Portside

The path of austerity could spread economic pain and social woes far beyond the Caribbean island, says public debt expert Martin Guzman. 1,000 miles off the coast of Florida, a small Caribbean island of 3.4 million American citizens is facing its worst economic crisis since coming under U.S. rule in 1898. In the short term, austerity aggravates the recession and reduces opportunities.

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Across Europe, people are fed up with a monetary union that is inefficient because it is so profoundly undemocratic. This is why the battle for rescuing Greece has now turned into a battle for Europe’s integrity, soul, rationality and democracy by setting up a Pan-European political movement, inspired by the Athens Spring, that will work toward Europe’s democratization.

The weakness of the petrostate economy could jolt Russia's political elites-or its ordinary citizens-to take action.

Detroit’s bankruptcy is, at its core, a cash flow problem caused by its inability to bring in enough revenue to pay its bills. Detroit’s bankruptcy was primarily caused by a severe decline in revenue and exacerbated by complicated Wall Street deals that put its ability to pay its expenses at greater risk.

The crisis in funding for pensions, both private and public, is a manufactured one. It's rooted in the Enron-style accounting and "something-for-nothing" financial engineering that set off the 2008 financial meltdown. Now that state and local governments are swimming in red ink because of tax cuts and the Wall Street meltdown, unions are caught flat-footed. Their erstwhile allies, after testing today's political winds, now line up to ax their pay and pensions.

What about the ratings agencies? Isn't it true that almost none of the fraud that's swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's rubber-stamping it? Aren't they guilty, too? Man, are they ever. And a lot more than even the least generous of us suspected.