Hold Fast

I read Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia last year and one comparison stood out about the scale of the bailout money given to Wall Street banks vis a vis the US housing market. It turns out this comes from Nomi Prin’s, It Takes a Pillage. Taibbi gives the full quote in his latest mailbag post at Rolling [...]

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Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine and many other musical projects, was in Wisconsin last week to play a show in support of union workers and the people who were protesting in solidarity with them. He has a great write-up in Rolling Stone about the trip and I definitely recommend giving it a read. [...]

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At Al Jazeera English, pseudonymous Egyptian writer’Abu Atris’ has a very interesting opinion column which seeks to analyze the Egyptian revolution as a revolt against neoliberalism. Atris makes the case that Egypt was among the most thoroughly neoliberal countries in the world and the failures of neoliberalism were evidenced by the intense inequality of wealth, [...]

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Matt Stoller has a post up at Naked Capitalism, which, while worthy to be read in full, draws out another set of lessons from the revolution in Egypt qua model for economic change movements in the United States: Egyptians are trying to throw off the IMF-imposed austerity measures that created such a system for their [...]

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Dean Baker has a short piece in Politico that contains the most straight forward rebuttal to attacks on public workers from the right. The reality that no honest person can dispute is that state budget crises are almost entirely due to the economic downturn, not out of control spending. This in turn was the result [...]

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The New York Times has a profile on Gene Sharp, arguably one of the most important advocates for freedom of the last hundred years. Sharp’s writing on non-violent strategic campaigning, specifically on the overthrow of dictatorships, has been instrumental to the thinking of activists in places like Serbia and Egypt, and remains instructive for countless [...]

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UK Uncut is doing what is probably the most inspiring and savvy economic organizing in the English-speaking world. The video above is just brilliant, not only for how powerful it is but for how simple they make the act of standing up for economic just in the face of austerity measures. The accompanying blog post [...]

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Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight at the Times has a very interesting and typically numbers-rich post looking at the comparative strength of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, as compared to the strength of past primary fields. So it does look like Republicans have some legitimate reason to worry. In the previous five competitive primaries — excluding [...]

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Matt Stoller has a post up at Naked Capitalism where he looks at the revolution in Egypt’s strong labor base and the extent to which it is a rejection of a Rubinite economic view. Stoller writes: What is going in Egypt represents a remarkable new political coalition striking deep at the heart of the Washington [...]

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