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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."

Critics of President Obama never tire of blaming him for today's high deficits. But if blame belongs with one president, it belongs with Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush. The chart above, which the New York Times created based upon figures from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, illustrates this point very clearly. But it's worth reviewing the history here, because while it's familiar to most of us who follow politics it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention in the political debate.

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

Drought could parch close to 70 percent of the planet's soil by 2025 unless countries implement policies to slow desertification, a senior United Nations official has warned. "If we cannot find a solution to this problem... in 2025, close to 70 percent could be affected," Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, said Friday. Drought currently affects at least 41 percent of the planet and environmental degradation has caused it to spike by 15 to 25 percent since 1990, according to a global climate report. "There will not be global security without food security" in dry regions, Gnacadja said at the start of the ninth UN conference on the convention in the Argentine capital. "A green deal is necessary" for developing countries working to combat drought, he stressed. The next meeting on the convention is scheduled to take place in South Korea in 2010.

CAMBRIDGE - Why is everyone still referring to the recent financial crisis as the "Great Recession"? The term, after all, is predicated on a dangerous misdiagnosis of the problems that confront the United States and other countries, leading to bad forecasts and bad policy.

"Overcriminalization" describes the trend in America - and particularly in Congress - to use the criminal law to "solve" every problem, punish every mistake (instead of making proper use of civil penalties)...

There has been much concern about financial contagion between Europe and America. But the real problem stems from another form of contagion: bad ideas move easily across borders, and misguided economic notions on both sides of the Atlantic have been reinforcing each other.

But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone's bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.

In May 2008, Josh Fox received a letter from a natural gas company offering to lease his family's land in Milanville, Pennsylvania for $100,000 to drill for gas.[1]Following the lease offer, he looked for information about natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale under large parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia. He visited Dimock, Pennsylvania where natural gas drilling was already taking place. In Dimock, he met families able to light their tap water on fire as well as suffering from numerous health issues and fearing their well water had been contaminated.Fox then set out to see how communities are being affected in the west where a natural gas drilling boom has been underway for the last decade. He spent time with citizens in their homes and on their land as they relayed their stories of natural gas drilling in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Texas, among others. He spoke with residents who have experienced a variety of chronic health problems as well as contamination of their air, water wells or surface water. In some instances, the residents are reporting that they obtained a court injunction or settlement monies from gas companies to replace the affected water supplies with potable water or water purification kits.[2]Throughout the documentary, Fox reached out to scientists, politicians and gas industry executives and ultimately found himself in the halls of Congress as a subcommittee was discussing the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act, "a bill to amend the Safe Drinking Water Act to repeal a certain exemption for hydraulic fracturing."[3] Hydraulic fracturing was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.[4]Making appearances in the film are Dr. Theo Colborn, founder of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX); John Hanger, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP); Dr. Al Armendariz, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator for Region 6; W

"In January, Mr. Obama signed a food safety law that provides broad new authority to the Food and Drug Administration," wrote Robert Pear in Friday's Times, in an article about the Congressional appropriations mess. But House Republicans, he added, had voted "to cut the agency's budget." Well, yes, in a nutshell, that is the sad story of the food safety law - the first major change in how the government regulates food safety in over 70 years. But the way the Republicans have dealt with its funding represents more than appropriations problems. It also represents the way they've allowed their unyielding antitax, antispend ideology to get in the way of common sense - and the common good.

Seems like only yesterday conservative nabobs of negativity predicted America's ballooning budget deficit would generate soaring inflation and crippling costs of additional federal borrowing.  Remember Standard & Poor's downgrade of the United States? Recall the intense worry about investors' confidence in government bonds - America's IOUs?  Hmmm. Last week ten-year yields on U.S. Treasuries closed at 1.83 percent. In other words, they were wrong. In fact, it's cheaper than ever for the United States to borrow. That's because global investors desperately want the safety of dollars. Almost everywhere else on the globe is riskier. Europe is in a debt crisis, many developing nations are gripped by fears the contagion will spread to them, Japan remains in critical condition, China's growth is slowing.  Put this together with two other facts: Unemployment in America remains sky-high. 14 million Americans are out of work and 25 million are looking for full-time jobs. The nation's infrastructure is crumbling. Our roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, subways, gas pipelines, ports, airports, and school buildings are desperately in need of repair. Deferred maintenance is taking a huge toll. Now connect the dots. Anyone with half a brain will see this is the ideal time to borrow money from the rest of the world to put Americans to work rebuilding the nation's infrastructure.  Problem is, too many in Washington have less than half a brain. 

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books. Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

The good news is that those who would have been working on dealing with this problem are mostly now off flipping hamburgers, if they're lucky. Outsourcing in an economy where applicants are refused employment on the basis of long term unemployment - an idea that just keeps on getting better. Link posted to Digg by user Ironeus.

Blog post about the joy that is life under "employment at will", and the public response to the problems that arise under that policy.

The investigation reported is one of those connected to Burges. Do you notice ... 1. That the authorites are just looking into the members of Burge's crowd, as if they were the only problem on the CPD. Please. Dealing with these thugs is a nice start, but it's only a start. One is left wondering, though, if this is where it will end. 2. That this wasn't exactly late breaking news or unknown in Chicago - the Reader did a series of articles on these fun, fun people back in the 90s, and word had hit the street long before then. Why wasn't anybody looking into this, then? That last question being rhetorical, of course, for reasons I'll get to, in a second. 3. That the human rights abuses mentioned took place during the 1980s, meaning that prosecution has been stalled for so long that, even if caught, most of the offenders will escape justice. 4. When, some years back, I and a few other demonstrators were on the street in Chicago, trying to raise a little consciousness about the issues surrounding the death penalty in Illinois, mentioning this very case, there's a reaction to which we became accustomed. The man on the street seeing absolutely nothing wrong with torturing confessions out of those accused of crimes. This is why, below, you see me suggesting that I was not surprised to see popular acceptance of the Bush administration's lavish use of torture. As a society, we had been there before, and hadn't seemed to be in any great hurry to get anywhere better.

The people for the ethical treatment of animals have decided that if they get people to start calling fish "sea kittens", people will have trouble telling the difference between their pet cats and the alewives washing up on the beach. Yeah, that will work. They wrote a children's book for this campaign. One of the characters in it, "Tony the Trout", is said to have pursued a double major in neuroscience and environmental studies. Pity he didn't augment the neuroscience with a little psychiatry. Maybe he'd be able to diagnose the problem ailing the person who came up with this campaign.

In a recent post about Rep. Charlie Rangel's possible ethics problems I wrote, "Stupidity and greed favor no political party. There are grafthounds and charlatans in all of them." It seems both the Democrats and Republicans are hell-bent to prove it.

'The underlying problem isn't the budget deficit. It's that so much income and wealth are going to the top that most Americans don't have the purchasing power to sustain a strong recovery.' Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

Since America's political and media class steadfastly ignore this glaringly obvious point, it's nice (albeit self-interested) of the Chinese to point it out for us.  As we endlessly hear about a massive debt crisis, the current President has started one optional war that has already exceeded its estimated costs, plans to continue (if not escalate) two more, is drone-attacking a new country on a seemingly weekly basis, expands sprawling covert military actions in still other countries, builds new overseas detention facilities, all while offering only the most modest, symbolic and illusory "cuts" in military spending.  The alleged need to slash the financial security of American citizens -- and the notion that America faces a severe debt crisis -- would be more persuasive if the country didn't continue its posture of Endless War and feeding the insatiable, bloated National Security State (to say nothing of the equally insatible and wasteful Drug War and its evil spawn, the increasingly privatized American Prison State, which the Obama administration is expanding as aggressively as the War on Terror).