“Police officers don’t face justice more often for a variety of reasons — from powerful police unions to the blue wall of silence to cowardly prosecutors to reluctant juries. But it is the Supreme Court that has enabled a culture of violence and abuse by eviscerating a vital civil rights law to provide police officers…
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” The White Queen to Alice, Alice in Wonderland
“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…
Below are two infographics from a September, 2019 PEW Research Center poll that shows how Americans feel about citizen inequality in the U.S. Majorities of Republicans and Democrats who say reducing inequality should be a top priority also point to inequality giving the wealthy too much political influence and access and being harmful…
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…
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…
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.…