Stripped from its fancy (and mystifying) jargon, quantitative easing (QE) simply means increasing the quantity of money supply, or easing credit conditions -- in the hope of stimulating a stagnant economy. This is usually done by having central banks inject a predetermined quantity of money into the coffers of commercial...

The threat I am referring to is not that of being pepper-sprayed, arrested, beaten or imprisoned. It is a different type of threat: a stealthy challenger that while pretending to advance the goals of the Occupy Movement tends to undermine it from within -- more or less like the proverbial...

The House Homeland Security Committee's hearings on "Muslim radicalization," which began on March 10 and expected to be held periodically for 18 months, are objectionable on a number of grounds.

To begin with, the hearings are championed and chaired by a politician, Congressman Peter King, who is known for his...

Remember the neoconservatives' plan of "domino effect" following the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq? It was supposed to be followed by the toppling of other "unfriendly" heads of "rogue states" such as those ruling Iran and Syria who do not cater to the US-Israeli...

Many Americans still believe that US foreign policies are designed to maintain peace, to safeguard human rights and to spread democracy around the world. Regardless of their officially stated objectives, however, those policies often lead to opposite outcomes: war, militarism and dictatorship. Evidence of the fact that US policy makers...

A bully or a mafia godfather would never run out of excuses to punish an insubordinate soul in "his territory." Accordingly, U.S. imperialism has been very creative in invoking all kinds of excuses to punish Iran for its aspirations to national self-determination.

To justify the criminal economic sanctions against the...

The unrelenting diplomatic and geopolitical standoff between Iran and the United States is often blamed on the Iranian government for its "confrontational" foreign policies, or its "unwillingness" to enter into a dialogue with the United States. Little known, however, is the fact that during the past decade or so, Iran...

While the harrowing economic hardship that started in late 2007 and early 2008 rages on, and countless people in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world are losing their jobs, their homes and their sources of livelihood, policy-makers in the advanced capitalist countries of the West are...

Instead of calling the recent G-20's brutal austerity declaration (issued at the conclusion of its annual summit in Toronto last month) an orchestrated declaration of class war on the people, many progressive/Keynesian economists and other liberal commentators simply call it "bad policy." While it is true that, as these commentators...

One year after his feverishly contested reelection as the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to be standing on firmer political ground than any other time of his presidency. Having withstood all the relentless destabilization plots, both from within and without, his government is now more confident at home and...

Never before has so much debt been imposed on so many people by so few financial operatives--operatives who work from Wall Street, the largest casino in history, and a handful of its junior counterparts around the world, especially Europe.

External sovereign debt, as well as occasional default on such debt,...

The "golden" years of the U.S. economy in the immediate post-WW II period, along with the recovery and expansion of the economies of other industrialized countries, afforded the working class of these countries a decent, even middle-class, standard of living. Combined with extensive social safety-net programs such as the New...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent economic contraction that continues to this day represent more than just another recessionary cycle. More importantly, they represent a structural change, a new phase, the phase of the dominance of "finance capital," as the late Austro-German...

On the US-Iran relationship, President Obama seems to be talking from both sides of his mouth. From one side we hear promising messages of dialogue and a "new beginning" with Iran; from the other side provocative words that seems to be coming right out of the mouth of his predecessor,...

How the Current Financial Rescue Schemes are Following the Failed Model of the Hoover Administration

Faced with the financial meltdown of the Great Depression, the Hoover administration created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that poured taxpayers' money into the coffers of the influential Wall Street banks in an effort...

How Schemes to Rescue Wall Street Gamblers Are Prolonging this Recession

Using the "too big to fail" scare tactic, the U.S. government has kept a number of terminally ill Wall Street gamblers on an expensive life-support system that is estimated to cost taxpayers $8.5 trillion. In light of...