Essays:

• Tom Engelhardt, Burning Questions: What Does Economic "Recovery" Mean on an Extreme Weather Planet?, TomDispatch.com, 17 February 2009.
  
  Tom Engelhardt, Is Economic Recovery Even Possible on a Planet Headed for Environmental Collapse?, AlterNet.org, 19 February 2009.


• Jason Bradford, How to Start a Farm with No Land and Little Money, The Oil Drum, 19 February 2009.
  
  Roger K., The Anti-Economy: How the Pursuit of Private Fortunes is Destroying Community Wealth, The Oil Drum, 21 February 2009.


• Tim Lambert, Washington Post rejects the concept of objective facts, Deltoid, 20 February 2009.
  
  Denialism depends upon ignorance, mistaken arguments and, ultimately, dishonesty. The denialism blog offers a useful guide to identifying cranks and crank thinking/arguments.
  
  Charles J. Hanley, Lord Nicholas Stern Paints Dire Climate Change Scenario: Mass Migrations, Extended World War, The Huffington Post, 21 February 2009.
  
  Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, London: H.M. Treasury, 30 October 2006.


• Justin Raimondo, The Joan Walsh Syndrome: Liberals jump on Obama's war wagon, AntiWar.com, 20 February 2009.


• Paul Krugman, Decade at Bernie’s, NYTimes.com, 15 February 2009.
  
  Interactive Bank Failure Map, TheStreet.com, 17 February 2009.
  
  Eileen A. J. Connelly, Paul Volcker: Economic Crisis May Be Worse Than Great Depression, The Huffington Post, 20 February 2009.
  
  Tunku Varadarajan, Nouriel Roubini Says Nationalizing the Banks Is the Market-Friendly Solution, WSJ.com, 20 February 2009.
  
  Paul B. Farrell, 10 Dirty Tricks Wall Street Con Artists Will Pull to Keep the Rip-offs Going, AlterNet.org, 22 February 2009.
  
  Edmund L. Andrews, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Mary Williams Walsh, U.S. Is Pressed to Add Billions to Bailouts, NYTimes.com, 23 February 2009.


• Michael Collins, "Us versus Them" - The Money Party, The Smirking Chimp, 25 March 2008.
  
  An interesting essay. But it is not a review of a similarly titled book:
  
  J. Peter Scoblic. U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservativism Has Undermined America's Security. Viking, April 2008. (publisher, Amazon.com.)


• Bryan Burrough, Death and Texas: Texas Has Had Its Day in the Political Sun, The Washington Post, 22 February 2009.
  
  While I sympathise with the author's relief/satisfaction at seeing the Bushies leave D.C., there are many things wrong with this essay.


• Paul Boutin, Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems, NYTimes.com, 18 February 2009.
  
  Lisa Katayama. Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan. Chronicle Books, April 2008 (publisher, Amazon.com).


• Joe Conason, There Was No GOP ‘Victory’, TruthDig.com, 18 February 2009.


• Pratap Chatterjee, The Military's Expanding Waistline: What Will Obama Do With KBR?, TomDispatch.com, 19 February 2009.
  
  Pratap Chatterjee, The military's expanding waistline, Salon.com, 23 February 2009.
  
  Chatterjee is the author of Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War, Nation Books, February 2009 (publisher, Amazon.com).
  
  Armand Biroonak, The Department of Defense Contractors, Institute for America's Future / OurFuture.org, 20 February 2009.
  
  Read more: Militarism article at Wikipedia; Andrew Basevich, The New American Militarism, Oxford University Press, 2005, 2006. (publisher, Amazon.com)


• Rick Perlstein, In which the blogger expresses a certain generosity toward conversatives, Institute for America's Future / OurFuture.org, 19 February 2009.
  
  Rick Perlstein, Queen of Fleece, Institute for America's Future / OurFuture.org, 03 February 2009.


• Soros sees no bottom for world financial "collapse", Reuters.com, 21 February 2009.
  
  Jennifer Ablan, Roubini: Nowhere near end of crisis, Reuters.com, 20 February 2009.


• I still find Glenn Greenwald one of the most insightful writers around:
  
  The right-wing nuts are as nutty as ever:
  Glenn Greenwald, Fox News "war games" the coming civil war, Salon.com, 22 February 2009.
  
  Fawning propagandists continue falling over themselves with gestures of submission:
  Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Lizza's People Magazine love letter to Rahm Emanuel, Salon.com, 23 February 2009.
  
  And the Washington establishment-loving politicians & propagandists continue singing the same song:
  Glenn Greenwald, The "Americans want bipartisanship" myth, Salon.com, 24 February 2009.


• * George Lakoff, The Obama Code, The Huffington Post, 24 February 2009.


• Ben Armbruster, Sanford Offers Unemployed South Carolina Resident ‘Prayers’ Instead Of Stimulus Funds, Think Progress, 23 February 2009.

Essays:

• Neil Irwin & Binyamin Appelbaum, Late Change in Course Hobbled Rollout of Geithner's Bank Plan, The Washington Post, 17 February 2009.


• Dan Froomkin, Obama: I Won't Play Washington Games, The Washington Post, 17 February 2009.


• Jefferson Smith, Why conservatives are always WRONG, no date (after 2004).


• inside the meltdown, Frontline, PBS, 17 February 2009.
  
  "Investigating how the economy went so bad so fast and what Bernanke and Paulson didn't see, couldn't stop and weren't able to fix."


• Glenn Greenwald, Charlie Savage on Obama's embrace of Bush/Cheney "terrorism policies", Salon.com, 17 February 2009.
  
  Savage is the author of Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy: Little, Brown and Company / Hachette Book Group, September 2007 (publisher, Amazon.com).


• Mark Faber, Synchronized Boom, Synchronized Bust: Bad U.S. monetary policy had global consequences, WSJ.com, 18 February 2009.
  
  via: Barry Ritholtz, Synchronized Boom, Synchronized Bust, The Big Picture, 18 February 2009.


• Chris Floyd, Operation Uptick: Obama Launches Afghan Surge, Empire Burlesque, 18 February 2009.


• Lawrence C. Strauss, How the Credit-Loss Cycle Got Supersized: An Interview with Robert Albertson: The financial crisis could drag on another two or three years, says this Wall Street veteran, Barrons.com, 17 February 2009.


• Jane Mayer, The Hard Cases: Will Obama institute a new kind of preventive detention for terrorist suspects?, The New Yorker, 23 February 2009.
  
  via: Scott Horton, The Enemy Combatant Canard, No Comment, 18 February 2009.
  "Thomas Jefferson and James Madison shared one definition of the term “tyrant” – a ruler who deprived a person of his freedom without operation of law and without accountability before a court. Which perhaps explains why American historians are consistently ranking George W. Bush at the very bottom of the list of all American presidents; the man, ultimately, is guilty of tyranny."
  
  and via: Terry Gross, Jane Mayer Details Obama's 'Hard Cases', Fresh Air, WHYY Philadelphia, 18 February 2009.
  
  Mayer is the author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals: Doubleday, July 2008 (publisher, Amazon.com).


• William Astore, An American Foreign Legion: Is the U.S. Military Now an Imperial Police Force?, TomDispatch.com, 15 February 2009.
  
  Article summary at Asia Times: "The United States military is close to being a foreign legion. Foreign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign as in being ever-more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its actions, yet serve the least in its ranks. And increasingly foreign to Americans."


• William Pfaff, America’s Confused Cause in Central Asia, TruthDig.com, 18 February 2009.


• Amy Goodman, How Two Former PA Judges Got Millions in Kickbacks to Send Juveniles to Private Prisons, AlterNet.org, 17 February 2009.
  
  Amy Goodman, Penn. Judges Get Kickbacks for Placing Youths in Privately Owned Jails, Democracy Now!, 17 February 2009.


• Chris Floyd, Field of Nightmares: Fixing the Economy to Death, Empire Burlesque, 19 February 2009 2009.
  
  Arthur Silber, The Vampire, Struck by Sunlight, Once Upon a Time ..., 15 September 2008.
  
  Arthur Silber, It's Called the Ruling Class Because It Rules, Once Upon a Time ..., 27 October 2007.


• Stirling Newberry, We’re In a Depression, Not a Recession: Here’s Why, Fire Dog Lake, 19 February 2009.
  
  "Once a Bushite, always a Bushite. Having been the architect of the economic policy that lead directly to the housing bubble, and been a member of the policy making apparatus at the Federal Reserve while a flood of accomodative money ballooned the world's economic system, Bernanke will go to his grave not admitting that he is the worst economic policy maker of the last generation. Republicans and stupidity are like baseball sluggers and steroids. They are all on it, they all deny it, and newspapers fawn all over them for it until it is obviously too late."


• John M. Broder, E.P.A. Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide, The New York Times, 18 February 2009.
  
  Frequently Asked Questions, from Climate Change (2007) The Physical Science Basis, a report accepted by Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.


• Susan Solomon, et al., Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions, PNAS, 28 January 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0812721106.
  
  David Archer, Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable, RealClimate.org, 01 February 2009.


• Elana Schor, Dems: Keeping Wall Street Profits High is 'Collateral Benefit', TalkingPointsMemo.com, 19 February 2009.


• Glenn Greenwald, Binyam Mohamed, war crimes investigations, and American exceptionalism, Salon.com, 19 February 2009.
  
  I have observed that the American ruling class believes that "might makes right." The Bush administration war crimes - and the U.S. Congress and Judiciary turning a blind eye - are one of the clearest expressions of that principle. See, for example, the James Baker interview in Lewis Lapham's film The American Ruling Class. "Nickel and Dimed" from The American Ruling Class. Who Owns America? from The American Ruling Class.
  
  Will Bunch, Reagan, Bush and How Presidents Got To Be Above the Law, The Huffington Post, 18 February 2009.
  
  Bunch is the author of Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future: Free Press / Simon & Schuster, February 2009 (publisher, Amazon.com).
  
  Mark Benjamin, "You can't sweep unlawful activities under the table": Abu Ghraib investigator Antonio Taguba talks to Salon about why he backs a commission to examine Bush torture policies, Salon.com, 20 February 2009.


• Kate Jennings, American Revolution: The Fall of Wall Street and the Rise of Barack Obama, Quarterly Essay, Issue 32, 2008.
  
  The author is an Australian-born Manhattan-resident, writing for an Australian audience, surveys recent U.S. economic and political events through the election of November 2008. The author has worked as a speech-writer at a large New York bank and so has an insider's perspective on the collapse of U.S. financial companies, but doesn't add much if one has been reading the various professional economists and financiers noted in this blog.
  Jennings is the author of Moral Hazard: A Novel: Fourth Estate, May 2002 (publisher, Google Book Search, Amazon.com). Jennings biography at HarperCollins.


• Robert G. Kaiser, interview, Bill Moyers' Journal, 20 February 2009.
  Kaiser is the author of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government: Knopf, January 2009 (publisher, Amazon.com). Wikipedia article on Kaiser.
  
  See also: Parker Palmer, interview, Bill Moyers' Journal, 20 February 2009.
  Palmer is the author of Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation: Jossey-Bass, September 1999 (publisher, Amazon.com). Wikipedia article on Palmer.


• Matthew Richardson & Nouriel Roubini, There's Virtue In Geithner's Vague Bank Plan: At least he doesn't want to guarantee more bad debt, WSJ.com, 18 February 2009.


• Barry Ritholtz, Federal Reserve Off Balance Sheet Lending, The Big Picture, 20 February 2009.
  
  Barry Ritholtz, Favoring Nationalization Are . . ., The Big Picture, 20 February 2009.

Essays:

• Michael Hudson, Obama's Awful Financial Recovery Plan, CounterPunch.org, 12 February 2009.


• Sandra Ward, Recession? No, It's a D-process, and It Will Be Long; An Interview with Ray Dalio: This pro sees a long and painful depression, Barrons.com, 09 February 2009.


• Simon Johnson, The G7 Are Asleep At The Wheel. Why?, The Baseline Scenario, 14 February 2009.
  
  Johnson has provided an answer in his other writings (see The Baseline Scenario): the oligarchy refuses to recognize its losses. The owners are still trying to make the U.S. Congress (and other national treasuries) pay for their losses. The People is now the only entity large enough to cover the bankers' failed investments. But it is not The People's debt to pay. Others could operate the nations' banks. However, the reigning oligarchy still controls the politicians sufficiently that the politicians act contrary to the public interest and continue to delay the day of reckoning. My suggestion to friends and others: prepare for a prolonged financial recession/depression unless & until a thorough house cleaning happens. At the moment even Obama acts as a tool of the oligarchy. See also the Greenwald essay noted below.


• Peter Boone, Simon Johnson, and James Kwak, Baseline Scenario for 2/9/2009, The Baseline Scenario, 08 February 2009.


• Matthew Richardson & Nouriel Roubini, Nationalize the Banks! We're all Swedes Now, The Washington Post, 15 February 2009.


• Nicholas D. Kristof, Our Greatest National Shame, The New York Times, 15 February 2009.
  
  Public Education, then Health Care.


• Glenn Greenwald, David Brooks reveals the mentality of the Beltway journalist, Salon.com, 14 February 2009.
  
  The Washington establishment has become so corrupt that it is unwilling to call attention to the corruption of itself and others.

Some recently noticed Essays I found insightful:

• Daniel Kaufmann, Capture and the Financial Crisis: An Elephant forcing a rethink of Corruption?, Governance Matters (a World Bank blog), 03 November 2008.
  
  Discusses the regulatory and policy capture by vested interests in recent years & decades, identified as one of the fundamental causes of recent economic problems. Indeed, it is a hallmark of the U.S. Republican Party's approach towards government (and obviously is not exclusive to the Republicans). See, for example: Binyamin Appelbaum & Ellen Nakashima, Banking Regulator Played Advocate Over Enforcer, The Washington Post, 23 November 2008. See also Thomas Franks' The Wrecking Crew. I find the Governance Matters blog has many useful essays for understanding recent economic events.


• Brian Butler, The "savings glut" that may be to blame ..., RGE - Global Macro EconoMonitor, 11 February 2009.
  
  Brian Butler, Top macro-trends for 2009, GloboTrends blog, 14 December 2008.


• Ann H., Are the Republicans Intellectually Bankrupt, or what?, Talking Points Memo, 11 February 2009.


• ** Alan Wolfe, Why Conservatives Can't Govern, Washington Monthly, July/August 2006.


• Richard Seymour, The Imperialist Propaganda of Hitchens and Friends, AlterNet.org, 09 February 2009.


• Ian Urbina & Sean D. Hamill, Judges Plead Guilty in Payoffs for Jailing Youths, The New York Times, 12 February 2009.
  
  This seems to me an obvious consequence of the misguided policy of creating a privatized (for-profit) prison industry: the industry can only profit by incarcerating an increasing number of people for longer periods of time. Privatizing government functions and services is so obviously contrary to the public interest that it boggles the mind how any such policy could ever be implemented. There's only one word for it: corruption.


• Yves Smith, New York Times: US Going Down the Japan Path By Not Taking Out Dud Banks, naked capitalism, 13 February 2009.


• Simon Johnson, High Noon: Geithner v. The American Oligarchs, The Baseline Scenario, 08 February 2009.
  
  See also Johnson's interview on Bill Moyers' Journal, 13 Feb 2009: link.

Yves Smith, Geithner Plan Smackdown Wrap, naked capitalism, 10 February 2009.

L. Kevin & Donna Philippe-Johnson, Thinking Small: How we Downsized from an Annual Income of $42,000 to
$6,500; And lived to tell about it!, Countryside Magazine, November/December, 2005.