In the summer of 2011, 14 million Americans were unemployed and 16% of the country was officially poor. Student loan debt eclipsed credit card with over $1 trillion outstanding. One in five mortgages was underwater. Our leaders said the economy was recovering from the recession caused by the financial crisis, but their soothing pronouncements seemed to mock the evidence of our senses. On September 17, a group of activists converged on a small concrete plaza in lower Manhattan, determined to Occupy Wall Street.

Bill McKibben is one of the most effective and widely-respected writers on environmental issues today. Starting with The End of Nature in 1989, he’s written and published a long line of powerful works that make complex environmental issues accessible to a general audience.

FDL’s Brian Sonenstein is at Zuccotti Square livestreaming from #OccupyWallStreet. He’ll be broadcasting Naomi Klein’s speech, which is scheduled to start at 6pm tonight.

I’ll be at the 3pm demonstration at the White House today with Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and others, and I hope to be livestreaming the event. Cross your fingers they’re not vindictively arrested by the Park Police on behalf of a thin-skinned government.

The Aegean – the ancient Greek word for it meant “chief sea” – is, of course, the body of water Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles and the other Achaeans crossed in their assault on Troy. Odysseus sailed its waters at the outset of his journey home.

In other words, it was Aegean waves that washed the shores where Western history began. And it’s hard not to think of the ancient sea’s destruction at the hands of greed-soaked cyclopean giants of finance as, at the very least, a symbolic end of that history.

Folks, right now, we need to support Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry Call for Civil Disobedience on Tar Sands. We need to stop the ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands straight to Texas refineries…

Once US investors own Pakistan’s transportation, oil, electricity and steel industries, you can bet that virtually no cash flow from these industries will come back into Pakistan. Where will Pakistan’s social safety net be then?

Today’s book salon is unexpectedly timely. With this weekend’s startling Washington Post opinion piece by Judge Goldstone which seems to contradict the factual findings of the report of The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, controversy over “The Goldstone Report” on Operation Cast Lead is in the news once again.

Now that I have effectively turned this blog into Gawker, I might as well take one more crack at the well heeled aristocracy. Today’s jet setting celebrity is none other than BP Big Man Dr. Anthony Bryan Hayward, CCMI. Better known to us “small people” here in the States as Tony Hayward, CEO of the [...]

An editorial in Friday’s New York Times advocates for Hamid Karzai to hand over responsibility for economic redevelopment of Afghanistan from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Such a move would do nothing more than complete the rape of Afghanistan by the west and institute policies that Naomi Klein documented in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.