Ordc Forum/Blog

So, what does this tell us about the real power in this country?
By Shan Li
March 7, 2013, 8:58 a.m.

First, financial institutions were too big to fail. Now, are they too big to prosecute?

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday that some banks had become so big that prosecuting them could endanger the wider economy.

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26 September 2012 by Michael Marshall
Never mind what's going to happen in 2100: climate change is already shrinking the global economy.

According to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor – a report by Spanish non-profit organisation DARA – in 2010 climate change shaved 1.6 per cent off global gross domestic product. The figure was calculated by adding the harmful effects of climate change to the problems of the carbon-based economy, such as air pollution.

Previous studies, such as the 2006 Stern Review, concluded that climate change would not become a net cost for decades. But they had not considered climate's impact on productivity. As the temperature increases, people work less well. "It has been assumed that a hotter living and working environment is nothing to worry about," says Tord Kjellström of Umeå University in Sweden. "But the 5 billion people living in the hot parts of this planet are already constrained by heat."

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By Laura Flanders and Noam Chomsky, AlterNet

05 May 12

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he's given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US. His new book, Occupy, published in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series by Zuccotti Park Press brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.

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Obama and Geithner: Government, Enron-Style
POSTED: December 20, 10:06 AM ET

Strongly recommend this piece at the Huffington Post by Jeff Connaughton, a former aide to Senator Ted Kaufman. Jeff is one of the smartest guys on the Hill and is particularly strong on issues surrounding Wall Street and the regulatory system. In this piece, he takes apart the oft-stated mantra that what Wall Street firms did during and after the crisis was maybe unethical, but not illegal.

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Kunstler suggests that Occupiers think ahead to the national conventions next summer.

By James Howard Kunstler
on November 7, 2011 8:11 AM
Portents of winter and the toothless chatter of flag-draped traitors vies with a fog of lies spread by Koch Brother messenger boys, Reagan nostalgia hucksters, suck-ups in office, Murdoch empire servlings, Banker PR catamites, and Jesus terrorists to occupy the national mind-space with a narcotic Jell-O of half-formed wish fulfillment scams. The nation is hostage to a confederacy of racketeers. Banking. Big Pharma. The Higher Ed / Loan nexus. GMO agri-biz. Fast food. Mandatory motoring. You name it. What a disgrace we are, and the worst of us are the least to know that.

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