Read all about ...

THE takeover of the world by Wall Street's cabal of insiders. It's all in this Matt Taibbi piece in rollingstone.com A key quotation:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

Obviously ...

SOME things seem to never change. To quote Mark Allender at Pruning Shears: "Responding to the looting of Wall Street by busting the UAW feels an awful lot like responding to 9/11 by invading Iraq."

The distinguished ...

JOHN Hope Franklin, who died last week at 94, wrote a history that many more Quincyans should read — and ponder.


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So where is ...

THE populist rage we hear so much about? If it's merely "virtual," that's not a good sign for the country, says a sociologist.

Another recent monotype:

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A recent monotype ...

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MEANWHILE, beware of those "critics" who predict the quick demise of the printed newspaper.

The columnist ...

LEONARD Pitts of the Miami Herald understands the bigger picture.