The operations of the Federal Reserve board are notoriously shrouded in mystery. Technocratic decisions on monetary policy that supposedly need to be protected from the fickle pressures of politics are…
The current metaphor of “the fiscal cliff” marks the return of a few common tropes in American politics. First is the latest incarnation of what Naomi Klein has referred to…
It’s easy while thinking critically about trends in US history to fall into two traps – romanticizing a period in the past when things were supposedly better, or telling the…
I don’t usually watch the Olympics much. Not because I don’t enjoy the events, but because NBC usually feels compelled to shovel forklifts of “human interest” stories down your throat…
Sometimes the mark of a good book is how it crops back up in your mind a few months or years or even many years after you first read it. …
The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The engineers there proudly showed off what they…
As a post script to my post on the censure of Ozzie Guilllen for his comments on Cuba, I’m posting today stories from The Real News Network and Democracy Now…