February 20, 2010 - It’s been a year since President Barack Obama signed the $787 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus package. The largest public investment in America’s infrastructure since the Great Depression, Obama called it “the most sweeping economic recovery bill in our history.” But a year later, many Americans are still hurting. And while the Labor Department reports the unemployment rate for whites has begun to fall (to 8.4 percent in January), it continues to rise for ethnic minorities. For African Americans, it is 16.5 percent and for Latinos unemployment is 12.6 percent.

February 17, 2010 - The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis -- and it's gotten even worse. As a record amount of U.S. citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening, how did we get to this point? The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on U.S. workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s.

February 15, 2010 - This story is not about the origins of 2008's financial meltdown. You've probably read more than enough of those already. To make a long story short, it was a perfect storm. Reckless lending enabled a historic housing bubble; an overseas savings glut and an unprecedented Fed policy of easy money enabled skyrocketing debt; excessive leverage made the global banking system so fragile that it couldn't withstand a tremor, let alone the Big One; the financial system squirreled away trainloads of risk via byzantine credit derivatives and other devices; and banks grew so towering and so interconnected that they became too big to be allowed to fail. With all that in place, it took only a small nudge to bring the entire house of cards crashing to the ground.

February 15, 2010 - [December 1st marked] the 150th anniversary of Brown’s hanging — the grim punishment for his raid weeks earlier on Harpers Ferry, Va. With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsenal there and freed slaves in the area. His plan was to flee with them to nearby mountains and provoke rebellions in the South. But he stalled too long in the arsenal and was captured. He was brought to trial in a Virginia court, convicted of treason, murder and inciting an insurrection, and hanged on Dec. 2, 1859. It’s a date we should hold in reverence.