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E.J. Dionne
$12.89
By Marc Schabracq
$37.95
$22
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State Farm (CC BY 2.0)
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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
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Steve Sack, Cagle Cartoons, The Minneapolis Star Tribune —
Posted on May 11, 2013
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Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and the other “Left, Right & Center” panelists examine the Benghazi attack. Was it terrorism? If so, did the administration try to cover it up, as Republicans say? Also, the immigration debate zeroes in on border security and a legalization process.
Posted on May 10, 2013
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AP/Francisco Seco
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As lawmakers on both sides of the aisle spend copious amounts of time on their seemingly futile quest to reach an agreement about how to deal with the nation’s burgeoning debt, there’s an even bigger economic problem in the U.S.: unemployment.
Posted on Apr 22, 2013
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west.m (CC BY 2.0)
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“It seems unlikely,” anthropologist and author David Graeber writes. “After all, as I and many others have long argued, austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality.”
Posted on Apr 22, 2013
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Economists from the University of Massachusetts appear to have debunked a Harvard paper that right-wing politicians have used to push economic austerity policies. The challengers explain where the Harvard economists went wrong in an interview with The Real News Network.
Posted on Apr 19, 2013
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The new cost-of-living index proposed in Obama’s latest budget is really a means to push lower living standards on people who need Social Security, University of Missouri economist Michael Hudson says.
Posted on Apr 12, 2013
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alh1 (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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A review of reports published over the last few years shows poor and lower-income Americans are increasingly being jailed for being unable to pay debts and fines “more than two decades after the Supreme Court prohibited imprisoning those who are too poor to pay their legal debts,” as the ACLU notes.
Posted on Apr 9, 2013
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Flickr/University of Portsmouth Students' Union
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College costs climbed to an all-time high in 2012 while state and local funding for items such as operating expenses and student aid fell, a new report shows.
Posted on Mar 7, 2013
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Don Hankins (CC BY 2.0)
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“Today the stock market is high not from profits from expanding sales revenues, but from labor cost savings,” former Reagan Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts writes in CounterPunch.
Posted on Mar 6, 2013
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By Eugene Robinson — I hate the sequester, beginning with its name. “Sequester” is a verb, not a noun. This ridiculous exercise is not just unwise and unproductive, but ungrammatical as well.
Posted on Mar 4, 2013
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Screenshot
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Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough are taking their feud over the country’s massive debt and lackluster economy to television.
Posted on Mar 4, 2013
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Laws proposed this year include a bill whose proponent is an Oklahoma cardiologist who sees venomous effects in hormonal contraception for women; the Obama administration has created a policy that will allow more public access to federally financed research; meanwhile, an Italian newspaper claims Pope Benedict resigned thanks to pressure from a secret gay lobby. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Feb 25, 2013
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Gruenemann (CC BY 2.0)
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By Steve Fraser, TomDispatch —
In 2013, you can’t actually be jailed for not paying your bills, but ingenious corporations, collection agencies, cops, courts and lawyers have devised ways to ensure that debt “delinquents” will end up in jail anyway. With one-third of the states now allowing the jailing of debtors (without necessarily calling it that), it looks ever more like a trend in the making.
Posted on Jan 30, 2013
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The New York Times columnist has consistently been a strong voice in the argument against making dramatic spending cuts in tough economic times. On Monday, Krugman was once again forced to defend his position during a discussion about the current financial crisis on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Posted on Jan 28, 2013
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pixelasso (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout —
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
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John Cole, Cagle Cartoons, The Scranton Times-Tribune —
Posted on Jan 24, 2013
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Luojie, Cagle Cartoons, China Daily, China —
Posted on Jan 20, 2013
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By Joe Conason — A prolonged confrontation over the nation’s debt ceiling—unlike the “fiscal cliff,” which provoked many scary headlines—could truly be grave for both America and the world.
Posted on Jan 18, 2013
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Office of the Speaker of the House/Bryant Avondoglio
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By Eugene Robinson — President Obama is set to begin his second term at a moment when the question is not what great things our nation can achieve but whether our government, in Obama’s words, can “stop lurching from crisis to crisis to crisis.”
Posted on Jan 14, 2013
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Jeff Parker, Cagle Cartoons, Florida Today and the Fort Myers News-Press —
Posted on Jan 13, 2013
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walknboston (CC BY 2.0)
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By Michael Hudson, ISLET —
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
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AP/Rich Pedroncelli
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“Despite such terminology as ‘fiscal cliff’ and ‘debt ceiling,’ ” writes Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., “the great debate taking place in Washington now has relatively little to do with financial issues. It is all about ideology.”
Posted on Jan 9, 2013
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Infrogmation (CC BY 2.0)
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The second installment of Michael Hudson’s status report on the U.S. economy identifies debt as the financial sector’s key weapon in the push to extract wealth from governments, companies and families.
Posted on Jan 2, 2013
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j3net (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Economists predicted the fighting would last six months when World War I broke out in 1914. Wars were too expensive to be sustained, and the approaching fiscal cliffs would soon enough force the nations involved to negotiate a peace treaty. But they didn’t, because those governments simply printed more money, Michael Hudson writes in the first of a series at CounterPunch.
Posted on Jan 1, 2013
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Flickr/401(K) 2012
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By Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica —
President Obama met with congressional leaders Friday in another attempt to avert the fiscal cliff—the automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect Jan. 1 unless Congress can strike a deal. The cuts and tax hikes are so large and so sudden that many economists fear they would plunge the country back into recession.
Posted on Dec 30, 2012
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LadyDragonflyCC <3 (CC BY 2.0)
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By Steve Fraser, TomDispatch —
“Debtpocalypse” looms. Depending on who wins out in Washington, we’re told, we will either free fall over the fiscal cliff or take a terrifying slide to the pit at the bottom. Grim as these scenarios might seem, there is something confected about the mise-en-scène, like an un-fun Playland. After all, there is no fiscal cliff, or at least there was none—until the two parties built it.
Posted on Dec 4, 2012
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An offshoot of Occupy Wall Street called Strike Debt has launched a movement called Rolling Jubilee that seeks to eliminate debt by purchasing it from financial firms and canceling it so borrowers do not have to repay.
Posted on Nov 15, 2012
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Flickr / respres
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Hundreds of California residents are being threatened with foreclosure by a major Canadian bank, but it has nothing to do with missing their home payments.
Posted on Oct 5, 2012
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Jianping Fan, Cagle Cartoons, Guangzhou, China —
Posted on Sep 17, 2012
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facebook.com/DefaultMovie
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By Emily Wilson — Explaining why she is fighting for reform of the student lending industry, Carmen Berkley bursts into tears. She is one of several borrowers interviewed in a documentary by Serge Bakalian, above.
Posted on Jul 10, 2012
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NCinDC (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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By Marian Wang, ProPublica —
A few months after he buried his son, Francisco Reynoso began getting notices in the mail. Then the debt collectors came calling.
Posted on Jun 15, 2012
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In the seventh episode of “The World Tomorrow,” Julian Assange and key Occupy figures from both sides of the Atlantic met in a hollowed-out Deutsche Bank building to talk about the movement’s inception and the challenges it has faced so far.
Posted on May 29, 2012
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: A student loan crisis just in time for graduation and “More Powerful Than Dynamite” author Thai Jones.
Posted on May 25, 2012
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: A student loan crisis just in time for graduation and “More Powerful Than Dynamite” author Thai Jones.
Posted on May 25, 2012
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Rick McKee, Cagle Cartoons, The Augusta Chronicle —
Posted on May 17, 2012
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(CC-BY-SA)
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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.
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AP/Michel Spingler
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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.
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AP/Shannon Stapleton
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By Robert Scheer — We do not care a whit now—nor have we ever cared—about their human rights or any other aspect of their lives as long as they satiate our unbridled appetites.
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AP / Michael Probst
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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.
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Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons —
Posted on Dec 27, 2011
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AP / Alex Brandon
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November’s dip in the official unemployment rate is nothing to clap about. Scrutiny of the details reveals that the new figure of 8.6 percent is due mostly to 315,000 Americans dropping out of the search for work, and most of the newly created positions were low-paying ones. That includes temporary jobs created to support the spike in commerce that comes with the holiday season. (more)
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Pat Bagley, Cagle Cartoons, Salt Lake Tribune —
Posted on Nov 27, 2011
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Real American Boy: How Our Byzantine Immigration System and Failed Economy May Have Made a Terrorist
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