The cumulative effects of years of deindustrialization, weakened unions and soaring inequality have fundamentally reordered the country.

As America's new economy starts to look more like the old economy of the Great Depression, the divide between rich and poor, those who have made it and those who never will, seems to grow ever starker. I know. I've seen it firsthand.

Once upon a time, I worked as a State Department officer, helping to carry out the occupation of Iraq, where Washington's goal was regime change. It was there that, in a way, I had my first taste of the life of the 1 percent. Unlike most Iraqis, I had more food and amenities than I could squander, nearly unlimited funds to spend as I wished (as long as the spending supported us one-percenters), and plenty of US Army muscle around to keep the other 99 percent at bay. However, my subsequent whistleblowing about State Department waste and mismanagement in Iraq ended my twenty-four-year career abroad and, after a two-decade absence, deposited me back in "the homeland."

I returned to America to find another sort of regime change underway, only I wasn't among the 1 percent for this one. Instead, I ended up working in the new minimum wage economy and saw firsthand what a life of lousy pay and barely adequate food benefits adds up to. For the version of regime change that found me working in a big box store, no cruise missiles had been deployed and there had been no shock-and-awe demonstrations. Nonetheless, the cumulative effects of years of deindustrialization, declining salaries, absent benefits and weakened unions, along with a rise in meth and alcohol abuse, a broad-based loss of good jobs and soaring inequality seemed similar enough to me. The destruction of a way of life in the service of the goals of the 1 percent, whether in Iraq or at home, was hard to miss. Still, I had the urge to see more. Unlike in Iraq, where my movements were limited, here at home I could hit the road, so I set off for a look at some of America's iconic places as part of the research for my book, Ghosts of Tom Joad.

The 1 percent hollowed out the middle class and our industrial base. And Washington just let it happen.

I know I'm dating myself by writing this, but I remember the middle class.

I grew up in an automaking town in the 1970s, when it was still possible for a high school graduate - or even a high school dropout - to get a job on an assembly line and earn more money than a high school teacher.

"I had this student," my history teacher once told me, "a real chucklehead. Just refused to study. Dropped out of school, a year or so later, he came back to see me. He pointed out the window at a brand-new Camaro and said, 'That's my car.' Meanwhile, I was driving a beat-up station wagon. I think he was an electrician's assistant or something. He handed light bulbs to an electrician."

In our neighbors' driveways, in their living rooms, in their backyards, I saw the evidence of prosperity distributed equally among the social classes: speedboats, Corvette Stingrays, waterbeds, snowmobiles, motorcycles, hunting rifles, RVs, CB radios. I've always believed that the '70s are remembered as the Decade That Taste Forgot because they were a time when people without culture or education had the money to not only indulge their passions, but flaunt them in front of the entire nation. It was an era, to use the title of a 1975 sociological study of a Wisconsin tavern, of blue-collar aristocrats.

That all began to change in the 1980s. The recession at the beginning of that decade - America's first Great Recession - was the beginning of the end for the bourgeois proletariat. Steelworkers showed up for first shift to find padlocks on mill gates. Autoworkers were laid off for years. The lucky ones were transferred to plants far from home. The unlucky never built another car.

For many of the richest people in Hong Kong, one of Asia's wealthiest cities, home is a mansion with an expansive view from the heights of Victoria Peak.
For some of the poorest, like Leung Cho-yin, home is a metal cage.

The 67-year-old former butcher pays 1,300 Hong Kong dollars (£105) a month for one of about a dozen wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment in a gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood.

Home to tens of thousands, such cages - stacked on top of each other - measure 6ft by 2.5ft.

We read a lot about a new Cold War, and I think there is truth in the words. Obama's so-called "pivot" towards Asia is clearly directed at China's emergence as a great power, at the notion of containing China, to use the very word, coined by the American State Department's George F. Kennan and used for many years to characterize America's policy towards the Soviet Union.

Obama's talk of a "pivot" is extremely revealing. How does a former sandal-wearing lecturer in Constitutional Law come up with such language? It is unmistakably the language of America's military-security establishment, that group of men glittering with brass buttons, rhodium-plated bits, and cascades of ribbons who, along with stern, close-cropped men in Armani suits, smelling of expensive cologne, periodically sit around a boat-sized polished walnut table with the President. The language, I think, reveals the real balance of power at the table, once again suggesting that it is not an elected official who sets American policy abroad.

"A freedom-destroying cocktail."

That's how Justice Antonin Scalia characterized Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling that law enforcement officers may pull over and search drivers based solely on an anonymous tip.

The justices ruled 5-4 Tuesday to uphold a traffic stop in northern California in which officers subsequently found marijuana in the vehicle. The officers themselves did not see any evidence of the tipped reckless driving, which was interpreted as drunkenness, even after following the truck for several minutes.

Justice Clarence Thomas said the tip phoned in to 911 that a Ford pickup truck had run the caller off the road was sufficiently reliable to allow for the traffic stop without violating the driver's constitutional rights.

The United States and the unelected European Union nomenklatura have decided to sacrifice the world economy in a bid to punish Russia for its response to the crisis in Ukraine.

British Finance Minister says economic pain suffered by sanctions price worth paying.

Changes to the Racial Discrimination Act proposed by federal Attorney-General George Brandis would ''open the door to Holocaust deniers'', allowing them to publish their claims with impunity, legal advice to NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell says.

The opinion by leading barrister Arthur Moses, SC, says the changes would ''radically narrow the protection that Australian citizens will receive from racial vilification'' and ''undermine the very purpose'' of the act.

''A new legislative right to engage in racial vilification in the course of public discussion would, for instance, open the door to Holocaust deniers to publish their opinions on websites and on social media in the course of 'public discussion','' he writes in the opinion handed to Mr O'Farrell on Friday.

Senator Brandis plans to abolish section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to publicly ''offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate'' a person. Section 18D, which provides protections for freedom of speech, will be removed.

Republicans in the Missouri legislature are schedule to begin impeachment proceedings against Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon on Wednesday because he has said that same-sex couples could file state returns jointly, allowing them to receive the same tax breaks as straight couples.

Although Missouri does not allow same-sex couples to marry within the state, Nixon announced last year that couples who were married out of state could file jointly. The governor argued that because Missouri's tax system was so closely linked to the federal system, it made sense to follow federal guidelines.

According to Ituit's TurboTax tips, filing jointly allows married couples to receive one of the largest standard deductions possible.

"On the other hand, couples who file separately receive few tax considerations. Separate returns may give you a higher tax with a higher tax rate. The standard deduction for separate filers is far lower than that offered to joint filers," Intuit noted.

For more than a century, May 1 has been celebrated as International Workers' Day. It's a national holiday in more than eighty countries. But here in the land of the free, May 1 has been officially declared "Loyalty Day" by President Obama. It's a day "for the reaffirmation of loyalty" - not to the international working class, but to the United States of America.

Obama isn't the first president to declare May 1 Loyalty Day - that was President Eisenhower, in 1959, after Congress made it an official holiday in the fall of 1958. Loyalty Day, the history books explain, was "intended to replace" May Day. Every president since Ike has issued an official Loyalty Day proclamation for May 1.

The presidential proclamation always calls on people to "display the flag." In case you were wondering, that's the stars and stripes, not the red flag. Especially in the fifties, if you didn't display the stars and stripes on Loyalty Day, your neighbors might conclude that you were some kind of red.

During the 1930s and 1940s, May Day parades in New York City involved hundreds of thousands of people. Labor unions, Communist and Socialist parties, and left-wing fraternal and youth groups would march down Fifth Avenue and end up at Union Square for stirring speeches on class solidarity.

Former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters said the comparisons between present-day Israel and Nazi Germany in the 1930s were "crushingly obvious."

Waters, a longtime critic of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, told CounterPunch magazine on Saturday that the powerful "Israeli propaganda machine" had influenced U.S. policy in the region and shaped the mainstream media narrative.

"The Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock 'n' roll, as they say," Waters said.

He has called on musicians to boycott Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, which he also compared to ethnic cleansing and South African apartheid.