Widespread demonstrations in support of Occupy Wall Street have put the financial crisis back into the national spotlight lately.

So here’s a quick refresher on what’s happened to some of the main players, whose behavior, whether merely reckless or downright deliberate, helped cause or worsen the meltdown. This list isn’t exhaustive — feel welcome to add to it.
Mortgage originators

Mortgage lenders contributed to the financial crisis by issuing or underwriting loans to people who would have a difficult time paying them back, inflating a housing bubble that was bound to pop. Lax regulation allowed banks to stretch their mortgage lending standards and use aggressive tactics to rope borrowers into complex mortgages that were more expensive than they first appeared. Evidence has also surfaced that lenders were filing fraudulent documents to push some of these mortgages through, and, in some cases, had been doing so as early as the 1990s. A 2005 Los Angeles Times investigation of Ameriquest – then the nation’s largest subprime lender – found that ‘they forged documents, hyped customers’ creditworthiness and ‘juiced’ mortgages with hidden rates and fees.

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Americans for Safe Access (ASA), the country’s largest medical marijuana advocacy organization, filed a lawsuit in federal court Thursday challenging the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempt to close down medical marijuana dispensaries in California.

‘Although the Obama Administration is entitled to enforce federal marijuana laws, the Tenth Amendment forbids it from using coercive tactics to commandeer the law-making functions of the State,

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For a long time, the holy grail of solar photovoltaics (PV) has been ‘grid parity,’ the point at which it would be as cheap to generate one’s own solar electricity as it is to buy electricity from the grid. And that is indeed an important market milestone, being achieved now in many places around the world. But recently it has become clear that PV is set to go beyond grid parity and become the cheapest way to generate electricity.

Whenever I say this I encounter incredulity, even vehement opposition, from friends and foes of renewable energy alike. Apparently, knowledge of the rapid developments of the last few years has not been widely disseminated. But it’s happening, right under our noses! It is essential to understand this so that we can leverage it to rapidly switch to a global energy system fully based on renewable energy.

Solar cells.A hundred solar cells, good for 380 watts of solar PV power.Photo: Ariane van DijkWorking on solar PV energy at Ecofys since 1986, I have seen steady progression: efficiency goes up, cost goes down. But it was only on a 2004 visit to Q-Cells’ solar cell factory in Thalheim, Germany, that it dawned on me that […]

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In September, I wrote a column about how the Government Accountability Office and I were concerned about how the military was going to get out of Iraq at the end of the year without the same massive waste as when we went in, and how the contractors left behind were going to be managed.

I also talked about the new faction of military contracting, which I call the war service industry, and how it is going to handle the shrinking of this war, because they won’t have a hot war or occupation in Iraq to keep the billions of dollars flowing to their ‘life support’ of the troops. I think that the Department of Defense (DoD) doesn’t really believe that we will pull out all the troops by December 31, 2011, and that the Iraqis will give our troops immunity so that some of them can stay.

That all changed when President Obama announced last Friday that the US will honor the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that was negotiated by the Bush administration and the Iraqi government to remove all US troops by year’s end. This has caused a lot of scrambling by the DoD and the State Department on how […]

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New street lights that include ‘Homeland Security

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