After a Republican sweep of four recent elections for House seats, Democrats are doing some soul searching about how to regain their momentum. They need a positive economic program, some are saying, rather than the current strategy of repealing and replacing President Trump. But if congressional Republicans succeed in their effort to replace the Affordable […]
Editor’s Note
Posted inOpinion
The GOP will free you from having health care
When I think of freedom, I think of it in positive, aspirational terms – our First Amendment freedoms, for example, or FDR’s “Four Freedoms” or the uplifting songs of freedom sung by oppressed people around the globe. But right-wing, corporate-funded ideologues have fabricated a new negative notion of “freedoms” derived from individual choice. You’re free […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s Note 6/22/17
That Gov. Bruce Rauner has a limitless capacity for audacity is well known. Yet his Tuesday evening plea for bipartisan “unity” while he is bankrolling ads attacking Democrats for supporting a tax plan similar to his own reached a new low. The governor calls for compromise, but so far he has been unwilling to compromise. […]
Posted inOpinion
Will you enlist in Trump’s war?
Donald Trump missed the opportunity to become a General Patton-style military commander and glorious war hero back in the Vietnam era. He surely would’ve been the greatest ever in history! But, he says – alas – some unspecified foot problem (or something or the other) kept him from the privilege of actually getting to go […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s note
With school out and summer heating up, bored kids get into trouble, sometimes with guns. After a signal from Mayor Jim Langfelder that the way to address teen violence is with activities and summer jobs, activists in several meetings I’ve been in recently discuss ways to help. As the discussion turns to the difficulty finding […]
Posted inOpinion
Where does inequality come from?
The vast inequality that’s rending our society is not a natural, inevitable or accidental phenomenon – it’s caused intentionally by policy-decisions that corporate and political officials make, often in tandem. Every now and then, we commoners get a glimpse of inequality in the making, as we did recently when the GOP Boss of the House, […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s Note 6/8/17
I’m pleased to announce that Michelle Ownbey was recently promoted to publisher of Illinois Times and Springfield Business Journal. She was associate publisher of Springfield Business Journal since January 2014, when it was acquired by Illinois Times. Earlier in her career, Michelle had been advertising manager of the Springfield Business Journal from 2001 to 2006, […]
Posted inOpinion
What is worse than being poor?
These are hard times for America’s gold miners. They’re struggling to haul wealth out of the land while seeing their pay drop further and further down. Take Bob Mercer. He’s been a top miner for years, but last year (which has been described as somewhere between lackluster and catastrophic), even Bob was down. He pulled […]
Posted inOpinion
Editors Note 6/1/17
If you are like me and Trump and Rauner are about to get you down, it’s time to dig in the dirt and put some seeds in the ground. “When the world wearies and ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden,” is the quotation I have on my wall. It’s a little late for […]
Posted inOpinion
Stop blaming workers for this mess
Anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the U.S. itself, and they’ve flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians and Chinese, among others. Even Donald Trump’s project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness – around the time of the nation’s founding, John Jay, who later became the […]
Posted inOpinion
Editors Note 5/25/17
It doesn’t help much for Illinois editorialists to get angry, bang the table and shout “Unacceptable” about the Statehouse budget impasse, or “Enough,” as they did a year ago. The neutral, blaming-everybody approach lets everybody – legislators and the governor – off the hook so they can escape responsibility as long as they appear to […]
Posted inOpinion
Trumpty Dumpty
Comandante Trump, El Jefe, the gringo strongman! That’s the image our current Commander in Chief seems to be cultivating. He has surrounded himself with generals, he cavalierly threatens war with all “bad hombres,” he is drastically bulking up military spending, and he imperiously slaps foreign leaders, whole ethnic groups and entire nations with demeaning tweets […]
