by WALTER BRASCH It’s time to retire the 99 percent. Not the people, but the slogan that identifies the Occupy Movement. “We’re the 99 percent” slogan focused upon two completely different groups of people. The 99 percent are the masses, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the middle class; the 1 percent refers to the concentration of wealth in the top one percent of the population and in the dominance of large corporate and global financial systems. The...
Economy
What They Fought and Fight For
To our eyes, the whole grotesque notion of slavery seems impossible, and yet, while we turn our eyes away from the slavery-in-all-but-title exploitation of "illegal immigrants" in sweat shops and farm fields, we struggle to understand how an entire society could have pretended that the horror of slavery didn't actually exist...
The Fundamental Madness of Eddie Munster
The notion, implausible and fantastic on its face, is that the "free market" -- which is to say, untrammeled greed -- will benevolently lift all of Mankind on the backs of selfish Supermen -- the Howard Roarkes and John Galts -- who will benevolently move industry and civilization forward because it pleases them to so do.
Labor Pains: A Fable for Our Times
Once, many years ago, in a land far away between two oceans, with fruited plains, amber waves of grain, and potholes on its highways, there lived a young man named Sam. Now, Sam was a bright young man who wanted to work and save money so he could go to school and become an electrician. But the only job open in his small community was at the gas station. So, for two years, Sam pumped gas, washed windshields, checked...
F.T.C. Fines Debt Collector $2.5 Million
In the midst of this economic recession (or depression) the F.T.C. has been cracking down on debt collectors who ”harass consumers for money they may not even be legally obligated to pay.” This is good news for consumers who have found themselves for whatever reason unable to pay their debts in this economy. In the second-largest penalty ever levied on a debt collector, the F.T.C. said that Asset Acceptance, one of the nation’s largest debt collection companies, had agreed to...
OCCUPY WALL STREET: Separating Fact from Media
Newspaper columnist Ann Coulter, spreading the lies of the extreme right wing, called the Occupy Wall Street protestors, “tattooed, body-pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun.” She claimed the protestors, now in the thousands in New York, are “directionless losers pose for cameras while uttering random liberal clichés lacking any reason or coherence.” (Several hundred thousand of these “directionless losers” are expected to attend rallies in more than 650 cities, Oct. 15.) Rep. Eric...
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