Debt

Profit maximizing in the newspaper industry is corroding the knowledge base that sustains government by the people. ( Inequality.org ) – Has the unthinkable, the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein mused earlier this month, now entered the realm of real possibility? Could democracy in the United States be disappearing? Millions of Americans are worrying about […]

Banking

Is the Turkish Finance Minister wrecking Economy ‘with a twinkle in his eye’?

Global Voices

By Arzu Geybullayeva ( Globalvoices.org) – Turkish Twitter-sphere was full of memes and jokes after the country’s new Minister of Treasure and Finance, Nureddin Nebati, exclaimed in a TV interview that the economy was about the “twinkle” in his eyes. The twinkle was the minister’s response to a question on economic indicators as the country […]

Debt

The Politics of the Poor in an America on Edge: Lifting from the Bottom So Everyone Can Rise

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com ) – When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. In April, he told Congress that “trickle-down economics have never worked” and that it was time to build the economy “from the bottom-up.” This came after […]

Debt

Debt and Disillusionment: Neoliberalism’s Unfair burden on this Generation of College Students

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – For the last decade and a half, I’ve been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now — admittedly, a little late to the party — I’ve started seriously questioning my own ethics. I’ve begun to wonder just what it means to be a participant, however minor, in the pyramid scheme that higher education […]

Debt

Only $3 Bn. of Federal $46 Bn rental assistance dollars reach renters, as eviction moratorium ends

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Brooke Newman | – ( Cronkite News) – WASHINGTON – The federal government’s COVID-19 moratorium on renter evictions ended Saturday, leaving thousands of Arizona renters vulnerable while state and local officials have distributed just a fraction of the funding aimed at keeping people in their homes. Government agencies in Arizona received almost $495 million […]

Banking

This time, it is the Students and the Unions that the Gov’t Needs to Bail out for a Healthy Economy

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Digging our way back out of the pandemic recession will not be easy, but we have the advantage of knowing what worked and did not work in the 2008 crisis. Any policy choice today does not operate on a blank slate. No one knows this more than […]

Debt

Why we need a Debt Jubilee for Renters as the Covid eviction Moratorium expires

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – What is going to happen when the eviction protections now scheduled to expire at the end of July finally do so? The rental deficits hanging over some tenants’ heads are so extreme that default is virtually inevitable, and the numbers affected so many that rental debt is […]

Banking

Let Lebanon be Lebanon: Paris should Stop Threatening Beirut with EU Sanctions

John Hickman

John Hickman “Governing Lebanon is surely more daunting than governing France.”[1] That pearl of wisdom in an essay defending consociational democracy by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Brendan O’Leary has never been more accurate. A delicate balance of domestic interests with institutional vetoes at the best of times, Lebanese politics has been stalemated for months […]

Coal

As Solar, Wind costs Plummet, Coal, Gas vastly Over-priced in Bubble that could Burst worse than 2008

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A new report by RethinkX, a think tank using the ideas of Tony Seba, who teaches Business at Stanford University, demonstrates that the value of fossil fuels and of the electric plants they fuel is vastly overstated by government agencies and financial analysts. Seba and his colleagues point out that […]