Archive
Wall Street Bonuses vs the Minimum Wage
Purveyors of Ferraris and high-end Swiss watches keep their fingers crossed toward the end of each calendar year, hoping that the big Wall Street banks will be generous with their annual cash bonuses. New figures show that the bonus bonanza of 2013 didn't disappoint....
Striking for the Public University
Earlier this year, hundreds of faculty members at the University of Illinois-Chicago canceled their classes and went on strike. In the first faculty walkout in UIC history, they picketed the campus for two days. What could professors possibly have to complain about?...
Rebuilding the American Dream, One Insurance Policy at a Time
The Republicans give lots of reasons for their opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Only two really matter. One is politics. The other is money. More precisely, big-business money. Like Social Security and Medicare, the expansion of health insurance coverage is...
A Silver Anniversary for the World Wide Web
Exactly 25 years ago, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee conceptually "invented" the World Wide Web — and set in motion a process that would rapidly make the online world an essential part of our daily lives. By 1995, 14 percent of Americans were surfing...
Cry a River over California’s Drought
As a Californian, I have not gotten too much sympathy from friends and family about our rotten weather this winter. Yes, I said rotten weather. It's been incredibly pleasant— except for a few times when the temperature crept up to 90 — but we've hardly had any rain....
The Corporate Land of Oz
In L. Frank Baum's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the "wizard' turns out to be a phony — just an old guy sitting behind a curtain, using his booming voice to spew nonsense in a vain effort to fool people. But now, a century after Baum's fictional Oz, a real-life...
The Rigged Housing Market
An upscale housing development in Wilton, Connecticut (all of Wilton is upscale) is having no trouble selling its 20 units for $800,000 each. On average, homes in that town now fetch more than $1 million a piece. And real estate experts only rank the region that...
Wall Street Charges Ahead
Caught in the Act
Medical science has long known that the optic nerve runs from the retina of our eyeballs to the visual cortex of our brains, letting us see what's going on around us. Don't look now, but another "optic nerve" has evolved. Rather than running to our brains, however,...
This week in OtherWords: March 5, 2014
This week in OtherWords, Timothy Karr explains what's so bad about Comcast's plan to gobble up Time Warner Cable while Jim Hightower weighs in on Greg Abbott's choice to campaign with Ted Nugent at his side. I'm new to Twitter @ESGreco, but have realized that...
