Hold Fast

Michael Hudson, posted at New Economic Perspectives: The situation is much like that from Iceland to Greece: Governments no longer represent the people. They represent predatory financial interests that are impoverishing the economy. This is not democracy. It is financial oligarchy. And oligarchies do not give their victims a voice. So the great question is, [...]

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Reading some of the reviews of last night’s Republican presidential primary debate, I can’t help but praise the Washington press corps for the various, creative ways they say Rick Perry makes George W. Bush look like a strong candidate for the Fields Medal. Here’s a sampling: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic: Perry treats questions as [...]

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Al Gore has an impressively argued 7,000 word essay in Rolling Stone this week about climate change. He touches on other issues as well, namely the systemic problem we have in America of confronting lies and distinguishing them from fact. He writes: In the same way, because the banks had their way with Congress when [...]

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I was a supporter of Bill Bradley in the 2000 Democratic primary, largely because of a speech I saw him give in the spring of 1999 on race relations and the broken criminal justice system. Bradley was moralistic, clear-minded, and willing to talk about racism in a way that I’d never seen a white politician [...]

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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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Matt Yglesias seems a bit surprised to find that polarization doesn’t always break on partisan lines but on ideological ones, looking at the example of Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace, who were both Democrats. But polarization isn’t limited to Red Team/Blue Team parameters, as set out by the DC press corps. King was [...]

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This should have been done four years ago, but it’s still great to see Google finally get to the right place and shut down Google.cn. The search engine was built to spec for the Chinese government, enabling their to be both censorship of search results and rigged returns for results that favored the Chinese government [...]

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Josh Schrei takes on comments of China apologist Tom Grunfeld and really lays the smackdown. Schrei’s writing is a phenomenally clear rebuttal to the pro-colonialist arguments that because Tibet wasn’t, in fact, a Shangri La prior to China’s invasion in 1950, that Tibetans shouldn’t be able to ask for freedom and self-determination. Here’s an excerpt: [...]

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I rarely do this on Hold Fast, but this is too incredible not to promote some work from my professional life at SEIU. The videos above is from a woman named Peggy Robertson. In the first she describes her experience of being told by her health insurance company that she was only eligible for coverage, [...]

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Ed Wong of the New York Times has a simply brilliant article documenting stories from Tibetan monks who have recently escaped into exile following participating in protests in the spring of 2008 in support of Tibetan independence. “If we monks hadn’t seized the opportunity to express our feelings, which are feelings in all Tibetan monks, then we [...]

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