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Abbott, DeSantis & the Extremely Extreme GOP

Most intolerable is the steady drip-drip-drip of power it drains from America's democratic ideals and commitment to the Common Good. I can't say that Abbott and DeSantis are the worst that the GOP will try to put in the White House in 2024, but either one is a signpost of an increasingly assertive American fascism. Read more...

How the right wing captured the Supreme Court

Today’s six-member GOP majority has surrendered all claim to being an impartial force for justice. Instead, the GOP’s network of corporate and right-wing operatives has fabricated and weaponized the court to increase their power over the rest of us. Read more...

Give nature a seat at the governing table

The demand that nature have a seat at society's governing table sparks panic in corporate boardrooms. But this concept is centuries old and widely practiced among some of the most experienced environmental stewards in our country: Indigenous Americans. Read more...

It's an endangered species: Save Kar-toon-us A-mer-i-kan-us!

Because cartooning is an expression of the human spirit that has been irrepressible since cave drawings, generation after generation of pen-and-ink champions of democracy have blossomed. Moreover, the general public's appreciation and demand for the cartoonist's sharp-pointed honesty and satire have never flagged, even increasing whenever the artists come under public assault by autocrats, plutocrats, theocrats, cultists, racists, demagogs, screwballs, and assorted other censors. Read more...

It’s time for dinner democracy!

Should the future of America's ag economy be controlled by industrializers and monopolizers who view food strictly as a profit center to be manipulated by and for the few? Or, should the future be modeled on the principles of grassroots producers, artisans, chefs, and consumers who understand that food is an essential element of life, community, and culture to be shared for the Common Good? Read more...

Let’s tackle monopoly power

Rather than a game of chance dependent on a roll of the dice, today's corporate monopolies are products of carefully plotted and executed power plays. Theirs is a game for the biggest, richest, most avaricious plunderers. Just to be a player now requires investing millions of dollars in campaign donations, lobbying firms, lawyer fees, etc. Why? Because Americans hate--hate, hate, HATE--monopolies. Read more...

We’re humans, not corporate cogs

When looking for a sign of the times, sometimes it might literally be on a sign. That was true in Lincoln, NE, on July 9, when the tall billboard in front of a Burger King boldly informed customers: "We all quit. Sorry for the inconvenience." The impetus for the workers' mass public resignation was the "We're not gonna take it anymore" rebellion that is sweeping across workaday America and fueling a rejuvenation of unionization. Read more...

Exxon tries to BUST a union

Today's Exxon executives have ambushed Golden Triangle unions. In a little-reported maneuver, they launched a crude attack this spring on the Steelworkers, attempting to bust the union, disempower the middle-class workforce, and entrench corporate autocracy in the oil industry. What's occurring in Beaumont is not a union strike, but a corporate lockout. Read more...

Will Congress finally fund quality, affordable child care?

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance," the old bumper sticker says: Yet for decades national and state lawmakers have flaunted their ignorance of what makes a good society by stupidly shortchanging our investment in our youngest minds. At the same time, corporate and governmental policymakers have intentionally rigged our economic and political systems to hold down workers' incomes even while their living expenses rise. The result is that mothers and fathers alike are herded into whatever jobs or jobettes are available--just to make ends meet. This leaves young children to ... what? Read more...

How we can save local news

Community life cannot thrive without community news, which in turn depends on reporters and editors who are of the community and have the know-how, time, and resources to investigate, educate, expose, inform, entertain, and generally enlighten the citizenry. Read more...

Incompetents, idealogues, and Wall Street: Hogs are fouling our water

How embarrassing is it that the techno-advanced, engineering powerhouse of America has a growing crisis of water quality and delivery usually associated with impoverished nations? From our biggest cities like New York to isolated rural communities like those in the sprawling Navajo Nation, millions of us endure raw sewage, industrial chemicals, lead pipes, burst water mains, price gouging, cut-offs, boil emergencies, and other water disasters. Read more...

State of the Plate 2021: High tech–or the human spirit?

Like practically everything else in 2020, practically everything in the wide domain of Food & Farm has been twisted, transformed, and otherwise thumped by the twin tornados of Covid-19 and Trump-45. And yet, even while those scourges loaded so much awfulness onto our plates, the progressive human spirit surged into the mess and ... well, we made progress: We created some beautiful moments and generated a stronger-than-ever grassroots push behind fundamental policy change-- change that is sorely needed to elevate the people's interests over the avaricious practices of profiteering agribusiness giants. Read more...

Let’s push for a political deep cleaning

The American struggle to make real the promise of our democratic ideals-- the creation of a society based on the egalitarian values of economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity for all--is not a one-year, one-president job. Removing Trump's narcissistic, plutocratic, autocratic regime is not the achievement of our progressive goals, but the opportunity to come out of our four-year defensive crouch and go on the offensive again. We can't time off, because history is calling on progressives to move quickly and forcefully--a la 1932--"to restore America to its own people," as FDR rightly expressed the overarching challenge. Read more...

Push hard and fast. Don’t settle. Demand big change.

Progressives can't settle for just sweeping out, disinfecting, and patching up our national house after Trump's four-year plunderfest. We must demand a fundamental, comprehensive, structural rebuild including policies for healthcare, immigration, environment, racial justice, labor law, and infrastructure. And there's at least one more area that must become a priority for a major policy overhaul--an area of huge moral, cultural, and economic significance that the Democratic Party and most progressives have ignored for decades, to the detriment of millions of people and our own political strength--RURAL AMERICA AND FARMERS. Read more...

Timeless truths for trying times

Although there are obvious exceptions to the rule, decades of behavioral studies, recurring surveys, in-depth conversations, cultural histories, real-life experiences, and every other kind of group observation have by and large produced the same finding: The great majority of people are guided in their daily actions and relations by deep values of fairness and sharing. Read more...

What progressives won this year

A jittery week at the polls, huh? One measure of our political anxiety is that liquor sales spiked this week....

‘Good trouble’ candidates are winning– and rebuilding politics from the ground up

The most encouraging political change in decades is that progressive candidates in the John Lewis mold are emerging directly and in increasing numbers from local grassroots insurgencies. Rather than upscale professionals, they tend to be single moms, poverty workers, climate change activists, immigrants, etc. Mostly young, the upstarts are rapidly altering the substance, structure, strategy --and success--of progressive politics. Read more...
Photo: Michael Fleshman / Flickr

Six ways the Right is shredding the vote

Little known fact: In more and more races, the GOP doesn't have broad enough appeal to fairly produce an election majority, so it has resorted to rigging the system so a minority prevails. As far-right tactician Paul Weyrich once bluntly put it: "I don't want everybody to vote. ...Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Thus, the right's electioneering strategy is to shrink turnout by blocking its opponents' core supporters--particularly African Americans, Latinx people, Native Americans, union members, and young people--from even entering polling places. This scheme is more than voter suppression--it's straight-out election sabotage. Read more...

Something Is Rotten at Big Meat, Inc.

A century ago Upton Sinclair condemned the "unspeakable" practices that went on in "packing houses all the time." But today's conditions would leave him no less appalled. While unions and other reformers have set higher standards for cleanliness and safety, there's a big difference between what's put on paper and what actually occurs. Progress in standards, it turns out, has been efficiently canceled out by (1) the sheer enormity of today's facilities, (2) the massive volume of animals slaughtered and butchered day and night, and (3) the treacherous work speeds corporate bosses demand. Read more...

Meet ‘the crazy lady’ who battled a marauding corporate polluter–and won

Point Comfort, Texas, is the setting for an epic, true-life drama of a 30-year struggle between malicious corporate power and tenacious human rebelliousness that is still playing out. You want bigger-than-Hollywood pizzazz? This unscripted narrative includes: a treacherous Taiwanese billionaire, panic in Calhoun County, the black-hatted rebel at The Hideout bar, a stormy night on Lavaca Bay,a plague of nurdles, the shocking decision by a Reagan-appointed judge, an encounter at Poor Boy’s Bait shop, and... “The crazy lady,” a woman who would not back off, shut up, be intimidated, or quit. Read more...

An action agenda for the Time of COVID

An unexpected and profound impact of today's horrific coronavirus crisis is that it is prompting a society-wide recalculation of the rocky road our nation's power elites have put us on. Mass death and economic collapse have a way of focusing public attention, not only prompting anger, but leading people to question the morality of the system itself. The abject failure of that system to cope with (or, initially, even address) the deadly pandemic, along with the aloof arrogance of the system's profiteers, has jolted open the minds of a huge swath of the general public to the reality that "We don't matter to them." As FDR taught Herbert Hoover in 1932, in times of widespread troubles, ordinary folks begin to understand that status quo is Latin for "the mess we're in." That's when they open up to non-establishment thinking, seeking solutions potent enough to meet the challenge. Read more...

“Battling the bastards is about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on.”

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