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Dear friends: Secretary of State Jon Husted has called a meeting of the Ohio Ballot Board for Wednesday, August 3, 2011, at 10:00 a.m. in the Finan Finance Hearing Room of the Ohio Statehouse, to consider and certify the ballot language for three statewide issues appearing on the November ballot.  Of particular interest, the board […]

  Financial crises are bad news for the status of the currency in which the turmoil is denominated, right? So the US-made financial crisis must be bad for the dollar, right? And especially so because of the expansive dollar monetary policy that has ensued, right? Ambiguity on What “Strong Currency” Means Several economists appear to […]

  The Republicans have successfully changed the main emphasis of the economic debate from job creation to deficit control.  Why the urgency for balanced budgets?  After all, this anemic “recovery” has set itself apart from all previous post-war turnarounds precisely by its manifest failure to generate jobs.  Economic growth needs to considerably exceed 3% per […]

  It is very difficult to explain American politics to those who are not Americans and/or have not lived here long enough.  Add to that the confusion over basic economic principles, and it becomes almost impossible to explain the debt-ceiling debate to rational people. As noted by James Galbraith, this is not a fiscal crisis, […]

Dear Sydney Morning Herald, You did your readers and all working people a grave disservice today.  By titling a column about hundreds of thousands of miners around the world going on strike for better working and living conditions a “strike contagion” — and thus associating actions by workers with germs, plague, and disease transmission — […]

Your house might not burn down next year.  So you could probably save money by cancelling your fire insurance. That’s a “bargain” that few homeowners would accept. But it’s the same deal that politicians have accepted for us, when it comes to insurance against climate change.  They have rejected sensible investments in efficiency and clean […]

As the eurozone authorities move closer to accepting the inevitable Greek debt default/restructuring, there are some who have pointed to the Jamaican debt restructuring of last year as a model.  It’s hard to imagine a worse disaster for Greece.  It is worth a closer look at what has been done to Jamaica, not only as […]

No sooner were the results of the 66th Round of the National Sample Survey Organisation (relating to data collected in 2009-10) released, than they became the subject of great controversy.  Surprisingly, the controversy was created not by critics of the government and its statistical system, but from within government circles! Some highly placed officials found […]

Testimony before the National Labor Relations Board, 19 July 2011 I am here to briefly summarize the findings of two papers by my colleague Dr. John Schmitt, on the risk of dismissal in the course of a unionization drive.  Dr. Schmitt, together with Ben Zipperer, used data on reinstatements from the National Labor Relations Board […]

Terry Everton is a cartoonist.  Visit his blog Working Stiff Review at .  | Print

  Rating Agency: “Don’t take it wrong, but some companies are paying me to come here to tell you that you have no future.” Juan Ramón Mora is a cartoonist in Barcelona.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 14 July 2011 under a Creative Commons license.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | […]

Throughout its history, capitalism never succeeded in preventing recurring economic cycles or crises.  However, they were usually contained within the system.  Economic crises usually did not become social crises; the system itself was usually not called into question.  Transition to a different system was then an idea kept away from public discussion, a project kept […]

When the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) defeated the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) in balloting among 43,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente (KP) last October, SEIU Executive Vice President Dave Regan was exultant.  SEIU’s victory was “a huge achievement,” he said.  “NUHW is now, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.  We’re thrilled.” On a […]

U.S. diplomatic cables now released from Wikileaks make it clearer than ever before that foreign troops occupying Haiti for more than seven years have no legitimate reason to be there; that this a U.S. occupation, as much as in Iraq or Afghanistan; that it is part of a decades-long U.S. strategy to deny Haitians the […]

Iran is a different case because the country already had a revolution in 1979.  Even those Iranians who are in the opposition called for reform within the system rather than revolution.  It is not a climate of fear that explains the survival of the Islamic Republic but the absence of revolutionary fervour.  No state can […]

  “The primary cause is an extended loss of power at the power plant, as ironic as that might be.  When the earthquake occurred, the normal grid was lost, and the plant’s own in-plant power from the generators was also lost because of the result of the earthquake. . . .  The tsunami came in […]

  Excerpt: The mid-2000s marked the start of a trend of steeply rising commodity prices, accompanied by increasing volatility.  The prices of a wide range of commodities reached historic highs in nominal terms in 2008 before falling sharply in the wake of the financial and economic crisis.  Since mid-2009, and especially since the summer of […]

“Conspirators Wanted” Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión among other sites.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. Fayez Nahabieh, “Réflexion sur les origines de la crise syrienne et les moyens d’en sortir” (InfoSyrie, 15 July 2011); Alastair Crooke, “Unfolding the Syrian Paradox” […]

My chief Bahrain correspondent: “Waad just released a statement on the National Dialogue.  They are joined by Al Minbar Al Demoqrati and Al Tajamou’ Al Qawmi Al-Dimoqrati (different than Al Tajamou’ Al Watani Al Dimoqrati which is boycotting the dialogue).  The bad news is, they still seem to be part of the dialogue.  However, by […]

The budget plan produced by the Senate’s “Gang of Six” offers the promise of huge tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in the country, while lowering Social Security benefits for retirees and the disabled.  Despite claiming that they will “reform” Social Security on a “separate track, isolated from deficit reduction,” the plan includes […]