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 […]
National – Jim Hightower
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 […]
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Let’s adopt these GOP national platform planks
From Rick Perry to Rick Santorum, many Republican sparklies say they reject the science of evolution, favoring instead the “science” of the Bible, including some of its interpreters who claim the Earth is not 4.5 billion years old, but has been around only about 6,000 years. Georgia Rep. Paul Broun (who ironically serves on the […]
Posted inOpinion
In battling Monsanto’s greed, tenacity matters
Remember the 1950s horror movie “The Bad Seed”? Any remake should cast Monsanto in the title role, because whenever something scary is being done to our food, you can usually find Monsanto lurking in the shadows. During the past two decades, this biotech behemoth has used its political connections to obtain a monopolistic grip on […]
Posted inOpinion
Do more than the minimum on minimum wage
“In the wealthiest nation on earth,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union speech, “no one who works full time should have to live in poverty.” Right! Way to go! Not only does his call to raise America’s minimum wage put some real pop in populism, but it could finally start putting some […]
Posted inOpinion
Watch out – the drones are coming
For nearly four years, President Obama refused to admit a foreign-policy “secret” that was widely known – that the White House, Pentagon and CIA are engaged in ethically questionable and rapidly escalating drone warfare that’s killing innocent civilians as well as enemy soldiers in Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere. But by nominating John Brennan, the architect […]
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A common sense crop for America’s common good
Four years ago, Michelle Obama picked up a shovel and made a powerful symbolic statement about America’s food and farm future: She turned a patch of White House lawn into a working organic garden. But now, as she begins another four years in the people’s mansion, the first lady is probably asking herself: “How can […]
Posted inOpinion
Jamie gets punished
If you are sensitive to stories of human suffering and economic hardship, let me warn you that the following report contains material that could be upsetting, so discretion is advised. It’s about a fellow named Jamie. He lives in New York City, and he has recently had a very rough go with a large financial […]
Posted inOpinion
Inaugural address: progressive and presidential
Skies were overcast, and the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees in Washington on Monday when President Barack Obama took the oath of office and began his inaugural address. In this year’s address, Obama showed some FDR, jut-jawed, presidential flair. Unabashedly rooting his address in America’s solid progressive values, he issued a call for the […]
