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Taxing Economics
This Week in OtherWords: March 27, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson makes the case for raising chickens in your backyard and Sam Pizzigati discusses Ford's worker-financed bailout. Donald Kaul is taking a spring break this week and will be back on April 3, when we'll run a Tax Day special...
A Plateful of Justice
When my father immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the mid-1980s, his first job was washing dishes at a Furr's Fresh Buffet restaurant in New Mexico. It paid the state-mandated minimum wage of $2.90 per hour. My father sent a portion of his scant earnings...
Ditching ‘Rape Culture’ for Good
Usually when I'm angry about something, my first instinct is to write. And while I'm furious about what happened to that 16-year-old girl in Ohio, I'm hesitant to lend more ink to the topic, because every additional word adds to the explosive media gossip-fest this...
A Dubious Honor
Global pork titan Smithfield has ranked second among food production companies on Fortune magazine's 2013 list of "Most Admired Companies." Before untangling how terribly strange and ironic this is, I'd like to address just what "most admired" means, and how the...
Don’t Cheat Your Grandma
Despite the fact that Social Security isn't contributing a penny to the federal budget deficit, fiscal hawks have convinced President Barack Obama that we must slash its benefits to save the country. He's joined the sky-is-falling crew in a crazed search for targeted...
When Workers Foot the Bill for Bailouts
Peter Drucker, the analyst who founded modern management science, died in 2005 at age 95. When he died, business leaders worldwide hailed this Austrian-born American for his enormous contribution to enterprise efficiency and effectiveness. But Peter Drucker also cared...
Why I’m a Chick with Chicks
In the span of a few years, I've gone from weird to trendy. Why? I keep chickens — in San Diego. Here's one sign of how times have changed. In 2009, the local newspaper's editorial page excoriated me for trying to change local laws to allow chickens. Last year, the...
Obama’s Unethical End Run
Back in 2010, President Obama declared: "I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests." That was so 2010. By 2013, the mist of corporate money has fogged over Team Obama's commitment to such ethical niceties. For example,...
A Tortured History
NATO forces have refused to turn Afghan prisoners over to some local jails due to concerns about the torture committed in many of those detention centers. After a dozen years of U.S. efforts to export democracy to Afghanistan, that's just one example of why this...
