Archive
Egging On North Korea
As our dust-up with North Korea stumbles inexorably onward, the U.S. media is tearing its hair out over how any sovereign nation could possibly act so irrationally. Well, how about looking in the mirror? North Korea's policies and supreme leader may seem kooky, but...
It’s Time Corporations Flew Old Glory Instead of the Jolly Roger
The swashbuckling pirates of olde amassed private fortunes by raiding ships and stealing them. Once they captured a ship, they would replace its flag — which represented one of the world's sovereign nations — with the Jolly Roger. By flying the skull and crossbones,...
Pirates of the Cayman Islands
Another Jersey Shore Show
If you see things that really are not there, are you losing it? Maybe not. Maybe the ones who put the non-existent things there for you to see are to blame. Recently, this surrealistic phenomenon of unreal "thereness" appeared in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. This...
Showing Our Caregivers We Care About Them
I am a physician and my husband works in finance. I work early hours and he travels for work. With two sons under the age of 6 and busy schedules, we needed flexible childcare and found this in the au pair program. After phone calls, emails, and exchanged photos of...
A Rotten Bacon Behemoth
American consumers may not even notice the change if a newly proposed takeover by China's largest meat processor of our nation's leading pork company goes through. But the $4.7 billion transaction would certainly show up on our plates: in the form of farmer...
This Week in OtherWords: A Spotlight on Poverty
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson puts her own brush with food stamps into a broader context, Jim Hightower lampoons a rich Tennessee lawmaker who wants to slash spending on the program but pockets plenty of farm subsidies, and Marc Morial calls for raising the...
None of My Business
It was late, I was grumpy, and the woman in front of me was buying cigarettes. I noticed the items in her cart: brand-name snacks, colas, and frozen foods. I looked at how she dressed, considered the carton of cigarettes she requested, and made a wager to myself that...
Prosperity for All
With the stock market breaking ever-higher records, Americans should be celebrating our economic resurgence, right? After all, why else are we supposed to care when the Dow ticks up or down? Although half of us own no stocks at all and the richest 10 percent of us own...
Boosting the Economy from the Bottom Up
The minimum wage is $7.25. If it had kept up with inflation since 1968, minimum-wage workers would be earning $10.69 an hour today. During his State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama put a face on the growing chasm between the "haves" and "have nots" with a...
