At last, America’s political leaders indicate that they now hear the voices and feel the pain of the poor and of the millions of working families slipping out of the middle class. Congress had previously paid no attention to the ever-widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us, but that inequality has recently […]
Common Sense
Posted inOpinion
Debt buyers bury hard-hit consumers in lies
Good news, people: The “boom” is back! Yes, good times are here again, thanks to an economic boom that’s being generated by (of all things) bad times. As you might know from your own experiences, tens of millions of Americans have been hit hard, knocked down and held down in recent years by the collapse […]
Posted inOpinion
Subsidizing corporate crime
“Do the crime, do the time,” the old saying goes. Unless, of course, the criminals are corporate executives. In those cases, the culprits are practically always given a “Get out of jail free” card. Even the corporate crimes that produce horrible injuries, illnesses, death, massive pollution, consumer rip-offs, etc. are routinely settled by fines and […]
Posted inOpinion
GOP gang of Supremes attack Obamacare
Look out – the Supreme Court’s black-robed gang of far-right ideologues are rampaging again! The five-man clan is firing potshots at Obamacare – and their political recklessness endangers justice, the Court’s own integrity, and the health of millions of innocent bystanders. In an attempt to override the law, these so-called “justices” have jumped on a […]
Posted inOpinion
The KBParty of Plutocratic Rule
Shouldn’t America have at least one major party that isn’t beholden to the corporate elite? Well don’t look now, but such a party has recently popped up, raring to roar into the 2016 presidential race. Called the KBParty, it has the funding, political network and expertise needed to bypass the establishment’s control of the election […]
Posted inOpinion
Chicagoans are reclaiming their city
Chicago! City of broad shoulders. Plutocratic hog butcher. Toolmaker for progressive change. Stacker of the wheat of grassroots power, wheat separated from the chaff of corporate politicians. Stormy, husky, brawling. Planning, building, breaking, rebuilding. Under its wrist is the pulse, and under its ribs is the heart of the people. Laughing! Proud to be hog […]
Posted inOpinion
Aetna’s common sense wage lift
Business schools and Wall Street banks preach a strict, anti-social doctrine of corporate management that comes down to this: CEO’s must be idiots. By that I mean the original Greek word “idiotes,” which applied to people who care only about themselves and the prosperity of their immediate family, rejecting any responsibility to the larger society, […]
Posted inOpinion
A corporate coup d’etat
When I was a tyke, Momma warned me not to eat anything unless I knew where it came from. That advice is so sensible that even Congress acted on it in 2002, passing a straightforward law called Country of Origin Labeling. COOL requires meat marketers to tell us whether the meat they sell is a […]
Posted inOpinion
A whining Wall Street banker pleads for pity
J.P. Morgan was recently socked in the wallet by financial regulators who levied yet another multi-billion dollar fine against the Wall Street baron for massive illegalities. Well, not a fine against John Pierpont Morgan, the man. This 19th-century robber baron was born to a great banking fortune and, by hook and crook, leveraged it to […]
Posted inOpinion
How tacky can the golden arches get?
McDonald’s is scrambling, and I’m not talking about eggs. You know your business has what image consultants call “quality perception issues” when you have to launch a PR initiative that publicly addresses such questions as: “Does McDonald’s beef contain worms?” Thornier yet for the world’s largest burger machine is its boneheaded response to the remarkable, […]
Posted inOpinion
Cannabis: America’s common sense crop
In 1914, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst mounted a yellow-journalism crusade to demonize the entire genus of cannabis plants. Why? To sell newspapers, of course, but also because he was heavily invested in wood-pulp newsprint and he wanted to shut down competition from paper made from hemp – a species of cannabis that is a […]
Posted inOpinion
College bowl games become corporate money games
Growing up in Texas, I learned that God and guns were important, but football – well, football was the real religion, the essence of life itself. So I can understand the hyperbolic exuberance of a radio hypester in Montgomery, Alabama, who declared that the Dec. 20 Camellia Bowl was “going to be the biggest event […]
