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$13
By Gordon M. Goldstein
$16.50
$40
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AP / Christophe Ena
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The uprising that sacked Tunisia’s government is continuing to echo through the region, with Egypt, especially, looking over its shoulder and fearing instability that could scare off foreign investors.
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By William Pfaff — Is it a case of murder, or has the Western economy deliberately, if unwittingly, attempted suicide and nearly succeeded?
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AP / Vahid Salemi
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Like a piece of Swiss cheese, U.S. sanction policy is riddled with holes, according to reports. A former Treasury official claims licenses to trade with blacklisted countries such as Iran have been doled out to the tune of billions of dollars in profits, all at the behest of lobbying groups.
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AP / Daniel Roland
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Despite sounding more like an arcade than a currency oversight organization, European Union leaders have agreed to set up an official bailout fund for eurozone members as soon as 2013, doing “whatever is required” to defend the beleaguered currency.
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New York Times
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Even after the economic crash and subsequent scrutiny of Wall Street, a circle of big banks has managed to maintain a monopoly on derivatives trading and keep a cloak of secrecy over its process.
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Flickr / getfrank.
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Like a recalcitrant and over-sugared child, U.S. unemployment figures just won’t settle down. The country’s jobless rate ticked up to 9.8 percent in November, a world away from economic recovery.
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youtube.com
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While European economies stutter and protests in a number of European countries continue to go unanswered, it’s almost hilarious that we may turn to 1990s soccer sensation Eric Cantona for help. A Cantona interview has become a YouTube sensation, launching an online political movement based on non-participation within capitalism.
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AP / Peter Morrison
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Although it may sound like a delicious alcoholic beverage rather than a $50 billion rescue of Ireland’s capitalist apparatus, an Irish bailout by the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank is being discussed as the island country reels from debt and failed banks.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a bastion of pro-business, anti-environment and anti-labor ideology since its founding in 1912. And so it is unsurprising that modern-day corporations have donated millions upon millions to the Chamber to fight such perilous things as, say, security requirements on chemical facilities.
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Flickr / International Monetary Fund
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While the International Monetary Fund has historically been an organization used by wealthy countries to assert economic dominance over the rest of the world, developing nations won a small battle Saturday as the IMF moved to increase scrutiny over its rich members, including the United States.
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Flickr / GuntherAnders is my co-pilot (CC-BY-SA)
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Considering how feeble most public art is, this rather arresting piece by Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan deserves some serious props, especially in light of its location—within spitting distance of the Milan stock exchange.
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Wikimedia Commons
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We knew capitalism was crazy, but it turns out it took only a single sale of $4.1 billion in futures to put into motion a series of events that culminated in the “flash crash” of May 6, during which the Dow Jones dropped 600 points in just a matter of minutes.
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Mike Keefe, Cagle Cartoons, The Denver Post —
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AP / Pier Paolo Cito
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The U.N. is warning that the world may be on the cusp of a new major food crisis as the result of a wave of recent environmental disasters (heat waves, floods, wildfires) and capitalist disasters (market speculation, inflation) that are pushing up the price of foodstuffs.
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AP / Wong Maye-E
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In a spare-no-one, off-the-cuff critique, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker delivered a blistering analysis of the nation’s financial system Thursday, criticizing banks, regulators, business schools, the Fed and money-market funds in a “plea for structural changes in markets and market regulation.”
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AP / Oded Balilty
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By Steven Hill — How is a country with a lower per capita income than Kazakhstan, one of the worst environmental records of any major nation and a dictatorship, besides, hailed by so many as the next global superpower?
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Flickr / Moto@Club4AG
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Shareholders of Continental and United Airlines have finally voted to form a more perfect United Airlines, merging the two companies under United’s name to create the world’s largest airline service, overtaking its closest U.S. rival—the newly merged Delta and Northwest Airlines—and European carriers.
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Wikimedia Commons / AgnosticPreachersKid
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Remember that crazy time back in May when the Dow Jones unexpectedly dropped by almost 1,000 points in only half an hour? Well, the SEC has finally worked in some protection against such sudden plunges by expanding the number of stocks subject to its current “circuit-breaker rule.”
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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Possibly taking a cue about resistance from the beloved Iraqi journalist who chucked his shoes at George W. Bush back in 2008, a 49-year-old doctor has thrown a piece of his own footwear at Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou in protest of the government’s economic austerity measures.
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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Not like the truth will make a difference for the folks who watch Fox News, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has analyzed the short-term effects of extending George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and concluded that doing so would be the least effective way to cut unemployment and spur the economy.
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Flickr / Aapo Haapanen (CC-BY-SA)
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Here in Los Angeles, we know gridlock and frankly we’re not impressed by what most people call “traffic,” but the Chinese are taking things to an extreme. China says a nine-day, 60-mile-long traffic jam is finally breaking up.
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Flickr / soathevy
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New rules curbing credit card company shenanigans took effect Sunday, as restrictions on “unreasonable late payment and other penalty fees” will now block the companies from charging excessive levies if users, to cite just one choice example, do not use their cards.
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Wikimedia Commons
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A decision by scientists back in 2003 to share their findings on Alzheimer’s research has led to a “wealth of recent scientific papers” and important advances in moving to understand the disease and develop drugs to combat it.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The titans of the private sector say President Obama is anti-business. Many progressives say he coddles business. How does the administration manage to pull that off?
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AP / Carolyn Kaster
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By Robert Scheer — The flight from reason that now marks American public discourse came home for me last Friday when I found myself on public radio debating whether Barack Obama is anti-business.
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Today’s list features an amazing animation on the crisis of capitalism, a dispatch from a Gulf Coast media felon and a debate on the ownership of breasts.
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AP / Petty Officer 2nd Class Scott Lloyd, U.S. Coast Guard
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As the government weighs a tax on petroleum production to help pay for the Gulf spill cleanup—and as oil companies cry foul—a quick analysis of the U.S. tax code shows the oil industry to be one of the country’s most heavily subsidized.
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Jerry Z. Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, provides in his provocative new book a fresh look at a subject that, to say the least, has been both thoroughly misunderstood and a forbidden, even taboo, topic.
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Flickr / Partido Socialist
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As the euro continues to tank and European countries scramble to deal with shrinking economic forecasts, Spain has proposed slashing its spending plans by nearly 8 percent next year as it struggles to deal with financial turbulence.
Posted on May 28, 2010
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Flickr / thaths
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With malnutrition already well past dangerous levels, some 10 million Africans will face extreme hunger over the next few months as the threat of famine floats across West Africa amid a drought that killed off last year’s crops and has left the region’s agricultural economy in ruins.
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Wikimedia Commons
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People close to the case are claiming that AIG executive Joseph Cassano will not face federal charges related to allegations that he misled investors over the company’s handling of mortgage-related securities prior to the economic crash and subsequent Wall Street bailout.
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Flickr / soathevy
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The beleaguered banking industry suffered yet another blow Thursday evening after the Senate voted to impose price controls on debit transactions, a move that follows years of begging by retailers for governmental limits on the high charges demanded by banks every time a consumer swipes a debit card. The amendment is in a bill that still must win Senate approval.
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Wikimedia Commons
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A onetime comrade, and current critic, of Venezuelan jefe Hugo Chavez has been sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of abuse of power, misappropriation of funds and violation of the military code while an officer in the army.
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Flickr / Nikolas Giakoumidis
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While the genesis of Greece’s financial crisis may come straight out of economic textbooks, the recent intervention of the EU and now the IMF into Greek affairs has guaranteed popular resistance to the bailout—which many see as foreign subjugation of their country.
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AP / Dimitri Messinis
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A stray dog named Kanellos has apparently been on the front lines of most major protests in Greece over the past two years. He is also the focus of a blog, the subject of a recent Guardian photo essay, and the inspiration for several YouTube video homages.
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Author Michael Lewis in his best-selling book takes us inside capitalism’s “doomsday machine,” and it’s your worst nightmare come true.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Stuart Whatley — Perhaps the most enervating element of the BP-Deepwater Horizon disaster is its eerie familiarity—the sheer, inexorable predictability of it all.
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AP / Juan Karita
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President Evo Morales is pressing forward with his nationalization program in Bolivia, seizing four private electric companies Saturday morning. The government now controls 80 percent of the country’s power generation.
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AP / Henny Ray Abrams
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Even in the face of an extended recession, devastating double-digit unemployment and a barrage of political charges that President Barack Obama’s health care reform will decimate the economy, the U.S. stock market finished the week at a 19-month high.
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Flickr / James Callan
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We can all now breathe a collective sigh of relief: Bank of America has returned to quarterly profit after losing almost $200 million in the last quarter of 2009. The news comes even as home foreclosure activity hit an all-time record in March.
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Flickr / The City Project
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Culture and history matter, even if it costs money. Someone should tell that to the city of Los Angeles, which is raising rents on the merchant tenants of Olvera Street, a Mexican-heritage historical site downtown that is currently undergoing privatization.
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Let us stop to collectively mourn a new figure from The New York Times: Chief executives in the United States’ largest publicly traded companies found that their compensation dropped 15 percent in 2009, hitting bourgeois rock bottom at a measly $9.53 million yearly average.
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Flickr / Studio d'Xavier
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Cap and trade was all the rage back in 2009, with the market-driven system of curbing emissions seen as a dominant force in addressing global warming problems. Now the concept has seemingly fallen out of favor.
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Flickr / Dan DC
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According to the International Monetary Fund, the global economic crisis has not only screwed over the poor but has left “deep scars” on the developed world. The level of debt owed to richer countries is the highest since World War II, the IMF says.
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Flickr / eflon
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Coming only a year too late to the party, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has asserted that regulators must be “significantly tougher” on the large financial firms, arguing that the perception of those institutions as “too big to fail” threatens competition in the financial markets.
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AP / Petros Giannakouris
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In an effort to save the Greek economy, and by extension the euro itself, eurozone countries—the 16 European Union states that use the common currency—have agreed on a multibillion-euro bailout that also will impose financial austerity measures on Greece.
Posted on Mar 12, 2010
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By David Sirota — Amazon has sent a message to states buckling under budget deficits: If you make us play by the same tax rules as other businesses, we’ll punish you.
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AP / Mikhail Metzel
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By Mark Heisler — In the wake of the just-concluded Winter Games—aka They Can Even Sell This Stuff?—it’s amazing to think how little was left of the Olympic movement in 1984, when it crawled into Los Angeles on its last legs.
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In a newly available interview, Truthdig’s Chris Hedges sits down with filmmaker Michael Moore and poignantly argues that capitalism is driving humanity’s downfall. Moore conducted the interview for his latest movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” but eventually cut it from the documentary.
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Flickr / No Sweat UK
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In an announcement that was one part election hackery and one part good domestic politics, the Iraqi prime minister has declared that his country will not sell the rights to any more of its oil fields to foreign companies, a move that signals an intent by Iraq to develop its own national oil industry.
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