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1 week ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
As a gap between billionaires and everybody else swells, a bipartisan project decades in the making, Jodi Dean, author and professor, considers if we are living through a change in the form of capitalism into what she terms “neofeudalism,” writing in Capital’s Grave (Verso Books, 2025).
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2 weeks ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
President Trump vows to “make America wealthy again” as he pursues a global trade policy that favors new, sweeping tariffs, a price hike on foreign-made goods arriving for sale in America. Invoking his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, he will impose a 10% tariff on all countries to begin April 5. Further, the U.S. president will impose an individualized reciprocal higher tariff on the countries with which the United States has the largest trade deficits.
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4 weeks ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
There is growing opposition to the Trump administration’s bid to radically slash federal spending and employment. We turn to Carolina Martinez, who joined the California Association for Micro Enterprise Opportunity (CAMEO) Network as its CEO in 2018.
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Score a win for the federal court system over President Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency, and its head, billionaire GOP donor Elon Musk. On the evening of March 13, U.S. District Judge James Bedar in Maryland ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to reinstate its illegally fired probationary employees in a lawsuit that Democratic attorneys general in Washington, D.C., and 19 states general had filed against the Trump administration.
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1 month ago | 
znetwork.org | Seth Sandronsky
Can you feel it? There is a palpable dread that the ruling class, which owns financial and industrial capital, will continue to invest in destroying the Earth System. One example is the half-dozen biggest American banks: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance that the UN had supported since 2021, aiming to reach net-zero carbon emissions in 2050.
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Can you feel it? There is a palpable dread that the ruling class, which owns financial and industrial capital, will continue to invest in destroying the Earth System. One example is the half-dozen biggest American banks: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance that the UN had supported since 2021, aiming to reach net-zero carbon emissions in 2050.
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Mainstream punditry on the verbal clash between President Trump and Vice President Vance with Ukraine’s Zelensky over the business-political terms to end the U.S. proxy war with Russia bears a critical look. Consider David Brooks of the New York Times on the PBS Newshour. The volatile exchange before news media between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky “nauseated” Brooks. He contextualizes that White House spat in the modern history of American foreign policy.
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
In A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby (Monthly Review Press, 2024), author and English professor John Marsh unpacks culture and the economy over a century through the lens of Fitzgerald’s novel. As month two of the Trump 2.0 era careens forward, reading Marsh’s book is a wakeup call to systemic themes and trends.
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2 months ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
My parents, Alex and Sylvia, grew up as Jewish Americans in NYC during the Great Depression. The Bolshevik Revolution had in part shaped the tenor of that era, but socialism had been popular in the USA before this revolutionary change. In the depression era, FDR, responding to the working-class ferment that swept up folks like my mother and father, critiqued elites as economic royalists.
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2 months ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Randell Leach is the CEO of Beneficial State Bank, a regional community bank based in Oakland, CA. He and I conducted via email the interview below about the ongoing shutdown of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and what it means for both the financial sector and consumers. Seth Sandronsky: Generally, what do you think about the head of Office of Management and Budget calling for the CFPB to cease investigations and end the beginning of new rules?
