In the summer of 2011, 14 million Americans were unemployed and 16% of the country was officially poor. Student loan debt eclipsed credit card with over $1 trillion outstanding. One in five mortgages was underwater. Our leaders said the economy was recovering from the recession caused by the financial crisis, but their soothing pronouncements seemed to mock the evidence of our senses. On September 17, a group of activists converged on a small concrete plaza in lower Manhattan, determined to Occupy Wall Street.

The United States was founded on the principle that no individual is above the law. We are, as John Adams said, “a nation of laws, not men.” But that principle is under assault, as Glenn Greenwald explains in his powerful new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.

It is a pleasure and an honour to introduce Professor Bernard Harcourt to the Lake for a discussion of The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of the Natural Order. The book advances several claims that go to the heart of libertarian ideology. For FDL readers probably the most important claim holds that belief in the efficacy of unregulated markets naturally to secure maximum economic and social well-being has as its counterpart the assertion that the role of government is properly confined to the spheres of criminal justice, national defense, and the protection of private property. Harcourt considers it no coincidence (Comrade, as we used to say in my cell), that the nation where free-market ideology is most pervasive has the world’s highest rates of penal incarceration by an order of magnitude, and that the rising incarceration rate since the mid-1970s is synchronous with the ascendance of an exceptionally rabid free-market ideology.

There is a deeper set of intellectual issues at play, however. What exactly do we mean by ’free markets’?

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.

The Wisconsin Supreme court sticks it to the poor and middle class while statistics show it is more than a trend, it’s a feature of the new gilded age.

Twenty-five protesters were arrested in Rancho Mirage, California today, at a protest in front of the Rancho Las Palmas resort, site of the “Billionaire’s Caucus,” an annual meeting put on by the Koch Brothers and other corporate entities and conservative movement operators.

Roger Simon looks at the Congressional Democrats trying to block the Obama-McConnell tax-cut-extensions-for-everybody-whether-they-need-them-or-not bill, and draws the only possible conclusion: Democrats hate rich people, and want everyone else to hate them too.

When the votes were tallied on the night of November 2, 2008, I was at a bar in Moab, Utah – the one rabid Democratic stronghold in a rabidly Republican state – to enjoy the hysteria as Barack Obama was summoned to lead the country out of the disaster of eight years of George W. Bush. People shook hands, hooted, clinked glasses, got drunk, raised fists, wept. The good liberals had elected a visionary Democrat to the presidency, who, blessed with a Democratic majority in Congress, would fashion “hope” and “change” into a palpable policy. I was told that in parts of Brooklyn, my hometown, voters ran through the streets banging pots and pans. The feeling was of religious jubilee – the new dispensation was upon us, and 2009 would mark the emancipation from the old rottenness. Corruption and fraud and deceit and war and oligarchy would be washed from the body politic. It was the beginning of the restoration of the republic.

After President Obama was elected there was sweet talk of America having become a “post-racial society.” If Arizona’s new immigration law isn’t enough of a wake-up call, a new study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University should set off the alarm: It found that the gap in wealth between white and African-American families quadrupled over the last generation. Following the same families over a 23-year period beginning in 1984, researchers found that the financial assets among white families grew from a median value of $22,000 to $100,000, while the African-American families still had less than $5,000 in 2007.

Different data sets from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF), which is collected every three years, corroborate that the black/white wealth gap grew between 2004 and 2007. A study released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in March found that the average single black woman under 50 had only five dollars to tap in the case of a financial emergency. According to SCF data, not only African Americans but all non-white groups had lower wealth levels than whites. Our nation is rolling backward on the track to racial equality.

The rich won the class war. Now we find out if the Obama Administration will allow them to consolidate their victory and make it permanent.