market
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Fukushima, the Criminal Complicity of Governments & What May Be in Store for US Reactors
Video: Fukushima gave the world a crash course in cascading nuclear failure. What many do not know is that the damaged reactors were designed by General Electric, rely on 40-year-old containment technology, and are substantially similar to 32 reactors currently operating around the world, including 23 in the United States. Continue reading
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Ellen Brown: How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street
CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. The CDS market is unregulated,… Continue reading
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Apple’s China Comes Home to Haunt Us By Robert Scheer
Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only now, with the sharp critiques of Apple’s China operation, beginning to fully comprehend. Continue reading
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Abstractions Versus the “Real World”: Economic Models and the Apologetics of Greed By Prof John Kozy
Economists build models by subtracting from reality the characteristics they deem unessential to the economic situations they model. The result is a bare bones description consisting of what economists deem economically essential. Everything that is discarded (not taken into consideration in the model) is called an “externality.” So the models only work when the externalities… Continue reading
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Abstractions Versus the "Real World": Economic Models and the Apologetics of Greed By Prof John Kozy
Economists build models by subtracting from reality the characteristics they deem unessential to the economic situations they model. The result is a bare bones description consisting of what economists deem economically essential. Everything that is discarded (not taken into consideration in the model) is called an “externality.” So the models only work when the externalities… Continue reading
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Two Icons, Two Deaths, Two Worlds: The Media Simplified Them Both By Danny Schechter
The world has said goodbye to two leaders who were worlds apart. One was a widely celebrated anti-communist, the other a widely despised communist. However, both the lives and thoughts of the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel, and North Korea’s Kim Jung-il were given short shrift. Continue reading
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Europe’s Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy By Michael Hudson
The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum. Continue reading
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Bloomberg Personifies What the Occupation Opposes BY Glen Ford
It was never in the cards for a plutocrat mayor to long tolerate a movement whose essential logic is the dissolution of his class. ‘If the Occupy Wall Street movement has been about anything, it is the absolute necessity to rid the nation – and the world – of the collective tyranny of the Bloombergs,… Continue reading
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Britain, France , US: ‘And the winner is …’ By Eric Walberg
The economic and social experiments in the past three decades by British governments from left to right have left the plucky Brits reeling, as this summer’s unprecedented bread and ipod riots showed all too conclusively. Continue reading
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Media Reform in Britain By Dan Hind
We are here because we know that there is something profoundly wrong in the communications sector. It has been obvious for a long time that much of the media are incapable of describing the world when doing so would disrupt the interests of powerful institutions and individuals. Continue reading
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The march of the neoliberals By Stuart Hall
We are living through an extraordinary political situation: the end of the debt-fuelled boom, the banking crisis of 2007-10, the defeat of New Labour and the rise to power of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition. What sort of crisis is this? Is it a serious wobble in the trickle-down, win-win, end-of-boom-and-bust economic model that has dominated… Continue reading
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The $600 Trillion Time Bomb That's Set to Explode By Keith Fitz-Gerald
The world’s gross domestic product (GDP) is only about $65 trillion, or roughly 10.83% of the worldwide value of the global derivatives market, according to The Economist. So there is literally not enough money on the planet to backstop the banks trading these things if they run into trouble. Continue reading
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Speculation in Agricultural Commodities: Driving up the Price of Food Worldwide and plunging Millions into Hunger By Edward Miller
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has again delayed the introduction of position limits required under the Dodd-Frank Act. These limits are intended to prevent speculation in (among other things) agricultural commodities, speculation which, many critics argue, have driven up the price of food worldwide and plunged millions into hunger. Continue reading
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Britain: The Health and Social Care Bill and the Negation of Democracy By Colin Leys
In voting, in the British House of Commons, for the third reading of Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill last week MPs voted to replace the National Health Service (NHS) as a public service with a system of competing businesses – foundation trusts, social enterprises and for-profit corporations. Continue reading
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Libya, the Lie By Murray Dobbin
When the U.S. invaded Iraq riding a pack of lies and monstrous manipulation, the entire U.S. elite, including major news services, academics, and politicians from both ‘sides’ of the spectrum, lined up to cheerlead and off they went to war. It was one of the most shameful chapters in the long history of shameful acts… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 