The World Cup packs up and leaves behind a Brazil suffering financial losses and intensified social conflicts, while FIFA walks off with profits.

I feel like an Iraq war veteran not because I served in that still ongoing war. No one thanked me for my service, and all praises be, I was not among those who were killed, wounded, or traumatized on our side or theirs.

How can you be in the past and present at the same time? Go to your college reunion. I did, this past weekend, up on the forever beautiful and very green Cornell campus in Ithaca, N.Y. About 350 members of a class of 2,400 trekked back to remember how we were, and to see how the ravages of age and affluence have affected us. I probably hadn’t bonded with as many fellow students because I was an independent, and not in a fraternity or on an athletic team. I was an early responder to activism.

Every month, rise or shine, the Federal Reserve Bank, an institution that most Americans believe is a branch of government or a federally run central bank, has one of its computers add $55 billion—that’s dollars with a B—to its ledger and balance sheet.

This is probably the worst time to release a book about my involvement in the long struggle to free South Africa. It’s a bad time because even as the country celebrates its 20th anniversary as a democracy with elections just completed, there has never been more rancor and anger in a land we all wanted to see as a true “rainbow nation,” a model for the world because of how it achieved a relatively peaceful transition from white rule and promoted racial reconciliation.

The word “oligarchy” has finally come home. For years, it was a term used only in connection with those big bad and sleazy Mafioso-type businessmen in Russia. Russia had oligarchs; we didn’t. That became a big difference between the official narrative of what separated our land of the free and the home of the brave from THEM, the snakes in the shades and private planes, in the post-Soviet period.

First the good news: The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was not only the best-covered of its awards this year, but it recognized a series of disclosures that made many media outlets nervous, if not adversarial—the publication of NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden.

With Nelson Mandela’s death, news from South Africa seemed to have died along with the world’s most famous ex-political prisoner turned president. It was as if the people there don’t deserve to be covered unless there is a larger-than-life celebrity or scandal to focus on.

Everyone’s talking about the Supreme Court’s perfectly predictable “Citizens United 2” McCutcheon decision. It’s what we are NOT talking about that worries me. Ironically, the far right—that many on the left see as the only beneficiary of a decision that treats money and free speech as if they are the same thing—is also not happy with it. They wanted, and may still get, the end of all campaign finance reform.

OK, I have to admit it, I feel as my faith in economic justice is being tested by these stress tests. Truth is, I am becoming more stressed than ever. The reason: despite all the “regulations” in the Dodd Frank Financial “reform” and the Volcker Rule and the Fed’s “oversight,” the banks seems to have free rein to do what they will despite the financial crisis, and the pathetic “recovery.”