Market Crash

( Code Pink) – In country after country around the world, people are rising up to challenge entrenched, failing neoliberal political and economic systems, with mixed but sometimes promising results. Progressive leaders in the U.S. Congress are refusing to back down on the Democrats’ promises to American voters to reduce poverty, expand rights to healthcare, […]

Afghanistan

As Banks threaten to Collapse and Aid Dwindles, 93% of Afghans already don’t get Sufficient Food

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – UN World Food Program surveys in August and September, Al Jazeera reports, found that 93 percent of Afghans already are not getting sufficient food, for the most part because they lack the cash to purchase it. Things are about to get worse, as Afghanistan under the Taliban is cut off […]

Featured

On Labor Day, Poverty for Workers has fallen from 12.8% to 8.5%

Juan Cole

Revised. Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – This Labor Day, American workers finally have something have to celebrate, by virtue of having voted for a Democratic president and Congress. The pandemic-driven labor shortage has raised wages. Direct payments from the government, including an expanded child tax credit and expanded unemployment benefits added $3,200 to the income […]

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 […]

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 […]