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.

The rebels in Libya have control over much of Tripoli at this hour. Fighting continues in pockets, and Moammar Gadhafi has gone missing. David Ignatius believes he and his family are preparing exit to Angola. Two of his sons are under the control of the rebels, captured last night. There will still be a dangerous fight to mop up the remaining military pieces of the old regime, including Gadhafi himself. But from a 1,000-foot view, this looks like a successful, home-grown revolution.

The American myth of the rugged, self-sufficient individual is ever-present in our culture. Think of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, a character based on the nameless “Continental Op” of Dashiell Hammett’s noir thriller, Red Harvest. The characters abandon the very concept of community. They no longer even want a name that could be known by others.

The myth, of course, is just a fictionalized reflection of a belief held by many Americans: the self-contained individual is all. The furtherance of individual liberty, with little regard for the fate of the community at large, is the only legitimate role of government. The belief comes with magical thinking (or cynical slight-of-hand) that unrestrained selfishness will produce more for all than selflessness, altruism, or compassion.

Charles Portis’s True Grit and the 2010 film version by the Coen Brothers turn the myth on its head.

Why is the US Department of Justice locking away non-violent eco-activist prisoners in domestic GITMOS? Why did the US Government spend vast resources on a provocateur named Anna to set up prosecution of Eric McDavid? Eric was her lover, he along with another young man was arrested right after they stepped out of a hardware store with materials for a bomb making plot designed and instigated by the FBI’s paid informant and provocateur, Anna. At a time when we all know corporatist banksters have done trillions of damage to America’s economy and walked free, why was Eric McDavid sentenced to Federal prison for over twenty years on terrorism charges when he hadn’t actually destroyed anything? How did Marie Mason – an eco-activist who actually had carried out property destruction – come to be sentenced to over twenty years in prison on “terror” charges?

Obama’s speech on the Arab uprising was delayed, apparently because of late rewrites. And I think that’s apparent in the text, which is a real tightrope. There’s a tension to fit all of the past and present actions of the United States in that part of the world under one coherent theme. The President spoke of how “America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator,” and this is impossible to square with tacit support for dictators before this moment, and more importantly, during it.

This compelling book traces the history of the assault on democracy and the rise of a police state that reached its zenith in the George W. Bush administration. From the war on communism, to the war on labor, to the war terrorism, our government has used surveillance, preventive detention, torture, and a climate of fear to consolidate its power and neutralize dissent. Under the guise of nurturing democracy at home and abroad, the U.S. government has actually undermined it.

Ernst & Young estimates in a new publication [pdf] that half of all shareholder proposals in 2011 will deal with environmental and social issues, and support for these proposals is growing. In fact, “83 percent of investors now believe environmental and social factors can have a significant impact on shareholder value over the long term.”