The other day as I was out promoting my book Plunder with a talk at a New York bookstore on the day the market dropped precipitously. It was a day that I led my blog with a quote from financial analyst fearing we are on the edge of the abyss.

One of the tactics of high pressure selling is to set a deadline, and make it clear that if you don't chose the offer by the date set, you lose it. The strategy fuels a sense of urgency to get buyers to make decisions without seeking advice or doing too...

As The Bailouts Begin, The Media is Rationalizing, Not Reporting

NEW YORK: Politics tends to be reactive. Issues often aren't issues until they make news. Media outlets and political candidates tend to speak out after disasters occur, not before, even when that old handwriting is on the wall.

I often think about the alphabet of the financial crisis -- a lexicon of terms like plunder -- I wrote a book taking off on that idea -- but, also related "P" words -- pricing, panic and plunge.

I think of this last one spelled this way: plungeeeeeee as...

Thank you Gulf States. Thank you for believing more in America than we may believe in ourselves.

Thank you Abu Dhabi for investing a billion dollars in the Hollywood film industry last week. Thank you Dubai for opening American-style malls and welcoming Donald Trump's latest hotel. And thank you Saudi...

NEW YORK: The storm is coming. All eyes on the Doppler radar, the graphic swirls, the reporters bravely standing on Levee watch in New Orleans. This time, the evacuations are underway as if to say the government is finally looking out for its citizens and evacuating the people...

Traditionally, time seems to slow down, I mean slooooo down, at summer's end. The phone calls taper off along with the emails. We have now had endless gold medals and the Guns of August. Obama stirred his hoojie with his Biden moment, sliding into centrist field. That's done now.

There...

A News Dissector Decides Not To Dissect At the Dems' Meet-up in Denver

New York: The first convention I remember was way back in l952. I was at a summer colony, and I watched it on a black and white TV in the company of fellow day camper,...

Why Are We All Complicit in Our Own Economic Servitude?

Let me try a few words out on you: "Charge It:," "Swipe It" and "Priceless." You know exactly what I am talking about. We all have credit and debit cards. We all use them, and many of us keep our...

New York, August 4: We have all heard the line, 'DA NILE is not just a river in Egypt.' Denial can be a pervasive social and political phenomenon. Some of us just don't want to know the truth or face its consequences. Maybe that's why we envelop ourselves in national...

Boston, July 26, 2008: The questions we face in late July, as regulators seize two more failing banks, is this: will we be engulfed by a further collapse in our economy or can the damage be contained, or, even turned around?

We know what goes up must come down...

NACA's 5 Day DC Event Offers Help, And A Way Forward
WASHINGTON JULY 20: Forty-five years ago this summer I spent a day Marching on Washington. Everyone remembers it as just four words of the many uttered by Dr. Martin Luther King: "I have a dream." After that march...

BOSTON: Sorry Dr. Phil 2, it's time for us to do some whining, not about how bad things are but about what some bad guys are doing to destroy our country and our lives.

Whining of course is only a first step. After that, we need to recognize that...

California Real Estate Insider Sues The Financial Greed Industry In The Public Interest

It's been nearly a year since what we now know as the subprime crisis melted down the markets, caused banks to begin writing down billions in assetless assets, and forced The Federal Reserve Bank to...

Is pornography an obscenity or an act of free speech?

The recent death of comedian George Carlin reminded us of one of his greatest routines and most bizarre encounters with our media. It led to a Court determination that there were 7 dirty words that could not be used on...

I am on my way to Johannesburg to work on a project honoring Nelson Mandela for his 90th Birthday this July. But Mandela isn't there. He's in London for a superstar concert which will be happening on June 27th, my own birthday. It's part of a series of events using...

Stephen Colbert has a popular feature in his Comedy Channel rants of the day. He calls it "The Word." (Rappers used to just say "word.") It explains how language has different meanings.

Consider the word, "predator."

My online dictionary offers two meanings, one for the animal world and one...

New York: There is still an air of unreality in the economic debate that is increasingly dominating the election.

For one thing, it is still "AAU" (All About Us) as if what happens in the US economy in a globalized world is somehow separate and disconnected to what happens to...

Boston MA: The media reform conference was just starting in Minneapolis when word bounded in from New York that the market dropped 394 points as oil prices rose, and to borrow an Iraq war word, unemployment "surged." The number of unemployed people grew by 861,000 in May -- rising to...

Duh: The Bush Administration deployed a dishonest but very effective propaganda campaign to sell the Iraq War to the American people on virtually every media outfit. Their "Culture of Deception" is now acknowledged.

How do we know? Scotty McClellan told us so. It's all in the former Press Secretary's...