Poisoning People in Apollo: All in a Day’s Work
Apollo is a small town in western Pennsylvania, part of the old coal and steel belt that surrounds Pittsburgh. The shallow Kiskiminitas River, a tributary of the Allegheny, flows through the borough. Although it is close to my hometown, I never knew much about it, except that my artist uncle once made a glass carving… | more |
The National Parks Were Made for You and Me
Arches National Park in Utah is a jumble of strange and beautiful rocks, spires, arches, and fins. The more times you come here, the more amazing wonders you might find: a fifty-feet long natural rock tunnel, nearly 2,000 arches, groves of cottonwoods in washes, springs, unusual canyons, beaver, turkeys, wildflowers, and petroglyphs. Most people who… | more |
Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is going on vacation for awhile. I’ve run out of things to say. Thanks for reading.… | more |
Whoopee! We’re All Gonna Die (Working)
We were in a Wal-Mart in Richfield, Utah. The greeters at the door were an elderly man and woman. Both were in wheelchairs. At a grocery store in Colorado, an old man bagging groceries was so bent over that he could barely look up. In our travels, we have begun to notice a new phenomenon:… | more |
It’s Still Slavery by Another Name
Right-wingers like Fox’s Bill O’Reilly are fond of saying that whites don’t have a monopoly on racism. Some black people hate whites, so they are racist too. Whites must stop being racist, but so must blacks. The implication of this way of thinking is that racism evens out in the end. It is seen as… | more |
The most important thing that has taken place since Wisconsin is another uprising, the phenomenal Occupy Wall Street (OWS). It began in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011 and spread rapidly to more than 2,600 towns and cities around the world. With OWS, the anger over growing inequality and the political power of the rich… | more |
When the great populist Huey Long was campaigning for governor of Louisiana, he wrote some clever slogans and songs. One song began: “Every man a king, for you can be a millionaire.” Back then, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the word “millionaire” meant that a person was rich beyond the dreams of mere… | more |
As I was channel surfing a few months ago, I stopped to watch a new Discovery Channel reality show called Gold Rush. Since then I have seen every episode. The show is now in its second season, and it is one of this network’s most popular programs. “Reality” is a misnomer since Gold Rush is… | more |
And the Farmworkers Are Still Poor
A Review of Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (New York: Verso), 742pp, hardcover, $54.95.* Frank Bardacke labored over this book for fifteen years. We can be grateful that he didn’t give up. This is the best history ever written of the United Farm… | more |
Occupy Wall Street and the U.S. Labor Movement
The Occupy Wall Street Uprising and the U.S. Labor Movement: An Interview with Steve Early, Jon Flanders, Stephanie Luce, and Jim Straub by Farooque Chowdhury and Michael D. Yates The Occupy Wall Street Uprising has taken the nation by storm, beginning in the Financial District in Manhattan and then spreading to cities and towns in… | more |