“Mingy” is a useful word. It merges stingy with mean, pretty well summing up the prevailing ethic of today’s corporate bosses. Take mingy CEOs of multibillion-dollar powerhouses like Amazon and 7-Eleven. They’ve been refusing to...
There are towns in Texas named New Deal, Fair Play, Progresso, Utopia, — and even Buck Naked! But what you won’t find is any town called “Moderate, Texas.” I offer this curiosity to the monied...
Congress keeps churning out laws that the great majority of us have explicitly, consistently, and loudly said we do not want! Are those lawmakers deaf? No, their ears are stuffed with ever-increasing wads of political...
Even in this ugly era of political divisiveness under “King Donald,” some things remain bigger than partisan politics. For example, travel deep into Southwest Texas to the Mexican border, and you’ll witness two powerful forces...
“Stand back,” shout Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires, “geniuses at work!” They refer to themselves, of course, demanding that public officials, farmers, towns, environmentalists, and all others get out of their way as they impose their...
There’s a clique of plutocratic, high-tech billionaires who think they’re entitled to turn America’s farmlands and rural communities into their personal domain of predatory AI “data centers.” But a little bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma, recently...
Here they come again. Every couple of decades another infestation of smiling, winking, fast-talking, corporate hucksters descends on rural America. The scammers have varied from Big Oil’s notorious land men to peddlers of private prisons....
Given the increasing dominance of right-wing politics by arrogant, super-rich Tech Bros, here’s a question about wealth inequality for you barroom philosophers to ponder: Does one have to be born a jackass to become a...
Most people believe the American economy is being rigged by and for bankers, CEOs, and other superrich elites, because… well, because it is! With their hired armies of lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers, and the like, they...
Our future was pronounced dead last week. I mean that glorious future of The Metaverse, promised to us by Silicon Valley’s tech and financial geniuses....