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If you sometimes wonder whether Congress is obtuse, narcissistic, or just stupid, Sen. Joe Manchin is evidence that the answer is: Yes. Plus, these days, the West Virginia corporate Democrat is mad – in both senses of the word. First, he’s mad at Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Raul Grijalva, Ro Khanna, and other gutsy progressive members of the US House. They rose up against their own Party leaders this month to kill Manchin’s corrupt, backdoor effort to force his massive Mountain […]
Dick Tuck, a political prankster who made a satirical run for public office years ago, got less than 10 percent of the vote. Conceding defeat, he quipped, “The people have spoken, the bastards.” Tuck’s jab at voters was in jest, but it exposed an awkward political truth: While people generally have little respect for today’s elected officials, many officials harbor even less regard for The People they supposedly serve. Exhibit A: Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. A multi-millionaire coal […]
This country needs highway signs on every interstate to caution the public about an extreme danger that lies ahead – “WARNING: GENIUSES AT WORK!” The danger comes from multibillionaire capitalists who proclaim themselves the crypto-meta wunderkinds of high tech. They say their class of high-wealth geniuses are the ones to save civilization. Among these “saviors” is Elon Musk, who’s so brilliant he’s on the verge of losing the $44 billion he stupidly paid for his egomaniacal takeover of Twitter – […]
Here’s an interesting fact: Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years – and they assumed they always would. Which brings us to… well, us. We bipedal, far-ranging, Homo sapien primates have certainly established our dominance over modern-day Mother Earth. And even though our reign has only lasted about 200,000 years, we 21st Century humans grandly assume that we’re ordained by the gods to rule ad infinitum over our planet (and beyond). But – oops! – unfortunately we’ve based our preeminence […]
Breaking news: After years of failed Republican efforts to uncover any proof of widespread voter fraud by Democrats, Republican Governor Ron “Tough Guy” DeSantis of Florida has found not one, but 20 ineligible people casting ballots! Like Donald Trump and a gaggle of other GOP governors, DeSantis has used the phony bugaboo of an illegal voting epidemic as a political ploy to keep true believers believing. They spend millions of taxpayer dollars on partisan wild goose chases, and DeSantis even […]
This election year has added a new season to our country’s calendar: The silly season. Not silly as in fun – but as in asinine… and pernicious. Forget any notion that America’s elections should be about lofty ideals, important issues, and real ideas. Instead, right-wing screwballs have turned the GOP into the Goofy Old Party, running campaigns based on frat-boy stunts, horror movie scaremongering, and moronic games of hate-your-neighbor. For example, the GOP reached a new level of political degradation […]
America’s political, corporate, and media establishments were cocksure about their prognostications that a powerful “red wave” was about to hit America in this month’s elections. It would sweep Democrats out and push Republicans into office all across America, they exclaimed. How shocking and embarrassing, then, that their raging wave turned out to be just a little ripple. Republicans ran poorly, and many Democrats ran well. Still, the Dem Party as a whole could’ve done even better if its meek, don’t-rock-the-boat […]
What hit the Republican party on election day was… well, the Republican Party. Blow number one, of course, was from the party’s president and cult boss, Donald Trump, who wields his narcissism like a political bludgeon. But then Republicans got an even more damaging gut punch from the party’s own Supreme Court majority of six partisan hacks. They chose this election year to assert their personal ideological view that the government should control every woman’s birth decisions. Not popular! Then, […]
America exists today as a bizarre anomaly – we profess to be an electoral democracy, yet we are ruled by a governmental plutocracy. One especially gross example of this incongruity is the overwhelming power of big money over the people’s will. By a wide margin, Americans of all political stripes want to ban the distorting force of huge, electoral campaign donations by favor-seeking corporations and ultra-rich elites. Yet… nothing. National and state lawmakers take the plutocratic money and promptly bury […]
Every election day, we’re told “Go Vote!” Your vote is sacred they tell us, it’s your Constitutional right. Well… yes to voting, but most people (including most politicians) would be astonished to learn that America’s Constitution contains no declaration that We The People have a right to vote! In the founding document of our democratic republic, voting is mentioned 37 times, but none of them embrace access to the ballot as a fundamental right. This is no oversight, for most […]
Perhaps you remember Sen. Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s fringy, far-right-wing 1964 presidential nominee who famously said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Today, however, the core of the Republicans Party has gone so far beyond the fringe that they would boo Goldwater’s right-wingism as insufficiently rabid. Instead, their new rallying cry is: “Nuttiness in the defense of extremism is no vice.” The GOP’s mainline officialdom now proclaim themselves The Party of Extremism. They are openly embracing The […]
In the 1990s, renowned Texas progressive writer Molly Ivins regaled (and appalled) readers with her reports on the tragicomic awfulness of George W. Bush’s two terms as Texas’ governor. His tenure was notable for his deep ignorance, frat-boy arrogance, and flagrant servility to corporate interests. But those very qualities made America’s moneyed powers decide that–Wow!– he’d make a dandy president! Molly warned that this was madness, but in the 2000 race, W’s patrons stuffed him with money, buffed him up […]
Throughout the country, newspaper subscribers are asking questions like: Hey, who took my Saturday paper? What happened to those political cartoons and columns that I liked? Why does it take two days to get election results and sports scores? How did my local paper get filled with filler? Oh… and who doubled the price of the damn thing? The cause of all of the above is a Wall Street concept called “financialization” – a euphemism for corporate plundering. Multibillion-dollar hedge […]
My newspaper died. Well, technically it still appears, but it has no life, no news, and barely a pulse. It’s a mere semblance of a real paper, one of the hundreds of local journalism zombies staggering along in cities and towns that had long relied on them. Each one has a bare number of subscribers keeping it going, mostly longtime readers like me clinging to a memory of what used to be and a flickering hope that, surely, the thing […]
The problem with our so-called “free market” is that it’s not free for you and me. It’s largely controlled by monopolies, which are free to inflate prices just because they can, letting gougers gleefully extract unwarranted monopoly profits from us. This milking of consumers by tightly consolidated industries is propelling today’s surging price hikes. Brand name corporations claim they’re being forced to mark-up price tags just to cover rising costs for raw materials, labor, transportation, etc. But in a competitive […]
Today, CEOs of big corporations are playing the tricky “Inflation Blame Game!” Publicly, they moan that the pandemic is slamming their poor corporations with factory shutdowns, supply chain delays, wage hikes, and other increased costs. But wait – inside their board rooms, executives are high fiving each other and pocketing bonuses. What’s going on? The trick is that these giants are in non-competitive markets operating as monopolies, so they can set prices, mug you and me, and scamper away with […]
Last year’s gubernatorial race in Virginia was narrowly won by Republican Glenn Youngkin. An elite Wall Street multimillionaire, he was going to lose – until he discovered a right-wing racist bugaboo called Critical Race Theory. Glenn suddenly turned into an anti-CRT attack dog, fomenting parental fear and promising to sweep all teaching of the theory out of Virginia classrooms. But, golly, CRT was not actually taught in any of the state’s public schools. To help Youngkin dodge this inconvenient fact, […]
Who were the robber barons? The originals, I mean. They were a class of minor lords in feudal Germany who’d been granted land and the title of baron by the king. Many of them set up illegal toll stops on roads and rivers crossing their fiefdoms. Using iron chains and brawny enforcers, these unscrupulous raubritter prevented shippers and travelers from passing unless they paid steep fees. Refuse to pay and you would be robbed of cargo or money, or even […]
It’s been an all-time record year of runaway wealth for America’s billionaires, with this tiny clique vastly widening the chasm separating them from us hoi polloi. For example, Amazon jefe Jeff Bezos hauled in $190 billion for the year. That pays him more than $360,000 a minute, for every single minute of the year. So much taken by so few who do so little while harming so many. Bezos erected his corporate empire on the backs of non-union workers he […]
Let me say one word to you: Nuts. Now, let me say one name to you: Ted Cruz. They’ve become synonymous, with the Texas lawmaker perennially topping national lists of goofy, right-wing political goobers. Only, Ted can’t rightly be called a lawmaker, for he’s not a serious participant in that process, instead devoting his senatorship to political stunts and picking silly PR fights with a growing list of enemies. Running out of people to attack, Ted has found another species […]
What makes a newspaper great? Many say it’s having street-savvy reporters and editors with the integrity to shine the light of investigative journalism on the power structure’s abuses. But, no, says Fred Ryan, top executive of the Washington Post – the secret is attendance. Ryan, a corporate manager and former Ronald Reagan staffer, was handpicked to be CEO of the legendary paper by Jeff Bezos in 2014, when the Amazon billionaire bought the Post. But on Ryan’s watch, readership is […]
For generations, workers have been punished by corporate bosses for watching the clock. But now, the corporate clock is watching workers! Called “digital productivity monitoring,” this surveillance is done by an integrated computer system including a real-time clock, camera, keyboard tracker, and algorithms to provide a second-by-second record of what each employee is doing. Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon, pioneered use of this ticking electronic eye in his monstrous warehouses, forcing hapless, low-paid “pickers” to sprint down cavernous stacks of […]
In the world of work, what two occupations might seem to have the very least in common? How about long-haul truck drivers… and school librarians? Yes, an odd pairing, but solidarity forever! Start with truckers, The job is literally a grueling haul. You’re wrangling massive 18-wheelers some 500 miles a day for 2-3 weeks straight, putting up with traffic jams, storms, bad roads, lunatic drivers, helter-skelter scheduling, truck stop food, sleeping in the truck – and battling fatigue, aches, your […]
For more than a year, America’s corporate chieftains have been moaning about “The Great Resignation” – the recent phenomena of workers just up and quitting their jobs. And now comes “Quiet Quitting,” workers who don’t leave their jobs, but only do what they were hired to do, quietly rejecting the endless extra (unpaid) tasks and weekend assignments that bosses try to pile on. What’s at work in the heads of all these workers? Simple, barked one taskmaster way back in […]
Sure enough, opportunists have rushed into America’s local news void, sowing thousands of poisonous “imposter” news sites that churn out lies and partisan hackery in the guise of legitimate reporting.