Are our oceans dying? Phytoplankton has declined 40% in 60 years as figures reveal Earth has been getting hotter since the Eighties

Microscopic marine algae which form the basis of the ocean food chain are dying at a terrifying rate, scientists said today. Phytoplankton, described as the ‘fuel’ on which marine ecosystems run, are experiencing declines of about 1 per cent of the average total a year. According to the researchers from Dalhousie University in Canada the [...]

Papantonio: Taxpayers On the Hook for BP Cleanup Cost?

Are taxpayers going to be footing the bill to clean up BP’s mess in the Gulf of Mexico? It’s certainly a possibility, and as Mike Papantonio explains on The Ed Schultz Show, BP is considering asking the government for a tax break to cover the cleanup costs.

Economy in U.S. Will Probably Keep Cooling as Lack of Jobs Limits Spending

The world’s largest economy will probably keep cooling in the third quarter as a lack of jobs prompts American consumers to rein in spending. The economy in the U.S. grew at a slower-than-forecast 2.4 percent annual rate from April through June after expanding at a 3.7 percent pace in the previous three months, Commerce Department [...]

Hollow Men of Economics

This is a guest post by Gregor MacDonald. Gregor is an oil analyst and energy sector investor, who, in his words, “also focuses on the coming transition to alternatives”. This post was previously published on Gregor.us.Left unaddressed during the past 3 years in most of the debates between economists has been the problem of energy. [...]

Watching The Fed Control the Economy

While we wait, watch and listen, the Fed decides when the banks will be given the word to start lending to get the domestic economy back to neutral. Action is needed quickly because the world economy is quickly deteriorating, and their recovery is simply not happening, as the administration admits to a fiscal deficit of [...]

The “new normal”: More than one in five Americans at risk of destitution

More than one in five Americans in 2009 suffered a household income loss of 25 percent or more over the previous year, according to a new report sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and entitled “Economic Security at Risk.” The report documents a steady increase in economic insecurity since the 1960s, and concludes that annual income [...]

Society Begins to Crack Under Harsh Measures

ATHENS, Jul 30, 2010 (IPS) – Every working day, more than a hundred people crowd around the entrance of the merchant and passenger boats’ reconstruction industry, well known as ‘The Zone’, in the southern suburb of Attiki. Most of them are unemployed steel workers and torch welders, who wait desperately from the early hours of [...]

Homes keep falling into foreclosure as programs fail to help

WASHINGTON — More than three years into the housing crisis that helped trigger a worldwide recession, the torrid pace of home foreclosures continues to tear at the core of the American dream. New figures Thursday from Realty-Trac showed that foreclosure activity declined over the first six months of the year in nine of the 10 [...]

Extend and Pretend: The Russian doll version

The US government is looking at possible solutions for the mess that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have long since become. There is, however, no solution available. Period. Simple as that. The government has dug itself into a hole when it comes to mortgages and mortgage-based securities that it cannot find a way out of. [...]

Banking Disaster Largely Ignored By Mainstream Media

Last week, bank failures quietly passed the 100 milestone for the year. I say “quietly” because the bank failure story has gone largely unreported or, at least, under-reported by the mainstream media. Just to give you an idea of how fast the bank insolvency problem is accelerating, last year, at this time, 64 banks had [...]