Vanity Fair profiles The eXile: "Gutsy...visceral...serious journalism...abusive, defamatory...poignant...paranoid...and right!"
MSNBC: Mark Ames and Yasha Levine
Broke the Koch Brothers' Takeover of America
exiledonline.com
NSFWCORP

Adelanto California

Originally published in NSFWCORP on April 16, 2013.

When I first started reporting on the subprime suburb of Victorville, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would become ground zero for a fight between billionaires on one side, and poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.

I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the Victorville Daily Press, which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school in the nation to be privatized under California’s new “parent trigger” law. The paper described the takeover as “promising a fresh start to the failing elementary school,” and claimed it had received widespread support from parents. (more…)

Posted on: December 5th, 2015 | Comments Off on Pulling the Trigger: School Privatization in California’s Subprime Suburbs

Book Review: Malcolm Gladwell Asks Us To Pity the Rich

Ever since Malcolm Gladwell’s “David and Goliath” came out in early October, he’s been on a non-stop promotional tour. He’s appeared on the BBC and the Daily Show, he’s done Twitter group chats and Ted Talk Q&As, and has had…

Posted on: October 26th, 2013 | Comments (1)

BuzzBagger Ben

Our story begins late last week when I got a tweet from @AlphaInvictus telling me to go check “who’s sponsoring BuzzFeed today.” I wasn’t expecting much… After all, BuzzFeed’s known for creating custom posts for advertisers, like the “15 Delicious Things You Can Stuff…

Posted on: May 15th, 2013 | Leave Comment

NPR’s Education Coverage Funded By Pro-Privatization Billionaires

Last week, I wrote about the nation’s first successful “parent trigger” privatization of a public school, in a isolated town on the edge of the Mojave Desert. In that piece, I mentioned how parents and teachers had become disillusioned by…

Posted on: April 24th, 2013 | Leave Comment

Back to Victorville: Dispatch Zero

It’s just past 5 a.m. and I’m sitting in my suite at The Plaza hotel, high up above the grimy streets of downtown Las Vegas. On the horizon, beyond the gold brick Trump Tower, beyond the needle of the Stratosphere,…

Posted on: January 9th, 2013 | Leave Comment

Journalism As Criminal Vagrancy: City Of LA Finally Charges Me For Reporting On LAPD's Occupy LA Raid

Barely had the ink time to dry on my employment contract with NSFWCORP, when I learned that the City of Los Angeles had filed criminal charges against me for reporting on a political protest that happened a year ago.

Posted on: November 28th, 2012 | Comments (1)