The Economics of Inequality

HOW AIPAC BECAME KING OF THE HILL — The new issue of CounterPunch magazine is hot off the press and it’s an explosive edition, headlined by Jeffrey Blankfort’s searing history of the Israeli lobby in American politics. Blankfort charts the rise of AIPAC, how it craftily avoided having to register as a foreign agent, how it has played presidents against congresses, and congresses against presidential administrations. He details in stark terms how any efforts to disentangle US foreign policy from Israeli interests, from Eisenhower to LBJ to George H.W. Bush, have been ruthlessly crushed. Darwin Bond-Graham writes a scathing profile of Motorola Solutions, a secretive spin-off of the tech giant which has quietly become the biggest corporate player in surveillance technology systems. Lee Ballinger takes readers deep into the merciless machinery of the US criminal justice system from the perspective of jurors. Ruth Fowler returns with a typically sharp class and race-oriented critique of the adoption craze currently trending among upper class white families. The analytical mind of John White, an Irish physicist and math whiz, puts the outrageous levels of economic inequality into sobering perspective. Kim Nicolini writes a trenchant assessment of how this year’s crop of Hollywood films portrayed the new economy of greed. Jeffrey St. Clair unveils his list of the best books of 2013, as well as a column on how the coal industry is running roughshod over West Virginia. JoAnn Wypijewski contributes a darkly comic account of being stranded in one of the nation’s most loathsome cities. Mike Whitney laments the death of the American consumer. Chris Floyd zeroes in on the most iconic (and chilling) moment of the Iraq war and Kristin Kolb serves up a measure of hope from the streets of Seattle.