OWS takes a walk uptown
No doubt you’ve all heard and read about the huge and wonderful Occupy Wall Street satellite rally in Times Square this afternoon. This crowd was anything but the shiftless hippies of Ann Coulter’s imagining. I bet a lot of them were Democrats, which means that the process of productive disillusionment I’d hoped for in the summer of 2008 is finally kicking into gear, after a long delay: Enough critique; the dialectic demands something constructive to induce some forward motion. There’s no doubt that Obamalust does embody some phantasmic longing for a better world—more… Read More
Radio commentary, December 5, 2009
[Not retrieved from the future. Most of this was delivered on WBAI last night, but the bits about the employment report and liberal disillusionment were written for tomorrow morning’s KPFA version.] Things today… Two stories on the front of Thursday’s Financial Times tell you a lot about life in today’s USA. Above the fold—a phrase that probably doesn’t mean that much to anyone under the age of 35—the lead story tells us that the Bank of America is about to pay back the $45 billion the U.S. government lent to it when… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
Posted on March 13, 2010 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, March 13, 2010
Recovery watch In a business cycle update, the grinding slog of a recovery continues. Last week, we learned that the job market looked got a little less bad in February than it was getting for most of 2009. On Friday, we learned that the retail sector had a not-bad February. Broad composite measures of the state of the U.S. economy, like the Conference Board’s Coincident Index and the Chicago Fed’s National Activity Index (CFNAI), are basically getting back to the zero line after deep collapses. Most measures, however, are behaving rather weakly… Read More