Cross-posted from In These Times…
“Dave Cote is feeling the beat. He takes a sip of Mountain Dew and bobs his head in time to the throbbing bass of Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life.” So begins a Fortune magazine profile titled “How Dave Cote Got Honeywell’s Groove Back.”
As someone who has covered Honeywell’s unionbusting—especially at an Illinois uranium processing plant—for the last two years, I found the long profile by Fortune Senior Editor-at-Large Shawn Tully fascinating. Tully was granted the type of access to Honeywell CEO David Cote and his closest friends and business advisors that reporters like myself, who focus not on profits but on how businesses treat workers, would love to have. (more…)
Creator of NPR’s Planet Money Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.
There’s a new Boomer vs. Millennial piece over at Esquire making its way across the intertubes. If you hadn’t noticed, wringing one’s hands about Baby Boomers gorging themselves on the syrupy sweet hopes and dreams of the young’ns is the…
A few months back I had a long conversation with Freke Vuijst, a journalist from the lefty Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, about the history of the Koch clan—specifically, we talked about what I learned during my trip to Quanah, Texas, the…
A man shot himself on April 4th in the very center of Athens. He is the latest in hundreds of suicides during and because of the crisis. Dimitris Christoulas chose the place (Syntagma Square) and the time (rush hour) to pass his message…
The depressingly familiar dead-end life that One L. Goh found himself in — surrounded by petty scams as revealed in the ex-staffer’s lawsuit and the bleak performance of the school’s graduates, combined with the back-to-back deaths of two family members — could make a lot of sane people desperate and enraged and suicidal…
One thing that the historical record makes obviously clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery
A little over a year ago, while researching the Confederacy’s economy, I stumbled across an unnerving graph charting the value of America’s “stock of slaves” in the last decades before the Civil War that helps give form to the brutal crackdown on the Occupy protests — and suggests darker things to come as we try to free ourselves from their vision of civilization, and our place in it.
This article was first published at TheNation.com If there’s one thing that distinguishes Ron Paul from the rest of the GOP field, it’s his principled stand against American empire and his ardent defense of individual liberties. [1] Paul’s opposition to wars, bloated…
In the spirit of the Millennial vs. Boomer debate raging in the comment section of Connor Kilpatrick’s great piece, “Thirty More Years of Hell,” I’d like to republish my account of an anti-healthcare town hall meeting I attended way back in 2009 in the subprime Southern California suburb of Victorville…
This is for my fellow Millennial. The one who gets his or her rocks off to visions of a glorious Boomer-hegemonic extinction, like those old claymation movies of dinosaurs getting nuked by meteor-fire. This is for those of you who, like me, need a vision of that mighty Boomer Brontosaurus keelin’ over for good…
The Oakland Police Department went on another massive tear this weekend. On Saturday, they used rubber bullets, pepper flash-bang grenades, tear gas and batons to violently crush an attempt by Occupy activists to take over a vacant convention center in downtown Oakland…
Earlier this week, I got into a little Twitter battle with Matthew Yglesias after the prominent blogger tweeted out “”EXCLUSIVE: The activities of individual business executives have no relationship to the level of economy-wide employment.”
Last Thursday I got up at 7:00 a.m. and drove NASCAR-style to make it in time to my arraignment hearing at the Central Arraignment Court in sunny downtown Los Angeles 8:30 a.m.–only to find out that I’d wasted my time….
A video recorded during last week’s early-morning raid on Occupy Berkeley shows a burly Berkeley cop strutting around with a repeat-fire tear gas grenade launcher, menacingly pointing it at protesters without provocation. At one point the bloodlusting cop threatens to shoot pointblank the guy with the camera…
Free Press’ Josh Stearns has put together, and continues to maintain, a great up-to-date resource that’s keeping track of all the journalists arrested while covering the Occupy movement. As of today that number stands at 36, and includes the recent…
With violence and government crackdowns making headlines from so many familiar parts of the world, there’s hardly been a peep in the media about the biggest and ugliest massacre of all: Last Friday in Kazakhstan, riot police slaughtered up 70…
Late last week, as I was reading a story by the Family Guy writer who had been brutally arrested and mistreated at the Occupy LA crackdown, I suddenly realized, “Holy shit, I remember that guy!” I didn’t catch his name…
I have written about the the correlation between austerity programs and violence–whether the mass state violence like the 1989 “Caracazo” bloodbath in Venezuela in response to an IMF-sanctioned austerity program, in which up to 3,000 people were massacred (leading eventually…
When I worked in Russia, there were two sets of laws–one for Kremlin favorites and oligarchs, who never worried about paying for their crimes; and laws for everyone else, who paid no matter what. Here, it’s starting to get even…
