If the "massive and complex challenges" facing one of the world's most finite natural resources are not resolved soon, the future looks grimly devastating: scarcities, pollution, droughts, floods, desertification and diseases. "We share the frustration and despair of all those affected, and we share the concern with many over the fact that our leaders did not resume their responsibilities (at the last failed Climate Change conference) in Copenhagen." Tags: water Climate ...

Democracy Now: It’s the economy, stupid. As President Obama faces devastating unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates, with no end in sight, he’s begun a ten-week campaign around the country leading up the November midterm elections. We speak with John Nichols, the Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine, who says Obama should borrow a page from FDR and call for economic justice. Tags: Obama Illusion Unemployment foreclosures ...

Democracy Now: We speak with veteran journalist and Truthdig editor, Robert Scheer, about his latest book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. Tags: Economic Death Squad Economic Reform Obama Illusion

If religion can be turned on its head like this - where the Invisible Hand of Wall Street (invisible to the Justice Department, at least) is elevated to a faux-Deist moral philosophy - is it any surprise that economic orthodoxy and formerly progressive tax policy are succumbing? The rentiers are fighting back - against the Enlightenment, against Progressive Era tax policy, and against hopes for U.S. economic recovery. Given today's florid emotionalism when it comes to discussing Wall Street finances, it hardly is surprising that the An...

In sum, Obama’s proposed corporate tax cuts (1) won’t generate more jobs because they don’t put any cash in worker’s pockets; (2) will subsidize companies to cut even more jobs; and (3) will cost $130 billion — money that could better be spent helping states and locales avoid laying off thousands of teachers, fire fighters, and police. So why is Obama proposing them? To put Republicans in a bind. If they refuse to go along he can justifiably say they have no agenda other than obstruction. After all, the only thing they’ve been arguing...

Government of India and World Bank procurement officials consistently failed to identify the business practices that were badges of collusion. The bidders’ view of the risk of detection of sanction by the procurement officials of bid rigging schemes (close to zero) proved accurate. When the frauds don’t fear the regulators and prosecutors it’s a sure sign that “control fraud” is common. Which brings us to Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank – the nation’s largest and, one fervently hopes, worst bank. Consider these passages from the New York Tim...

The face of day labor appears to be changing, with more women, non-Latinos and former white-collar workers taking up manual labor. Amid continued high joblessness, employers say they are seeing more workers at curbside hiring sites, or seeking work through less traditional routes such as Craigslist, who before the downturn might have had full-time jobs. Many lost desk jobs in the hard-hit auto, construction and financial industries. Some see manual labor such as housecleaning or hauling debris, where people are hired and paid per die...

A Republican political operative in Arizona has taken the third-party to the third degree: he's now recruiting candidates to run on the Green Party ticket in an effort to dilute support for statewide Democratic candidates. And he's recruiting candidates on the street -- candidates with no political experience whatsoever. "Benjamin Pearcy, a candidate for statewide office in Arizona, lists his campaign office as a Starbucks," the New York Times' Mark Lacey reports. "The small business he refers to in his campaign statement is him strum...

Turns out politics, for all its focus on the gloomy economy, is a recession-proof industry. This year's volatile election is bursting with money, setting fundraising and spending records in a high-stakes struggle for control of Congress amid looser but still fuzzy campaign finance rules. Based on the latest financial reports, House and Senate candidates in this election cycle raised nearly $1.2 billion, well ahead of the pace for contests in 2008, 2006 and 2004. Races for governor in 37 states - more than half of those for open seat...

Obama’s pitiful $30 billion (or is it $50 billion?) offered as infrastructure spending is a ridiculous move if it is meant to be evidence that he is attempting to do anything to stimulate the economy. Such spending would need to be higher by at least a factor of ten before it begins to even be worth putting into a Krugman-style analysis for its possible effect on reducing unemployment. Recall that in the previous analysis, Krugman worked from the assumption that it takes $300 billion of GDP growth in a year to reduce unemployment by 1%...

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan is asking for 2,000 more soldiers to join the 140,000-strong international force here, NATO officials said Monday. It was unclear how many would be Americans. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the NATO-led command had been asking for the troops even before Gen. David Petraeus assumed command here in July. Petraeus recently renewed that request with the NATO command in Brussels. The alliance has had trouble raising more troops for the war effort, with at least 450 t...

Business-as-usual activism and politics will guarantee catastrophic climate change, more environmental disasters like what we are witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico and continued corporate depravity. Wherever people stand in the debate on the use of violence versus nonviolence, Jensen's sense of urgency at this moment in history is unarguable. So, where do you stand? "I say, do something," Jensen urges. "The big dividing line is not between those who advocate resistance through any means necessary and those who don't. It's not even betw...

Days after the United States officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad yesterday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens. It was the first exchange of fire involving US troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting. The a...

The security company Blackwater Worldwide formed a network of 30 shell companies and subsidiaries to try to get millions of dollars in government business after the company faced strong criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, The New York Times reported. The newspaper said Friday that it was unclear how many of the created companies got American contracts but that at least three of them obtained work with the U.S. military and the CIA. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has asked the Justice Department ...

As the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected. Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opport...

While the Middle East -- indeed, the world -- is riveted by the on-going crisis around Iran’s nuclear program, the most immediate danger of a war may be on Israel’s border with Lebanon: “Exceptionally quiet and uniquely dangerous” was how the Independent’s Robert Fisk described it last month. That quiet was broken Aug. 3 when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) got into a firefight over tree trimming that ended up killing one Israeli and three Lebanese. Both sides backed off, but events over the past s...

Real News Network interview: INVERTED TOTALITARIANISM & COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM -- Chris Hedges has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Tags: Economic Justice ...

The practice, called “quote stuffing,” happens when stock exchanges are flooded and, at times, clogged by huge numbers of buy and sell orders—orders that are ultimately cancelled. The SEC is investigating whether quote stuffing may have been one of the causes of the May 6 “flash crash,” when the Dow briefly plunged 1,000 points in a matter of minutes. To get an idea of the volume of quotes produced by high-speed, computerized trading, consider this: During the day of the flash crash, “there were hundreds of times that a single stock h...

There are four main charges against the so-called “Maestro”: One—Irresponsible Market Liquidity, Which Created Rampant Moral Hazard: The Accused was instrumental in creating the pernicious policy mentality of “providing markets with necessary liquidity”—essentially, throwing money at every problem. This first started within days of Greenspan’s assuming the role of American central banker: The frenzy that caused the stock market crash of October 1987 was doused by Greenspan’s pledge to provide “all necessary liquidity, should the ...

Pakistan's Taliban threatened to launch attacks in the United States and Europe "very soon." The warning came after a renewal of militant violence in Pakistan this week that is piling pressure on a U.S.-backed government overwhelmed by the flood crisis. "We will launch attacks in America and Europe very soon," Qari Hussain Mehsud, a senior Pakistani Taliban leader and mentor of suicide bombers, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location." Tags: af-pak

By James Kwak I know you can see Simon somewhere virtually every week (OK, that’s a big exaggeration, but you know what I mean), but I wanted to let you know about a couple of talks I’ll be giving. ...

From our partners at The Agonist Mary Dejevsky | Moscow | Sept 7 The Independent – Russia is positioning itself for active reinvolvement in Afghanistan, the country’s Foreign Minister indi...

Stacy Summary: Max Keiser on the middle class. h/t @Mirrormirror

My wife, a labor economist, is upset with NPR's "The Take Away" (and many other news programs) for reinforcing the myth that somehow the unemployed are to blame for not having a job. We all should be angry as w...

Stacy Summary: As Goldman is involved, they’ll probably never have to. Greek deals hidden from EU probed as 400% yield gap shows doubt

There's a difference between being paranoid and being suspicious. Paranoia is mental disturbance; suspicion is a rational deduction. For example, if you suspect that America's economy, politics, government...

Imagine you’re legendary business guru Jim Collins. Decade ago Good to Great and Built to Last made him the new Peter Drucker. He’s a guy USAToday says would rather be rock-climbing than helping companies learn...

Bloomberg -- Roubini Says Stimulus Will Sap Second-Half U.S. Growth (Click for Video [5:05])   Bloomberg --  Nouriel Roubini, chairman and co-founder of Roubini Global Economics LLC, talks about the outl...

“Burn a Koran Day” is drawing fire from all over the world. But who is the preacher behind this monstrosity? A man named Terry Jones, and as Mike Papantonio points out on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, ...

From our partners at Newshoggers.com By Steve Hynd A bit of news from Danger Room that should give you pause. An untold number of active-duty troops and recent veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are ...

"So far, I've lost eight women from my shelter," Hina Jilani says. "One went out for a job in town, she left our shelter, got on a bus – and was gunned down by her brother. Her name was Shagoft...

Town Square: Author Robert Wright outlines possible solutions on how to fix the economy (Other)

Daily Rant: The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur explains why mothers and fathers need to step up to help their children succeed in school. (Other)

According to researchers at Princeton University, a person is happy making $75,000 in annual income. Author Tony Schwartz explains why making more or less doesn’t cut it. (Other)

Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network and former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin discuss the results from the latest NBC News/ WSJ poll and why Americans aren’t condiment in the government’s handling...

By James Kwak On my way to and from New Haven, I listen to podcasts, including a lot of TED Talks. Today I listened to a talk by Esther Duflo, the recent winner of the Clark Medal (top economist under forty), f...

From our partners at The Agonist Pepe Escobar | Sept 7 Asia Times – Ten years ago, while the Taliban were filling their coffers with taxes from the world’s largest smuggling ring, a reincarnati...

Five years after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – a natural disaster with unnatural responses – led to the death of an estimated 1,800 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of others, the lesso...

Five years after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – a natural disaster with unnatural responses – led to the death of an estimated 1,800 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of others, the lesso...

The number of “dead zones” in U.S. coastal waters — where oxygen is so depleted that it can harm marine life — has soared 30-fold over the last half century, according to a new White Ho...

Israel: A refuge or a colonial project? Pt.3 Israeli historian Tom Segev

Last week, a Houston-based group called Texas Tea Party Patriots PAC, alerted the Federal Election Commission that it intends to raise unlimited sums of money, without following any contribution size limits.

The only way to fix the economy is to give billionaires more money. After that, we must pray to these billionaires and hope that they answer our prayers and pass that money onto the rest of us. Sounds crazy, ri...

President Barack Obama’s proposal to spur the ailing U.S. economy by investing in transportation infrastructure is an effort to restart a stalled and chaotic process detailed by the Center for Public I...

This story originally appeared at TomDispatch. [Note to TomDispatch readers: We’re back, well rested and ready to roll.  As of today, the offer of a signed Chalmers Johnson book in return for a contribution to...

By Janine Wedel and Linda Keenan This is the fifth of a Shadow Elite series, investigating the game-changing effects of government contracting on the most vital government functions. As an outrage-genera...

[Note to TomDispatch readers: We’re back, well rested and ready to roll.  As of today, the offer of a signed Chalmers Johnson book in return for a contribution to this site is over, but I wanted to ...

Stacy Summary: We look at the scandals of “the weather in healthcare”, virtual girlfriends and illegal immigrants giving up on the US economy. In the second half of the show, Max talks to independen...