Steve Fraser | The Nation

Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire is confused about the connection between the Tea Party and conservative cultural populism.

Prison labor as the past—and future—of American “free-market” capitalism.

It was Karl Marx who first observed that high finance is “the Vatican of capitalism.” How right he turned out to be.

After an absence of well over half a century, Wall Street is back, center stage, as the preferred American icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history.

From the first jobless Americans through the Great Depression to the Great Recession of the present moment, the reserve army of labor marches through time.

How could Barack Obama have ended up, one year later, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt began?

San Francisco

T.J. Stiles's The First Tycoon is a gilded portrait of the robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt.

As the bailout state goes into overdrive, popular anger at the lords of Wall Street is raging. In 1929, that anger was harnessed to result in huge change. Is the same change possible in 2009?

If original thinking doesn't find a home among the Obama administration's Clinton-era Brainiacs, how can we move beyond the bailout state?