AUSTIN, Texas -- Have you lost your homeowner's insurance lately? Seven hundred thousand of us here in Texas have, after Farmers Insurance decided to pull out of the Texas market -- despite the fact that we pay the highest insurance rates in the nation, an annual average of $680 more than homeowners in other states.

So here's 700,000 of us scrambling to find new insurance and fainting when we hear the rates quoted. If we don't carry insurance, under law, the mortgage companies can seize our homes. Great, a whole new class -- the affluent homeless.

How, you may ask, did we get into this mess? If you listen to the insurance companies, they'll tell you it's all because of those terrible trial lawyers bringing those ridiculous lawsuits, and the stupid juries that award millions and then the appeals courts never, ever throw those verdicts out.

Actually, that's not the problem. It is however, part of the problem. It is a small part of the problem.

Since the racist three-fifths compromise in 1787, the U.S. government has been largely designed to perpetuate undemocratic, unequal power for white elites at the expense of nonwhites and the majority of the white population as well. Since the founding of this nation, only four African Americans have served in the U.S. Senate-Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, representing Mississippi during and immediately after Reconstruction, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, and Carol Mosely Braun of Illinois. Only two blacks have served on the Supreme Court-Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. The lack of black representation has been no accident.

Therefor, the demand for black reparations, while at first appearing to many to be racially divisive, is absolutely essential to the process of constructing a new democratic discourse on the historical origins and meaning of race in American society. Both white conservatives and white neoliberals, for very different reasons, want to take "race" off the political table. We can't allow them to do it.

Here are 10,500 dockworkers locked out at every port on the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, with the shipping and terminal operators and big retail chains like Wal-Mart begging Bush to help them break the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), and Bush beginning the process of imposing an 80-day back-to-work order under the Taft-Hartley law.

He could escalate by trying to place the longshore workers under the aegis of the Railway Labor Act rather than the National Labor Relations Act. The former allows the government to close down a strike by fiat and impose a settlement.

Another line of attack would be to try to undercut the ILWU's strategic ace in the hole, its status as a bargaining unit for every port on the Pacific Coast. Before Harry Bridges won that right for the union back in the 1930s, the owners could simply whipsaw the different bargaining units by shifting shipments from a struck port to one still operating. A modern escalation of that would be the development of a port on Mexico's West Coast, where labor costs are negligible, and whence under NAFTA the containers could be funneled up by rail.

Throughout this year, the black reparations debate has become widely known, and it continued to attract increased national and international attention. In February 2002, CNN and USA Today commissioned the Gallup organization to conduct a national poll to assess public opinion on the issue. The results seemed to directly mirror the nation's parallel racial universes that are reproduced by structural racism. When asked whether "corporations that made profits from slavery should apologize to black Americans who are descendants of slaves," 68 percent of African Americans responded affirmatively, with 23 percent opposed, while 62 percent of all whites rejected the call for an apology, with only 34 percent supporting it.

AUSTIN, Texas -- We just lost the whole ballgame on corporate reform without the news even making it to the front page. The sick, sad tidings were tucked away discreetly on the business pages: "SEC Chief Hedges on Accounting Regulator." Now there's a sexy headline.

All of you who were shafted by Enron, shucked by Worldcom, jived by Global Crossing, everyone whose 401(k) is now a 201(k) (I think that's Paul Begala's line), you just got screwed again. They're not going to fix it.

They've already called off the reform effort; it's over. Corporate muscle showed up and shut it down. Forget expensing options, independent directors, going after offshore shams, derivatives regulation. For that matter, forget even basic reforms like separating the auditing and consulting functions of accounting firms and rotating accounting firms every few years. Bottom line: It's all going to happen again. We learned zip from the entire financial collapse. Our political system is too bought-off to respond intelligently.