Say goodbye to 2009, the worst economic year since the Great Depression.

Say hello to the billionaire bailout society in which the super-rich gamble, lose and get bailed out by the rest of us.

To save the system from total collapse we poured trillions of dollars into the financial...

"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street." President Obama, December 14, 2009.

Was the President signaling that it was time for progressives to form a visible protest movement against "fat cat bankers"? Did he all but invite us...

Bankers must think we're stupid. How could they expect anyone to buy their performance at the recent White House/Wall Street confab during which, with hands on hearts, they swore allegiance to the American people? They want us to think they're Boy Scouts instead of rapacious profiteers who crashed our economy?...

"The assistance to banks, once thought to cost the taxpayers untold billions, is on track to actually reap billions in profit for the taxpaying public." -- President Obama, December 8, 2009

"But like many other big banks, Bank of America is once again making money, in large part...

"I want to be clear: While I believe the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector." President Barak Obama, White House Jobs Summit

Well, Mr. President, I've got a proposal for...

"With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children."

Hunger is returning to a nation that...

Joe Biden's father had it right: "It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor." How did we get here?

More than thirty years ago we embarked on a grand deregulatory experiment. The financial sector was unleashed from New Deal-era controls. We were told this would lead to great...

Bill Clinton and John Doerr, the venture capitalist, are urging the Obama administration to use unspent TARP funds to stimulate jobs and reduce energy wastage by providing cash to homeowners and businesses for weatherization. It's being sold as a way to counteract our jobless recovery (make that our job-loss recovery)....

It's going from obscene to disgusting. Each day reveals how we've traded away our sense of decency and the common good in exchange for pure, unadulterated greed.

Unemployment is a statistic. We hear it so often that, unless we are without work, it loses its meaning. Even when we...

Peter Galbraith wanted to do well by doing good. He passed himself off as a diplomat who was helping the Kurds to write their constitution and to develop their oil fields. But winning a peace prize was not on Peter's mind. He wanted to secure his place in the Billionaire...

When I read the headline "American Wages out of Balance" on page 2 of the New York Times business section, I figured it would be a well-reasoned piece about our obscene distribution of income. It would be good for the Times to describe how Wall Street profits and bonuses,...

Let's weigh the pros and cons of the record bonuses going to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley (and many others) during the worst economic crash since 1929:

Pros:
1. The bonus winners found a way to get rich. This is America and if you're smart enough...

To: President Obama
From: The Looting of America
Re: Speech you should give to prevent a Republican sweep next fall.

"My fellow-Americans,

We face a true national emergency. More than 30 million Americans are without jobs or are working part-time because there...

"Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the '70s and the '80s. It just won't be half of our economy....We don't want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader." -- President Obama, May 2, 2009.

It's...

It's just sitting out there.

Talk to your neighbors and you can sense how angry they are about the rich gaining ever more wealth during the Great Recession. They understand that the bailout money -- our tax dollars -- went to the largest financial institutions in the world which...

Everyone realizes that we have to do something about "too big to fail." But there are two fundamentally different paths: one threatens the very existence of the billionaire bailout society and the other makes it permanent.

The obvious way to end "too big to fail" is to break up large...

Democracy, socialism, capitalism, neo-liberalism -- none of them do justice to who we are and where we're headed. Socialism left the planet several decades ago, except in the minds of Fox News pundits. We're not sure what capitalism really is anymore, now that we've bailed out the entire financial sector....

We are entering the billionaire bailout society.

For the past thirty years we have minted billionaires, and we have created the most unequal distribution of wealth since 1928-29. This didn't happen by accident. We deliberately deregulated the financial sector and we deliberately eliminated the steep progressive taxes on the...

You knew this was coming. The Obama administration had to come down hard on the companies that received the most obvious bailouts -- Bank of America Corp., American International Group (AIG), Citigroup, General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial. They had to do something to show they were not Wall...

Are we becoming a nation of hypocrites?

We force very low income single moms to jump through hoops to get their welfare checks. We resent them living off our tax payer dollars. We want them out working hard to support themselves even if there are no suitable jobs available, no...