The economic crisis in Cyprus began with a depressingly familiar story: bank gambles on risky debt, loses its bet, goes bust and needs a bailout. It very quickly took what was to me a bewildering turn: Instead of a central bank cranking up the money printing machines until smoke billowed from them creating sufficient reserves to keep the banks going, the so-called troika of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank had another idea: take money from individual depositors.

Tonight’s Occupy Supply Skill Share will feature a discussion on Finance in the Occupy Movement with FDL’s Edwin M. Walker. Ed will go over some of the best practices from different Occupy Finance Working Groups and some simple ideas your Occupation can use to start creating revenue streams to become more self sufficient.

Palast takes us on a fast paced, kick ass narrative that globe trots from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, to the coast of Alaska, to New Orleans, to Liberia, to Azerbaijan, to Fukushima, Japan. It’s the real-deal investigative reporting of corporate irresponsibility. As Greg Palast said himself in an interview,” This book is a story of the 1%. It’s why we occupy.”

The country is in the grip of a great financial crisis. People face record unemployment.Wall Street executives are described as geniuses who are fully worth the exorbitant salaries and bonuses they are paid, but those salaries are coming out of money that should rightfully go to their shareholders.

The object of this diary is twofold: a) to show that Dylan Ratigan at MSNBC does in fact cover the issues of the banking and fraudclosure travesty; and b) to simplify some of this for financial neophytes like myself.