The nation’s greedy corporations and insatiable wealthy are fattening themselves on workers. There’s no trickle down. It’s the opposite; the rich have been sucking the economic lifeblood from the middle class for decades. When reckless Wall Street banksters get taxpayer-funded bailouts, billionaires get tax breaks and gigantic corporations like GE and Bank of America pay absolutely no federal income taxes, they’re getting for free the very public services that enable them to make massive profits in this country—the courts, the roads, the trade regulators, the patent enforcement. The middle class doesn’t get those big time special deals and loopholes. Workers pay their taxes. As a result, it’s workers footing the bill for the government services that enrich the rich. Greedy corporations...
It’s on days like these – rainy, technicolor, zipped – that a man considers his legacy. How will he be remembered? How will he be renumbered? What achievements will stand after he’s gone?
For me, I trust my name will be synonymous with shoes and boots thrown atop buildings. Commercial buildings, second homes, garden sheds – all within my reach. If need be, I’ll use a ladder. And they won’t be my shoes. People will still chuckle when they think of the time I stole their work boots and violently flung them to the roof of their local Jiffy Lube.
And children will cry for having not met me.
I've had this Winter Sweater Cookie for a few months now. It's pressed between two sheets of Waxed Paper in a large manilla envelope. Every so often I take it out and force people to look at it, then write down how it made them feel.
I think the green icing tastes like mint not like a frog or a traffic light. I don't know for sure. I don't know the snow man's name, but I never asked.
Also, I lied: I've actually had this cookie for a few years now. I can't get to sleep without knowing where it is. I would never eat it in front of anyone. Just like Veal.
As a 7th grader I spent many evenings sitting inside a large refrigerator cardboard box. By choice. The box had one side section removed through which television reruns of Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains could be viewed.
Inside I sat on a considerable pile of stuffed animals, most purchased, some donated. Often I would don goggles and keep my fingers crossed until it was uncomfortable. At regular intervals, even during viewing hours, two Teamsters would enter the house, lift the lid above me and pour in more stuffed animals, often Korean in origin.
This went on for months until both my parents and the school agreed I would repeat the 7th grade and never discuss this matter publicly.
Today, that embargo ends.
Joe described himself as a redneck socialist, and he was. He was profoundly concerned with the fate of the people he wrote about, those who worked hard all their lives and ended up with nothing. Funny: I’ve never met a socialist who didn’t care about others, or a capitalist who did. The truth is that a great many decent people are on the wrong side of the intelligence curve, don’t come from families that send their young to university,and can’t protect themselves from the corporate lawyers and bought legislatures.
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Taking in Charles Ferguson's excellent documentary, Inside Job, about the dark doings of Wall Street in our time, I confess I was awestruck all over again at the complete surrender of Obama to the very characters who embodied the corruption that rotted our system from the heart outward. Summers, Rubin, Geithner, and a host of other revolving door grifters who did everything possible to set up the implosion of banking, defeat the rule of law in money matters, and ruin millions who wanted nothing more than something useful to do in this society for a living wage. Most impressive of all in this brave film were the shameless academic mandarins caught on camera trying to weasel out of their greed-driven misdeeds - Glenn Hubbard, chair of the Columbia University Econ department, a perfectly...