By Kasia Anderson —He's spent some good screen time studying the ways of Wall Street, but what does director Oliver Stone have to say about the Occupy Wall Street movement?
An emergency economic summit in Europe brought direly needed relief to Greece and neighboring nations, but will it last—and is it enough? Meanwhile, on our side of the planet, a report from Congress showed that the richest 1 percent of Americans more than doubled their share of national income in the last 30 years.
Until the 2012 presidential race moves past the infighting stage and the field narrows enough for would-be contenders to start picking on foes from across the aisle, we’re going to see the likes of this little parodic number by Jon Huntsman’s daughters skewering Herman Cain’s recent, ineffable campaign ad.
In this special Web-exclusive Halloween edition of Truthdig Radio, Howie Stier interviews art historian Paul Koudounaris, whose macabre new book explores fetishistic tombs and morbid monuments around the world.
The multimedia collaboration between director Oliver Stone and one-man political think tank Tariq Ali began not three years ago, but their creative mind-meld has already produced three projects spanning multiple continents and eras. Stone gave a talk in Los Angeles last weekend … (more)
“I keep an eye on the love life of the Colorado beetle and work against it,” Samuel Beckett writes in this second volume of his collected letters. “… That is to say by throwing the parents into my neighbor’s garden and burning the eggs. If only someone had done that for me!”
Social movements come with their own unique aesthetics, often drawing raw material from past protest traditions and performances, as well as from the font of plenty that is popular culture, and repurposing it in inventive new ways for the cause at hand. The movement that began with Occupy Wall Street has brought a bounty … (more)
While Occupy Wall Street and similar movements around the country take aim at financial institutions and their political cronies for taking the country into recession, let’s not forget those at the very bottom who were victims of economic depression long before the current collapse.
Before Paul Ryan delivers another lecture on the “fatal conceit of liberalism,” he ought to examine his own silly conceit: that he and others like him represent the hardworking majority, when he was merely born at the top.
On cable TV, “national news” is a euphemism for New York- and D.C.-focused content engineered primarily by a closed ecosystem of East Coast elites who believe the only things that matter are Manhattan gossip and Beltway games.
The hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party claim to despise the redistribution of wealth, but secretly they love it—as long as the process involves depriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other way around.
Looking at the newspapers this morning, I noticed that Tom Brokaw was making a speech in New York. It made me wonder if he was working on a sequel to his books on "The Greatest Generation." This one might be called "The Worst Generation." Us.
It is class warfare. But it was begun not by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly but rather the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy.
These are daunting numbers, almost as unfathomable as that looming 7 billion figure. But there’s no need to turn away because the scope of the problem is simply too large to comprehend.
Some 400 Occupy Wall Street protesters got into costume Friday, but the occasion wasn’t an early observance of the beloved pagan-inspired holiday that is Halloween. Rather, the messengers from among OWS ranks paid visits to big bank headquarters in Manhattan to deliver mail from Americans ... (more)
Do the mayors of, say, Oakland, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles have each other on speed dial this week? That’s kind of what it looked like, with tensions between those city leaders, aided by creative interpretations of public property regulations, and their respective Occupy movements ratcheting up this week. Updated
Tuesday night’s showdown between Occupy Oakland protesters and police, during which former Marine and two-tour Iraq vet Scott Olsen was critically injured, has spurred movement organizers and local activists to put out a call for a strike across Oakland on Nov. 2.
One might think that after the ecological apocalypse that British Petroleum visited upon the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding environs with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, BP might harbor a healthy sense of shame about returning to that scarred region. Yeah, no.
Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff’s got nothing but time as he serves his sentence in a North Carolina prison for defrauding a vast network of clients out of billions of dollars, and he’s apparently not averse to spending some of it sitting for interviews that aren’t likely to help his standing much.
This week’s European crisis summit in Brussels has produced an agreement in an effort to mitigate what was looking like an inevitable economic catastrophe, judging by the dire situation in Greece and elsewhere in the eurozone. By Thursday, international markets were registering the results.
Despite showing support early on for the protesters occupying their lawn, the people who run L.A. City Hall have decided the occupation “cannot continue indefinitely.” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa complained to the Los Angeles Times, “The lawn is dead, our sprinklers aren’t working … our trees are without water.” (more)
‘Left, Right & Center’: Relief in Europe, Inequality in America
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