 30, 2012 READ MORE



Danielle Walquist Lynch (CC BY 2.0)

Ensuring Scottish Sovereignty: Exploring the Public Bank Option

Will a publicly owned bank help Scotland avoid unnecessary debt and take control of its economic destiny as North Dakotans did in the U.S.?

Posted on Dec 7, 2012 READ MORE


Good Grief

Share
Posted on Dec 6, 2012 READ MORE        



broo_am (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror

Hurricane Sandy not only failed to arouse a heightened sense of moral outrage and call for justice, it has quickly been woven into a narrative that denied those larger economic and political forces, mechanisms and technologies by which certain populations are rendered human waste.

Posted on Dec 5, 2012 READ MORE


View older articles:  1 2 3 >  Last »

View the most popular tags overall?

Newsletter

sign up to get updates


 
 
 
 
Join the Liberal Blog Advertising Network
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
© 2013 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.