Edward Luce’s book has been widely praised as carefully balanced and filled with evocative analysis and reportage. With a cast of dozens of academic, business and governmental thinkers, it wrestles with America’s relative economic decline, how the global economy is increasingly siphoning away America’s ability to innovate and manufacture, and a wide range of U.S. policy failures from education to healthcare to reinventing government. Too often Internet-entranced readers like me look for distillations to digest quickly, rather than dwell on the fascinating interviews, anecdotal treasure chest, and hard-nosed analyses in Mr. Luce’s detailed yet highly entertaining book.

Hat tip to Boing Boing for passing along this juicy bit of Sunlight Foundation news concerning Mike Rogers (R-MI) and his love of that sweet, sweet CISPA lobby money.

On September 17, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement first encamped in New York City’s Zucotti Park, soon renamed Liberty Square. Within weeks, Occupy groups were spreading like wildfire throughout the United States so that, even today after the breakup of the encampments, almost every major city in the United States has an active Occupy cell. In those first months, thousands took to the streets and made groundbreaking use of social media to orchestrate major actions nationwide; the United States became the latest country to develop a major people’s movement since the wave of protest began in the Middle East earlier that year. The Occupy name, and the ideas behind it, quickly became international.

Fatster rounds up stories from everywhere about a species still struggling to find itself, but always struggling to be free of tyranny, ignorance, lies, oppression, fear, poverty, disease, greed, thieves, bullies and thugs.

The National Association of Manufacturers courageously condemns the undemocratic tyranny of five teenagers in California.

Palast takes us on a fast paced, kick ass narrative that globe trots from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, to the coast of Alaska, to New Orleans, to Liberia, to Azerbaijan, to Fukushima, Japan. It’s the real-deal investigative reporting of corporate irresponsibility. As Greg Palast said himself in an interview,” This book is a story of the 1%. It’s why we occupy.”

Not everyone in the 1% is a greedy selfish bastard. But the ones that are, really really are.

The corruption of money spawns apologists everywhere, even the pulpit.

Lost Decades looks at why the explosion of debt happened through the traditional lens of supply-and-demand. It examines the motivations and situations of people on both side of this debt. Why did demand for debt increase in the United States? The first reason Chinn and Frieden identify is the huge deficits run during the George W. Bush years. These are the trillions spent on the Bush tax cuts, the expansion of Medicare part D and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that weren’t paid for.

Age of Greed offers a long survey of the rise of regulation liberated financial markets and actors. The historical sweep is artful and well presented. The text argues for a return to more caged financial markets and actors. The steady and mounting pressures on the American middle class are correlated with the rising excesses, fortunes and missteps of financiers and their vehicles.