10th April 08 - Heather Stewart, The Guardian (UK)

The US mortgage crisis has spiralled into "the largest financial shock since the Great Depression" and there is a one-in-four chance that it will cause a full-blown global recession, the International Monetary Fund warned yesterday. As finance ministers and central bankers arrived in Washington to discuss ways of tackling the crisis, the IMF warned, in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook, that governments might be forced to step in with more public bailouts of troubled banks and cash-strapped homeowners before the crisis was over.

10th April 08 - Walden Bello, Transnational Institute

The following is excerpted from an acceptance speech at the Outstanding Public Scholar Award Panel, International Studies Association, 49th Annual Convention, San Francisco, California, March 27, 2008. Bello was the second recipient of the award, the first being Dr. Susan George in 2007. Members of the panel honoring Bello were Dr. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University; Dr. Robin Broad, professor at American University, and Dr.Barry Gills, professor at the University of Newcastle.

9th April 08 - John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review

With the benefit of hindsight, few now doubt that the housing bubble that induced most of the recent growth of the U.S. economy was bound to burst or that a general financial crisis and a global economic slowdown were to be the unavoidable results. Warning signs were evident for years to all of those not taken in by the new financial alchemy of high-risk debt management, and not blinded, as was much of the corporate world, by huge speculative profits.

9th April 08 - Johann Hari, The Independent (UK)

On the streets of London, the Chinese dictatorship has just learned with a painful jab that their Olympic Slogan – "One World, One Dream" – is true. In every city the Olympic torch sashays through on its world tour, its greeting is the same. Tibetans wave their banned flag and grieve for their freshly-slaughtered countrymen. Falun Gong refugees hold aloft pictures of their co-believers who have vanished into China's vast "re-education camps". Darfuris cry for an end to the massacres against them backed from Beijing. And ordinary people line the streets to support them. Yes, they all have One Dream: an end to human rights abuses.

9th April 08 - Daphne Wysham & Shakuntala Makhijani, Green Left

The World Bank’s long-running identity crisis is proving hard to shake. When efforts to rebrand itself as a “knowledge bank” didn’t work, it devised a new identity as a “Green Bank.” Really? Yes, it’s true. Sure, the Bank continues to finance fossil fuel projects globally, but never mind. The World Bank has seized upon the immense challenges climate change poses to humanity and is now front and center in the complicated, international world of carbon finance. It can turn the dirtiest carbon credits into gold.

8th April 08 - Dan La Botz, ZNet

When I was growing up in the 1950s, a photo of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1932-1944) still hung in the homes of some family members and friends. Our only four-term president was remembered by them as the leader -- and even the savior -- of the country. Those like my parents, who experienced the Great Depression and World War II, were transformed by the experience of Roosevelt's New Deal into life long Democrats. Union members, immigrants, and African Americans, and then their children, stuck with the Democrats through thick and thin for fifty years, largely held in place by their experience of the New Deal.

8th April 08 - Edmund Sanders and Tracy Wilkinson, LA Times

For 15 years, he's been a "grocer" for Africa's destitute. But he's never seen anything like this.Pascal Joannes' job is to find grains, beans and oils to fill a food basket for Sudan's neediest people, from Darfur refugees to schoolchildren in the barren south. Lately Joannes has spent less time shopping and more time poring over commodity price lists, usually in disbelief. "White beans at $1,160," the white-haired Belgian, 52, cries in despair over the price of a metric ton. "Complete madness! I bought them two years ago in Ethiopia for $235."

7th April 08 - Agence France Presse

Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, according to NASA's top climate scientist. "We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," says James Hansen, 67, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

7th April 08 - Howard Zinn, Tom Dispatch

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

4th April 08 - Michel Morkos, Dar Al Hayat

Since 1971, the world has witnessed 24 economic crises, at a rate of a crisis every one and a half year. They were all different in intensity and impact on global economy. Some were limited to their country of origin, others expanded within a multinational economic sector, such as banks or IT. A third category had more comprehensive global dimensions. Banks and financial services markets registered the highest number of crises between 1971 and 2008, in addition to crises related to them.