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I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really.
Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960's I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930's. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am.
We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 4, 2009 The Coming Struggle, Why Your Guns Won't Save You
This lunatic mentality believes that somehow the government is afraid of you because you own a pump shotgun and a revolver. Maybe you own a lot of guns and have them buried in a secret location, waiting for the uprising, but no matter how many guns you have they'll always have more.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 3, 2009 Close to the Edge, A Country Without Pity
Your government doesn't care a whit about you! Ask Gov. Schwarzenegger if these things matter as he attempts to end public health care in California. Your government rejoices at the Chrysler and GM bankruptcy; Wall Street soars on news that another thirty thousand union auto workers will soon become unemployed and one hundred and fifty thousand dealership employees will also get the ax.
SHARE Tuesday, June 2, 2009 More of the Same Game
Obama ran for office promising change! He was going to change the way the government does business. He was going turn us away from neocon zealotry and given his first shot he appoints a candidate closer to Alito and Souter than anyone now on the court. Where is our champion? Where is an appointment that will turn the courts back towards the direction of Thurgood Marshall?
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 30, 2009 The Next Wave
They are trying to pick the winner of the Kentucky Derby without understanding that what they are looking at is a sawhorse. This is not your father's recession, this is the twilight zone. Business will not just gradually improve until we'll all forget these difficult times. We are watching the deconstruction of our economy.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 29, 2009 One Hundred Days
At a time of falling wages and struggling families it would seem a tiny ray of hope for workers that somehow they could turn the tide. Just the threat of employees being able to organize would prompt employers to treat their workers better or face the consequences. But in one hundred days that hope is as dead as the turkeys at a Sarah Palin photo op.
(13 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 23, 2009 Where Do We Go When All Hope Is Gone?
The Democrats in Congress whined for two years about all that they would do if only they were in the majority. So, now there they are, and what do we get?
We get lame excuses, futile half measures, and right-wing rhetoric balled up as centrist humanitarianism. Under the Republicans, banks and big business got all their needs promptly attended to. What is different now?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 13, 2009 The Future Without A Future
Remember when they told us free trade would bring jobs? Well it did, it brought jobs to Japan and South Korea and even tiny Taiwan who is, officially at least, at odds with Beijing. When it comes to import partners, the US lags behind an island slightly smaller than Maryland and Delaware.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, May 8, 2009 The Trickle Up Theory
The Obama administration might long be remembered as the administration that saved the banks but lost everything else, to have saved the ship's wheel but lost the ship. Mired in the plutocracy and unable to rise above insider politics, they serve only those that feed them.
(12 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 5, 2009 Stray Cats
I watch the sun go down reluctantly. This world offers little, and I have little to offer in return. I have lost everything, so as the birds sing at daylight's demise, I hear no music. The world has lost its music for me. It is just an endless grind with a police siren in the distance.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 2, 2009 From Haymarket to Ludlow from Harlen to Matewan from Mother Jones to You
So what does May Day mean to you? Probably nothing, maybe you've got a job, maybe a real good one and you're only concerned with your own look out. So you don't want me jostling your bed cause you sleep good at night. I used to sleep good at night too. Then by the moonlight I began to wonder why it is that there is always money to help big business and never enough money to help the workers?
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 30, 2009 A Death in the Family
So, as we talk about the demise of America's big three automobile companies, let us remember that when they depart from us we will see their like no more. During the last ten years they have spent their profits on new factories in China and Russia, India and South Korea. They intend on being with us, just not on employing us.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 21, 2009 Another Earth Day
Poison pet food, toxic baby formula, sweat shops, child labor, forced labor, falling living standards and environmental degradation, the thread of greed runs through it all. It makes Earth Day like world prostitute day; we celebrate them today but go back to screwing them tomorrow. The problems are addressed but never resolved.
SHARE Thursday, April 16, 2009 Dispatches From the Front
That is America after all, kill or be killed. Ride on someone's back or let them ride on your back. Dignity is an option only available on the luxury models. Because I was self-employed and because I tried for too long to kick start the business, I have no unemployment benefits. I paid in for 27 years and when I need them I get bubkis! There is no aide. There is no government program; there is nothing.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 14, 2009 It All Gets Real
Are Americans just more criminally bent? Or is it a collective madness brought on by a society that talks one way and acts another.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 3, 2009 No Nation Can Long Endure Half Bankrupt
Mr. Obama's change so far has been to the right of Bill Clinton, "The Centrist." I wrote about the 6,500 American families losing their homes to foreclosure each day, and I got this as a response: "Houses are overvalued. Their prices must decline." Many people like this just don't know any better, after being raised in the Reagan revolution, but how is that response any different than George W. Bush's response to Katrina?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 25, 2009 Tomorrow a New World Begins
Now this same media and these same Republicans say that it's wrong to try and assist the people because "They," the people, were irresponsible! One company, A.I.G. (American Insurance Group), has already received $150 billion in taxpayer aid and today will ask the US taxpayer for an undetermined amount to cover a $60 billion loss in the fourth quarter of last year. But, you? You get five hundred bucks and Republican sneers.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, February 20, 2009 Breaking Bad is Breaking Ground
Walter White has been given a death sentence; all his life he has worked and struggled to find the American dream, and now it comes to this. Stage three lung cancer with a prognosis of two years to live. His insurance from his job as a high school chemistry teacher will help, but he has a wife and children to think of, as well.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, February 20, 2009 The Howling Days of Madness
I really don't know what to make of our new President. I voted for him, but what other choice was there, really? Obama is very smart, but of course next to George Bush, Elmer Fudd comes across as Steven Hawking. Obama is so smart I never would have tried to sell him weed in high school; he's scary smart.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 14, 2009 Why Eric Cantor Hates You
Cantor sees the world a little differently than most Americans; his world belongs to the wealthy, and the middle class and poor are seen as an impediment to his world. You are the garbage to be swept off the street; he will gladly support prisons to incarcerate you, but not colleges to educate you.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 7, 2009 I'll Wait For You
I admit openly to being cynical, but why shouldn't I be? I've seen my industry devastated with the associated plant closings and suicides. I started two businesses myself;I've shuttered them both and because of that when I see a vacant storefront I don't just see an empty building, I see a devastated dream.