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By David E. Sanger
$17.79
By J. M. Coetzee
$16.47
$22
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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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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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The logic of global capitalism is everywhere. New investigations are showing that the same Wall Street tactics—and companies—that ushered our own economy to economic collapse have emerged to exacerbate Greece’s current financial crisis.
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AP / Gregory Bull
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Call it pity or call it sensible politics, the G-7 nations have together pledged to cancel $1.2 billion in debt that Haiti owes them, something Global South activists have been requesting for all developing countries—not just those hit by horrible earthquakes.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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Recently disclosed internal documents and an audio recording regarding a 2008 securities standoff between Goldman Sachs and insurance giant AIG appear to be the smoking guns necessary to pinpoint Goldman’s culpability in the mortgage meltdown and the collapse of AIG.
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By Robert Reich — It has been more than a year since all hell broke loose on Wall Street, and even after the State of the Union, almost nothing has been done to prevent all hell from breaking loose again.
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commons.wikimedia.org / Ramy Majouji
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President Barack Obama wants to slap a new tax on the country’s largest financial institutions in an ostensible attempt to “recover every single dime” given away in 2008’s Wall Street bailout. The tax was met with predictable fat-cat jeers, despite the fact that the industry has largely recovered from the crisis.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The cartoon “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is a classic that offers us an endearing and memorable message against yuletide commercialism. But ABC must not have been paying attention, as it cut several key scenes from the program to add even more space for—you guessed it—advertisements.
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seplan.am.gov.br
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Citing the fact that industrialized countries cause much more environmental destruction than loggers and farmers in the Amazon, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called on Western countries—“gringos”—to help halt deforestation.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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Does the prospect of deepening economic meltdown and political disarray raise the specter of a social upheaval and, perhaps, the collapse of capitalism, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression?
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radicalsforhappiness.com
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Two new biographies about the irascible and idiosyncratic Ayn Rand, objectivist philosopher and ham-fisted mistress of the capitalist morality tale, show how her rocky Russian childhood and her subsequent self-reinvention campaign in America (partly conducted in Hollywood, of course) influenced her work, and how her ideas led to her own undoing.
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Wikimedia Commons / marxists.org
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Although Pope Benedict XVI made a point of denouncing institutionalized Marxism two years ago, the Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, last week cast a more redemptive light on Karl Marx’s ideas by going to the primary source and validating the German economist’s critiques of capitalism.
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blogspot.com
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In a move to quell public outrage, President Obama has ordered the government’s “pay czar” to cut by 90 percent the multimillion-dollar salaries that executives of seven bank and auto companies are receiving, citing the fact that these firms are entirely dependent on U.S. taxpayer money for financial survival.
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gawker.com
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The Obama administration, perhaps getting wise to public opinion, is lashing out at Wall Street firms. White House senior adviser David Axelrod called the huge bonuses executives received this year “offensive” in light of the fact that the rest of us are struggling through an economic crisis.
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AP / Lynne Sladky
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President Barack Obama has finally put into words what everyone already knows: that insurance companies are “deceptive and dishonest” in their efforts to kill any semblance of health care reform, no matter the cost. Now let’s see if he does anything with this knowledge.
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nydailynews.com
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Billionaire hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam was arrested Friday and charged with running the largest hedge fund insider-trading scheme in history. Charged with Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon Group, were executives of several prestigious U.S. companies.
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modernsalon.com
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Cause-related marketing, such as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, may just be a way to move products at higher prices. A new report details the difficulty well-intentioned consumers may encounter in getting a tiny portion of their purchases to go to the intended charities.
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infiniteunknown.com
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It’s unsurprising to say the least: A Freedom of Information Act request has discovered that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in daily two-way communication with a small group of Wall Street CEOs—at Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs—while lawmakers like Rep. Xavier Becerra are forced to leave messages for him.
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wfxl.com
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Economic news and pessimistic views: U.S. unemployment increased slightly to 9.8 percent and, moreover, this figure shows the crisis is far from over, experts say. Joblessness is at a 26-year high.
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capitalismalovestory.com
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By Peter Z. Scheer — Michael Moore’s latest look at what’s wrong (and right) with America is a lot better—and a lot more radical—than some of the brie-eaters reviewing it think. It’s a cry from the soul of a man who sees the whole country turning into his hometown hell of Flint, Mich.
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EPA / Win McNamee
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It looks like the G-20 is set to permanently replace the G-7 as the world’s dominant economic forum, an indirect admission that there was something unfair about the world’s seven wealthiest countries deciding economic policy for the entire globe.
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polarice.com
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We normally think of capitalists as ravaging the Earth with profit in their eyes. While that still might be true, 181 of the world’s largest investors have issued a united call for action against climate change, most importantly a binding treaty to cut pollution and boost funding for low-carbon technologies.
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wordpress.com
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These tough economic times have ganged up on the poor, homeowners, investors, students and immigrants. And now comes word that even Harvard and Yale, among the wealthiest schools in the world, have suffered dramatic losses in their endowments over the past year.
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wordpress.com
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It’s a vicious circle: Millions of job cuts and shrinking household incomes combined to push more Americans below the poverty line last year. Nearly 40 million Americans now officially live in poverty.
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A new documentary by Oliver Stone called “South of the Border” follows his earlier trajectory of “Salvador” (1984), “Comandante” (2003), and “Looking for Fidel” (2004) as he talks to several Latin American leaders to understand what is happening on the continent and how U.S. perceptions of our own backyard are skewed.
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guim.co.uk
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A recent squabble between “The Shock Doctrine” author Naomi Klein and the director who is adapting her book into a documentary film has led Klein to ask that her name be taken off the credits. Conflict reportedly arose over the form of the documentary, and the director’s use of narration rather than interviews as the key story-telling device.
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Flickr / showbizsuperstar
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In this topsy-turvy world it seems one’s proximity to full-blown communism is directly proportional to one’s success in capitalism. Take Red China’s explosive economic growth, or the unexpected success of semi-socialist Germany and France, which just bid auf Wiedersehen and adieu to the recession.
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visitbulgaria.info
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For almost two years, insurance giant AIG has experienced quarterly losses—until now. The infamous company is reporting its first profitable quarter since 2007, a turnabout that will give the U.S. government a whopping $1.5 billion gain as a shareholder, while individual shareholders get to split $311 million among themselves.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Chris Hedges — Positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness, is a quack science that justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress.
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The ruling party in South Korea passed a bill that allows print media companies to own up to a 20% share in the broadcast medium. The opposition believes this benefits only a handful of conservative media giants. So they started fighting ... in parliament. Watch the protest and the “Seoul” demonstrated by politicians for just media policies.
Posted on Jul 22, 2009
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By Rep. Dennis Kucinich — In mid-May, President Obama secured a deal with the health insurance companies to trim 1.5 percent of their costs each year for 10 years, saving a total of $2 trillion. Just two days after the announcement at the White House, the insurance companies reneged on the deal that was designed to protect and increase their revenue at least 35 percent.
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blackplanet.com
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It seems that President Obama has finally taken Africa seriously—and in a way that doesn’t look like Bush-era health funding that reeks of an infomercial for Christian charity. In a speech on Saturday, Obama is expected to focus on the importance of democratic governance on the continent and will make the ending of conflicts a key diplomatic initiative.
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highvolumemedia.com
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In the spirit of the poignant critiques of capitalism made popular by Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI has written a scathing letter just in time for the capitalist G-8 economic summit in Italy that demands we find a “profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise.”
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cnbc.com
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SEIU President Andrew Stern and Wal-Mart have joined forces, breaking with most other companies to support President Obama’s plan requiring employers to provide health insurance to workers. The thing often forgotten is Wal-Mart’s horrible record on health care and its current move to make about 40 percent of its employees part-time and thus ineligible for benefits.
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flickr.com
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For only $5 a month, you too can undermine a developing country’s health infrastructure. Since 1990, foreign funding for “development assistance” has quadrupled, offering medical resources to the poor but also luring local health care workers away from government hospitals and toward more lucrative private companies.
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guim.co.uk
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In clashes between native groups armed with spears and development interests packing guns, Peru has seen at least 50 people die and hundreds go missing after President Alan Garcia initiated a campaign to open the rain forest to foreign investors.
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By William Pfaff — Many in Britain and the United States are in mourning for what’s taken as the suicide of the American (or Thatcherite, or Chicago-school) model of capitalism, accompanied by the non-interventionist state that hands the national economy over to business and financial leaders to run.
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visitbulgaria.info
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AIG CEO Edward Liddy defended his enfeebled company on Capitol Hill Wednesday, yet claimed that even $180 billion in taxpayer money has only “reduced, but not eliminated the systemic risk [toxic assets] that AIG presents to the global financial system.”
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flickr.com
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By Scott Tucker — The current global economic crisis is not just another roller-coaster ride. Many sane and sober observers fear that the international locomotive of corporatism is going off the rails. Is this a necessary crisis of the capitalist system, determined by the self-destruction and self-renovation of a perpetual motion machine?
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imf.org
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A shrinking global economy has many at the International Monetary Fund worried, as economists project that 2009 will see a decline of 1.3 percent in world economic output—the first global recession since World War II.
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connectedmichigan.com
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics has put March’s unemployment rate at 8.5 percent, the highest in a quarter-century. After 15 consecutive months of job loss, more than one in 12 people (who are looking for work) are unemployed.
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flickr.com
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No matter how trite it has become for the media to focus on the “clashes” and “violence” that have “erupted” at the G-20 demonstrations in London, stories on the economic summit seem to overlook the legitimate concerns that protesters have against the world’s 20 largest economies orchestrating macroeconomic policy for the rest of the world.
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By William Pfaff — The globalization of the international economy launched as an accidental policy of the Clinton administration has proved to be a destroyer of people, governments and wealth.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Chris Hedges — The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — We are at the beginning of a great popular rebellion against those who showed no self-restraint when it came to lining their own pockets.
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Quelle Surprise! Haiti on the Mend
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