Articles

Taylorism

August 2014

BEZOS’ COLD, MICROMANAGED, time-motion approach to the workplace is a direct descendant (and extreme extension) of a theory of “scientific management”...

The birth of Amazon

August 2014

LEGEND HAS IT that Amazon is a classic story of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. In 1994, a bright,...

Like Walmart, only with supercomputers and drones: At Amazon.com “cheap” comes at a very hefty price

August 2014

IN HIS CLASSIC 1936 COMEDY, ModernTimes, silent filmmaker Charlie Chaplin depicted the trials and tribulations of a harried factory worker trying...

A blue/red movement

July 2014

You might expect such liberal bastions as Boston, Madison, Boulder, and San Francisco to call for an end to corporate...

The protest spreads

July 2014

In order of the date of passage, here are the 16 states that have already petitioned Congress to let their...

The Senate will soon vote on an amendment to overturn Citizens United. History is calling!

July 2014

So many absurdities abound in our lives that there’s a whole body of philosophical thought called “absurdism,” as well as...

Confusing “conservative” and “corporate”

June 2014

Oklahomans have been socked with a surprise from their supposedly conservative state officials. Thousands of Sooners have put solar panels...

When no news is bad news

June 2014

If a tree falls in the woods and NBC, ABC, and CBS aren’t there to cover the crash, does it...

Warning: The virtues of the egalitarian internet are standing in the way of higher corporate profits!

June 2014

Imagine my surprise when Robert Marcus, COO of Time Warner Cable, reached out to me in March. I don’t get...

Do elites really think they can knock us down without provoking us to stand up and push back?

May 2014

While taking in the splendor of the Grand Palace in Bangkok, a tourist came across a monk and asked if...

Lessons from corporatized college: Even PhDs are being squeezed out of the middle class

April 2014

Working. Poor. In our US of A, those words ought never be juxtaposed. The very concept of paying poverty wages in...

The sad death–and “second life”– of an adjunct professor

April 2014

Until her death last summer, Margaret Mary Vojtkotaught French for 25 years at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, earning high marks from...

Why keep an expensive, illegal, invasive spy program that doesn’t even work?

March 2014

A critic of President Obama’s policy of allowing everyone’s electronic communications to be dumped into the NSA’s computer netherworld recently...

Citizen Snowden: Why he matters

March 2014

Who knew that 1984 was a how-to manual? Of course, George Orwell did not intend for his novel about life in a...

Senate and House “intelligence”?

March 2014

In January, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the intelligence committee, teamed up with her House counterpart, Rep. Mike Rogers, to...

Seeds of a movement: A 21st century Populist renewal is flourishing at America’s grassroots

January 2014

In November, I spoke to an overflow crowd gathered in Duke University’s Lilly Library for Larry Goodwyn’sunusual memorial service. Unusual? Well,...

America isn’t broke. There’s plenty of money to build an economy worthy of our ideals and can-do spirit

December 2013

Several pro football franchises have chosen chest-pounding team names meant to symbolize how big, powerful, ferocious, and scary they are–names...

A rebellion of restaurant workers is challenging the deplorable low-wage ethic of the fast-food behemoths

November 2013

By gollies, McDonald’s cares. Despite being a corporate behemoth (more than 14,000 stores in the US, $27 billion a year...

In the name of making us “safe,” the NSA has shredded privacy rights and now treats all citizens as suspects

October 2013

Rube Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist of the last century, was famous for drawings of what he called “inventions” –complicated...

Do the three hop

October 2013

To see how easy it is for millions of innocent citizens to get caught up in NSA’s vast electronic web,...

The support of anti-choice candidates by brand-name corporations fuels the national war on women

September 2013

  If you’ve never seen a pack of pompous state legislators fall into a panic, you’ve missed a scene of...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It’s a corporate coup d’etat–against us!

August 2013

In 2002, it was reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had told a friend an amusing tale about our man George W....

America’s true history is not about “Great Men,” but about grassroots rebels and movements

July 2013

Beginning in elementary school, we’re taught a fictionalized “Great Man” version of our history. Generals, presidents, industrialists! All are romanticized, sanctified,...

One in three Americans are now poor, sapping our nation’s social, economic, and moral strength

June 2013

Poverty in America: Bigger than ever and rapidly spreading. The flood of poor people in this Land of Plenty is being...

The money swamp created by Citizens United: Dark Money, corporate shell games, and SuperPAC plutocrats

May 2013

Some of you might remember “CREEP” from 1972’s Nixon-McGovern matchup. It could’ve been an apt code name for Tricky Dick himself,...