In a new era, new challenges and new choices for how we want to live . . .

“The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the…

America

While more people are out of work now than at any time since the Great Depression, COVID-19 ravages through the country, and middle class folks are lining up in their cars at food banks, the following news items caught my attention. I came across this article again recently: These 91 companies paid no federal taxes…

Surveillance Capitalism, the definition

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.   1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modifications; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism…

When We All Vote

I just signed the campaign Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson started on Moveon.org. Check out their work and join us by adding your name to fight for safe and fair elections. Every name that is added builds momentum around the campaign and makes it more likely for us to get the change we want to…

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

To help you understand your new world environment, this is essential reading. It can be heavy lifting sometimes. But stick with it. It’s extremely enlightening. And I found it to be a sobering message about the unprecedented challenges we face as citizen of this American democracy, and our new world of global surveillance. Highly recommended.…

Knowing the Truth

Knowing the Truth Novelists typically aren’t held to the same truth standards as journalists. Our “business,” after all, is imagining stories that have never been told before. Mostly, our truths are in the realm of authenticity, making our characters “ring true,” our dialogue seem “natural,” our stories tell the truths of human nature. But being…