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…
I was recently re-reading The Art of Questioning: Thirty Maxims of Cross-Examination by Peter Megargee Brown, former President of the Federal Bar Council and Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. (It’s an old book, published in 1987. I bought it on 29 January 1992 while I was working on my novel An…
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…
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…
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 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…
Professor Tim Wu who teaches law at Columbia university wrote in the New York Times on March 5, 2019, that “Ignoring what most of the country wants — as much as demagogy and political divisiveness — is what is making the public so angry.” Below are some excerpts from his article, The Oppression of the…
I’ve written here before about whether or not it’s time to abandon the long-compromised tool of the Electoral College as a framework for fair and just elections in the U.S.. The subject has come to the forefront again. As Jamelle Bouie states in his column in The New York Times this morning, The Electoral College…
Putin’s One Weapon: The ‘Intelligence State’ ,Russia’s leader has restored the role its intelligence agencies had in the Soviet era — keep citizens in check and destabilize foreign adversaries.By John SipherMr. Sipher, a former chief of station for the C.I.A., worked for more than 27 years in Russia and other parts of Europe and Asia.…
“This planet will not be secure or peaceful when so few have so much, and so many have so little — and when we advance day after day into an oligarchic form of society where a small number of extraordinarily powerful special interests exert enormous influence over the economic and political life of the world…