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The media has been so preoccupied with acute symptoms of the debt crisis - sliding home prices, foreclosure abuses, ongoing Euromarket bank/sovereign debt stress, ongoing battles over financial regulation implementation, unhappiness over the Fed's QE2 - that lingering problems are not getting the attention they deserve. High on the list is the how the weak job market is affecting new college and advanced degree program graduates. We have an unspoken social contract: young people who get an education, particularly a "good" education (which means more elite universities, more serious courses of study, graduate degrees) are supposed to be rewarded by higher lifetime earnings. And the prospect of higher lifetime earnings in turn makes it rational to borrow to invest in education. But this whole premise has started to go awry, and the huge uptick in unemployment has started to make matters worse.

European financial markets were expected to suffer another week of turmoil after the Spanish government was forced over the weekend to rescue a regional mortgage lender and European leaders revealed deep divisions over how to tackle mounting deficits in the eurozone.

"Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."- John F. KennedyThere's one thing for sure: 2008 isn't anything like politics as usual.The corporate media (with their unerring eye for the obvious point) is fixated on the narrative that, for the first time ever, Americans will likely end this year with either a woman or a black man headed for the White House. Bloggers are telling stories from the front lines of primaries and caucuses that look like something from the early 60s - people lining up before dawn to vote in Manoa, Hawaii yesterday; a thousand black college students in Prairie View, Texas marching 10 miles to cast their early votes in the face of a county that tried to disenfranchise them. In recent months, we've also been gobstopped by the sheer passion of the insurgent campaigns of both Barack Obama and Ron Paul, both of whom brought millions of new voters into the conversation - and with them, a sharp critique of the status quo and a new energy that's agitating toward deep structural change.There's something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air. And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who've been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years. Can it be - at long last - that Americans have, simply, had enough? Are we, finally, stepping out to take back our government - and with it, control of our own future? Is this simply a shifting political season - the kind we get every 20 to 30 years - or is there something deeper going on here? Do we dare to raise our hopes that this time, we're going to finally win a few? Just how ready is this country for big, serious, forward-looking change?Recently, I came across a pocket of sociological research that suggested a tantalizing answer to these questions - and also that America may be far more ready for far more change than anyone really believes is possible at this moment. In fac

Here are just some of the sobering facts:-- There are 8.5 million people receiving unemployment insurance and over 40 million receiving food stamps.-- At the current pace of job creation, the economy won't return to full employment until 2018.-- Middle-income jobs are disappearing from the economy. The share of middle-income jobs in the United States has fallen from 52% in 1980 to 42% in 2010.-- Middle-income jobs have been replaced by low-income jobs, which now make up 41% of total employment.-- 17 million Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor's degree.-- Over the past year, nominal wages grew only 1.7% while all consumer prices, including food and energy, increased by 2.7%.-- Wages and salaries have fallen from 60% of personal income in 1980 to 51% in 2010. Government transfers have risen from 11.7% of personal income in 1980 to 18.4% in 2010, a post-war high.The bottom line is simple says Schwenninger: The middle class is shrinking, which threatens the social composition and stability of the world's biggest economy. "I worry that we're becoming a barbell society - a lot of money wealth and power at the top, increasing hollowness at the center, which I think provides the stability and the heart and soul of the society... and then too many people in fear of falling down."

Glenn Greenwald studied law and spent ten years as a litigator in federal and state courts across the country. Now he's a big two-fisted progressive blogger and columnist for Salon.com. And he's out with a blistering critique of what has happened to American law. We've stopped applying it to everyone, says Greenwald. We've carved out an exemption for Americans in the halls of power. We've created what Greenwald calls a "lawless elite" that is running roughshod over our economy and national policy. Over American law. This hour On Point: Glenn Greenwald, and liberty and justice for some.

One of the singular victories of the rich has been convincing the rest of us that their disproportionate success has been due to abstract economic forces beyond anyone's control (technology, globalization, etc.), not old-fashioned power politics. Hopefully the financial crisis and the recession that has ended only on paper (if that) will provide the opportunity to teach people that there is no such thing as abstract economic forces; instead, there are different groups using the political system to fight for larger shares of society's wealth. And one group has been winning for over thirty years.

Germany balked for weeks over a possible bailout for Athens. Now its delays are coming back to haunt it in the form of intense international criticism of Angela Merkel's crisis management.

Political leaders and central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic struggled over the weekend to persuade jittery investors that Europe would pull through its sovereign debt crisis, saying that it would be helped by a stronger-than-expected economic recovery in the United States.

MADRID - Spanish riot police said Thursday that the long hours they have been required to work this week to prevent protesters from gaining access to Madrid's main square "is not tolerable for much longer".

We provide direct evidence of market manipulation at the beginning of the financial crisis in November 2007. The type of manipulation, a "bear raid," would have been prevented by a regulation that was repealed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2007. The regulation, the uptick rule, was designed to prevent manipulation and promote stability and was in force from 1938 as a key part of the government response to the 1928 market crash and its aftermath. On November 1, 2007, Citigroup experienced an unusual increase in trading volume and decrease in price. Our analysis of financial industry data shows that this decline coincided with an anomalous increase in borrowed shares, the selling of which would be a large fraction of the total trading volume. The selling of borrowed shares cannot be explained by news events as there is no corresponding increase in selling by share owners. A similar number of shares were returned on a single day six days later. The magnitude and coincidence of borrowing and returning of shares is evidence of a concerted effort to drive down Citigroup's stock price and achieve a profit, i.e., a bear raid. Interpretations and analyses of financial markets should consider the possibility that the intentional actions of individual actors or coordinated groups can impact market behavior. Markets are not sufficiently transparent to reveal even major market manipulation events. Our results point to the need for regulations that prevent intentional actions that cause markets to deviate from equilibrium and contribute to crashes. Enforcement actions cannot reverse severe damage to the economic system. The current "alternative" uptick rule which is only in effect for stocks dropping by over 10% in a single day is insufficient. Prevention may be achieved through improved availability of market data and the original uptick rule or other transaction limitations.

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The Great Recession could have spawned another era of fundamental reform, just as the Great Depression did. But the financial rescue reduced immediate demands for broader reform. Obama might still have succeeded had he framed the challenge accurately. Yet in reassuring the public that the economy would return to normal, he missed a key opportunity to expose the longer-term scourge of widening inequality and its dangers. Containing the immediate financial crisis and then claiming the economy was on the mend left the public with a diffuse set of economic problems that seemed unrelated and inexplicable, as if a town's fire chief dealt with a conflagration by protecting the biggest office buildings but leaving smaller fires simmering all over town: housing foreclosures, job losses, lower earnings, less economic security, soaring pay on Wall Street and in executive suites.

Economics: I'm going to discuss trillions of dollars in a moment. As an economics teacher, I understand numbers this large are extremely difficult to imagine. If you are among the majority with this difficulty, I recommend that you follow the expert testimony that paints the picture, and know that success in this area of public education transformation that unleashes trillions of our dollars for human creative capacity in unimaginable power is sufficient to end the current economic crisis. This is the longest section of my briefing. If you tire in reading, please consider that at trillions of dollars of annual public benefits, you literally have nothing more valuable to do than understand the following facts and ideas. Harvard's Linda Bilmes co-authored a paper with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz estimating the long-term costs of current US wars at now $3 to $5 trillion ($30-$50,000 per US household of $50,000/year income), with total debt increase since 2001 of over $10 trillion. Remember, as demonstrated by the evidence disclosed by our own government, all the reasons Americans were told to go to war were known to be lies as they were told and applicable law proves these wars Orwellian unlawful. Just down the Charles River from Harvard, MIT's Simon Johnson (and former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund) describes our economy being lead by gambling oligarchs who have captured government as in banana republics (his words), and might plunge the US into an economy worse than the Great Depression. From his article under the telling title, The Quiet Coup: "Elite business interests-financiers, in the case of the U.S.-played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The govern

As fear continues to spread over the impact of the Greek debt crisis, more people are questioning how such a small country could impact markets around the world.

May Day clashes in Athens as belt-tightening policies are set to reverse rights won by workers over 30 years

European politicians are fuming over the US credit ratings agencies and their role in various financial crises. But some experts say it was governments who allowed rating firms to gain too much power in the first place.

Emergency moves by the European Central Bank on Monday and the €110bn ($145bn) international rescue package agreed over the weekend have failed to quell investor fears about the future of the eurozone as concerns have risen about other member countries' stability.

The deal widens a divide between a group of countries led by the U.S., on the one hand, and developing nations on the other, over the right of Iran and other developing nations to use nuclear energy.

Brazil and Turkey, which were represented by their presidents in the talks, invested significant diplomatic cache in the negotiations. It is rare for non-permanent members of the Security Council to intervene in a process led by nuclear powers, and in many ways the result could be seen as a revolt by smaller powers over the rights to nuclear power and prestige.

Rumors of the imminent collapse of the eurozone continue to swirl despite the Europeans' best efforts to hold the currency union together. Some accounts in the financial world have even suggested that Germany's frustration with the crisis could cause Berlin to quit the eurozone - as soon as this past weekend, according to some - while at the most recent gathering of European leaders French President Nicolas Sarkozy apparently threatened to bolt the bloc if Berlin did not help Greece. Meanwhile, many in Germany - including Chancellor Angela Merkel herself at one point - have called for the creation of a mechanism by which Greece - or the eurozone's other over-indebted, uncompetitive economies - could be kicked out of the eurozone in the future should they not mend their "irresponsible" spending habits.