Iraq War Vet: “We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us”

Wednesday 07 April 2010 by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Report On Monday, April 5, Wikileaks.org posted video footage from Iraq, taken from a US military Apache helicopter in July 2007 as soldiers aboard it killed 12 people and wounded two children. The dead included two employees of the [...]

April 18th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »

False Profits

by: Leslie Thatcher
hat tip: t r u t h o u t

(Photo: Polipoint Press)

False Profits: Recovering From the Bubble Economy
By Dean Baker
PoliPoint Press, 2010

He who feels punctured must once have been a bubble.

- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 6th century BCE

As the nation struggled to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the people who got us here are desperately working to rewrite history. The basic story of this economic collapse is very simple. The Federal Reserve Board, guided by its revered chairman, Alan Greenspan, allowed an $8 trillion housing bubble to grow unchecked.

- Dean Baker’s “False Profits”

The delicious double-entendre of Dean Baker’s most recent title is enhanced by the book’s cover photo of a trio of false prophets, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and Henry (Hank) Paulson, all of whom are thoroughly excoriated within the book’s pages for their responsibility in feeding, prolonging, misdiagnosing and incorrectly responding to the 2007-2009 financial meltdown and the associated economic collapse. However, the book also chronicles the loss of $8 trillion of housing “wealth,” $1.4 trillion in annual demand, whatever financial security the vast majority of baby-boomers ever had, “increases” in homeownership rates and any other widespread economic gains associated to the post-2000 period.

Truthout has published Dean Baker’s columns about net job losses for 2000-2010, a decade that also saw a 26 percent drop in the stock market, the elimination of the $236 billion federal budget surplus President Bush inherited and its transformation into a record deficit and the overall deliquesce of any societal and most people’s personal economic “profits.”

February 7th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »