In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll see pro-banker politicians denounce the proposed settlement, asserting that it’s all about defending the rule of law. But what they’re actually defending is the exact opposite — a system in which only the little people have to obey the law, while the rich, and bankers especially, can cheat and defraud without consequences.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands.

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail.

The reality today is that one will say something, it will be caught on tape and then distorted by the likes of Fox News, which will usually stick to the falsehood long enough to transform the distortion into a "factoid" - basically, a lie that seems like a fact. Even after the lie is revealed, no public apology arrives.

The Republican Party platform of Eisenhower's 1956 called for expansion of Social Security, broadened unemployment insurance, better health protection for all of our people. It called for voting rights--full voting civil rights for D.C. It called for expanding the minimum wage to cover more workers.

Those desperate to decipher the baffling Obama presidency could do worse than consult an article titled “Understanding Stockholm Syndrome” in the online archive of The F.B.I. Law Enforcement Bulletin. It explains that hostage takers are most successful at winning a victim’s loyalty if they temper their brutality with a bogus show of kindness.

The idea is that unemployment has nothing to do with structural economic forces or rigged public policies and everything to do with individual motivation. Yes, we're asked to believe that the 15 million jobless Americans are all George Costanzas

We already suffer from higher unemployment, lower homeownership rates, and smaller levels of income and net worth than do our White counterparts. That makes it all the more critical that we manage our resources wisely and recognize the true cost of our spending and the overall toll that it takes individually on our families and collectively on our race.

$3.7 trillion is the figure that is generally cited as the projected ten-year impact of the Bush tax cuts. Letting the tax cuts expire will eliminate $3.7 trillion from the projected national debt with one stroke. Why does this help the middle class? Because Social Security and Medicare are currently under assault.

I know, you think you’ve taken “your country back” with this election — and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise — but you are wrong.

Can anyone name a movie that came out recently starring a black man who wasn't a sociopath? Someone who had a terrific screen presence, like a young Paul Robeson? And he portrayed a character who was complex and fully drawn? Did he respect black women, too?

Referring to the disarming of blacks during the post-Reconstruction era, Thomas wrote: "It was the 'duty' of white citizen 'patrols to search negro houses and other suspected places for firearms.' If they found any firearms, the patrols were to take the offending slave or free black 'to the nearest justice of the peace' whereupon he would be 'severely punished.' " Never again, Thomas says.

"I see how the n-----s live on TV -- the videos, they show me," he said, beaming proudly. Now, you probably think I was uncomfortable because he said the N-word, but that wasn't it. It didn't even offend me, because I realized he meant it as a compliment. I knew that by using that word he was trying to fit in with another black person from the United States

Chicago and other urban areas are in crisis. In Chicago, 113 people have been killed this year -- a higher death toll than the troops have suffered in Afghanistan. The emergency is so dire that state legislators support calling out the National Guard to patrol Chicago's streets.

The Arizona immigration bill -- which Governor Jan Brewer has decided to sign into law -- is racist, deceitful, and reflects some of the most mean-spirited politics against immigrants that the country has ever seen. The power that this law gives to police to detain people that they suspect to be undocumented

Thirty years ago, top executives at S&P 500 companies made an average of 30 times what their workers did -- now they make 300 times what their workers make. And between 2000 and 2008, the poverty rate in the suburbs of the largest metro areas in the U.S. grew by 25 percent -- making these suburbs home to the country's largest and fastest-growing segment of the poor.

Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X's daughter, has agreed to write the foreword to three chapters omitted from the original "Autobiography of Malcolm X." Released in 1965, the classic returned to No. 1 on the best-seller list 30 years later. The "lost" chapters were recently discovered by Detroit attorney Gregory Reed who acquired them

This is no longer about political dissent. It is about storm trooper sound bites, and hate. This isn't the kind of honest debate on which our system of government has been built. It is vile, back-alley fighting, getting worse by the day, with no end in sight. People say that opposition to all Presidents, even the most unpopular white ones

This is a public service announcement to all millionaire gang members – “Stop brainwashing our youth you ignorant bastards!” This goes out to Baby from Cash Money Records with your big red star tattoo on your head, talking about, “keeping it blood all day,” while your son (Lil Wayne) is locked up on Rikers Island for gun charges.

I will come to D.C. and clean up the mess that's been created around you. I will work for $1 a year. I will help the Dems on Capitol Hill find their spines and I will teach them how to nonviolently beat the Republicans to a pulp.

Simmons wrote that Tiger Woods's return to golf from "sex addiction" would be tougher than Ali's return to the ring after being banished for opposing the war in Vietnam. Yes, for Simmons, Ali's efforts to resist the military draft are dwarfed in importance by Tiger's efforts to resist nookie.

With 15 million people out of work (and if we count the underemployed and those too discouraged to look for work, 26 million), and with six unemployed jobseekers for every opening, it's no wonder the New York Times describes the jobs bill taking shape in the Senate as "so puny as to be meaningless."

Those in the middle have been hit hard. The job losses there have been severe and long-lasting. But for those in the lower-income groups, the scale of the employment crisis has been mind-boggling. What you’re not hearing from the politicians and the talking heads is that the joblessness and underemployment in America’s low-income households rival their heights

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power.

But we know this evening as we assemble here that if democracy is to live segregation must die. [applause] Segregation is a tragic cancer which must be removed before our democratic health can be realized. Segregation is something of a, a tragic sore that debilitates the white as well as the Negro community.

Sir, I am forever grateful that you so proudly sought out and served as attorney for my father, Al Hajj Malik Shabazz, Malcolm X, when he, just a young man himself, hoisted humanity upon his shoulders and challenged a government that had been historically unjust.

A long-overdue reform in criminal justice - one crucial to the fight against inner-city violence - is to place checks, balances and limits on the way cops and prosecutors use criminal informants. Right now, there are few controls and almost no reliable data about the vast, shadowy world where law-enforcement personnel offer all sorts of benefits to criminals

Blacks are living a tale of two Americas — one of the ascension of the first black president with the cultural capital that accrues; the other of a collapsing quality of life and amplified racial tensions, while supporting a president who is loath to even acknowledge their pain, let alone commiserate in it.

The fact is that college opens doors for young people, and many young people of color need doors opened for them. If there are too many people going to college, there are not too many black people. I bristle at the notion that we would restrict college access when all evidence suggests that education not only transforms individual lives

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near

She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever.

Well, if the president wants to make sure he doesn't let down the millions who believed he really would change the rotten system, he should read the The Audacity to Win from beginning to end -- and rediscover a whole host of things he knows, but seems to have forgotten.

Forty years ago, President Nixon used the unfortunate phrase “War on Drugs,” launching a misguided crusade that has encouraged street violence, eaten away at state budgets and packed our prisons with non-violent offenders. The nation’s punitive approach to drugs has turned us into a penal colony.

Almost as quickly as news broke of Limbaugh's football dreams, I was contacted by members of the NFL Players Association over concern they had regarding ownership from a man who previously equated the NFL to a game between rival gangs the Bloods and the Crips.

National Football League owners could be on the verge of a catastrophic error in judgment. In a league that is 70 percent African-American, an unapologetic racist is in talks to buy a team. Yes, Rush Limbaugh, along with St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts, is close to buying the St. Louis Rams.

The Universal Zulu Nation gives HONOR and RESPECT to Brother Mr. Magic who was a Giant and Pioneer in the Growth of Hip Hop Radio. A brother who was not scare to challenge what was being played on mainstream radio. A brother who show Love not Hate when it came down to playing all forms of Hip Hop Music on the airwaves.

Over a year ago, we suffered the most significant financial collapse since the Great Depression, and the result of that is massive unemployment and underemployment. People lost their savings. People lost their homes.

On the right, we're hearing about communist takeovers, birth certificates, Oval Office dress codes, teleprompters, death panels, czars and a return to segregated buses. During the previous administration, on the other hand,

Fifteen million Americans are locked in the nightmare of unemployment, nearly 10 percent of the work force. A third have been jobless for more than six months. Thirteen percent of Latinos and 15 percent of blacks are out of work. (Those are some of the official statistics. The reality is much worse.) Consider this: Some 9.4 million new jobs would have to be created to get us back to the level of employment at the time that the recession began in December 2007. But last month, we lost 216,000 jobs. If the recession technically ends soon and we get to a point where some modest number of jobs are created — say, 100,000 or 150,000 a month — the politicians and the business commentators will celebrate like it’s New Year’s. But think about how puny that level of job creation really is in an environment that needs nearly 10 million jobs just to get us back to the lean years of the George W. Bush administration. We’re hurtin’ and there ain’t much healin’ on the horizon.

And that is what the attack on Van Jones is about: exploiting white fears and anxieties. Anxieties about a black President, anxieties about a basket-case economy (which they're trying to blame on the black President even though it was well in the crapper before he came along), anxieties about a changing demographic balance in the nation (which animates their fear and anger over immigration), anxieties about a popular culture whose icons look less and less like them as the years go by. And so they play up the militant black guy image, turning a low-level bureaucrat into a "Green Jobs Czar," (the latter of which term they have sought to spin into a communist thing, despite the fact that the Russian Czars were actually the royalist pigs who were thrown out by the Russian left, a small historical detail which doesn't matter to illiterate people of course), and making him the bad guy who's running the Obama administration from behind the scenes.

Except that if you have been listening over the past few days to the lunatic fringe, PS 57 and all schools like it, in New York and all across the country, are at great risk now, not because of budget cutbacks or the swine flu, but because President Obama wants to give a speech about education to the nation's schoolchildren tomorrow. If you want to get a sense of just how haywire the country has gone lately, in less than eight months of the Obama presidency, start here. Start with the crazy people you saw on television this weekend, women actually crying that Obama's plan is really to brainwash her children, like he's invading her kid's middle school because some other President already invaded Iraq. Of course. Who would want to put their children at risk this way, listening to a success story like this President's, listening to him describe the possibilities of both education and America, talking to them about hard work?

News recently broke about the unfortunate return to the airwaves of Bob Grant, a radio talk show host whose stock in trade, racially charged hate speech, seems to be enjoying a resurgence. Nationwide, shock jocks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are seeking rating points and relevance by making heated, racially charged attacks on President Obama. In doing so, they are following the lead of Grant, the granddaddy of race-baiting broadcasters. Full disclosure: I host a weekday morning program on AM 1600 WWRL, a rival station to the ones that broadcast right-wingers. All New Yorkers of good will should cringe at Grant's reappearance on the scene. "Bob was fired by WABC in 1996 after making a remark on the air that corporate parent Disney found offensive," reads an announcement on the WABC Web site. That sanitized statement ignores the fact that a great many people - not just their "corporate parent" - were disgusted with Grant's gutter antics.

According to news reports, the Obama administration — which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives. Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise. A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach. The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health care plan.

Two issues that absolutely undermine any rosy assessment of last week’s employment report are the swelling ranks of the long-term unemployed and the crushing levels of joblessness among young Americans. More than five million workers — about a third of the unemployed — have been jobless for more than six months. That’s the highest number recorded since accurate records have been kept. For those concerned with the economic viability of the American family going forward, the plight of young workers, especially young men, is particularly frightening. The percentage of young American men who are actually working is the lowest it has been in the 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old were working on any given day in the first six months of this year. In the age group 25 through 34 years old, traditionally a prime age range for getting married and starting a family, just 81 of 100 men were employed.

It'd be nice to think that the recent surge in overtly racist rhetoric on the right has been a case of random opportunism, provoked by the coincidence of a wealthy black Harvard professor yelling at a white cop who arrested him in his own home. Like, who could've predicted that the professor would be a friend of the Harvard law school graduate who is president, or that president would then say on camera that the cops acted "stupidly"? Or that the incident would happen just as Congress was going into a clinch over health care reform? The Henry Louis Gates imbroglio did come out of nowhere, and it did give President Obama's opponents a chance to howl about the onerous burdens "reverse racism" puts on the fading white majority in this country. You may not see how that justifies the big-time bigotry that took over the discourse last week, but hey, it's a white thang: There were Birthers insisting that Obama's presidency is illegitimate because he was "born in Kenya"; CNN's Lou Dobbs trying to legitimize the Birthers, and of course, an angry Rush Limbaugh fuming that Obama "is an angry black man."

 My Grandfather told me a long time ago that he couldn't put all white people in the category of devils because he had to judge each person as an individual. Now, if they prove themselves to be devils, then that is a different story, but they have to prove that first. He had a long list of previous experiences that I couldn't even imagine living through or being able to deal with, but he always concluded that there are good white people and there are bad white people, just as there are good black people and bad black people. This is my point: no matter what our past experiences are, it is not intelligent, nor is it fair not to see people as individuals. Furthermore, if a policeman is to prejudge a situation and not have the ability to view it on a case-by-case basis, he has no business being a policeman. If not responsibly honed, their power can become catastrophic, dangerous, destructive and corrupt.

Back in the late 80's, rap activist Sister Souljah lit a powder keg in this country with her sharp criticisms of America's treatment of African Americans. Her rhythmic rebel rousin' rap had black folks of my generation ready to stand up and fight the power at the drop of a hat. Twenty years later, we have CNN's Sister Soledad O'Brien whose sanitized social critiques make me want to drink a peach smoothie and pet a poodle. There has always been a bitter debate between black folks who advocated building this country up and those who thought that it was more politically expedient to burn it down. But with an African American as head of the free world the argument takes on new nuances. What is proper black rage etiquette in the Obama age? Since slavery, black rage has been expressed in many ways.

Push finally came to shove in Washington this past week as the battle for health care escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat. If it all seems to be getting more and more confusing, join the club. It's hard to see what's happening through all the gun smoke. The Republicans have more than health care reform in their bombsights -- they want a loss for Obama so crushing it will bring the administration to its knees and restore GOP control of Congress after next year's elections. In the words of Republican Senator Jim DeMint, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." The "Waterloo" of DeMint's metaphor, of course, is not the 1974 Abba hit but the battle in 1815 that ended Napoleon Bonaparte's rule as Emperor of France -- a humiliating defeat and a turning point in European history. Right-wingers like Glenn Beck see Obama as Napoleon incarnate, a popular emperor who must be stopped.

Time magazine said it. So did CNN. The New York Times said it, too. In fact, without exception, every major United States media outlet has, in one way or another, reported on Republican (and other) fears of Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor's potential for "racial bias," given her Puerto Rican ethnicity and her now infamous comments about a "wise Latina" making better choices than a "white man." I've watched it all as I watch so much of what passes for journalism in my beloved, forgetful country - which is to say with a mixture of concern, annoyance, and indigestion. Astoundingly, not one media outlet has bothered to report what, to me, is a glaringly obvious omission in the discussion about Sotomayor and race: Puerto Ricans, like all other Hispanics/Latinos, can be of any race, and are. Latinos/Hispanics are not a racial group, according to our own Census Bureau, which, incidentally, created the amorphous (and many might argue, false) category in the 1970s.

Sadly, our national willingness to confront hard truths--or more to the point our unwillingness to do so--is a contagion, the likes of which has clearly infected the President, as evidenced by his July 4th message to the nation today, a copy of which arrived in my e-mail inbox as I was writing this, in fact. In it, President Obama--a man who surely knows better but who, having traded honesty for political viability, now finds himself tethered to patriotic blather as a condition of his public image--begins by insisting that on this day we should remember the "courageous group of patriots" who "pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to the proposition that all of us were created equal." Of course, as I'm sure the President learned at Columbia (or for that matter in prep school in Hawaii), most of them believed in no such thing. For many of the revolutionaries, indeed most, freedom and liberty were to be the preserve of white men only. And so, while whites like my own sixth-degree great grandfather received 10,000 acres of land for his service in the war, the 5000 blacks who served every bit as valiantly as he received no such prize.

The Senate on Thursday followed the House in voting to apologize for slavery and the Jim Crow segregation that followed it. In other words, it only took almost 150 years and the election of an African-American who is not descended from slavery to move Congress to apologize for slavery.Thanks, senators, but you're a little late. As "senior black correspondent" Larry Wilmore quipped on "The Daily Show": "I thought Barack Obama's election was our apology." He was joking, but not by much. After all, part of the appeal of Obama's White House victory was its symbolic message of post-racial optimism: We were ready as a diverse nation to stand together as Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed, put our ugly racial past behind us and look to a better future. By contrast, the slavery apology issue erupts at a convenient time for Congress but it's an inconvenient distraction, at best, for Obama.

This hatred is fed by the extreme rhetoric of our politics -- as Republicans accuse Obama of promoting "fascist" policies and call Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Right-wing radio host Glenn Beck charged that Obama's lifting of the ban on stem-cell research was designed to create a new "master race." Rush Limbaugh accused the Obama administration of actively seeking to destroy America as we know it. All this speech is protected by the First Amendment, but that doesn't make it any less reckless. Add to this hatred our obsession with guns -- which has reached ridiculous extremes. The gun lobby has cowed Democrats and Republicans from what once was bipartisan common sense. Now both parties scrape low to please. The credit card reform bill was amended to allow concealed weapons in national parks. In Virginia, R. Creigh Deeds won the Democratic nomination for governor while backing measures to allow concealed weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.

Earlier this year, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning to local police departments to watch for a possible upsurge in violence by right-wing extremists, a roar of complaint went up from Republican pols and conservative pundits. But a spate of terrorist murders in Kansas and Washington, and elsewhere - including some that haven't made big headlines and took place well before the recent carnage - make clear that the original memo from DHS was a timely and accurate warning that America must take seriously. The April 7 report was brief, clear and plausible. It warned that four factors - Obama's election as the first black President, the economic hardship of the recession, disillusionment among some veterans and proposed gun control measures - could "attract new members into the ranks of right-wing extremist groups. The report also said "the high volume of purchases and stockpiling of weapons and ammunition by right-wing extremists

Let's be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 - but this occurs every year.  In the midst of this horrendous lack of coverage, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation - and health care costs continue to soar. At $2.4 trillion dollars, and 18 percent of our GDP, the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country is unsustainable both from a personal and macro-economic perspective. At the individual level, the average American spends about $7,900 per year on health care. Despite that huge outlay, a recent study found that medical problems contributed to 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007.

Two decades ago, in May 1989, I was a 20-year-old history student at Beijing University. By June 13, my name was at the top of the list of the 21 "most wanted" student leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement. I was arrested and spent nearly four years in jail, re-arrested in 1995, and then was exiled to the United States in 1998. Secret memoirs have just been released by Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party who lost a power struggle with hardliners in 1989 and died under house arrest. Zhao's writings reveal his conviction that our demands for economic and human rights reform were not only reasonable but also could have accelerated China's modernization. Twenty years have passed since our landmark demonstrations in Tiananmen Square for democracy and free speech and against corruption. And during this time, China has changed in important ways. Economic reforms have allowed millions of Chinese people to lift their families out of poverty, and many in China find their lives changed for the better.

Chrysler has been forced into bankruptcy and GM is next in line. At the same time, many banks recently failed the "stress test" and, after already receiving tens of billions in bailout funds, will require billions of dollars in additional capital to remain solvent. We are stimulating banks, top-down; but eliminating auto and manufacturing industries, bottom-up. Each week, new shock waves are being sent through our economic system: Chrysler announced it will shutter 25 percent, or nearly 800 of its dealerships. Some 1100 GM dealers got pink slip letters. That amounts to, as reported in the NY Times, almost 200,000 jobs, more than are employed directly in the U.S. by GM and Chrysler today. The economic stimulus must stop the hemorrhaging as priority #1: workers are losing their jobs at a rate of 600,000 a month, as "official" unemployment approaches 10%. 2 million families are losing their homes to foreclosures each year. The shut down of industries like auto and steel and related small businesses will exacerbate the crisis.

The options are running out for Troy Davis, a man who has been condemned to death for killing a police officer in Georgia, but whose guilt is seriously in question.  It’s bad enough that we still execute people in the United States. It’s absolutely chilling that we’re willing to do it when we’re not even sure we’ve got the right person in our clutches. Mr. Davis came within an hour of execution last fall. His relatives and his attorney, Jason Ewart, had come to the state prison to say goodbye. Mr. Davis had eaten his last meal, and Mr. Ewart was ready to witness his execution. The mind-numbing tension was broken with a last-minute stay from the Supreme Court. The case then made its way to the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, which ruled 2-to-1 last month against Mr. Davis’s petition for a hearing to examine new evidence pointing to his innocence.

We've all heard the argument. Moving terrorists to mainland Supermax prisons and the like will endanger American lives. The Republicans, along with the Senate majority leader, are suggesting that rather than being incarcerated in state of the art maximum security facilities -- facilities financed via the multi-billion dollar U.S. prison-industrial-complex mandated by lawmakers -- terrorists will simply be turned loose on American soil for some crazy reason, and will subsequently hork a nuclear missile and proceed to crash it into your house. Somehow. The reality is that Guantanamo detainees would be held in our most secure, impenetrable prison facilities where it's literally impossible to harm any outside citizen. Fact: no human being has ever escaped from a Supermax prison. Zero. Convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui has been held in a Supermax near Florence, Colorado since 2006. So far, Colorado has not been destroyed.

Today’s G.O.P. is, after all, very much a minority party. It retains some limited ability to obstruct the Democrats, but has no ability to make or even significantly shape policy. Beyond that, Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats. But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties. One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday.

The market mystique didn’t always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that. And the financial system wasn’t just boring. It was also, by today’s standards, small. Even during the “go-go years,” the bull market of the 1960s, finance and insurance together accounted for less than 4 percent of G.D.P. The relative unimportance of finance was reflected in the list of stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which until 1982 contained not a single financial company. It all sounds primitive by today’s standards. Yet that boring, primitive financial system serviced an economy that doubled living standards over the course of a generation.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya

You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad. We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions. But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd. When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.

Expectations for Barack Obama, already high, jumped even higher when his aide and longtime confidante, Valerie Jarrett, announced that the President-elect plans to create a White House office dedicated to urban affairs. That would make good on a promise Obama made in a June speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "We need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution," he said. "Strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America." Obama's point was that urban policy would be part of a broad plan to boost the economy of metropolitan areas, including suburbs. Obama's point was that urban policy would be part of a broad plan to boost the economy of metropolitan areas, including suburbs.

These are frightening and unusual times. The world of finance and the overall economy are both in perilous condition. Almost every day a new crisis erupts. The stock market has plunged dramatically, and is more volatile, than at any time in memory. Loans between banks have dried up. Major financial houses have either failed or merged. Government bailout follows government bailout. Just how deep the financial crisis is can be seen from this paradox: the Bush Administration, the most wild and irresponsible defender of right-wing economic ideology and free markets in our nation's history, now has to muster one initiative after another to intervene in the financial markets. It is even in the process of nationalizing banks.

As the McCain/Palin ticket lurches toward what is starting to look like certain defeat on Nov. 4, Republican operatives and their parrots in the right-wing media are trying to blame the debacle on election fraud by ACORN and other left-leaning grass-roots organizations. It's not even remotely true. The essence of the right-wingers' case is that thousands of voter registration forms submitted by ACORN workers - out of an estimated 1.3 million registrations completed in 21 states over the past 18 months - turned out to be fraudulent or defective. A fake or defective registration, while troublesome, has no impact on a vote count unless an imposter shows up.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be. Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

These were the reckless clowns who led us into the foolish multitrillion-dollar debacle in Iraq and who crafted tax policies that enormously benefited millionaires and billionaires while at the same time ran up staggering amounts of government debt. This is the crowd that contributed mightily to the greatest disparities in wealth in the U.S. since the gilded age. This was the crowd that cut the cords of corporate and financial regulations and in myriad other ways gleefully hacked away at the best interests of the United States. Now we’re looking into the abyss. When President Bush went on television last week to drum up support for the bailout package, he looked almost dazed, like someone who’d just climbed out of an auto wreck.

Sarah Palin admittedly hasn't had much of a track record when it comes to acknowledging -- let alone promoting -- diversity during her short tenure as Alaska governor. She's on record with a terse utterance on hate crimes legislation and on cultural diversity. But Palin's skimpy track record and paucity of words on diversity is relatively tame compared to the far more damaging accusation that's making the rounds. On April 29, 14 black leaders in Alaska, including prominent ministers, NAACP officials, and community activists, met with Palin to voice their complaint over minority hiring and job opportunities. During the meeting she allegedly said that she didn't have to hire any blacks. Even more damning, she purportedly said that she didn't intend to hire any.

The term "'b**** fighting" is what some women privately call a pier room brawl that a pack of girls or young women engage in with one another. The term and the behavior is loathsome and offensive. But it was that sort of brawl that claimed the life of 23-year-old Shontae Blanche, and even more shockingly, her 7 month unborn child.

Stadiums are sporting shrines to the dogma of trickle-down economics. In the past 10 years, more than $16 billion of the public’s money has been spent for stadium construction and upkeep from coast to coast. Though some cities are beginning to resist paying the full tab, any kind of subsidy is a fool’s investment

The Bushies, it seems, like starting fights, but they don’t believe in paying any of the cost ... Above all, they don’t believe that they or their friends should face any ... penalties for trivial sins like distorting intelligence to get America into an unnecessary war, or totally botching that war’s execution

In an absolutely mind bending turn of events, Don Imus is now a man without a job.  A week after calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy headed hos," the man once hailed by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in the country, is officially off the air.

In the polarized political conflict with liberalism, shrinking government has become the organizing conservative principle. Economic conservatives have the money and the institutions. They have taken control. Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse.

I have often said that Hip Hop saved my life; now we need Hip Hop to do what it does best; tell the hard truth, bring people together to create the means to battle whatever ails us and try to save lives. For those of us in this Hip Hop village suffering from this wretched debilitating disease we must Break the Silence