Progressives’ concerns about the climate crisis typically bring our gaze to the north – struggling polar bears and melting ice caps. But in Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti makes the case that we’re missing the real story to the south – where our addiction to dirty fuels is introducing a new level of disorder in places that are already struggling and unstable.

Age of Greed offers a long survey of the rise of regulation liberated financial markets and actors. The historical sweep is artful and well presented. The text argues for a return to more caged financial markets and actors. The steady and mounting pressures on the American middle class are correlated with the rising excesses, fortunes and missteps of financiers and their vehicles.

Why is it that Republican job creation strategies never seem to have anything to do with creating jobs? Just remember one simple rule, and it will all make perfect sense.

Laws and rules are for the little people. Especially the ones without guns.

Midway through his presidency, when Bob Woodward about how history would judge the War in Iraq, George W. Bush responded: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Instead, in a 2006 essay in Rolling Stone, the prominent historian Sean Wilentz argued that a substantial majority of U.S. historians already considered the Bush administration to be a “failure” (81% in a poll conducted by the History News Network). Wilentz predicted that Bush would “be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”

What do shooting sprees and massive oil rig blowouts have in common?

At FDL News, David Dayen covers an article on Elizabeth Warren in which she argues, correctly, that if the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been up and running years ago, much of the banking/mortgage fraud could/would have been prevented.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But there’s something missing from the polite Ms. Warren’s telling.

Jasmine Farrier’s Congressional Ambivalence tackles a subject that is both classic and timely: delegation of policy choices to the President and the executive branch. Farrier analyzes delegation to the executive on military base closures, trade policy (“fast track”), and the “War on Terror”—the PATRIOT ACT, Iraq policy, Guantanamo, and surveillance wiretaps. She finds a recurring theme of ambivalence: expressions of reluctance before Congress cedes power, expressions of regret after the fact. But Farrier suggests that Congress nonetheless rarely reclaims power once it has been ceded to the executive, a point illustrated perfectly by the PATRIOT act.

I got a call yesterday from a telecommunications lobbyist who had an interesting and very plausible theory regarding the handling of the decision on net neutrality: What if Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, is simply running out the clock?

The New York Times turns over valuable op-ed space to a former Bush OMB official who uses it to obscure it was his and OMB’s job to oversee how effective Interior and Minerals Management Service (MMS) were in promoting and regulating offshore oil drilling.