Tag: USA
-
Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than A Doorstop
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 carried out by an appointed board of governors who like to operate behind closed doors. William Grieder set out to demystify this institution in the…
-
Ill Communication
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 story of past oppressions in ways that make it sound like no one spoke or acted out against it at the time. The recent book…
-
The Interpretation of Dreams
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 with brief breaks taken for cursory athletic performances. So I wasn’t surprised when I checked in on the Olympics briefly this summer and didn’t see…
-
Debt.4: What’s good for General Motors and what’s good for America
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. I wrote 3 posts about the book Debt by David Graeber back in February & March. There have been several occasions since then when the…
-
To the victor go the spoils…
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 thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio. When Boyd asked…
-
Muffled in Miami.2
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 on the isolation of the US and Canada at the just-concluded Summit of the Americas because of their refusal to allow Cuba to participate. As…