You can see it in the streets of Cleveland, or Buffalo, or Minneapolis. On all those streets, the working poor who five years ago lived in their own homes, are back in cramped apartments, paying rent to their landlords. On the streets where they used to live, their old houses sit boarded up and rotting. Every week, some of these homes come down, as city governments spend millions to demolish houses abandoned because of what is being called the “subprime” mortgage crisis. It should be called the “free-market” housing crisis. What these streets tell us is the catastrophic failure of…
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When John Negroponte travels abroad, he expects to be listened to. The current U.S. deputy Secretary of State, formerly Director of National Intelligence (appointed in 2005), made a name for himself in the 1980s, as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. He was intimately involved in the brutal war against Nicaragua conducted by the “contras” as a proxy for Negroponte’s boss, Ronald Reagan.[1] But when Negroponte and assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher landed in Pakistan March 24, they were given the cold shoulder. The visit came just after the spectacular election defeat for dictator (and U.S. ally) Pervez…
Comments closedOld sermons by Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor, have caused a storm of outrage to sweep through the presidential campaign in the United States. It is really a storm of hypocrisy. The outrage should be saved for the conditions faced by African Americans, conditions that remain appalling long after the end of slavery and Jim Crow. In one of the sermons, Wright says: “The government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing…
One CommentDemocracy – a word we derive from the Greek: demos (the common people); kratos (rule) – hence democracy: rule of the common people.[1] Except there is nothing very common at all about the obscene wealth being used to try and “democratically” elect the most powerful man (or woman) in the world. The average cost to date in the race to become the Republican candidate for U.S. president is $32,283,430. This isn’t surprising, as the Republicans are the “right-wing” pro-corporate party. But their union-backed “alternative”? Average cost per candidate to date is $44,847,149 for the Democratic Party.[2] Let’s be clear –…
Comments closedJANUARY 7, 2008 – Getting a picture of something as complex as the economy of the U.S. – the world’s – is not an easy matter. An earlier post showed that it is completely misleading to paint such a picture using only the “simple” figures of annual growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). To only use these “simple” GDP figures, you arrive at the ridiculous conclusion, pictured in the first graph of this article, that today’s U.S. economy is twice as big as in 1995, four times as big as in 1983, eight times as big as in 1976, 16…
Comments closed“I’m here to tell you … the U.S. economy is in a recession,” said Sherry Cooper, chief economist for BMO Financial Group, speaking to the Canadian Club of Ottawa January 22.[1] Yet it is only November 29 that the Associated Press reported that the U.S. economy “barreled ahead in the summer, growing at a 4.9 percent annual rate.”[2] How does an economy go from barreling in one quarter, to slump in the next? The 4.9 percent figure comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), who offers a table which offers simple percentages of annual growth rates in GDP by…
Comments closedIt is now a decade since the establishment of the Project for A New American Century (PNAC) – the neo-conservative think tank whose ideas formed the backbone for the two administrations of George W. Bush. The central legacy of PNAC will undoubtedly be the war on Iraq. It is, put simply, a legacy of barbarism. Some of the signatories on the original PNAC “Statement of Principles” were hard to take seriously (remember Dan Quayle, the vice-president who couldn’t spell “potato” – or Francis Fukuyama who thought that history had ended?). But others – Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld…
Comments closedBy 1970, it was clear to most that the United States could not win the war in Vietnam. But a defeated imperialist power is not a power without teeth. Before it finally left in 1975, the U.S. twice escalated the war massively. The first was April 30, 1970, when then president Richard Nixon announced a joint, U.S./South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The second was in late 1972, when Nixon ordered a horrendous bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and its principal harbour, Haiphong. The anti-war movement today has been bracing for our own “Cambodia”. We, like the…
Comments closedThe British are withdrawing from the province of Basra in the south of Iraq, and the occupation of that country is now clearly exposed as an almost completely U.S. affair.[1] When the Iraq war began in 2003, it was already considerably different than the earlier war in 1991. The “Coalition of the Willing” put together by George W. Bush was just a shadow of the massive force, which backed his father’s war. France, Germany and Canada were among the major powers that refused to participate in 2003. Now, this already weak coalition is starting to completely unravel – it is…
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