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“The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven” is a classic bluegrass song recounting a spectacular train crash in 1903, caused by the company’s demand that the engineer speed down a dangerous track to deliver cargo on time. One hundred twenty years later we have the “Wreck of the Norfolk Southern” – a devastating crash caused by the corporate demand that it be allowed to run an ill-equipped, understaffed, largely-unregulated, 1.7 mile train carrying flammable, cancer-causing toxics through communities, putting profit over […]
Stuff happens, right? I mean, who could’ve thought that in these modern times of digital monitoring of everything, something as massive as a freight train could become a toxic fireball rolling undetected and unslowed into an Ohio town? But a Norfolk Southern train did just that, derailing in East Palestine and contaminating the air, water, land, and families with tons of cancer-causing chemicals. Gosh exclaimed Norfolk Southern’s CEO; gosh exclaimed the Ohio Governor; gosh exclaimed the US transportation chief; gosh […]
Your doctor is out and unable to see you now. Not out for lunch or out on vacation — but out of medical practice. America’s perverse health care system, which sublimates care to the profiteering demands of Wall Street speculators who essentially own today’s system, has been driving out hordes of nurses, pharmacists… and now doctors. These practitioners take their Hippocratic Oath seriously: “First, do no harm.” Yet, again and again they see corporate managers of hospital chains, physician clinics, […]
No one needs another outrage to worry about, but here’s one that could literally be your last worry. Our hospitals are killing us. Not that the staffers are going room to room snuffing our patients, of course, but hospital owners and top executives are nonetheless killing thousands of ill Americans entrusted to their care. They are doing by deliberately short-staffing their facilities and shortchanging sick and injured people they’re richly paid to serve. At the core of this outrage is […]
There are industries that occasionally do something rotten. And there are industries like Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco – that persistently do rotten things. Then there is the nursing home industry – where rottenness has become a core business principle. The end-of-life “experience” can be rotten enough on its own, with an assortment of natural indignities bedeviling us, and good nursing homes help gentle this time. In the past couple of decades, though, an entirely unnatural force has […]
Please be my Valentine! That is not only a warm, sweet, sometimes romantic sentiment people express in mid-February on a frilly, red card. It’s also the name of a third-century saint who literally lost his head, a ninth-century pope whose reign lasted only 40 days, three Roman emperors, a very good Mexican hot sauce… and a tiny town in Texas. That town has a genuinely sweet story to tell and a unique role to play in the sending of thousands […]
Why would anyone believe anything that a big corporation tells us? Corporate powers use lies as a core element of their business strategy. I’m not even counting the tsunami of polished, poll-tested lies they call “advertising.” Rather, I mean their secret perversions of facts to hide the deadly harms they and their products cause, all pushed by top executives and elite investors in cynical efforts to keep profiteering at the expense of customers and society at large. Pharmaceutical price-gougers, Wall […]
People are baffled by the surreal saga of George Santos, the bizarre Republican congress critter who is a bottomless sink hole of lies. How could he think that he, a highly visible public figure, could get away with such blatant fabrications? Perhaps he thought he was a corporation. After all, these multibillion-dollar brand-name outfits routinely lie about who they really are. Crass polluters shamelessly run PR campaigns claiming to be environmentalists, price gougers pose as consumer champions, and economic downsizers […]
Word of the Day: Change. Whether used as a verb or a noun, it’s one of the most powerful and versatile words in our language, capable of stirring a wide range of emotions, from dread … to hope. You don’t want to hear your corporate boss tell you: “We’re going to make a change.” On the other hand, you can move forward joyously in the implicit promise of Mavis Staples’ uplifting anthem “Change”: “Say it loud, say it clear/We gotta change around here.”
An old political saying notes that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. However, given the proliferation of today’s goofball culture wars and fanatical right-wing phobias, that truism should be updated to say: Evil swarms when power-hungry leaders unleash the crazies. Which brings us to the US House of Representatives, now led by a run-of-the-mill corporate Republican, Kevin McCarthy. He’s always been a crassly-ambitious political climber untethered to any moral principle […]
Big news from Congressional Republicans: After years of failing to unearth any proof that America’s elections are corrupted by flagrant cases of voter fraud, the GOP has now found a whopper! Unfortunately for the Party’s voter integrity police, though, what they’ve uncovered is not some nefarious Democratic plot, but a scheme of mass deception by one of their own congress critters: George Santos. Last November, he effectively stole a New York City congressional seat. How? By making himself up. Santos […]
High-dollar corporate executives and Wall Street bankers keep telling us that it’s lonely at the top. Well, they should try toiling at the bottom of America’s pay scale. The radical rise of inequality in our society is a function of the vast political inequality separating the working class from the power structure. The elite rich have many friends in high places paying close attention to their needs, but the further one tumbles down the economic ladder the lonelier you are […]
I don’t usually cover sob stories, but this one is so touching it might make you cry. Or throw up. It’s about some workers who toiled all last year in the caverns of New York City, only to find at year’s end that their pay was being cut by up to 50 percent. Actually, it’s not their salaries that were cut – but their bonuses. You see, these are Wall Street investment bankers whose annual salaries total only a few […]
Growing up, I absorbed a lot of values from my Ol’ Texas Daddy – a strong commitment to the Common Good, a healthy work ethic, and a lively sense of humor. But one thing about him I’ve rejected: His determination to have a perfect yard of thick, verdant, St. Augustine grass. Lord, how he worked at it – laying sod, (watering), fertilizing, (watering), weeding, (watering), spreading pesticides, (watering), mowing… (more watering). But it was too hot, too dry, too infested […]
Democrats have actually decided that the smart thing to do is just kiss-off entire swaths of the country–especially the farm counties and factory towns of rural America.
Sometimes, little things can be a big deal. For example, in considering ways to help protect Mother Earth from global environmental rampages by us humans, look out your window. In many cities and most suburbs, chances are you’re looking at a lawn – a grass-carpeted yard that looks almost the same as the one next door, the one next to it, etc. Some see a lush expanse of green grass as the ultimate in landscaping beauty, and some even consider […]
As many of its own members privately admit, Congress has become a pay-to-play lawmaking casino – closed to commoners, but offering full-service access to corporate powers. But there’s another government entity that’s even more aloof from workaday people – and it has become a handmaiden to the corporate elites trying to increase their dominance over us: The Supreme Court. The six-member, right-wing majority on this secretive powerhouse now routinely vetoes efforts by workers, environmentalists, students, local officials, voters, and all […]
Question: How many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg? Answer: Four – calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it one. Likewise, calling a small group of partisan lawyers a “supreme” court doesn’t make it one. There’s nothing supreme about the six-pack of far-right-wing political activists who are presently soiling our people’s ideals of justice by proclaiming their own anti-democratic biases to be the law of the land. On issues of economic fairness, […]
Sometimes, stupid political ideas beget even stupider political tactics. For example, a faction of right-wing Republicans want to stop public discussion and actions involving two ideas they hate: (1) racism always has been and still is a systemic problem in American society; and (2) LGBTQ people are a normal and welcome part of… well, of us – America’s richly diverse society. Aside from the raw ignorance behind the GOP’s denial of these realities, consider the boneheadedness of their current campaign […]
Excuse me for using explicit language here, but it seems to me that today’s most vulgar expression of right-wing extremist dogma is its unhealthy obsession with banning books. It’s a political perversion that, ironically, its participants usually rationalize by claiming they are “battling vulgarity.” And, boy, are they hot to trot! There’s a surge of them these days, because stripping books out of schools and public libraries has become a favorite way for autocratic right-wingers to stimulate their supporters’ political […]
There’s a new “ism” creeping into America’s vocabulary… and into our social order: Bossism. Being a boss can merely mean you’re in charge – but in this age of glaring inequality and autocratic corporate rule, bossing implies being overbearing, tyrannical… a jerk. Amazingly, then, it’s precisely those detestable qualities that are drawing a group of uber-rich, Silicon Valley executives and financiers into an emerging cult of bossism. These high-tech elites are united in a belief that America’s workers have become […]
The craziest political word of the year is “woke,” as in “Don’t be woke!” It’s a command barked by far-right-wing fomenters of culture war and their political toadies. Their intent is to demonize and shut up school teachers, preachers, librarians, historians, musicians, students, websites, business executives, and any sensible human who dares speak (and act on) the truth that racism, sexism, poverty, environmental degradation, and such are systemic blights in America. These pious censors of reality demand that anyone presenting […]
Why, you might ask, is there so much labor activism these days? Right-wing Republicans claim it’s the work of union agitators fomenting class warfare. Bovine excrement! Rather, it’s the accumulation of years of actual class warfare waged against America’s workaday majority by avaricious corporate executives. As labor leaders know, unions don’t create organizing drives – bad bosses do. And our economy has become dominated by self-enriching, worker-abusing, bad bosses. So, fed-up working families are now rebelling. Consider the ongoing revolt […]
‘Tis the season of gift giving – including Time magazine handing out its somewhat pompous “Person of the Year” award. My beef with this gift is that it perpetuates the fallacy that social progress comes from some wondrous individual. It diminishes the more-inspiring fact that progress (and even the “greatness” of any one person) comes from the extended family – the group, the movement, the many – who sustain the alleged Person of the Year. It’s in that democratic spirit, […]
I’ve never been a farmer, but I’ve learned quite a bit about being one from the many I’ve known. Start with High and Lillie, my parents, both of whom were raised on hardscrabble Texas farms and had a trove of stories about the ups and downs of that experience. Also, during my growing-up years in Denison, Texas, I had extended stays on the nearby farm of my Aunt Eula and Uncle Ernest, chipping in on the cotton picking, corn hoeing, […]