Essays, etc.:

• Kurt Zenz House, Reading List, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
  "I believe we're witnessing a near perfect storm in the energy landscape, involving climate change, rapid development, and traditional resource scarcity. These forces will reorient the energy industry over the next several decades, and the following reading list is intended to provide any interested party with broad and deep perspective to better understand how the energy landscape will change. The list covers the basic science of thermodynamics, the history of energy technology, the history of the energy industry, modern energy technology, the science of climate change, and energy policy."


• David Barsamian, Citizen Gore Vidal, In These Times, 03 November 2008.


• Alan Rusbridger, A Chill on 'The Guardian', The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 1, 15 January 2009.
  "Among all the postmortems that will inevitably follow the dramatic implosion of the global financial system, there will doubtless be one on how it was covered in the press. Was there sufficient information in the public domain about the dangers of financial derivatives and subprime mortgages? Did news organizations, facing their own crises of liquidity, have sufficient resources to monitor and analyze the available data? In view of the intricate financial engineering involved, did newsrooms employ journalists with the expertise to understand and explain what was going on? Did the ones who could comprehend it project the issue powerfully, repeatedly, and noisily enough? Did anyone pay attention?"


• George Monbiot, Nuked by Friend and Foe, Monbiot.com, 20 February 2009.
  Monbiot is a realist and accepts that, in order to reduce the use of fossil fuels, we will increase the use of nuclear power generation, in addition to solar, wind and other non-greenhouse gas producing energy sources.
  
  George Monbiot, The Propaganda of the Victor: How the poor were airbrushed from history, Monbiot.com, 24 February 2009.
  
  George Monbiot, The Proceeds of Crime, Monbiot.com, 03 March 2009.
  "The US and British governments have created a private prison industry which preys on human lives."


• * Stephen M. Walt, What's wrong with America? Case in point: Richard Perle; Richard Perle is a liar, ForeignPolicy.com, 23 February 2009.
  "Let's face it: there is little or no accountability in Washington, where being wrong means never having to say you're sorry; indeed, you don't even have to admit responsibility for past mistakes, no matter how serious. It's just the American taxpayer who ends up footing the bill, along with the soldiers who fought and died for these blunders.
  
  "As Frank Rich and others have figured out, we are in trouble today because we have allowed a culture of corruption and dishonesty to permeate our institutions and pollute our public discourse. Until that changes -- until our public institutions contain a lot more truth-tellers like Gene Kranz and fewer liars like Richard Perle -- we are not going to know where we stand, where we are headed, or whom to trust."
  
  Frank Rich, What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us, The New York Times, 21 February 2009.
  
  Stephen M. Walt, Another "Axis" to grind? The dangers of glibness; Why Niall Ferguson's "Axis of Upheaval" is not a useful concept, ForeignPolicy.com, 20 February 2009.
  
  * Stephen M. Walt, Obama's dilemma: change the system or change the policy?, ForeignPolicy.com, 09 February 2009.


• Heather Scoffield, 'There will be blood', The Globe and Mail, 23 February 2009.
  "Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson predicts prolonged financial hardship, even civil war, before the ‘Great Recession' ends."
  The sensationalism of violence scenarios aside, I find Ferguson's other more general observations interesting.


• * Michael Hudson, The Language of Looting, CounterPunch, 23 February 2009.
  
  Chris Floyd, Feudal Gestures: Bailout Lords and Their Modern Peons, Empire Burlesque, 27 February 2009.


• Parade of Interchangeable Starlets Delights U.S. Populace, The Onion, 23 February 2009.


• Michael T. Klare, A Planet at the Brink: Will Economic Brushfires Prove Too Virulent to Contain?, TomDispatch, 24 February 2009.


• President Obama, Obama Speech Tonight: Video, Text, The Huffington Post, 24 February 2009.
  
  Governor Jindal, Bobby Jindal Response To Obama: Full Video, The Huffington Post, 24 February 2009.


• Renee Schoof, Expert: Carbon dioxide emissions could last millenniums, McClatchy Newspapers, 24 February 2009.
  
  The expert refered to is David Archer, professor at the University of Chicago and contributor to the indispensible RealClimate. Some of Archer's publications include:
  
  Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. Wiley-Blackwell, December 2006.
  (publisher; Google Book Search; Amazon.com; book website)
  
  The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate. Princeton University Press, October 2008.
  (publisher; Google Book Search; Amazon.com)
  
  Millennial Atmospheric Lifetime of Fossil Fuel CO2 [PDF], D. Archer and V. Brovkin, Climatic Change 90:283-297, 2008.


• Tavis Smiley, Adam Cohen interview, Tavis Smiley Archives, PBS, 24 February 2009.
  
  Adam Cohen, Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America, The Penguin Press, February 2009 (publisher, Amazon.com).


• Ted Rall, Talking Smack: Obama Doubles Down on Bush's Afghan Disaster, The Smirking Chimp, 24 February 2009.
  "If you were a U.S. soldier shipping off to Afghanistan, what would you think you were fighting for? Obama couldn't tell you. I think I can: to prop up Karzai's regime until a new-and-improved strongman can be found to replace him, then to prop him up. To flex military muscle against neighboring countries, most notably China, Iran and Pakistan. And to keep a shot at scoring a piece of the action if the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline oil and gas pipeline is ever finished.
  
  "It hardly seems [worth] killing, much less dying, for."


• Michael T. Klare, A Planet at the Brink: Will Economic Brushfires Prove Too Virulent to Contain?, TomDispatch.com, 24 February 2009.


• Norman Solomon, Freeing Up Resources ... for More War, TruthOut.org, 25 February 2009.


• In Performance at the White House: Celebrating the Music of Stevie Wonder, PBS, 25 February 2009.


• John Lippert & Jim Efstathiou Jr., Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights, Bloomberg.com, 26 February 2009.


• Vivien Lou Chen, California’s Newly Poor Push Social Services to Brink, Bloomberg.com, 26 February 2009.


• Glenn Greenwald, Karl Rove: Self-deluded or consciously dishonest?, Salon.com, 26 February 2009.


• Rick Perlstein, Rush from Reality, OurFuture.org, 26 February 2009.


• Michael Luo, Jobless Angry at Possibility of No Benefits, The New York Times, 26 February 2009.
  The employed and retired may also find Republican policy outrageously misguided.


• Office of Management and Budget, A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise [PDF], 26 February 2009.
  (Office of Management and Budget; http://www.budget.gov/)
  
  I don't think any substitute exists for reading the introductory material for oneself, particularly the President's Message, pages 1-3, and Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced Priorities, pages 5-15.
  
  * Paul Krugman, Climate of Change, The New York Times, 27 February 2009.
  
  Mike Madden, This is not George Bush's budget, Salon.com, 27 February 2009.


• Portfolio Staff, Elie Wiesel and Bernard Madoff: Wiesel Lost "Everything" to Madoff, Portfolio.com, 26 February 2009.


• Peter Cohan, Bill Gross, the $747 billion bond man, declares the death of equities, Daily Finance, 26 February 2009.
  
  Peter Cohan, More taxpayer bucks to bail out AIG, $61 billion loser, Daily Finance, 02 March 2009. (See especially the discussion of systemically expensive derivatives contracts.)


• * Joe Nocera, Propping Up a House of Cards, The New York Times, 27 February 2009.
  One of the better explanations of what's happening in finance.


• Party Like It's ... 1996, Calculated Risk, 27 February 2009.
  
  Investment Contributions to GDP, Calculated Risk, 27 February 2009.
  
  Interesting graphs: "Four Bad Bears;" "Investment Contributions to GDP."


• Warren Buffett, Letter to Shareholders, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 27 February 2009.


• * Eleven separate authors speculate: When Will the Recession Be Over?, The New York Times, 28 February 2009.


• Gavin Schmidt, What George Will should have written, RealClimate, 28 February 2009.
  
  Other RealClimate articles on previous episodes of George Will nonsense:
  
  Eric Steig, Will-full ignorance, RealClimate, 26 December 2004.
  
  David Archer, Incurious George, RealClimate, 02 April 2006.


• Jaime O'Neill, A cruel and a false economy, The Smirking Chimp, 28 February 2009.


• Frank Rich, The Ecstasy and the Agony, The New York Times, 01 March 2009.


• Robert Kuttner, Geithner's Folly, The Huffington Post, 01 March 2009.


• Bob Herbert, Wars, Endless Wars, The New York Times, 02 March 2009.


• Ben Popken, Jeep Incapable Of Selling To Man With $24,000 In Cash, The Consumerist, 02 March 2009.


• David Stout & Brian Knowlton, Fed Chief Says Insurance Giant Acted Irresponsibly, The New York Times, 03 March 2009.


• Michael Quint & Gillian Wee, Harvard Losing AAA Benefit in Market Shows Swap Risk, Bloomberg.com, 03 March 2009.
  
  Barry Ritholtz, Big Firm Conflict of Interest: The Penalty Box, The Big Picture, 03 March 2009.
  
  A couple articles illustrating the kinds of financial practices that have undermined the U.S. economy. Of course, these particular examples do not exhaust the range of financial malpractice. Note that Harvard's losses came at the hands of Larry Summers, who was also one of the architects of the financial deregulation legislation of the 1990s that established the conditions that resulted in current problems, and who now advises President Obama.


• Glenn Greenwald, The newly released secret laws of the Bush administration, Salon.com, 03 March 2009.


• Yves Smith, On the Need to Leash and Collar Effectively Nationalized Banks, naked capitalism, 04 March 2009.


• Mike Whitney, Blowing Up the Economy, CounterPunch, 04 March 2009.


• Patricia Cohen, Ivory Tower Unswayed by Crashing Economy, The New York Times, 04 March 2009.
  
  via: Barry Ritholtz, Ivory Tower Economics, The Big Picture, 08 March 2009.


• Yalman Onaran, Buffett, Tavakoli Flag Scheme Bigger Than Madoff’s, Bloomberg.com, 05 March 2009.
  (publisher, Amazon.com)


• Caroline Salas & Shannon D. Harrington, Darth Wall Street Thwarting Debtors With Credit Swaps, Bloomberg.com, 05 March 2009.


• "TocqueDeville," Jim Cramer Uses CNBC to Manipulate Stocks, DailyKos.com, 05 March 2009.
  Details on what you probably already suspected.
  
  Phantom Shares, Bloomberg, 2006 or 2007.


• Gareth Porter, Military Dominance In Mideast Proven A Costly Myth, The Huffington Post, 05 March 2009.
  
  Here is an explicit account of the U.S. bipartisan policy of imperialism as practiced in the oil & gas producing regions of the Middle East.


• * Simon Johnson, Confusion, Tunneling, And Looting, The Baseline Scenario, 05 March 2009.
  
  This instance of ex-Countrywide executives
  {Eric Lipton, Ex-Leaders of Countrywide Profit From Bad Loans, The New York Times, 03 March 2009}
  is an example of "Tunneling".


• * Paul Krugman, The Big Dither, The New York Times, 06 March 2009.
  
  Krugman diplomatically omits the final, explicit explanation for why the U.S. government / Obama administration continues dithering: nationalizing / reorganizing the insolvent banks entails wiping out current stockholders and some/many debt holders of the insolvent banks: the current owners and creditors would experience permanent losses (instead of the current temporary unrealized loss which would go away if the bailouts worked and the stock price rebounded in the future). The people who own that stock and debt (the banks' owners and creditors) still have enough power to protect their assets at the expense to the taxpayers of the half-measure bailouts. Those people and their power are the obstacles to cleaning up the mess. And as should be obvious by now, those people control the politicians of both political parties. But these factors are outside the bounds of polite conversation.


• Glenn Greenwald, The casual, corrupting use of anonymity for political officials, Salon.com, 06 March 2009.


• Peter S. Goodman & Jack Healy, Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of U.S. Economy, The New York Times, 06 March 2009.


• Rick Newman, Why the Merrill Bonuses Are a Watershed Moment, usnews.com, 06 March 2009.


• Frank Rich, Some Things Don’t Change in Grover’s Corners, The New York Times, 07 March 2009.


• Joe Conason, The questions our healthcare debate ignores, Salon.com, 09 March 2009.
  "Why does every developed nation except the U.S. have universal healthcare? Why do they pay half as much in medical costs? Why are their infant mortality and longevity statistics superior?"


• "thereisnospoon", The Coming Crash No One Is Talking About, DailyKos.com, 09 March 2009.
  On short-term small business credit.


• Ryan Grim, Romer Seems To Break With Geithner On Cause Of Crisis, The Huffington Post, 10 March 2009.
  This article discusses the difference between a solvency crisis and a liquidity crisis; the interpretation one chooses as the fundamental cause(s) of U.S. financial problems naturally has implications for policy choices.


• James Kwak, Financial Crisis Macroeconomics for Beginners, The Baseline Scenario, 10 March 2009.
  
  Refers the reader to useful introductory texts by Charles I. Jones at Stanford Univ. and especially a new chapter on recent events [PDF].
  
  See also The Baseline Scenario's page on the Financial Crisis for Beginners.


• Michael Lewis, Wall Street on the Tundra, Vanity Fair, April 2009.
  On the financial rise and collapse of Iceland.