The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it's changing the conversation.

I believe democracy requires a 'sacred contract' between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."

I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

There is a historic strain of dominion theology which says, taking its references from the Psalms, that man is made just a little lower than God, and that we are the crown of creation. That interpretation has come at the expense of the one that says when God, in the story of Noah, intervened to save human life against the flood, against the acts of nature, He did not stop with human beings. He made sure that every kind of animal was represented twice on that ark.

Now Barack Obama, who campaigned for transparency, is the President defending secret negotiations on new trade agreements that are largely being written by corporate lawyers and lobbyists. He would give corporations the key to the treasury while he gets the authority to fast track another hammering of working people and the environment. Yet the only people who get a real tongue-lashing from this President's White House are progressives around town who dare to call him on the carpet for abandoning his promises.

The massive upward distribution of wealth engineered by our political class over the last few decades has solidified the plutocratic control of the rule-making machinery in Washington and state capitals.