Time to beat up on really, really bad news reporting. The stock market doesn’t tell people why it does what it does. We have commentators who bloviate on what they think caused the market to rise or fall, but they don’t really know and they could be completely wrong. That is why it was incredibly […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
Obama’s Gift to Verizon: The Poison Pill in PPACA Used to Extract Concessions from Labor
Since Saturday night (August 6), 45,000 members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have been on strike from Massachusetts to Virginia — in the largest private sector work stoppage in the last seven years. Health care cost shifting is high on the list of givebacks demanded […]
Panic on the Streets of London
I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and […]
“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). […]
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 […]
Middle East News Roundup: Arab Spring, Royal Summer, Islamist Autumn
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Creative Cities
Josephine Berry Slater and Anthony Illes. No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City. Mute Books. 124 pp. “Gentrification was already coming. The feta-cheese footprint.” — Stewart Home Broadway I Located on the historic drovers’ road that led from Essex to the slaughterhouses of Smithfield, Broadway Market in Hackney is one of the […]
Venezuelan Government Condemns Bombing of Libya’s State Television
Communiqué The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Comandante Hugo Chávez, in the name of the Venezuelan people and government, categorically condemns the illegal bombing perpetrated on Saturday, 30 July 2011 by the NATO military forces against the installations of the Jamahiriya, the Libyan state television. This barbaric act of the NATO constitutes the […]
Entangled in Neocolonialism: The Weight of Chains
An interview with documentary filmmaker Boris Malagurski Who in their right mind would actually want to be a colony? That is the question asked in the opening section of The Weight of Chains, the latest film directed by Boris Malagurski. His film demonstrates how the South Slavs emerged from centuries of colonial rule under the […]
Sense and Nonsense in the Balanced Budget Debate: A Socialist Response
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 […]
From Lender of Last Resort to Global Currency?Sterling Lessons for the US Dollar
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 […]
Jamaica Remains Buried Under a Mountain of Debt, Despite Restructuring
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 […]
From Economic to Social Crisis: Deficits, Debt, and a Little Class History
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 […]
Global Oil Prices
There was a time when global oil prices reflected changes in the real demand and supply of crude petroleum. Of course, as with many other primary commodities, the changes in the market could be volatile, and so prices also fluctuated, sometimes sharply. More than anything else, the global oil market was seen to reflect not […]
Greece
Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain. The cartoon above was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 29 June 2011. | Print
“Bringing Back” Black Money
There have been periodic demands, the latest being from Baba Ramdev, that “black money” from India which is stashed in Swiss banks should be “brought back” and used for development purposes. This money of course does not have to be physically brought back; all that is required is a nationalisation of those deposits, ie, a […]
Italy’s Crisis: The ECB Could Just Print the Money
It would have been worth reminding readers that the debt crisis in Italy and other euro zone countries is first and foremost a political crisis. The European Central Bank (ECB) can just print euros which can be used to address any potential default risk among its member countries. There would be little obvious economic downside […]
Blood Channels
“Channels of blood or channels of sedition or channels of the other side — call them what you like. These channels, as illustrated below, are a gun pointed to our land and our people. We the people must stand up, face them, and fight them. We don’t allow anyone to prejudice the security of […]
