Reading room

From Obama and Geithner, no real fixes for fraudonomics. Matt Taibbi questions whether the executive is serious about dealing with systemic financial abuses.

The Nation looks at how climate change became a key plank in the anarcho-capitalist kulturkampf, and whether we're willing to pay the price to save our planet.

Speaking of capitalism, Matt Stoller, author of Naked Capitalism, points out ideological problems that Ron Paul highlights for the liberal establishment. (I tend to think that Stoller oversells the efficacy of Paul's critique of central authority's expression in military-industrial terms, but it's a good, brief essay about a thousand times more coherent and less cherry-picked than Glenn Greenwald's customary hate-on for Obama that linked to it.)

Similar to Stoller's discussion of historical plates in American liberalism, Haaretz looks at shifts in the Israeli left, in the context of the Occupy protests.

And speaking of Occupy, this (now outdated) article from The Nation, "Hard Times at Occupy Boston, looks at the problems of small self-government and describes some of the challenges that were overlooked in the national unsympathetic coverage.

Climate consensus on Kool and the Gang

From 2008, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS, which has a pretty sweet acronym for an academic journal) totally guts the myth that in the 1970s, people were more concerned about global cooling than global warming (PDF here). The publication record simply doesn't support that assertion, frequently heard from climate denialists like Sen. Jim Inhofe. It's a pernicious myth, but this is a pretty handy debunking.