Are you concerned about the country's large budget deficits? Are you wondering how we are going to pay for two wars, bank bailouts and economic recovery projects while continuing to maintain our roads and bridges and pay for our schools and police and firefighters? Are you wondering what we can do about the great concentration of wealth and income into the hands of a very few at the top?

There are so many budget problems. It would be so nice if we could just go back to a simpler time.

Well there is something we can do to solve most of these problems in one fell swoop. We really can just go back to a simpler time. Why don't we just go back to the income tax structure that we had back when budgets were balanced, our infrastructure was maintained, our schools were good, the economy grew at a nice, fast clip and the middle class knew that their incomes would grow steadily? What I am suggesting is that we just return the income and corporate tax rates to where they were during the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.

After these "golden years" we cut those top taxes and things started to fall apart. Then we started borrowing to make up for the lost revenue and even borrowed all of the money in the Social Security Trust Fund. We deferred maintenance of our infrastructure of roads and bridges, etc. We cut school budgets. We cut ... well almost everything except what the richest were taking home.

Cutting and passing the savings to a few at the top became the corporate business model, too, once executives no longer had to pay high taxes.

As a result of these policies income and wealth have concentrated at the very top ever since. While working people haven't had much of a raise since the 70's, the top 1% now recieve the highest share of the nation's income since 1929. (If that date rings a bell, there's a reason.) UC Berkeley Professor Robert Reich recently wrote, "In the U.S., the root of the problem is a growing share of total income going to the richest Americans, leaving the middle class with relatively less purchasing power unless they go deep into debt."

Suppose we did go back to the tax rates of a simpler time? What effect would such a change have on how our country is doing?

The United States now has to pay a huge share of its budget just to cover the interest on the borrowing that tax cuts made necessary. Raising taxes, stopping the borrowing and paying off the debt would remove this huge drag on our economy.

Raising the top tax rates removes the incentive for corporate executives to lie, cheat and steal. Today they can pocket huge sums in a single year, and leave behind the mess they make for others to fix. But high taxes at the top would force longer-term thinking. When it takes years to build up a fortune you want your company to be around for a long time, and you need the surrounding public infrastructure to be in good shape to support your enterprise. So we would all benefit.

I know I am going to be accused of wanting to "punish the rich." Nothing could be further from the truth. Taxes are not punishment; they are what we all pay to have the benefits and protections of modern society. Those benefits and protections enable people to become wealthy, and we ask that they give some back so others can prosper as well. We all want to be rich. With this tax structure, the more people make the more they can pay in taxes so we all benefit.

So of course we want our corporations to make money, too - and lots of it. That way they can distribute the money so shareholders benefit - and pay taxes.

I am asking that we return to a tax structure that builds wealth but also leaves the companies and communities that helped build the wealth intact and in good shape for the long term.

This was written as part of the Commonweal Institute Progressive Op-Ed Program and appears at the Commonweal Institute's Uncommon Denominator blog.

ORLANDO, Fla. — All that Miami speed was no match for the big, bad Badgers.

John Clay had 121 yards rushing and two touchdowns, powering No. 24 Wisconsin past 14th-ranked Miami 20-14 in the Champs Sports Bowl on Tuesday night.

Clay ran through, over and around the Hurricanes to help the Badgers (10-3) earn their first victory over a ranked opponent this season and claim a big win for the Big Ten.

Scott Tolzien threw for 260 yards, and Montee Ball added 61 yards rushing for a Wisconsin team touted as too big and too slow for the dynamic Hurricanes.

Miami's Jacory Harris struggled before throwing a touchdown pass to Thearon Collier with 1:22 remaining. The Hurricanes recovered the onside kick, but Harris threw incomplete on fourth down to end any hope of a comeback.

Harris, who threw for 188 yards, was slowed by an injured right thumb, brace around his left leg and a Badgers team that smothered him with four sacks. Miami also lost Graig Cooper to a right knee injury in the second quarter.

The Hurricanes (9-4) will have to wait at least another year to end their drought of 10-win seasons. The Badgers made sure of that. Even if they didn't show it at the start.

Sam Shields took a reverse from Cooper on the opening kickoff, zipped up the middle, then cut down the left sideline for a touchdown. But an illegal block in the back on the play returned the ball to the Wisconsin 16-yard line.

Shields was credited with an 84-yard return, a Hurricanes bowl record. Cooper had a 16-yard touchdown run on the next play that gave Miami the lead 23 seconds into the game.

That was about the only thing that went wrong for the Badgers.

Their big and bulky lines bullied the speedy Hurricanes, whose all white jerseys – almost all complete with long sleeves on the brisk 50-degree night – parted to a sea of Wisconsin red on both sides of the ball.

Clay had all sorts of seams to run through, and he bulldozed his way to the rest of his yards.

The Big Ten offensive player of the year ripped through a hole for a 52-yard run, and followed that with his second 3-yard TD run of the game to put Wisconsin ahead 14-7 in the second quarter. The Badgers would then add a 37-yard field goal by Phillip Welch.

But they blew a chance to send Miami home early.

Garrett Graham caught a 20-yard pass at the Hurricanes 5, fumbled after a hard hit by Brandon Harris and the ball was recovered by Miami's Randy Phillips in the end zone.

The Hurricanes never could take advantage.

Harris later fumbled after being sacked by O'Brien Schofield with 7:49 remaining. The ball was recovered by J.J. Watt.

The Hurricanes tried to rally late, but Harris' errant pass to Collier on fourth down ended Miami's hopes of its first 10-win season since 2003.

Only adding to Miami's offseason problems was Cooper's nasty fall.

He took a second-quarter kickoff 27 yards before he lost his footing and tumbled to the ground on the patchy Florida Citrus Bowl field. He clutched his right knee on the ground and was examined by trainers for about 5 minutes.

Cooper was barely able to stand as he was helped off the field by teammates Javarris James and Damien Berry. He did not return.

The Department of Education has an assignment that's about five years late: reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, called No Child Left Behind by 43). It's a difficult assignment that requires collaboration of the contentious--to have good chance of passing Summer 2010, it would require the unions to stand down and a handful of Republicans to step up.

It will also require the reform community--charter school and civil rights advocates, gap closers and teacher effectiveness advocates, and sponsors of high standards and the multiple pathways, national and state advocates--to unite behind a set of principles and push.

It would be impossible to describe in less than an Atlantic-length article how complicated this is. K-12 education is a bigger part of the American economy than defense and while federal spending is a small proportion, federal legislation increasingly frames how it operates. ESEA is a monster omnibus with lots problems that should have been fixed five years ago. The good news is that the unexpected policy success of Race to the Top has reframed the edu-debate in state capitals around Duncan's four assurances: college ready standards, teacher effectiveness, longitudinal student data, and turning around low performing schools.

In fact, progress has been so dramatic that many reformers think Congress should let the Race play out and wait until 2011 to take up ESEA when the new conventional wisdom is firmly rooted.

There are three possible approaches to reauthorization: a fix, a reframe, and an overhaul.

The fix, a transitional ESEA, would address the problems and added a dose of Race to the Top. But opening ESEA isn't without risk. It's quite easy to imagine the odd bedfellows of tea-baggers, school boards, and unions advocating for a return to local control. Many state leaders, broke and chaffing under federal influence, will join the critics. This could go downhill fast.

When reopened, ESEA may as well be reframed--a strategy leaving most programs intact but under a new framework that is more performance oriented and incorporates the competitive spirit that has already made the Race a success.

Six principles that could frame the deal include
1. College/career ready: all students should graduate with viable life options that include employment and further and higher education.
2. Good schools: states must uphold a 'good school promise' that ensures access to at least one quality public school where students in all subgroups make at least a year of academic progress for each year attended (i.e. a replacement for the tricky AYP--Adequate Yearly Progress).
3. Good teachers: states and districts must ensure that every student has a teacher proven effective by a comprehensive evaluation system incorporating achievement data.
4. Good data: states must maintain a longitudinal data system that tracks student progress using multiple forms of assessment.
5. Flexibility: states are free to organize and manage their education system as they see fit if they comply with these four principles.
6. Incentives for innovation: the federal government can play an important role in advancing competitiveness and civic capacity by investing in a focused research and development agenda and rewarding innovate states, districts, and companies.

An overhaul would reimagine federal involvement in education (and would drive a Tenther crazy). It's hard to imagine a battered congress with any imagination, but an overhaul could include some stretch ideas like:
• a portable national teaching certificate and pension plan
• national charter (including virtual) school networks
• stronger efforts to address funding equity within and between states
• incentives for adoption of student progress models based on multiple assessment (ie, progress based on learning not age and credits)
• a new student support contract that extended the day/year and provided targeted tutoring to kids that need extra help
• incentives for models that blend preschool and elementary and high school and college
• give IES a broader mandate to pilot, fund, and evaluate solutions and spark innovation
• college savings account for every student
• requirement that states fund higher education based on completion for receipt of federal scholarship funding

George Miller is the only one of the Gang of 4 that championed NCLB left in a leadership role, so he'll have a lot to do with the strategy and the timing.

Here's a little secret that would support a delay: states could DIY reauthorization by applying for a waiver for stuff they don't like in their Race to the Top application. The Department could approve requests that are generally heading in the right direction. Stick with what's working; provide a pressure relief valve where you need to.

Elementary and secondary education in America is bigger than the military and, in the long run, will play a more important role in determining national security. Like NCLB, the new ESEA is likely to frame debate, energy, and investment for most of a decade. Unlike the health care reform bill, education deserves, in fact requires, bipartisan support. Getting this right is more important than doing it fast.

DENVER — Mike Hermanstorfer was clutching his pregnant wife's hand when her life slipped away in a Colorado hospital on Christmas Eve, and then he cradled his newborn son's limp body seconds after a medical team delivered the baby by Cesarean section.

Minutes later he saw his son come to life in his arms under the feverish attention of doctors, and soon he learned his wife had inexplicably come back to life.

"My legs went out from underneath me," Hermanstorfer said Tuesday. "I had everything in the world taken from me, and in an hour and a half I had everything given to me."

Hermanstorfer's wife, Tracy, went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing during labor on Thursday, said Dr. Stephanie Martin, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, where the Hermanstorfers had gone for the birth of their son.

"She had no signs of life. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, she wasn't breathing," said Martin, who had rushed to Hermanstorfer's room to help. "The baby was, it was basically limp, with a very slow heart rate."

After their miraculous recovery, both mother and the baby, named Coltyn, appear healthy with no signs of problems, Martin said.

She said she cannot explain the mother's cardiac arrest or the recovery.

"We did a thorough evaluation and can't find anything that explains why this happened," she said.

Mike Hermanstorfer credits "the hand of God."

"We are both believers ... but this right here, even a nonbeliever – you explain to me how this happened. There is no other explanation," he said.

Asked about divine intervention, Martin said, "Wherever I can get the help, I'll take it."

Tracy Hermanstorfer, 33, was getting prepped for childbirth at the hospital Thursday morning and her 37-year-old husband was by her side when she began to feel sleepy and laid back in her bed.

"She literally stopped breathing and her heart stopped," her husband said. Pandemonium erupted as doctors and nurses tried to revive her with chest compressions and a breathing tube, but nothing worked.

"I was holding her hand when we realized she was gone," Hermanstorfer said. "My entire life just rolled out."

Doctors told him, "We're going to take your son out now. We have been unable to revive her and we're going to take your son out," he recalled.

After the Cesarean section, some of the team rushed his wife to the operating room while the others attended to Coltyn.

"They hand him to me, he's absolutely lifeless," Hermanstorfer said. The doctors went to work on Coltyn as Hermanstorfer held him, and soon he began to breath.

"His life began in my hands," Hermanstorfer said. "That's a feeling like none other. Life actually began in the palm of my hands."

Martin said Tracy Hermanstorfer's pulse returned even before she was wheeled out of the room and into surgery. She estimates Hermanstorfer had no heartbeat for about four minutes.

Hermanstorfer remembers getting sleepy and closing her eyes in her hospital bed, then awakening in the intensive care unit.

Friends have asked if she saw a light or had other experiences described by others who have survived near-death experiences, but she didn't.

"I just felt like I was asleep," she said.

When doctors told her what happened, "I'm like, 'Holy cow, was it that bad? Wow.'"

The Hermanstorfers returned Monday to their home in Security, just outside Colorado Springs about 65 miles south of Denver.

Both Mike and Tracy Hermanstorfer worry that she might have a recurrence. Martin said she can't offer the Hermanstorfers much advice because she doesn't know what caused the original problem.

On Tuesday, the couple celebrated a delayed Christmas with their 3-year-old son Kanyen and Tracy Hermanstorfer's 11-year-old son, Austin, from her previous marriage.

She plans to tell Coltyn about his birth when he's old enough to understand.

"I'll tell him everything ... that he's my miracle baby. That he had a tough time coming into this world, that he's my miracle baby and he's still here with us," she said.

She said Austin is worried and confused but the experience is improving his already-close relationship with Mike Hermanstorfer, his stepfather.

Kanyen doesn't understand much except that doctors had to work on his mom in the hospital, she said. His reaction was, "OK, we got the baby, let's go home now."

For Bolivia, December marked an important and historic step forward in climate change politics. We are of course not referring to Brokenhagen, where we saw the worst of intransigent, undemocratic and cynical tactics from the world's largest emitters of carbon dioxide. The interesting action happened in a completely unreported event in New York when on 22 December, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution which put the issue of Mother Earth rights as an item on the UN agenda.

This might sound rather esoteric, when you consider that in Copenhagen, it was the failure of rich nations to set ambitious and binding specific targets that led to the conference's rightly discredited conclusion. For Bolivia, which is already facing unprecedented droughts, disappearing glaciers and water shortages, the difference between a target of 2 degrees or 1 degree is a matter of life and death for many. But we also believe that even if we had succeeded in achieving consensus on these important issues, we would still have left with a flawed agreement.

This is because the UN climate change framework does not deal with the root causes of climate change and the wider problem of environmental exploitation. Climate change is like a fever that is symptomatic of an underlying disease which must be cured before the fever will dissipate. The underlying cause is the belief that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature and that more is better. These beliefs have fueled the misconceived and doomed attempts of industrialized, consumer-based societies to achieve lasting human well being by exploiting and damaging Earth.

Bolivia's proposal for Rights for Mother Earth is therefore about tackling these fundamental underlying issues. For centuries indigenous communities have warned that if human communities are to remain part of the Earth community they must behave as respectful members. We call our planet Pachamama, Mother Earth, because we know we cannot live without her. This understanding is supported not only by ancient spiritual traditions but also by contemporary science which continues to reveals the complex interdependence of life on earth. These perspectives are coming together in what is known as "Earth jurisprudence."

Stabilizing the climate at levels that allow human life to flourish will require human societies to meet our needs in a way that contributes to, rather than degrades, the health of the ecological communities which sustain us. This will require balancing human rights against the rights of all the other members of our planet.

And this stated position isn't just more hot air in the atmosphere. Bolivia, Ecuador and other Latin American countries already have begun the process of defining such a development path. We use terms like "living well" to describe a way of life that seeks not to live "better" and at the cost of others and nature, but in harmony with all. The struggles of indigenous people and social movements in Latin America have enabled this perspective to be enshrined in the Bolivian and Ecuadorian constitutions.

On 22 April 2009 President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia called on the General Assembly of the United Nations to develop a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. His proposal has received backing from nine countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). The recent UN General Assembly resolution approved in December now calls on all countries and the Secretary General to share their experiences and perspectives on how to create "harmony with nature." In Bolivia, we hope to take this proposal forward in a People's Assembly on climate change that we are organizing on Mother Earth Day, 22 April 2010.

So what would rights for nature look like? One of the most important implications is that it would enable legal systems to maintain vital ecological balances by balancing human rights against the rights of other members of the Earth community. Presently many environmentally harmful human activities (including those that cause climate change) are completely lawful. Most legal systems define everything, that is not a human being or a corporation, as property. Just as slave laws, which turned humans into property, entrenched an exploitative relationship between the two, our legal systems have entrenched an exploitative and inherently damaging relationship between ourselves and Earth. Even most environmental laws do little more than regulate the rate at which environmental destruction may take place.

If legal systems recognized the rights of other-than-human beings (e.g. mountains, rivers, forests and animals), courts and tribunals could deal with the fundamental issues of environmental contamination rather than being bogged down in the technical details of permitted pollutants and emissions. For example, a rights-based approach could evaluate whether the rights of humans to clear tropical forests for beef ranching should trump the right of species in those forests to continue to exist. Instead of devising ever more complex schemes to authorize environmental damage and to trade in the right to pollute, we would focus on how best to maintain the quality of the relationship between ourselves and Earth.

In 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, it was a declaration of hope into a post-war world. It had no legal basis as a document. Sixty years on the declaration has been incorporated into the laws of many countries and been the basis for the International Criminal Court. Facing a crisis far worse than any world war, might it not be time for humanity to launch a new declaration, one that defends our planet and its biodiversity from ever-continuing extinction?

Pablo Solón is the Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations. Cormac Cullinan practices as an environmental lawyer and is the author of Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Tired of your old credit card rate? Skyrocketing fees and shrinking credit limits? In the first of our series on Financial Resolutions -- here's how you can find the best terms.

If you traveled through the blogosphere this year, you would think that the country has three presidents -- a foreign born socialist dictator; a tool of "business class rule and militarism" and Barack Obama who, despite the slurs being hurled on the right and left, is doing a pretty good job.

On the right are the "Teabaggers" who can claim President Obama is a fascist and a communist in the same breadth. The anti-tax Teabaggers were up in arms over the President's stimulus package -- even though it included the largest tax cut in history which will benefit 95 percent of working families.

Teabaggers wail about the deficit and Obama's imagined Constitutional excesses, but strangely were silent during the Bush years when he squandered a record surplus or, in the words of conservative Republican Bruce Fein, "declared war on the Constitution." More significantly, they claim Obama is ignoring the will of the people; but the will of the people is expressed at the ballot box and last November the people embraced the Democrats by a 27 million vote margin.

The criticism from the left is equally laden with contradictions. Liberals are crying foul over Obama's Afghanistan policy when the hero they once embraced did exactly what he campaigned upon. It took Bill Maher less than five months to jump ship over Obama's climate change legislation since it did not go far enough in reducing carbon emissions even though he was the first President to even attempt to tackle this problem.

The same is happening on health care. As President Obama stands on the verge of delivering what President Truman first sought 64 years ago -- a health plan for all Americans, liberals are now organizing against the bill. There is no doubt that the President could have done a better job on this issue and there still remains hope that a stronger bill will reach his desk; but -- at the risk of being called a "power-worshiping parrot" or "Obama sycophant" by David Sirota or others -- I fail to see the wisdom in opposing a bill that would extend coverage to over 30 million uninsured Americans at a time when 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance.

I am reminded of Senator Pell (who died on January 1st) whose maxim was that "half a loaf can feed an army" since in the democratic process achievement of half of an objective is just as significant as achievement of the ultimate objective and makes it that much easier to do so. Pell should know since his Pell Grants grew from 176,000 recipients in its first year to 3.6 million by the time he left the Senate in 1996 and nearly 7 million under President Obama.

The same will be true with the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act". Republicans know this all too well, as Social Security and Medicare has taught them that once the program is enacted the most they can achieve is to contain its growth -- which is why they are so vehement in their opposition.

The worst criticism from the left is that President Obama is no different than President Bush. It was this same reckless intellectual laziness that led some on the left to embrace Ralph Nader and the decade's biggest lie -- that Al Gore and George Bush were one in the same -- and look where that got us.

In judging the President, it is worth remembering that it is far easier for an incoming Republican president to have an immediate impact than for a Democrat. Republicans dislike government and need only to hit the off switch to see change. In contrast, a Democrat must both jump start and turn the giant ship of state - and Obama has done both.

President Obama not only stopped our economic free fall but a recovery is now underway; his stimulus package provided critical investment in our infrastructure including $60 billion for clean energy; Obama also increased fuel economy standards for the first time in 20 years; expanded the SCHIP program to provide health coverage for an additional 4 million children; strengthened gender discrimination laws; enacted credit card reform and is fighting to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency; ended the stop-loss policy; began bringing troops home from Iraq and closing Guantanamo Bay; and appointed the first Latino to the Supreme Court to name just a few accomplishments. As Andrew Sullivan, notes "no recent president has had such a substantive start since Ronald Reagan."

As 2009 comes to a close, it is clear that the Oval Office is not occupied by a socialist, a corporate shill or even a messiah, but rather a very determined, hard working and entirely human President who spent the year making a substantial down payment on delivering change that we can believe in.

America is beset by airport chaos after a 23-year old Nigerian tried to bring down a Northwest-Delta flight to Detroit with an underwear explosive device (UED).
To update the good Doctor Johnson's bon mot about 18th century maritime voyages, air travel will now offer all the joys of Supermax prisons, plus a chance to crash, or be marooned in Buffalo.
As of this writing, we don't know if the Detroit incident was a plot by a Yemen-based al-Qaida cell (much more about Yemen in my next column) or the act of an enraged individual helped by a Yemeni explosives-maker.
This thwarted attack was the latest in a series of violent incidents that have been staged by criminally misguided young Muslims protesting the western occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Attacks have occurred in the US, Spain, Canada, France, Britain, North Africa, Turkey, India and Indonesia. I was on London's Underground when it was bombed in 2005 by young British Muslims protesting Afghanistan.
More attacks may be expected as those wars grind on. Distressingly, many of these outrages were done by educated young men. In Britain, medical doctors were actually involved. Such is the anti-western fury among some Muslims, particularly in Pakistan.
CNN's Larry King asked me on his show last Saturday if there is any end in sight to terrorist attacks against American targets. My politically incorrect response: with the US so deeply involved in the affairs of the Third World, we have to expect more attacks.
It may have been no coincidence that US air strikes had killed a reported 50 or more Yemeni tribesmen just before the Detroit incident. Yemen, in my view, is the Afghanistan of Arabia.
US military forces are currently engaged in combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, West Africa, the Philippines and, likely, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Blowback is inevitable.
In 1991, I was aboard a Lufthansa airliner bound from Frankfurt to Cairo. A young Ethiopian smuggled aboard a pistol and hijacked us on a long ordeal- first to north Germany, then to New York City. He planned to crash the Airbus A310 jumbo into Wall Street. Fortunately, the FBI talked him down and he surrendered. Unfortunately, the lesson that a hijacked airliner would make an excellent guided missile was quickly forgotten - until 9/11.
The hijacker got his gun through very tight German security by secreting it under his hat. Security agents who were checking us with metal-detecting wands forgot to pass one over his head. Airport security cannot be airtight, particularly at rush periods, unless we adopt Israeli-style security which is highly effective but hugely time-consuming. I don't think North American air travel could handle such onerous security.
Our lesson from this latest scare: if we can afford to spend $200 billion per annum alone in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be able to afford two air marshals on larger passenger jets. Pat downs will become mandatory.
More and more people will decide to drive, or avoid travel altogether. Bad news for the suffering airline industry.
Having said all this, we must remember than Osama bin Laden has been trying to give America a national nervous breakdown. We should not overreact and certainly not panic. Personally, I am more worried about germs and viruses aboard commercial aircraft than bombs.
*The global recession that began in America in 2008 was triggered by run amok speculation, failure of government supervision, and massive fraud by accounting and credit rating agencies. The global banking system came within hours of total collapse.
America's and Britain's economies were artificially juiced up and distorted by the narcotic of cheap, easy credit. Both are now experiencing painful withdrawal from credit addiction. It's an ugly sight. Their leaders still call for more massive debt to supposedly cure the disaster caused by too much debt. Interestingly, Canada's "stuffy, boring" banking system turned out to be the industrial world's most solid.
The financial fraud and reckless gambling that ignited the worst recession since the 1930's began under the Clinton administration, then ran rampant during George W. Bush's two terms. Federal regulators, media, Congress and three presidents were suborned by Wall Street. Finance became America's leading industry. Parasitism replaced production.
Millions are out of work. America is crushed by trillions in debt. US global power has taken a staggering beating. Yet the perpetrators of this biggest crime in modern US history and the politicians that allowed it to occur remain unpunished. Wall Street churns obscene, government-financed profits while small investors lost billions. Taxpayer money went to rescue Wall Street nabobs ordering $350 bottles of wine while people on main street America could not pay their medical bills.
The big money houses should have been broken up by federal trust busters. Instead, the surviving big banks now control 40% of all deposits in America.
*President Barack Obama does not walk on water. To worldwide disappointment, his foreign policy is floundering. Obama's promise to solve the Mideast mess, America's largest overseas headache, was scorned by Israel, which refused to stop colonizing Palestinian land. Israel made Obama look like a weakling and amateur who is clearly not in command of US Mideast policy.
Those who hoped the US would change course under Obama to play a positive, cooperative, non-imperial role in world affairs were profoundly dismayed.
We see continued occupation of Iraq, the expanded, trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan, military operations in Africa and now Yemen. The White House stonewalling on releasing torture documents, failure to prosecute the Bush era's torturers and kidnappers, refusal to end domestic surveillance and continued violations of the Geneva Convention.
Almost nothing has been done to end the idiotic blockade of Cuba, which infuriated Latin Americans. We trade with Communist Vietnam but not Communist Cuba.
Military spending has risen from US $667 billion under Bush to $734 billion under Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama. Add an astounding $49.8 billion more for intelligence.
The US is bankrupt and living on credit from China. But Washington's national security juggernaut keeps rolling on, finding new enemies around every sand dune.
*Pakistan is fast becoming a huge, very dangerous problem. The isolated, corrupt, US-backed government in Islamabad is crumbling. The Afghan war is fast spreading into Pakistan's Pashtun tribal zones.
The Pentagon can't wage war in Afghanistan without total Pakistani cooperation. But 95% of Pakistanis oppose the US-led war. Their nation of 168 million seems about to erupt into truly dangerous chaos while India gets ever more deeply involved in Afghanistan.
Washington's $15 billion effort to buy its way out of trouble in Pakistan won't work. Obama has truly stuck is head in the proverbial hornet's nest. He could have withdrawn it, but chose, instead, to go deeper. The president has only himself and his neocon advisors to blame.
What he and we should have learned is that waging wars without clear strategic or political purpose in the middle of nowhere is a fool's errand, and a very dangerous, expensive one. Afghanistan, graveyard of empires, may also become the graveyard of Obama's presidency.

SHREVEPORT, La. — Brandon Boykin's teammates were giving him all kinds of kudos after his school record-setting kickoff return for a touchdown sparked Georgia's win over Texas A&M in the Independence Bowl.

Boykin wanted none of it, though. To hear him tell it, all he did was run.

"The kick return that I had I really couldn't take credit for that," Boykin said. "The kick was short and my blocking, I felt like it parted just like the Red Sea."

His third kickoff return for a score of the season – an 81-yarder late in the second quarter – hardly qualified as a miracle, but it was just what the Bulldogs needed to fuel a 44-20 victory on Monday.

Fifty-six seconds later Georgia blocked a punt, setting up another touchdown, and a game that was supposed to be an offensive showdown turned into yet another contest decided by the unit most folks usually forget about.

"The bottom line is you've got offense, defense and special teams and you hope to win two out of the three phases," Georgia coach Mark Richt said.

"We could've been down 14-0 if it weren't for the special teams and who knows what would've happened after that."

Boykin set the school record and tied the Southeastern Conference mark with his kick return TD, Georgia blocked two kicks and Joe Cox threw his first touchdown pass after a snap sailed over the Texas A&M punter's head in the third quarter.

In all, special teams play led to 24 points for the Georgia, which also got a 49-yard field goal from Blair Walsh. Add in an unexpectedly strong defensive effort and the Bulldogs managed to salvage a smile after a disappointing season.

Boykin may have deflected the credit, but everyone else called his return the "spark" that kicked the moribund Bulldogs to life.

"If you're not 100 percent against Boykin he's going to hurt you and he did," Texas A&M coach Mike Sherman said.

Instead of trailing going into halftime, Georgia was up 14-7. Joe Cox hit offensive MVP Aron White on touchdown passes of 24 and 2 yards in the second half and the Bulldogs (8-5) scored a bowl record 30 points in the final two quarters for their fourth straight postseason victory.

It was the fourth straight postseason loss for the Aggies (6-7), who have not won a bowl since 2001.

The Bulldogs sealed the win by intercepting Jerrod Johnson twice in the third quarter, an unexpected outcome for a defense that was playing with just one full-time assistant after the firing of defensive coordinator Willie Martinez and two others.

"I think we probably need to start out by saying what a fantastic job our defensive coaches did," Richt said.

All the offense expected from two teams with porous defenses and stars on offense such as Johnson and Georgia receiver A.J. Green never really developed. The teams had more punts than first downs in the first 25 minutes of the game.

Texas A&M finally got moving in the waning moments of the second quarter behind Johnson, whose 15-yard TD pass to Jamie McCoy with 2:33 left in the first half had the feel of a momentum builder.

But on the ensuing kickoff, Boykin tied the score at 7.

Even after the late first-half collapse, the Aggies seemed to have life. Christine Michael scored from 14 yards out on Texas A&M's first drive of the second half to make it 14-14.

Their next three drives were disastrous, though.

The first ended on the botched snap over the punter's head, which gave Georgia the ball at the Texas A&M 24. Three plays later, Cox hit White with a touch pass down the middle of the field with a rusher in his face to make it 24-14. Johnson threw interceptions on the next two Aggies' possessions.

Georgia was unable to score after the first turnover, but Reshad Jones' 59-yard interception return on the second gave the Bulldogs the ball at the Aggies 28.

"We just wanted to show the world that even though we lost most of our coaching staff we could still come out in play," said Georgia defensive end Geno Atkins, who blocked an Aggies field goal attempt.

Five plays later, Cox faked the handoff from the 2, rolled right on a naked bootleg and found the wide-open White in the right corner of the end zone for a 31-14 lead.

Caleb King, who scored twice, and Shaun Chapas tacked on TD runs in the fourth quarter to pad Georgia's lead and gave the Bulldogs a share of the Independence bowl record with six touchdowns.

The Bulldogs improved to 7-2 in bowls under Richt and put a positive finish on a season that didn't go as expected.

"With the year we had it could've ended up a lot worse if we'd lost this game," Cox said.

By the end of the decade the western world could only look admiringly at the speed with which the Chinese government had responded to the breathtaking collapse in exports caused by the US credit crunch, a collapse which might have been expected to devastate Asia.

While the developed world teetered on the verge of a second Great Depression, China suffered little more than a minor growth slow-down, thanks to a highly effective government stimulus programme and massive credit expansion.