Kevin Doogan - Not all that is solid | New Humanist
Analysis of global foreign direct investment patterns also reveals two interesting and counter-intuitive trends. FDI expands during boom periods and contracts during recessions. To blame job losses on capital migration is questionable. Secondly the lion's share of overseas investment goes to the rich rather than [...]

Patrick Cockburn | The Case Against Tony Blair
The case against Tony Blair has revolved too much around his good faith and too little around his competence. The placards held up by protestors on Friday as he gave evidence should have read “sucker” and “dope” rather than “Bliar”.
Amateurs have a fluency denied to professionals because they [...]

Victor Grossman | Oskar Lafontaine and the Troubled German Left
While German politicians stared at the calendar, wondering nervously what the May 9th elections will bring in the biggest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, with its 18 million people, media attention suddenly switched to a personal drama within the party called Die Linke (The Left). A few [...]

Henry A. Giroux’s tribute to Howard Zinn | Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
"I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading James Baldwin, hearing William Kunstler and Stanley Aronowitz give talks, I caught a glimpse of what it meant to occupy such a fragile, contradictory [...]

ONE | Drop Haitian Debt
As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans. Sign the petition.

The Real News | Haiti and the ‘Devil’s Curse’
Excellent 12 minute news segment from the Real News on Haiti’s history of poverty, which includes a critical examination of how mainstream media is reporting this history without mentioning the impact that various foreign interventions has had on the country.

According to Peter Hallward, author of [...]

k-punk: Spectres of revolution
Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, is talking about "Revolution" :
"So let's be clear. I'm very far from saying that nothing can ever change. There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn't pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in [...]

Translating David Brooks - Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - True/Slant
A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and [...]

UK company law is terrorism’s friend | Prem Sikka | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Over the years, I have conducted many investigations into dubious corporate practices for newspapers, radio and television programmes and the trail always leads to tax havens, which hold no public information about the individuals behind those companies. The registered address is [...]