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Zack Beauchamp, News Report: "The historic decline in home prices since 2006 has cost Americans more than $7 trillion in household wealth, forced millions of families out of their homes, and left nearly one in four homeowners owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Private investment in housing is a fraction of its historic norm, translating to billions in lost economic output and millions of missing jobs. And more than five years into the crisis, the U.S. mortgage market remains on life support as the federal government guaranteed more than 95 percent of home loans made last year." 
Stephen Zunes, Op-Ed: Occupy activists justifiably express skepticism over how much to trust the president's left-leaning rhetoric when his actual economic policies have been decidedly centrist. Still, the fact that Obama's re-election campaign recognizes the advantage of decrying unfair tax laws and similar policies that affect middle class Americans is indicative of how the tone has shifted. Unfortunately, much of the decline of the Occupy movement can also be attributed to the distraction from this year's election campaigns. 
Greg Palast, Book Excerpt: Secretly, Paulson personally designed the package of mortgages to load it up heavily with losers, concentrating on adjustable rate mortgages, given to those with low credit scores, while culling out high-quality loans given by West Coast banker Wells Fargo. ACA, thinking Paulson was helping them pick the good stuff, put their valuable seal of approval on the mortgage packages, though they were quite nervous about their "reputation." 
News Report: Earlier this year, the American Petroleum Institute launched its Vote 4 Energy campaign, an astroturf effort to promote drilling and fracking during the 2012 election. A similar campaign is underway in the European Union (EU), where the fossil fuel lobby has been presenting natural gas, including unconventional gas extraction, as a cheap "no regrets option" and painting renewable energy sources as unaffordable. 
Allan Goldstein , Op-Ed: "Call it cynicism, call it disillusionment, call it the debunking of America, and just don't call it liberalism. Reciting the litany of woe has become a habit with liberals. It's hard to fault them for it, but that should never be an end in itself. Liberalism is about hope and the future, even in the worst of times. Especially in the worst of times. When corrosive liberal debunking spreads despair in America, the American people despair and the liberals lose. Nihilism is the mortal enemy of liberalism." 
Robert Reich, Video Report: A president is supposed to represent all of America, not just the 51 percent who elect him, and have a modicum of sympathy for the less fortunate among us. Yet here is the real Mitt Romney — a fabulously wealthy financier, presumably speaking to other wealthy people (note the waiters scurrying about), with a passion we haven't before seen in him — saying it isn't his "job" to worry about Americans who he describes as "irresponsible," who fail to take care of themselves, and whose neediness is presumably their own fault. 
Froma Harrop, Op-Ed: "Companies operating here won't care as much whether their employees are unionized or not. For one thing, they'll employ relatively few humans. For another, the people who run the robots will have high-level skills that automatically command good pay. Local cost of living and the price of energy may still play a role. But to attract the factories, a community will have to offer a tech-savvy workforce able to keep the robots on task." 
Beverly Bell, Op-Ed: According to a September 4 statement by OFRANEH, Vallecito "is in the heart of the coastal strip that the Honduran state plans to hand over to foreign companies under a new Law or Special Regions for Development (RED)." Wealthy tourism and agricultural developers, some with known ties to organized drug crime, have taken the land, developed it, and kept the GarÃfuna out. 
Jim Hightower, Op-Ed: Nearly 4 million Americans are being paid at or below the desiccated federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. For a single mother with two kids, that's $4,000 a year beneath the poverty level. Where are the ethics in a "work ethic" that rewards so many with paychecks that deliberately hold them in poverty? Consider the kind of life $7.25 buys. At that rate, a full-time worker is taking in only $1,250 a month, before payroll taxes. 
Apostolis Fotiadis, News Report: "Authorities are reportedly ignoring complaints, or discouraging victims from filing them at all. On Jul. 23, the rape and attempted murder of a 15-year-old girl in the island of Paros by a Pakistani migrant worker, Ahmed Vakas, fueled a wave of attacks against foreigners during which Iraq Aladin, an Iraqi immigrant, was beaten and stabbed to death by five hooded youngsters on Aug. 12." 
Khalil Abdullah, News Analysis: "When lower court Judge Robert Simpson issued his decision in August to the let the voter ID law stand, he received withering criticism from voting rights advocacy organizations, including the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice. His decision was disparaged for, among other reasons, being divorced from the practical reality of how the state could meet its obligation to issue the number of IDs required." --
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