From the San Francisco Earthquake to Superstorm Sandy, How Capitalism Stacks the Deck on Disaster

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

In 2007, a financial firestorm ravaged Wall Street and the rest of the country.  In 2012, Hurricane Sandy obliterated a substantial chunk of the Atlantic seaboard.  We think...

From Debtor’s Prison to Debtor Nation

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

[This essay will appear in the next issue of Jacobin.  It is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

Shakespeare’s Polonius offered this classic advice to his son: “neither a borrower nor a lender...

Debtpocalypse and the Hollowing Out of America

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

“Debtpocalypse” looms.  Depending on who wins out in Washington, we’re told, we will either free fall over the fiscal cliff or take a terrifying slide to the pit at the bottom.  Grim as...

Prison Labor as the Past -- and Future -- of American “Free-Market” Capitalism

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world.  Penitentiaries have become a niche market...

A Modest Proposal for Occupy Wall Street

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a famous essay, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing...

A Century of Our Streets Vs. Wall Street

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com

Occupy Wall Street, the ongoing demonstration-cum-sleep-in that began a month ago not far from the New York Stock Exchange and has since spread like wildfire to cities around the country, may...

America's Reserve Army of Labor Marches Through Time

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Not long ago, the city council of Ventura, California, passed an ordinance making it legal for the unemployed and homeless to sleep in their cars.  At the height of the Great Recession...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

On a winter’s day in Boston in 1773, a rally of thousands at Faneuil Hall to protest a new British colonial tax levied on tea turned into an iconic moment in the pre-history of the American Revolution.  Some of the demonstrators -- Sons of...

On March 4, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the “money changers” who “have fled from their high seats in the temples of our civilization [because...] they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.  They have no vision and...

Reposted from TomDispatch.

On a December day in 1932, with the country prostrate under the weight of the Great Depression, ex-president Calvin Coolidge -- who had presided over the reckless stock market boom of the Jazz Age Twenties (and famously declaimed that "the business of America is business")...