While visiting my friend Sara, I picked up a novel called Carry the One in her bathroom and read the first chapter, in which a 10-year-old girl dies when she runs in front of a car. The next morning, I opened another book, Half a Life, on Sara’s kitchen table. It was a memoir […]
Tainted Chinese Drywall Concerns Went Unreported for Two Years
Remnants of Chinese drywall sit in an infested home in the Venetian Golf and River Club in North Venice, Fla., on Friday, May 20, 2010. (Chip Litherland / Sarasota Herald Tribune) A leading East Coast homebuilder learned four years ago that the Chinese-manufactured drywall it had installed in several Florida homes was emitting foul […]
Obama Announces Troop Surge: More War, More Debt, Less Accountability
It was announced by Barack Obama that in accordance with his campaign statements that he is deploying 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq in order to seek out Osama bin Laden and the members of al Qaeda per the original Resolution passed by Congress in the wake of 9-11 (after, of course, at first promising […]
Why Authorities Haven’t Stopped the Foreclosure ‘Rescue’ Boom
This story is a collaboration with Steve Henn of American Public Media’s Marketplace [1]. It was co-published with Salon [2]. During the go-go years of the real estate bubble, shady mortgage brokers [3] thrived, thanks to the sluggish response of regulators and law enforcement agencies. Amid the ruins of the crash, there’s a new boom […]
Bush Fiddles While Wall Street Burns
The alarm bells have been ringing for quite some time telling many people that the U.S. economy was going to hit a major crisis in the year 2008. Some of the more astute were calling it a few years ago when the mortgage companies were giving out sub prime mortgage loans. Last year it became […]
McCain and Obama and American Socialism: It’s The Economy, Comrade!
Scrap any political party affiliation: both presidential nominees unveiled socialist agendas at last night’s presidential debate. This is what it has come to. John McCain spoke about federal bailouts for all distressed mortgages – under the banner of stabilizing U.S. housing prices and of saving the economy. Under this plan, the government would […]