I once worked for a successful company headed by its mercurial founder just when the enterprise increasingly became an instrument of personal vendettas, rather than a business, as the owner aged, ungracefully. The heirs were either deemed unworthy or estranged; so an endless string of managers, chosen not generally for their inherent brilliance but their [...]
It was a telling moment when Mitt Romney said that niggling little things like the massive income inequality that’s turned out so phenomenally well, for him anyway, ought only be discussed in “Quiet rooms,” where, presumably, the servants couldn’t hear. It seems that after the recent unpleasantness, the rich are hurriedly drawing the portieres [...]
It’s impossible to escape the breathless (and brainless) reporting of the sad, sad, spectacle that is the Republican Presidential primary, but what’s most painful, not to mention infuriating, is watching the media treat it as a serious exercise, when it’s anything but. Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on [...]
UPDATE BELOW: Awesome picture from New York. Today Occupy Portland was scheduled to meet at 8:00am at the East end of the Steel Bridge, so I went down to take a look. I walked along the west side waterfront, figuring that would give me the broadest view of what was happening, and alert me to [...]
In the aftermath of the of the rout of OccupyPortland yesterday afternoon, I decided to take a look at the oft-touted “damage” to the parks. Peering through the hastily installed cyclone fences at a crew of city workers, who had doffed the ever-so-telegenic masks worn by the earlier invaders, all I saw was what any [...]
UPDATE: (4:00pm) Reinforcements have been brought in from enlightened places like Salem, and the cops are really rolling up with rubber bullets, tear gas, and what not. Another busload of cops is heading in. More news later; the protesters are heading right here to Park Ave. Bowing to the bleatings of The Oregonian and [...]
Lots of people don’t realize that the little town of Lewiston, Idaho, is a seaport, partly because it seems impossible that a spot hundreds of miles inland that no one’s ever heard of could be so. Such skepticism is entirely warranted; Lewiston wasn’t, in fact a port until the completion of four taxpayer-funded dams on [...]
Please call 212-NEW-YORK (212-639-9675), and tell Mayor Bloomberg not to interfere with Occupy Wall Street tomorrow. Residents of New York City can call 311. (H/T DailyKos) UPDATE: (Friday) Occupy Wall Street will remain in Zuccotti Park. Admittedly, it’s happened a little later than I expected, but it appears that over the next few days, the [...]
That didn’t take long. Perennial austerity advocate Robert J. Samuelson over at the WaPoo frets about the poor little feelings of America’s rich, in these troubled times: There are many theories about why inequality has increased, though no consensus: New technologies reward the highly skilled; globalization depresses factory wages; eroded union power does the same; [...]
It seems that war profiteer and Pentagon shill Barry McCaffrey slithered into Little Beirut the other day, to talk about some things near and dear to his heart, like, well, war profits, and their indefinite continuation. The Oregonian’s jaw-droppingly credulous and fawning interview with this flagrant criminal contained some of the most blatantly authoritarian [...]