Amy Goodman

50-State, $25B Mortgage Settlement: Relief for Struggling Homeowners or Bailout for Big Banks?

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The U.S. Justice Department has unveiled a record mortgage settlement with the nation’s five largest banks to resolve claims over faulty foreclosures and mortgage practices that have indebted and displaced homeowners and sunk the nation’s economy. While the deal is being described as a $25 billion settlement, the banks will only have to pay out a total of $5 billion in cash between them. We speak to one of the settlement’s most prominent critics, Yves Smith, a longtime financial analyst who runs the popular finance website, “Naked Capitalism.”

Rx for Greece: A dose of Thanatos

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In this essay I argue that the rapid decline of Greece’s health system –and socioeconomic conditions throughout the nation- is proximately due to a fiscal/economic crisis that political and financial leaders have chosen to address by imposing draconian austerity measures upon most of the Greek people so as to: a.) protect the wealth, status and power of dominant elites, and b.) shield and resuscitate a moribund financial system. The distal cause of the deterioration of Greece’s health system, however, lies in reaching the earth’s physical limits to perpetual economic growth. Therefore, attempting to restart growth –the taken-for-granted panacea- is not working and the case of Greece demonstrates that “austerity” has pernicious costs.

A new approach to rating?

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Over the past few years, ever since the financial crisis began to unfold, there’s been sporadic talk in the media and among politicians of the need to reform the credit rating agencies. These agencies are doing a terrible job at forecasting their clients’ futures, and yet their ratings can have catastrophic effects on financial markets and on vast swathes of the world economy. Clearly something needs to change here.

Long live the hockey stick! Climate science fights back.
(Interview with Michael Mann)

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The propaganda technique of the repeated lie has been applied obsessively, against the “hockey stick,” the reconstruction of past temperatures on which Michael Mann and coworkers had been working from the 1990s.

It is rare in the history of science that a single piece of experimental evidence has been the object of so many attempts of demolition. Yet, all the serious reviews of the original data have basically confirmed the initial results. Being unsuccessful in demolishing the science, the attacks have moved against the scientist, Michael Mann himself, who has been subjected to an unbelievable denigration campaign, defamed, insulted, and even physically threatened.

Three major journals publish articles on limited world oil supply

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In the past month, three major peer-reviewed journals have published articles relating to limited world oil supply. This is significant, because articles in the mainstream press, such as Bloomberg in a recent article , seem to suggest that our oil problems are past. While the US oil supply situation may be a little better, the world supply situation is still very bad, and oil prices are still very high around the world.

Debate within Occupy about the Black Bloc

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On February 6, journalist and activist Chris Hedges wrote a searing article on the Black Bloc. Occupy theorist David Graeber wrote an open letter in reply.

The Black Bloc first appeared in the 80s and has been with demonstrations across the world ever since. The Black Bloc is a tactic, whereby black-clad individuals wearing hoods and masks appear in the midst of a demonstration to trash stores, break windows, etc.

Not involved with Occupy? It’s still important. Occupy is a wild card which could break through the stalemate on energy, climate and politics which bedevils the United States. It could also fizzle out. Or it could take a dark direction, as did some of the radical politics in the 1970s.

Occupy – free, educating theatre coming to a town near you

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We are seeing today the first widespread global popular uprising in history that shares a name-tag and an idea: an end to corporate greed, extreme socio-economic inequality and, by deduction, the capitalist system in general. This performance on the world stage is wrestling with notions of publoid space and the challenge of ‘scaling up’.

Transition and solutions – Feb 13

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– Portland, the US capital of alternative cool
– Are electric or hybrid cars a green marketing myth, or a real solution?
– Is This the Most Beautiful Street in the World?
– Voices from the previews of ‘In Transition 2.0′ (video)
– When the Transition Movement & the Community Rights Movement Start Collaborating, Watch Out!