Archive
Taking Stock of the Most Affluent Among Us
How unequal have workplaces in the United States become? Our best answer happens to come from a source you might not expect: the Social Security Administration. Social Security statisticians each year tally up how much compensation gets reported on W-2s, the forms...
Who Deserves Our Thanks for Truly American Food?
What do turkey, sweet potatoes, and cranberries have in common? Yes, you eat them on Thanksgiving. Additionally, they are all distinctly American foods. So are potatoes and the corn in your corn bread. Believe it or not, the day that Columbus blundered into the...
Paying for Corporate Crime on the Taxpayer’s Dime
Sometimes, a news story can be so crammed with irony that it boggles the mind. Consider just the headline on one such story that ran recently in my town's daily paper: "Man gets 10 years for defrauding banks." That just screams for a rewrite, doesn't it? I yearn for a...
Why Politicians Shouldn’t Fear Getting an F from the NRA
As plenty of unarmed Americans have deduced, our gun-toting brethren live in a propaganda-induced nightmare world. They envision armed, foul-smelling villains either breaking into their snug homes or menacing them on the street. In response, our gunslingers plan to...
Fixing Social Security
These Rhinos Need Their Own Guns
Have you ever heard of the rabbit hunter's nightmare?A guy dreams that he and a few of his buddies have fanned out across some brushland to scare-up and shoot a few hares. They kill a couple, but then, one of the hunting buddies who'd headed down a slope into a...
Reading between the Links
As an aspiring writer and avid reader, I never miss the annual Library of Congress National Book Festival on the National Mall. This year, the best part was seeing one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood. Atwood, author of The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid's Tale,...
This Week in OtherWords: November 6, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Sam Pizzigati, William A. Collins, and I point out that this is no time to slash the food stamp program and Jill Richardson explains how a gusher of corporate cash appears to have killed a food-labeling initiative in Washington State. Donald...
A Reason to Party Like It’s 1989
These days, you can get the feeling the Cold War never ended. Le Carré-style intrigue has, it turns out, barely skipped a beat. The 9/11 attacks injected the U.S. spymaster apparatus with steroids. But 23 years ago this week, the Cold War did end. I don't remember...
Caving on Immigration
This was supposed to be Marco Rubio's big year. Back in February, the junior senator from Florida made the cover of Time magazine — billed as "The Republican Savior." The supposedly rising star was proclaiming himself ready to lead on the thorny issue of immigration....
