Carl Bloice

There are a lot of things you wouldn’t know from reading most of the papers or watching the TV. For instance, there were demonstrations and press conferences across the country earlier this month, demanding action to deal with the growing crisis in the home ownership business. Major civil rights and housing groups have called for…

These are perilous times. Navigating troubled waters, keeping our bearings, recognizing the dangers and seizing opportunities, as we go about trying to secure peace and improve our communities, is not easy. One indispensable requirement is to have space to examine and discuss social and political issues concretely, in something other than the sound bites of…

Something really momentous took place inside Iraq’s Green Zone last week and if you’re looking for a full report on it in the U.S. major media save yourself the trouble. As far as they are concerned, the fact that over half of Iraq’s parliament joined in a call for setting a withdrawal date of the…

The U.S. bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya and three days before a large anti-war action in Washington, January 27. Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN) was present in Nairobi, and after returning home asked out loud how “to explain the silence of the…

Had the central bank stepped in earlier, it might have prevented the current subprime-mortgage meltdown by curbing lax lending standards, Federal Reserve’s chief bank supervisor, Roger T. Cole told a Senate hearing last week. “Given what we know now, yes, we could have done more, sooner,” he said. There’s a little problem with that; there…

“Deterioration was marked in the more recent loans, as the absence of equity appreciation reduced customers’ options for refinancing.” Fannie Mae—the government-chartered housing lender—banks, and other companies involved in making loans are now busy tightening the criteria for new home loans but for the people who bought subprime mortgages over the past two years that’s…