Walden Bello: Bin Laden's Game‏

"But one cannot escape the fact that he succeeded in unleashing a chain of events that led to his nemesis, the United States, becoming a diminished power compared to what it was in the halcyon days of unilateralism at the end of the last century. In the duel between Washington and Osama, the latter was, at the time of his death, far ahead on points."

http://www.counterpunch.com/bello05122011.html

Mike Whitney: A Short History of Bubblenomics‏

"It might surprise you to know that the Fed has become so skilled at bubble-making, that the condition of the underlying economy doesn't really matter any more. By fixing interest rates below the rate of inflation and attaching a liquidity-tailpipe to the stock market (QE2), the Fed has been able engineer a boom in equities, while the so-called "real" economy languishes in a near-Depression. In fact, consumer credit is actually shrinking (excluding student loans) while margin debt (the amount that speculators borrow to buy stocks) continues to soar. This is an astonishing development. The Fed has created a bifurcated market where bankers and hedge fund managers are able to rake in billions off their gaming operations while 300 million working Americans remain mired in debt."

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05062011.html

Patrick Cockburn: Portrait of the US Press in the Hour of Its Fall‏

"The media is often credited or blamed for an independent sceptical spirit which it seldom shows in reality. In wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan effective media criticism has tended to follow rather than precede public opinion. Even then it usually needs important politicians to be standing on the same side of the fence. The Afghan war is unpopular in the US, but there is no effective anti-war movement because the Democrats, once so critical of the Iraq war, are now in the White House and, if Obama goes on being presented with targets as vulnerable as Trump, are likely to stay there."

http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick05092011.html

Andy Kroll: The McJobs Economy‏

"Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald's was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices."

http://www.counterpunch.org/kroll05092011.html

Robert Lipsyte: Why the NFL Would Do Us a Favor by Canceling the Upcoming Season‏

"It's not exactly a fair fight, which of course is why unions were invented. It's estimated that half of the NFL owners are worth at least a billion dollars each, while slightly less than half of NFL players make more than a million dollars annually. The average player's career lasts fewer than four years."

http://www.counterpunch.com/lipsyte05102011.html

Pierre Rimbert: Can France's Left Thinkers Escape the Ivory Tower?‏

"Back in the 1930s, Paul Nizan depicted academia as conservative and filled with “watchdogs”. Then in the radical 1960s and 1970s, human sciences, social critiques and revolution seemed to go together. Their connection has enlivened an institution riven with tensions, designed to back the bourgeois regime but also capable of nurturing revolutionaries. This contradiction may explain why critical publishing is both fascinated and repulsed by academia and lecturers or researchers. The stereotype of the independent publisher suggests a 30-40 year-old who has begun, or even finished, a doctorate in human sciences but hasn’t found a research or higher education post that allows him or her to combine academic work with anti-Establishment action. Though this picture fails to take account of the diversity of the new “militant” publishers, it captures their conflicted environment, falling somewhere between the scholarly and the political."

http://www.counterpunch.com/rimbert05112011.html

Are We Still on an Imperial Planet?

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Are We Still on an Imperial Planet?

TomDispatch‏

"What if this isn’t an imperial planet any more? What if, from resource scarcity to global warming, humanity is nudging up against previously unimagined limits on unbridled growth? From at least the seventeenth century on, successive great powers have struggled over the control of vast realms of a globe in which expansion seemed eternally the name of the game. For centuries, one or more great powers were always on hand when the previous great imperial power or set of powers faltered.

In the wake of World War II, with the collapse of the Japanese and German empires, only two powers worthy of the name were left, each so mighty that together they would be called “superpowers.” After 1991, only one remained, so seemingly powerful that it was sometimes termed a “hyperpower” and many believed it had inherited the Earth.

What if, in fact, the U.S. was indeed the last empire? What if a world of rivalries, on a planet heading into resource scarcity, turned out to be less than imperial in nature? Or what if -- and think of me as a devil’s advocate here -- this turned out not to be an imperial world of bitter rivalries at all, but in the face of unexpectedly tough times, a partnership planet?"

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175386/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_are_we_still_on_an_imperial_planet/#more