An Economist's Travelogue
III. Like everyone else, Clyde Yassem remembered what he had been doing on December 7, 1941. Sleeping. His parents and two of his younger brothers rushed in to awaken him and tell him the news. He…
I. [Note: This is a story from my book, In and Out of the Working Class. I am posting it in episodes, so stay tuned!] Sometimes a random event can change a person’s life. Clyde Yassem…
The motor force of capitalist economies is the accumulation of capital—the drive by businesses to make as much profit as possible and use as much of this profit as they can to expand their operations.…
If you have never driven the Big Sur Highway, which is the most famous part of California 1, you should to do it someday. Just east of Carmel, where Clint Eastwood was once mayor, you…
We were so entranced by Point Reyes that we returned three weeks later. After our first stay, we reserved a room at the Point Montara Lighthouse hostel, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, twenty-five miles…
California 1 is an engineering marvel, a highway that hugs the breathtaking California coast for hundreds of miles. It doesn't go from the northern to the southern border, but it covers enough of the coast…
We have been nearly fifty days in California. It is a state of geographical extremes: the deserts, the Sierras, the long ocean coast, and the central valleys. It is a great agricultural state, and every…
After reading The Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel’s fine account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), I re-read an article I wrote for the Nation magazine in November…
[Note: We have been staying in hostels, and internet connections are poor. So I can’t upload pictures. You can see some on my facebook page, which is public] The earth in the western United States…
We left Yuma and drove due north on lonely US 95, through desert mountains, and stopped a few miles past the farm-worker town of Blythe to see the Blythe Intaglios (more formally, "geoglyphs"). These…