Tom Janssen, The Netherlands The political and financial turmoil continues in Greece. Bigtime. The context: yet another vote on a tough austerity plan. The political setting: the “mother of all strikes” before the vote. The Christian Science Monitor reports: Greece is today racked with protest and violent episodes in what is being called the “mother of all strikes,” ahead of another vote...

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Aislin, The Montreal Gazette This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Here is live blogging of tonight’s CNN Western Republican Leadership Conference debate in Las Vegas, NV. This debate could have more serious consequences than others. Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain is surging in the polls and even the front runner in several but some analysts contend he is “strolling for President” — not taking seriously enough the need for solid policy positions...

NEW YORK CITY. — In these days of globalization it certainly fits our times: Occupy Wall Street has now gone global. Pat Bagley, Salt Lake TribuneWelcome to New York, a city with more stoops than a talk show host convention. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” say the lyrics of “New York, New York,” and Occupy Wall Street has made it here. Local newspapers are crammed with long stories...

My secretly held view (I suppose I was hedging my blogger bets) that the Occupy Wall Street protests wouldn’t last a month was a product of the pessimism that has chased my life-long optimism about all things American. I am now happy to admit that I was wrong, perhaps very wrong, and you better believe that I’m paying attention when a friend who is a wise old head of some 70 years and is cynicism...

THE HAYMARKET MASSACRE There is an historic precedent for the Occupy Wall Street movement — the labor strikes of 1877 and 1886. While thuggish police and troops made those late 19th century strikes as violent as Occupy Wall Street protests have been peaceful, the two sets of events are inextricably bound by the same dynamic: In 1877 and 1886, the hundreds of thousands of striking workers were revolting...

Police arrested 175 Occupy Chicago protesters in Grant Park yesterday, recalling not only the night Barack Obama was elected but one when I was tear-gassed there 43 years ago. [corrected: see comments] “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” the President-elect told 250,000 celebrants three years ago, “who still wonders if the dream...

Kap, La Vanguardia, Spain This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka visits Occupy Wall Street protesters in Manhattan's financial district accompanied by Writers Guild East President Michael Winship. Photo: Pat Ivers Occupy Wall Street Wins Labor’s Love by Michael Winship Early last Friday morning, as the Occupy Wall Street protesters were just uncurling from their sleeping bags, I went downtown for a walkthrough of their campsite at Zuccotti...

We may be at one of those moments when the whole world changes. Like 1848, 2011 may turn out to be a historic year for world governments. David Ignatius writes in Friday’s Washington Post that: What’s intriguing about the eruption of Occupy Wall Street is that it’s so similar to other populist movements that are demanding change in nearly every major region of the world. You can’t help but...

What is at the root of what’s wrong with our economy and our civil society? Weaving the issue of the U.S. death penalty into the global financial crisis, columnist Guido Rossi of Italy’s Il Sole 24 Ore is unequivocal: our system of ‘financial capitalism’ has slowly but surely eaten away at the fabric of society, which demands protecting the rights of not only the powerful and well-connected,...

Call it propaganda or call it delusion, but Tehran is crowing about not only predicting Occupy Wall Street and allied groups, but says it considers itself primarily responsible for all the unrest – Eastern and Western – since the Arab Spring began. So could it be that the protests which began in New York on September 17 and have now spread across the developed world reflect a yearning to reject...

Putin’s New Vision of “Eurasia” by John Daley Many western politicians have harbored deep suspicions of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Vladimorovich Putin since he first emerged on the Russian political stage in 1999. This is hardly surprising, given his KGB background, though those with longer historical memories will recall that Yuri Andropov came from the same organization and that the...

The Expanding Demonstrations of Occupy Wall Street: What Is The End-Game? by Robert A. Levine The spontaneous eruption of the demonstrations against Wall Street in New York and their spread around the country signals the depth of unhappiness and distress over the economy. The public also places the blame for the economic downturn squarely on the bankers and financiers. Heightening people’s anger is the fact...

Pampered Protesters by Michael Reagan The hordes of so-called “protesters” now polluting the streets of several U.S. cities, including New York, are sending confused messages about their grievances. The unemployed among them complain that the jobs available to them are beneath them. I guess that cancels out the old concept of starting in the mailroom and advancing step-by-step to the boardroom....

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Are we about to see protests like those in New York sweep the Western world? Columnist Alexander Hageluken of Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung urges his German readers to get up and take resort to the only method of effecting change left to the average person: mass protest. For the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Alexander Hageluken writes in part: To begin with, at first there were very few people occupying a park...

Is Steve Jobs and the success he engendered the perfect demonstration of how far off track the global financial system has gotten? According to columnist León Bendesky of Mexico’s La Jornada, innovation and creating new products that consitute progress requires the availablity of credit, an element of buisiness that banks have rejected in favor of sophisticated financial instruments that generate little...

By WALTER BRASCH Newspaper columnist Ann Coulter, spreading the lies of the extreme right wing, called the Occupy Wall Street protestors, “tattooed, body-pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun.” She claimed the protestors, now in the thousands in New York, are “directionless losers [who] pose for cameras while uttering random liberal clichés lacking any reason or...

Has Washington concocted a tale of Iranian terror in order to, a) divert the anger of the American people over the behavior of government leaders and financial officials, b) ruin Iran’s reputation among neighboring states, particularly with Saudi Arabia, c) divert the Arab Spring from following the example of the Iranian Revolution and, d) help Israel out of its current isolation? According to this news...

That Huffington Post headline was the lead for one of its many celebrity stories that I noticed this morning. I admit to perusing HuffPo a few times a week to give balance to my daily readings of various Internet news blogs. One savvy woman creatively used the free content from many talented writers to make herself a multi-millionaire – beyond what she had achieved through her earlier divorce proceedings....

After seeing that Occupy Wall Street protestors are organizing a hackathon, I googled to find out if the Tea Party had ever done such a thing and came up with predictable results. The fact that coders are getting involved to build tools around the protests suggests a level of sophistication and maturation around the movement that many are still failing to recognize. Simon Owens is a PR consultant and journalist....

Occupy Wall Street protests have been growing exponentially since the first demonstrators began filling Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan on September 17. The reasons are pretty obvious: * The overreaction of the NYPD to demonstrations marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1 got the attention of the mainstream news media, which had largely ignored the protests. There’s nothing like some indiscriminately...

Among other things, Republicans today are the party of the delusional. It’s courtship with Christianists and then the Tea Party in the quest for short-term gains took it ever further to the right — and sometimes completely out of right field — while ignoring the larger reality that mainstream voters wouldn’t by these brands of extremism. But a funny thing is happening on the way to...