The coalescing of disaffected middle Americans looks different in 2011 than the coalescing of disadvantaged Americans in the 1960s.  In that era, the civil rights, anti-war and free speech movements were broadly unpopular with the middle class and relied almost entirely on upper crust intelligentsia to persuade the nation’s courts and – to a lesser degree – its legi

More than a few seasoned financial observers say Bank of America is in desperate financial shape and its problems are worsening. Its acquisition of Countrywide was disastrous and left them with hundreds of billions of toxic glop on their books. In addition, they are getting hammered by a multitude of lawsuits and investigations over their allegedly dicey business practices.

A long-awaited trio of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) were passed by both congressional chambers last week in a bipartisan effort to open up duty-free export channels to Colombia, Panama and South Korea.

Occupy Wall Street, the nationwide protest movement inspired by the ongoing demonstration in downtown Manhattan, invites comparison with the Tea Party movement, which took the nation by storm in early 2009.  The question is, what can Occupy Wall Street learn from the Tea Party movement? 

As mechanized as our food industry has become, the retail price of food is still at the mercy of two unpredictable forces: mother nature and international market speculation. Two crops that have shaped the American diet since the latter half of the 20^th Century were recently shocked by one or both of these forces.