Thank God for Congress, right? When things get out of balance in America, we can always count on our legislative stalwarts to recalibrate the scales of justice. Take greed, for example. Wall Street barons, whose raw greed and casino scams wrecked our real economy five years ago, are back to shoving great gobs of bonus […]
Common Sense
Posted inOpinion
Repeal the Patriot Act
It’s back. The Patriot Act – that grotesque, ever-mutating, hydra-headed monstrosity from the Bush-Cheney Little Shop of Horrors – has risen again, this time with an added twist of Orwellian intrusiveness from the Obamacans. Since 2006, Team Bush, and then Team Obama, have allowed the little-known, hugely powerful National Security Agency to run a daily […]
Posted inOpinion
Let us commence toward the common good
Ironically, June is both the month of the summer solstice and of America’s biggest annual blizzard. I don’t mean a weather event blowing in from the Arctic, but a merciless storm of words blowing from commencement speakers at high school and college graduation events. This year, I was one of the blowhards, the chief speechifyer […]
Posted inOpinion
IRS should ban pretend welfare groups
If you’re covered in political stink, it might be prudent to avoid yelling “dirty politics” at others. Lately, a mess of right-wing tea party groups have been wailing nonstop that they have been targeted, harassed and denied their civic rights by partisan, out-of-control, Obamanistic IRS thugs (no adjective too extreme when assailing Obama or the […]
Posted inOpinion
Corporate cowards divert shareholder funds into ‘dark money’
If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court pretends, they certainly are loudmouths, constantly telling us how great they are and spreading their names everywhere. Amazingly, though, these corporate creatures have suddenly turned demure, insisting that they don’t want to draw any attention to themselves. That’s because, in this case, corporations are not selling, they’re […]
Posted inOpinion
George W’s $250 million can of whitewash
Big doings in Big D – the George W. Bush Presidential Library is open for business! What a piece of work it is: a $250 million, 226,000-square-foot edifice on 23 acres in Dallas. His brick-and-limestone structure is certainly imposing, but once inside, you quickly see that it’s a $250 million can of whitewash. Of course, […]
Posted inOpinion
Saving our ravaged planet … and ourselves
Earth Day cometh – the 43rd year of this national focus on the state of our globe. So, how is Earth doing? Should we be weeping … or cheering? Both. The first step to any recovery is recognition of the obvious: Earth has a problem. In fact, beaucoup of them. For example, despite the squawking […]
Posted inOpinion
Where’s the cop on the Wall Street beat?
Bankers gone wild! Let’s tally some of their crimes: JPMorgan Chase engaged in massive, systematic fraud to foreclose without cause or due process on innocent homeowners, tossing thousands of families into the streets. Goldman Sachs profited by marketing an investment package that was designed to fail, collecting fat fees on each sale to unsuspecting investors […]
Posted inOpinion
Wall Street hogs still running wild
Wall Street is a beast. And proud of it! In fact, a pair of animals are the stock market’s longtime symbols: One is a snorting bull, the other is a bear. But I recently received a letter saying that we need a third animal to depict the true nature of the Wall Street beast: a […]
Posted inOpinion
Corporate kangaroo courts supplant our Seventh Amendment rights
Being wronged by a corporation is painful enough, but just try getting your day in court. Most Americans don’t realize it, but our Seventh Amendment right to a fair jury trial against corporate wrongdoers has quietly been stripped from us. Instead, we are now shunted into a stacked-deck game called “Binding Mandatory Arbitration.” Proponents of […]
Posted inOpinion
Blanket of PR to make you want to hug a drone
In a recent senatorial dustup, Sen. John McCain called Republican colleague Rand Paul one of “the wacko birds” of Congress. McCain was giving Sen. Paul a tongue-lashing for having mounted a 13-hour, old-fashioned, stand-alone filibuster over the possibility that murderous drones could be used for targeted assassinations of Americans right here at home. McCain said […]
Posted inOpinion
‘The Dow’ versus ‘The Doug’
“It’s a sign,” exclaims a February Associated Press story – a sign that our economy is “healing.” “It signals that things are getting back to normal,” added a delighted market analyst. And a March 4 New York Times report heralded it as “a golden age.” The “it” they’re hailing is the Dow, that mystical force […]
