There is an unsettling similarity between the recent bank crisis and the unfolding oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. In both cases exploitative industries had carte blanche to stuff money in their pockets without having to prove to anyone that they were prepared for trouble ahead. Congress is mulling over 2,615 pages of [...]
Read More...Sociologists surely examine the warp and weft of American society with scholarly diligence, and I don’t wish to presume on their domain or to popularize a particular view. That said, it seems to me as a newspaperman and poet that our society has become ever more adversarial. In a familiar phrase, het up. It only [...]
Read More...It’s Christmas night. A frosty Enlightenment gentleman pours out lumps of coal from a white Christmas stocking in a window on Warren Street in Hudson, New York. This ingenious window display prompts me to think what Americans have received in their stockings this year. Among our lumps of coal: —a bankrupting and open-ended war in [...]
Read More...If news media were not as commercially governed and censored as Congress they would have the integrity and nerve to point out where members of Congress get their money every time they open their mouths to parrot the lines lobbyists feed them. The reason the media don’t do this is because they feed at the [...]
Read More...While cable anchors prattled about issues of staggering inconsequence California voters showed us just how cynical politicians who run on feckless tax-cut platforms can be. On May 19th a microcosm of voters killed six spending initiatives, leaving the state with a $21.3 billion gap between revenues and spending. A mere 3,882,919 votes were cast on [...]
Read More...“Clear, crisp, and easy to read,” the purveyor of auction signs says. But there have been no clear, crisp and easy-to-read signposts in our bitter slog into trickle-down economics, not because they weren’t there, but because the press didn’t have the stomach for the story. Now, as the for sale signs give way to auction [...]
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