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"You can't sustain a democracy in an oligarchic state. The writers on Athenian democracy understood that 2000 years ago," says Chris Hedges, whose new book The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress explores the problems of a crumbling empire, inside and out. Chris joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the death of Bin Laden and the continuing concern over terrorism, the end of empathy in the U.S., and what avenues are left for progressives to fight back.  "The elites are not going to help us," he warns, "We're going to have to help ourselves."

The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs.  The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well here's why:  it's not extraneous - it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination - an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.     Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics -- and the stories --  of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness." I had a chance to sit down with Alexander earlier this summer. We'll be posting the full interview in two parts.     "We have managed decades after the civil rights movement to create something like a caste system in the United States," says Alexander in part one here  "In major urban areas, the majority of African American men are either behind bars, under correctional control or saddled with criminal record and once branded as criminal or a felon, they're trapped for life in 2nd class status."     It's not just about people having a hard time getting ahead and climbing the ladder of success. It's about a rigged system. Sound familiar?  Like the Pew Research Center report on household wealth and the Great Recession -- the NAACP resolution story was a one-day news-blip - despite the fact that it pierces the by-your-bootstraps myth that is at the heart of - you pick it - the deficit, the stimulus, the tax code - every contemporary US economic debate.     White America just maybe ought to pay attention. With more and more Americans falling out of jobs and into debt, criminal records are a whole lot easier to come by than life-sustaining employment.  Contrary to the conventional media version, the "Drug War" story is not a people with problems

"The Responses to 'Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama'"

Well, it turned. The police bureau is starting to crack after six weeks of Occupy Portland. And one picture, right here, crystallizes the precise moment when it happened. During a choreographed effort to pull a few dozen protesters out of the Chase bank branch outside Pioneer Square, part of today's hundreds-strong N17 day of action, Portland police officers resorted to a decidedly more muscular show of force in a clash watched by TV cameras and rush-hour commuters earlier this evening. Suddenly all the fun-the dance parties, the union songs, the peaceful arrests earlier on the Steel Bridge and at Wells Fargo-was for naught. Tromping in with mounted officers, they pushed marchers who had gathered on the sidewalks along SW Yamhill into the street-forcing them to block MAX trains, something no one was doing until the heavily armored riot squad showed up-and then poked and, for the first time, pepper-sprayed the marchers. Significantly, some of the spraying came after protesters had clearly retreated to the opposite sidewalk. (In another odd shift, there also was no federal-court-required verbal PA warning that chemical munitions would be deployed-a hallmark of every other mass police action to date.) Meanwhile, at almost the very same moment, Police Chief Mike Reese was on TV blaming Occupy Portland for his officers' inability to respond to a rape victim for three hours today. Consider that tantamount to a declaration of war. Reese's point? Officers are tired and have been too distracted to do their main jobs: responding to actual crimes. It was an attempt to spin sentiment against the movement, which seems to be attracting adherents. Even the O today said the movement is "building momentum" and said the average age of some 34 arrestees earlier today was 50-not a bunch of young, anarchists/punks/hoodlums/hippies/road warriors etc. But that might come back to haunt him, judging by a wave of outrage on Twitter and elsewhere among those who noted that it

In a new report (PDF) by the Open Society Institute, human-rights researcher Jonathan Horowitz contrasts the official prison system that the Pentagon has constructed in Afghanistan-where they often arrange press briefings and invite journalists on tours-with the super-secret facility run on the periphery of Bagram Air Base, the "Tor" or "Black Jail."

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding -- indeed, an integral part of it.