To Comfort The Afflicted
And Afflict The Comfortable
Let’s Skip The War Against Baby Boomers, OK?
BY FROMA HARROP When things get dull, enterprising rousers of rabble promote a war against something or other to gain attention. The war against the baby boom generation is already in full swing. One book about the Americans born between 1946 and 1964 has “Generation of Sociopaths” in the title. And a recent piece in The Atlantic goes for their throats as “grandparents stealing from the grandchildren.” [Ouch, that serpent’s tooth.] There’s good reason for […]
Rick Scott’s Medicare Messiness
In Washington, acrimonious public disagreements among congressional leaders of the same party are unusual, which was why reporters took note not long ago when Sen. Mitch McConnell publicly spanked Sen. Rick Scott for what he considered an act of monumental stupidity. What infuriated the Senate minority leader, who yearns above all to become the majority leader again, was Scott’s unveiling of a 60-page “plan” describing what the Republicans will do if and when their party […]
Mass Transit Is For The Young
BY FROMA HARROP I frequently ride one of those cheap buses connecting my small city with a big city. At first, I expected my fellow passengers to be largely poor and old – the folks who can’t afford to drive or are unable to. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Most are able-bodied, youngish adults taking the bus to save something more precious to them than money – their time. Like me, they spend the hours […]
How Megrahi and Libya Were Framed for the Lockerbie Bombing
BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN Amid all the bellowing about the release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, with 281 dead, all current commentary and congressional hearings ignore the hippo in the room, which is that Megrahi is innocent, framed by the U.S. and British security services and originally found guilty because Scottish judges had their arms brutally twisted by Westminster. The conviction was one […]
The Ethical Rot Of Wells Fargo, From The Top Down
BY JIM HIGHTOWER Just when you thought that Big Banker greed surely bottomed out with 2008’s Wall Street crash and bailout, along comes Wells Fargo, burrowing even deeper into the ethical slime to reach a previously unimaginable level of corporate depravity. It’s one thing for these giants of finance to cook the books or defraud investors, but top executives of Wells Fargo have been profiteering for years by literally forcing their employees to rob the […]