Economy and Business
Reclaiming Our State Budgets
I live in Chicago, a city of dramatic skylines and gleaming office towers for titans of business and finance. My state of Illinois is home to 17 billionaires, and our downstate farmers are the country’s second-largest corn and soybean producers. And yet new Illinois...
What We Lose with a Privatized Postal Service
Did you know that when you ship a package through Federal Express, the U.S. Postal Service often carries it the last mile? Last year, the Postal Service delivered 1.4 billion packages for FedEx and UPS. In fact, it delivers the last mile for almost a third of FedEx...
Wal-Mart Does Something Right
Once, I indirectly forced a neighbor to drive far out of her way for a head of broccoli. I think she's forgiven me, but I'm not sure the love is still the same. She was kindly caring for my child and running errands when she turned toward Wal-Mart for a quick stop. My...
A Crash Course on Reality
I was always one of those kids who got As in school. Give me an assignment, I’ll do it. A test? I’ll take it. Lecture to me, and I’ll absorb every word. Now that I’m back at school 11 years after getting my college degree, though, I suddenly find myself in a very...
A Model Philanthropist
When you get fed up with all the greed and narcissism that seems to rule our country, a good way to restore your faith in humankind is to reflect on the generosity of people like Ron Read — a philanthropist from Dummerston, Vermont. Read was no splashy,...
An Escape Hatch for Corporate Cons
"Do the crime, do the time," goes the old saying. Unless, of course, the criminals are corporate executives. In those cases, the culprits are practically always given a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. Even the corporate crimes that produce horrible injuries, illnesses,...
Money to Burn
Someday soon, will all our jobs involve keeping extraordinarily rich people entertained? These days, that prospect doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. "The rich," as journalist Chanelle Tourish notes, "seem to be willing to pay almost any price for outstanding service...
Marshaling Marooned Tax Dollars
Republican lawmakers have largely greeted President Barack Obama’s new spending plan as dead on arrival. But at least one provision has a chance of becoming law: a plan to tax the profits that large U.S. corporations have parked in offshore tax shelters and use that...
A Corporate Apostate
Business schools preach a strict, anti-social doctrine of corporate management that comes down to this: CEOs must be idiots. By that I mean the original Greek word idiotes, which applied to people who care only about themselves and the prosperity of their immediate...
A Super Bad Deal
How about this year’s Super Bowl, huh? You may know that the final score in this nail-biter was 28 points for the Patriots to 24 for the Seahawks. Let me add: minus 2 million for the city of Glendale. Two million dollars, that is. That's the amount that Mayor Jerry...
