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 […]
National – Jim Hightower
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 […]
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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 […]
Posted inOpinion
Populist proposals won in 2014
There’s no denying that Democrats took a drubbing at the polls in 2014. Running cautious campaigns and shying away from Obamacare, Wall Street regulation, the anti-fracking movement, immigration reform and Obama himself – was not a winning strategy. While voters were tossing Democrats aside in this past election, bigger majorities of the same electorate leapt […]
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Citigroup becomes its own lawmaker
Congress, which has long been so tied up in a partisan knot by right-wing extremists that it has been unable to move, suddenly sprang loose at the end of the year and put on a phenomenal show of acrobatic lawmaking. In one big, bipartisan spending bill, our legislative gymnasts pulled off a breathtaking, flat-footed backflip […]
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Think of the Amazon workers
During the hectic holiday shopping season, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.com may seem like a great option, especially for us procrastinators. Anything you want can be shipped directly to your doorstep. All it takes is a few clicks on the Amazon website and – of course – some of your hard-earned money. The media sings the […]
Posted inOpinion
The pain of inequality among yacht buyers
In this season of mass commercialism, let’s pause to consider the plight of simple millionaires. Why? Because we now share a common cause: Inequality. You don’t hear much about it, but millionaires are suffering a wealth gap, too, and it’s having a depressing impact on both their level of consumption and their psychological well-being. It’s […]
Posted inOpinion
Police militarization: your towns, your tax dollars
It can be tough policing the mean streets in these days of desperation, when drug cartels and other hardened criminals are out there … somewhere. But the good people of Orange County, Florida, are lucky because they’ve got the astonishing team of the Department of Business and Professional Regulation and the Orange County Sheriffs Office […]
