The world’s financial system continues to teeter near a very nasty brink, with the United States and Europe disagreeing about how to pull back from the edge. Danny Shechter sees crisis, crisis, everywhere.
Can Financial Markets Avoid Collapse?
Tag: Wall Street
Is Obama’s TR Rhetoric Just Talk?
In the same Kansas town where Teddy Roosevelt castigated his era’s financial speculators 101 years ago, President Barack Obama spoke to the concerns of America’s 99 percent, those who have struggled while the super-rich prospered. But is Obama’s new rhetoric…
Cleansing Wall Street of Blame
The Right’s giant megaphone is reversing the narrative for today’s crisis: It is Barack Obama’s “food-stamp presidency” and the Occupy demands for fairness that are at fault for the hard economic times, not Wall Street’s unregulated greed increasing the need for food stamps…
As Wall Street’s Universe Collapses
Wall Street has created a “moral” universe that elevates short-term profits into the ultimate “good,” rewarding those who can achieve them with massive bonuses. The movie Margin Call follows these players when their universe collapses, writes Lisa Pease.
Punching a Hole in the Bubbles
In America, bubbles come in two forms: how Wall Street insiders suck in a sucker’s money before the speculative bubble pops and how those same scam artists stay inside a protective bubble to spare themselves from the fallout. In this…
Occupying the Heart of the Beast
Finally, a truly “populist” movement not like the Tea Party funded by billionaires to serve the interests of billionaires has arisen in America to challenge the growing economic inequities in U.S. society. Phil Rockstroh found his time with the “99…
How the Rich Won the Class War
Over the past several decades, the Right has convinced millions of Americans that Government is the source of all problems, that Corporations must have near-total freedom, and that the Rich must enjoy low taxes. The consequence has been a devastated…
Skating to the Financial Abyss
Even as another potential Great Depression looms, the U.S. political/media system seems incapable of addressing the crisis and devising coherent answers. Instead, the old partisan and lobbying games dominate the political world and obsession with trivia commands the news media’s…
Wall Street Was ‘Too Big to Jail’
HBO’s new docudrama on the Wall Street crash of 2008 details the frantic government efforts to stabilize the banking system and stave off a global depression, but the program misses the systemic fraud and other crimes that were at the…
Perp-Walking the Wrong Banker?
The sexual-assault arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn touched off a frenzy of media coverage in New York, including repeated showing of the French banker looking disheveled in handcuffs. But Danny Schechter pines for the day when the…