National – Jim Hightower

As an Associated Press article joyously put it, “The U.S. job market has settled into a sweet spot of steadily solid growth.” At long last, the American dream is back for working families, right? Well … in a word: No. Further down in the article, AP’s sweet news turns sour with this little admission: “About […]

What’s the matter with these people? The Trumpsters in the White House and Congress, I mean. Start with The Donald himself, a guy who can’t pass a mirror without casting an adoring eye at his own reflection. What is it about him that requires the top officials of his government to humiliate themselves publicly in […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’ve observed that the true political spectrum in our society does not range from right to left, but from top to bottom. This is how America’s economic and political systems really shake out, with each of us located somewhere high or low on that spectrum. Right to left is political theory; top to bottom is […]

Journalism, which is supposed to help make sense of our turbulent world, can’t seem to make sense of itself. In addition to “news,” we’re now getting “fake news” (stuff that’s completely made up). But wait – the barons of corporate news are adding to today’s tumultuous state of journalism by putting out feeds of “BS […]

In high school, I had a girlfriend who was involved in student government and all sorts of good works. While she paid attention to all that was happening in those years of the early 1960s, she essentially was a moderate – certainly not some movement rebel. Or so we thought – until one lazy Sunday […]

In an insightful song about outlaws, Woody Guthrie wrote this verse: “As through this world I travel/I see lots of funny men/Some’ll rob you with a 6-gun/Some with a fountain pen.” The fountain pens are doing the serious stealing these days. For example, while you would get hard time in prison for robbing a bank […]