Egypt Amin Saikal (ABC, 29 July 2011): “The Islamist parties [in Egypt] now stand a good chance to win an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections in November, and also contest successfully the presidential election. . . . According to an Aljazeera public opinion survey, released on July 7, 2011, nearly 50 per cent of […]
Archive | News
News updates or analysis.
“Living within Our Means” and Standard and Poor’s Downgrade
The President, Senators, Congresspersons, media representatives, and many ordinary people speak often, these days, about Washington “learning to live within our means.” Last Friday, the private rating company, Standard and Poor’s (S&P), said the riskiness of lending to the US had risen because the US was not living within its means (i.e. borrowing too much). […]
Cautionary Tales for Would-Be Weather Engineers
James Rodger Fleming. Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Columbia Studies in International and Global History Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Illustrations. xiv + 325 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14412-4. In Fixing the Sky, James Rodger Fleming traces human efforts to control weather and climate from ancient […]
Listening to What Iranians Say about Their Nuclear Program Instead of Relying on “Intelligence” and Agenda-driven “Analysis”
As part of the current and ongoing effort to demonize further the Islamic Republic, there has been an uptick in media stories, drawing on conveniently leaked Western intelligence assessments, highlighting Tehran’s allegedly looming acquisition of nuclear weapons. One of these stories, from the Associated Press, seems particularly emblematic, so we want to look at it […]
Energy Information Administration Report Undercounts Subsidies to Coal, Oil, Natural Gas, and Nuclear Energy: Renewables and Energy Efficiency Shortchanged by Flawed EIA Methodology
The Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest report on federal energy subsidies, released on August 1, underreported direct and indirect federal subsidies to the nuclear and fossil fuel industries, creating an inflated view of the subsidies that benefit renewable energy and efficiency programs, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Although the agency concedes that […]
What Ails the World?
“Hmmmm, your problem is capitalism!” Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). Cf. Frida Kahlo, “Peace on Earth So Marxist Science May Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism” (1954). | Print
The Tent Protests in Israel: Can They Break Out of the (Zionist) Box?
6 August 2011 The demonstrations currently roiling Israel constitute a grassroots challenge to Israel’s neo-liberal regime. Beginning as an uprising of the middle classes — especially young people who have trouble finding affordable housing — it has spread to the working class, the poor, and the Arab communities as well, though not the religious as […]
What America’s Debt-Ceiling Crisis Reveals
The United States has an archaic piece of legislation, passed in 1917, which puts a ceiling on the magnitude of the debt of its federal government in absolute dollar terms. (Since the various state governments in the US are not allowed to run fiscal deficits and hence incur debt, the federal debt is synonymous with […]
Health Economics
Terry Everton is a cartoonist. Visit his blog Working Stiff Review at . Cf. “State of Working America Preview: A Staggering Rise in Health Insurance Costs” (Economic Policy Institute, 15 December 2010); Don Trementozzi and Steve Early, “Romney, Obama Health Care Reforms Offer No Relief for Unions” (Labor Notes, 22 June 2011). | Print
Credit Rating Agency That Rated Subprime MBS Investment Grade Downgrades U.S.
This would have been an appropriate heading for this article on S&P’s decision to downgrade U.S. government debt. S&P gave investment grade rating to hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities. They received tens of millions of dollars from the investment banks for these ratings. It would have also been worth asking what S&P […]
The Struggle against Stupidity: European and U.S. Governments Continue Wrecking Their Economies
All money managers’ eyes were on the U.S. jobs report this morning after the U.S. stock market yesterday suffered its biggest drop since 2009 and panic surged through financial markets worldwide. The headline numbers were not as bad as many had feared: the U.S. economy added 117,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate edged […]
Cuba Opposes Any Attempt to Undermine the Independence, Sovereignty, and Territorial Integrity of Syria
We wish to express our deep concern for the treatment of Syria’s internal situation at the United Nations Security Council, beginning with strong pressures exerted by the Western powers who are members of this organ, in order to adopt decisions against the legitimate government of Syria. Taking into account the experiences of, and precedents […]
The Great Unity of the Libyan Rebels
Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela. His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión among other sites. Cf. C. J. Chivers, “Libyan Rebels Accused of Pillage and Beatings” (New York Times, 12 July 2011); Kim Sengupta, “Libyan Rebels Have Conceded Ground since Bombing Began” (Independent, 27 July 2011); David D. Kirkpatrick, “Death of Rebel […]
Employment Rate Hits New Low as Economy Creates 117,000 Jobs in July
The employment rate for blacks hit its 4th consecutive low for the downturn. The Labor Department reported that the economy created 117,000 jobs in July and revised prior months’ growth up slightly to bring the average over the last three months to 72,000. This rate of job growth is below the 90,000 a month needed […]
Unraveling the Unemployment Insurance Lifeline: Responding to Insolvency, States Begin Reducing Benefits and Restricting Eligibility in 2011
Excerpt: State lawmakers enacted a range of policies in 2011 to amend their unemployment insurance (UI) programs, most of them motivated by insolvent state trust funds. Most notably, six states passed unprecedented cuts in the duration of benefits, for the first time reducing benefit weeks to less than the decades-long accepted standard of 26 […]
What Everyone Should Know about the “Debt Crisis” in the U.S.
Since the U.S. “Debt Crisis” has been a big international story for the last few weeks, it is worth clarifying what is real and what is not. First, the U.S. government does not have a “debt crisis.” The U.S. government is paying net interest of just 1.4 percent of GDP on its public debt — […]
Hidden by the Debt Ceiling “Crisis”: A Double Looting of the State and the Working Class
The political posturing around the debt ceiling “crisis” was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those — underlying US economic decline — keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains, and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes — two long-term trends over the last 30 years — help also to explain […]
Labor Idle As Obama, Democrats Back “Raw Deal” for Working People
After it was too late to make a difference, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry denounced the debt-ceiling agreement as “a raw deal for working people and the 30 million Americans who are still looking for work.” In fact, neither SEIU, the AFL-CIO, nor AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka aggressively mobilized union members against the deal […]
Interview with Joshua Landis: Sanctions against Syria Will Only Hurt People
Joshua Landis: Hama, which is the center of this crackdown, left government control about three weeks ago. The governor called off the troops and withdrew security from the town. He was summarily fired. The government realized that this was a big mistake. . . . The government is clearly trying to take control of […]
Syrian Tweets: “Peaceful Protests”?
Syrian Commando (2 August 2011): “Peaceful demonstration tools in #Hama #Syria for Ramadan http://t.co/FyPY1NM“ Eslam Jawaad (2 August 2011): “Father is Druze. Mother is Alawite. They raised me as Muslim. My wife is Sunni. Brother’s wife Christian. F#$k sectarianism. Pray for #Syria“ 3arabiSouri (2 August 2011): “Syrians r so grateful to our Libyan brothers, if […]
