Billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who has already injected over $10 million into helping Newt Gingrich become President, told Forbes that he could easily spend $100 million this year on influencing politics. Having elections heavily impacted by the whims of a few billionaires is a horrible way to run a democracy. Even the billionaires currently exploiting it admit it is a horrible system, but that hasn’t stopped them from choosing to exploit it.

Dylan Ratigan is well positioned to author a book, designed to be an enjoyable and informative read by normal humans, on the ongoing financial crisis. He is the wunderkind who became Global Managing Editor for Corporate Finance of Bloomberg, the premier news service that specializes in finance, at an exceptionally young age. He was at CNBC while that network was hyping the housing bubble as a non-bubble offering fantastic investment opportunities.

As historian Jay Feldman describes in his brilliantly researched and artfully written new book, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America, there have indeed been a great many things wrong with this country specifically with respect to government attacks on civil liberties. Feldman pulls together a jaw-dropping historical catalogue of 20th Century examples where the United States government not only trampled the Bill of Rights, but did so while whipping up class warfare, xenophobic hysteria, and political mob violence, all on the pretext that war or the threat of war necessitated the abrogation of liberty.

As we wind down the overt military phase of the Iraq war, I think this article carries some important knowledge. In Iraq as well as Afghanistan, the way out of the country has been to train native security forces to take over. We trained hundreds of thousands of security personnel in Iraq, and just as many in Afghanistan. And now, we’re learning that those security forces are actually abusing their own citizens.

Tennessee official denied a 98-year old woman a voter ID because she couldn’t produce her marriage license. As a person living in a neighboring state where the GOP is doing its best to disenfranchise voters most likely to vote Dem, this news from Tennessee isn’t surprising, but it is disgusting.

Obama must be stopped while we still have some tyrants left!

If nothing else, the #occupywallstreet protests, happening in the heart of the world’s financial center, have forced elites to reckon with their own precarious position. The New York Times does the honors today, connecting the protests to other uprisings around the globe, and making a subtle (and also wrong) point that there’s something anti-democratic about popular protest.

It’s easy to see what’s going on here. Elites, having broken the world, are trying to pin the blame on voters. It’s not voters’ fault that their votes matter far less than the elite consensus, which has been adopted by virtually every politician, regardless of stated ideology, and which has been proven to be tragically wrong.

Helping millions of poor people to vote for someone they hope might occasionally represent their interests is “antisocial and un-American,” but a tiny minority of ridiculously wealthy people and corporations spending gobs of money to put the government securely in their pocket is “free speech.”

In this segment, I emphasize the importance of having a real vision of the world we wish to see; if we don’t have an answer to the question “If you don’t like capitalism, and you don’t like state socialism, then what do you want?”, then there’s no reason to take what we’re saying seriously.