Global Research Nobody expected industrial capitalism to end up like this. Nobody even saw it evolving in this direction. Marxists saw industrialists growing into giant trusts and depriving workers of the wages needed to buy their output, and the post-1980 era of corporate raiding has indeed seen downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force....
USA
The Next Big Bail Outs: State, Local and Private Pensions
Counterpunch Early on the morning of July 30, President Bush signed the act that the Senate had passed at a special session the previous Saturday. The new “housing act” (a more honest title would have been the “Financial Bailout Act of 2008”) authorizes the Treasury and Federal Reserve Board to provide unlimited credit to...
Rewarding the Bubble's Enablers: Why the Bail Out of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae is Bad Economic Policy
A Counterpunch Special Report I am writing this article about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while sitting in the Queens Botanical Garden. This was not my plan today. The central air conditioning in my apartment broke down six weeks ago and still has not been fixed. (It’s a nice condominium building, but accidents happen.)...
The Fed Sinks the Dollar: The Price-Wage Squeeze
Counterpunch Against the recommendations of most economists and even the Financial Times of London, the Federal Reserve Board yesterday cut its discount rate by yet another quarter-point, to just 2%. Ostensibly, the intention is to try and spur economic “recovery” – as if a cut in the interest rates would do this. At first...
Resurrecting Greenspan: Hillary Joins the Vast, Rightwing Financial Conspiracy
Counterpunch On Monday, March 24, presumably representing Wall Street – as any New York senator must do in view of its dominant financial role in the state’s political campaigns – Hillary Clinton proposed that Congress show its bipartisan spirit by appointing an “emergency working group on foreclosures,” to be led by none other than...
A Trillion-Dollar Rescue for Wall Street Gamblers, But No Money for Families and Retirees
Counterpunch If the move to a Unitary Executive of unfettered presidential power frightens you, America’s radical right turn to Unitary Finance should compound your fears – and your debts as well. The financial events of the last two weeks of March 2008 demonstrate that the “economic royalists” and “money changers” whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
A Grand Global Bargain? Save the Economy, Dismantle the Empire
Counterpunch Today’s deepening financial and economic crisis cannot be alleviated without addressing a number of problems that the public does not really want to hear about. Even to cite them raises a wall of cognitive dissonance. For starters, today’s debt problem is not marginal, but has become structural – and structural problems cannot be...
Books by Michael Hudson
