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What to make of the “encouraging” 7.8 percent unemployment rate
When the news came out on October 5th that the unemployment rate had dropped to 7.8 percent, the Obama administration embraced the numbers as proof that its policies were working. The NY Times, one of...
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Does it matter who wins?
Michael Roberts Blog blogging from a marxist economist Does it matter who wins? Does it matter who wins the US presidential election tomorrow? Is it Tweedledum and Tweedledee? It is often claimed by...
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Who says the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson wasted their money?
David and Charles Koch Sheldon Adelson One of the things heard incessantly since Election Day is that the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson did not get their money’s worth. Alternet’s R.J. Eskow spoke...
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Argentina, vulture funds, and Thomas Griesa
Thomas Griesa My first exposure to “vulture funds” was at the 2010 Left Forum in NY, where I walked into a BBC documentary by Greg Palast that was in progress. Although I didn’t care for Palast’s...
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Is Growth Over?
(I was invited to write a short article for an Indian journal that will be translated into Hindi on the question of “Crisis of Capitalism and Challenges of Marxism”. This is what I wrote.) The question...
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Caught in the sequestration web
Two days ago I got a letter from NY State Unemployment telling me to show up for an appointment next week to certify for extended benefits after my current benefits expire on August 14th. I got a...
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Catastrophism and the left: a response to Sasha Lilley
Sasha Lilley Although I was aware that West Coast radio host Sasha Lilley, a kind of radical version of Terry Gross, had come out with a book on “Catastrophism”, I had no plans to read it or comment on...
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Obama doublespeak on the economy
Last week Obama gave a speech at Knox College in Illinois on the economic situation that like his remarks on Trayvon Martin a few days earlier was filled with the number of bromides calculated to give...
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When the puppet talks back to the puppeteer
The puppet becomes the master in a classic Twilight Zone episode Today’s NY Times raises some interesting questions about the connections or lack thereof between the big bourgeoisie (pardon me for a...
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Assault on Wall Street
“Assault on Wall Street”, a B movie that was in and out of New York theaters about a year ago for only a moment and with scant attention from critics, just showed up on Netflix streaming. The director...
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Reading Richard Seymour in the Age of Austerity
Counterpunch Weekend Edition April 11-13, 2014 Strategies of Resistance Reading Richard Seymour in the Age of Austerity by LOUIS PROYECT Dating back to the overthrow of Salvador Allende, financial...
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Boom Bust Boom
If I were to mention that a new film opened today that consisted pretty much of economists discussing financial crisis, your eyes would glaze over, right? But when such a film is directed by Monty...
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Karl Marx rides again
(From my 2014 archives) Seemingly three or four years late in the game, Rolling Stone weighed in on the relevance of Karl Marx. In an article titled Marx Was Right: Five Surprising Ways Karl Marx...
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Is America committing slow-motion suicide? A look at the decline of CUNY
Since my wife is a faculty member at Lehman College, the picture of its library in yesterday’s NY Times captured my attention: Lehman and other City University of New York colleges were profiled in an...
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Divided We Fall
If victorious strikes by teamsters in Minneapolis in 1934, by San Francisco dockworkers the same year and auto workers three years later in Flint define the rise of the American working class as a...
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The political economy of hurricanes and debt
Yesterday I interviewed Ian Seda-Irizarry, an economics professor at John Jay College, about the situation in Puerto Rico, where he was born and raised, The interview covered the hurricane aftermath...
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WWII ended the Great Depression, not New Deal economics
My views on these matters were first put forward in a blog post titled “Did World War Two End the Great Depression”, written in September, 2011. It cited a Paul Krugman Op-Ed piece written in 2008 and...
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Generally, I try to read as little as possible about a film before I watch a screener in order to avoid the possibility that I might be influenced by other critics. All I knew about “Nomadland” is...
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COUNTERPUNCH, JUNE 18, 2021 Arriving with very little fanfare on Amazon Prime, the Italian TV series “Devils” is easily the most penetrating narrative drama on “banksters” I have ever seen. Set mostly...
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