Good reads: telling the story we already know

We resisted Britain's state-sanctioned monopolies in 1776. Today's government-sanctioned corporations hang out on Wall Street, not by the chartered Thames. The spirit of the East India Company lives in the five banks which now control nearly 96% of the derivatives market in this country. Our financial oligarchs receive Treasury Department money, Federal Reserve giveaways, and get-out-of-jail-free cards for a corporate crime wave that would make Al Capone blush.

Some of our ancestors came to this country as slaves or indentured servants. The slaves were freed in body but their descendants' economic freedom is not yet fully won. Unemployment's much worse for African Americans. Infant mortality rates are 2.5 times higher than they are for whites and life expectancy is years shorter. Indentured servitude's making a comeback, too. In colonial days people signed away years of freedom for the "loan" of ship's passage to America, where they were sold to bidders for a period of bondage. If only Wall Street had existed then! Imagine the money Goldman Sachs could have made on selling "IBS's" -- "indenture-backed securities."

And then shorting them, of course.

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”