Some meandering thoughts as I prepare for the West Coast Port Shutdown tomorrow . .

The Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, provide an object lesson on income inequality. The math is pretty stark. This one family holds as much wealth as the bottom 30% of all Americans.

On Saturday, December 10, Occupy groups all over the world marked International Human Rights Day with rallies, marches and other actions. The groups demonstrated for a “global civil society” that is not based on power but rather human values.

I encourage readers to purchase two copies of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism – one for themselves and one as a Christmas present for their right wing uncle. That uncle might well stay with Skocpol and Williamson’s highly readable and well-crafted study to the end without throwing it down in anger – something I can’t say with much confidence about my book with DiMaggio.

Saint Timothy of The 48% Completion Rate takes on the Cutler-less, Forte-less Chicago Bears today who managed to roll up a whopping 181 net yards against Kansas City last week en route to three, count’em, three (3) points. If the Bears could be beaten by KC’s Tyler Palko (who has the distinction of having once been cut by the United Football League’s California Redwoods in the pre-season) one can only imagine what the Anointed One will do to the Bears.

In two months time, Occupy Wall Street has already made a significant impact in moving the national dialogue towards the needs of people rather than the needs of the elite.

I actually find it positive that no settlement has been reached, because the driving forces behind the settlement – the Treasury Department, DoJ and HUD – did no meaningful investigation that would dictate the amounts needed for a reasonable settlement. In fact, to the extent that anything has happened on foreclosure fraud over the past year, it has come from the only entities willing to do their jobs and follow the law: a handful of state Attorneys General doing the investigations and handing out the indictments that others won’t. Beau Biden, Eric Schneiderman, Martha Coakley and Kamala Harris, among others, have pointed the way forward for legitimate accountability for banks involved in systematically stealing homes. And Catherine Cortez Masto, the Attorney General of Nevada, needs to be singled out for special praise. Because thanks to the law she helped push in the state, criminalizing wrongful and fraudulent foreclosures, evictions have slowed to a crawl.

Water down regulation of for-profit schools to the detriment of striving students? Sure, just another day at the office.

It’s a presidential primary as docu-comedy. Some talking jumping beans mount the debate stages and the talk shows and tell us, one after the other, that he or she must be out next president if the Republic is to be saved. Begging the question, from what exactly?

The holiday season is a time of material pleasures, but it’s also a time to take stock of how our social values tend to be at odds with the objects we most prize.

While countless American shoppers splurge this month–probably to delude ourselves momentarily that we can still afford to indulge—the social cost of one luxury item has exposed a global crisis. The human rights group Global Witness has abandoned the Kimberly Process, the international regulatory framework aimed at restricting trafficking in “conflict diamonds.” The group argues that the process, which it helped create, is broken and ridden with loopholes.