Michael Blim teaches anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He writes about equality and global justice and is the author of Economy and Equality: The Global Challenge (2005). Email: [email protected]
by Michael Blim Call them aftershocks: the sovereign debt crises and the return to zero growth and recession in developed countries, along with the current world stock market “correction.” Add in the wry spectacle of the flight to U.S. bonds as doubt that America will ever pay off its debts, and you have the rather…
by Michael Blim The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else’s goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. They control the people through the people’s own money. –Louis Brandeis, Other…
by Michael Blim Ben Bernanke met the press this past week with no good news to report. Rather he admitted that “we don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting. Some of the headwinds that have been concerning us, like the weakness in the financial sector, problems in the…
Michael Blim You know things have once again reached a pretty pass when you start recalling Seinfeld episodes in the midst of the morning newspaper read. By the end of this past week, it seemed to me that a goodly part of America had become Seinfeld’s Bizarro World, a place where down was up, left…
by Michael Blim For America’s liberals, these are soul-trying times. The romance with Barack Obama is over. They have discovered, as one pundit in the Washington Post put it, there he is an Eisenhower Republican. In fairness to Obama, he never promised to be anything else, as perceptive commentators before the election noted. Yet, as…
by Michael Blim “…When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating…
by Michael Blim With each stone thrown, each Molotov cocktail hurled from one side of Cairo’s Liberation Square to another, an Egyptian revolution appears being thrown further away. The Square is a symbolic space, first occupied by people envisioning revolutionary change, and now made a marker in a game of competition among elites for governance.…
Michael Blim Suddenly the blue below turns to white and gray. We pass over the last of Lake Michigan and begin our descent into O’Hare, crisscrossing the orderly Chicago street grid, former corn farm townships since divided into smaller squares still, each comprising a family or two. Past the countless brown lawns, now covered with…
by Michael Blim I get The Nation magazine whether I want to or not. Years ago, a close friend and I found ourselves separated by the geography of new jobs and career moves, and so we unknowingly gave each Nation subscriptions as going-away gifts. For me, it’s one of those things that I’ll read because…
by Michael Blim Think back to your first class in American history. It could have been in high school or in college. The opening line was probably the same: “Half of American history occurred before the Revolution. If you want to understand American history, you need to understand the colonial period.” Or words to that…
by Michael Blim The Democrats are running scared and triaging their Congressional majorities for salvageable seats, according to the Sunday New York Times lead story. The President may be confined to quarters, but they are going to impress Michele Obama, last seen by photo yesterday with two really nice heads of fennel fresh from the…
by Michael Blim The scene is a country cottage about three weeks ago. Family are over for a birthday celebration. Three little nephews are running everywhere with their mother and my sister’s adolescent dog, a Golden Retriever version of Scooby Doo, running after them. Their young adult cousins are absorbed in checking their iPhones and…
by Michael Blim A bag of books for two bucks, said the sign. Deflation has hit the little Connecticut country library used book sales I haunt each summer. Imagine what you can stuff into a big supermarket paper bag, and then cross-rough it with a run of terrific books – a book of Giotto’s frescoes,…
Michael Blim The word tonight, Sunday, May 2, is that Greece is saved, even though Athens has been burning for weeks with non-stop strikes and street confrontations. Greece will not go broke this year, even though many of her citizens may. Greece, the IMF, and the EU have finally agreed to a bailout. Another breathless…
by Michael Blim Question: The Barack Obama Administration in its first year has been characterized by fecklessness inexperience incompetence all of the above none of the above My friends, as it used to be said in Chicago, vote early and often. For my part, I’ll vote number 4. After all, incompetence and inexperience can be…
by Michael Blim And so the speech, the “just war” speech is given. Or rather “the cold war” speech is given. President Obama’s Oslo Nobel acceptance speech, that is. It could have been given by John F. Kennedy. It could have been written by Kennedy’s Sorenson, Goodwin, or Schlesinger, filled as it was with allusions…
Michael Blim As the battle of the bedpans drags on, consuming what little is left of the short attention span of the Congress, Democrats are taking up financial reform. Representative Barney Frank is responsible for legislation in the House and Senator Christopher Dodd in the Senate. Neither of them is exactly presenting a profile in…
by Michael Blim Now begins the end game of the health care reform legislation. The President has spoken, and Senator Baucus has finally made his play. The results could not be more disappointing. These latest contributions to the health debate leave millions of people uncovered, and everyone else save people on Medicare and Medicaid and…
Michael Blim So the Prez says we’re in a wee-wee period. Well, I am in a pee’d off period. Looks like nobody is going to rid me of my private health insurance. The public option looks dead. I’m lucky. I have something I wish to be rid of. At least 46 million Americans don’t have…
Michael Blim Heard enough about those “little green shoots” of economic recovery? Not finding them in your backyard garden? Not popping up in between the cement slabs on your stoop? Perhaps this is because the only place the green is sprouting is on Wall Street and on the balance sheets of several mega-banks. The Dow…