Last week we looked at the trial of Enron executives Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay and how Enron really is an emblem of U.S. corporate capitalism. In a connected, but little-noticed act, Bush granted ghoulish intelligence chief John Negroponte the power to grant corporations the right to conceal financial information from public scrutiny if there is some connection with "national security."

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Not surprising really. Barbara Ehrenreich, our foremost journalist of, and dissector of class is regularly not here. Practically a household name since she entered the low-wage working class disguised as herself and, in her already classic account, Nickel and Dimed, reported back on just how difficult it is for so many hard-working Americans to get by. Then, a few years later, she repeated the process with the middle class, only to find herself not in the workforce but among the desperately unemployed who had fallen out of an ever meaner corporate world. Her most recent book, Bait and Switch, The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, was the result. Now, she spends much time traveling the country talking to audiences about her -- and their -- experiences. She has become a blogger, is involved in launching a new group to help organize the middle-class unemployed, and in her spare time she's even finished a new book.

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