Archive
Life Comes at You Fast. Plan Ahead.
For some 45 years, it’s been my good fortune to team up with Susan DeMarco — my cohort, companion, and co-conspirator in all things progressive and fun. But life comes at you fast… often including an abrupt end to life. Sadly, after a blood clot had slammed into her...
Diplomacy at Last
In OtherWords: April 11, 2018
It's Tax Day this week. In OtherWords, Lindsay Koshgarian has some stunning facts about where your tax dollars go: the military. Or, more specifically, to private corporations that sell ludicrously expensive things to the military. If you're an average taxpayer, she...
It’s Time to Cut the Contractors Loose
How much of your paycheck do you plan to hand over to corporate Pentagon contractors this year? The average American taxpayer will have paid $14,520 in federal income taxes in 2017. And that’s not even including the taxes that every working person pays to take care of...
Teacher Strikes Are About a Lot More Than Paychecks
Teachers across the United States are having a moment. Educators are building on the momentum from West Virginia, where striking teachers won a 5 percent pay raise for state employees. Now the protests have spread to Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and the nation’s...
Police Killed More People Last Year Than Mass Shooters
This spring, an estimated 800,000 Americans gathered in Washington, DC to participate in the "March for Our Lives" organized by the teenage survivors of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida. Thousands more attended 800 sister marches across the nation and around...
‘Modernization’ Is Media Code for Military Build-Up
One of the most effective rhetorical tools in normalizing massive military budgets is to treat spending billions — and sometimes trillions — of dollars as something one has to do in order to be "modern." "Modernization" is, after all, an attractive label. Who doesn’t...
It’s Up to Grown-ups to Stop Bullying, Not Kids
Bullying's been in the news a bit lately, in part because of the Parkland shooting. In response, some people suggested that school children themselves should befriend kids who get bullied to prevent school shootings. Others say this is victim-blaming. I'm not thinking...
Betsy DeVos Needs an Education on Ethics
Question: What do you get when you combine ignorance, imperiousness, and incompetence? Answer: Betsy DeVos. She's Donald Trump's multi-billionaire education secretary, who hates public education and loves the plutocratic idea of corporate rule over democracy. DeVos is...
Draining the Swampsky
