Archive
In OtherWords: April 15, 2015
This week in OtherWords, Donald Kaul weighs in on Hillary Clinton's White House bid and Mary Alice Crim explains why the latest Comcast merger would be bad for everyone, especially communities of color. Do you want to make sure you don’t miss the latest from...
Did Slaves Catch Your Seafood?
A few years ago, a friend promised Asorasak Thama a job in the Thai fishing industry. The job offered good pay for a few weeks of work. Instead, he wound up trapped at sea for a year, working in terrible conditions for no pay at all. Thama had become a slave....
Don’t Let This Cable Giant Stamp Out Democracy
Comcast’s gleaming tower soars over its hometown of Philadelphia. The cable giant’s presence in the city is palpable. You’d like to believe that the company would have a sense of what’s going on in its backyard — and what its neighbors need. But Comcast isn’t paying...
Wine over Brine
My home near Seneca Lake in New York is famous for a lot of things — good wine, fine food, and the Finger Lakes region’s beautiful scenery. Now, though, Crestwood Midstream — a Houston-based company that drills, stores, and distributes fracked natural gas — wants to...
The Road to Ruin
That harsh whine you hear in the background — like a buzzsaw getting ready for a log to come down the chute — is the vast right-wing conspiracy revving its engines. America Rising, an opposition research Super PAC that lives to trash the Clintons, dashed off a press...
Odd Bedfellows, Lying Together
Come one, come all. Step right up and buy your ticket for a ride on the splendiferous, phantasmagoric, and miraculous Trans-Pacific Partnership! The TPP isn’t some sort of futuristic flying machine. It’s just another global trade scam coming at us like a volcanic...
It’s Not Easy for Obama to Prove He’s Green
President Barack Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, recently boasted that his boss will “go down in history as the greenest president we’ve ever had.” Yes, cars, trucks, and buses will increasingly burn less fuel because of this White House. If the courts don’t spike...
Life in Anxietyland
Greetings from Anxietyland. Or as some might know it, graduate school. I've got just a few weeks left of teaching and taking classes before the semester ends. You might see that as hectic yet manageable. It's not exactly fun, but it's only temporary. Logically, I can...
Fast Tracking the TPP
Making Science History
We've all seen those touchy-feely TV ads with baby deer, butterflies, and sylvan streams — claiming that some big corporate polluter is nature's best friend. There's a word for such hokum: greenwashing. Leave it to the Koch brothers, however, to invent a whole new...
