ArcaMax

It's time to talk turkey!

No, not the Butterball who just announced another bid for office. I'm talking about the real thing, the big bird, 46 million of which we Americans will devour on this Thanksgiving Day.

It was the Aztecs who first domesticated the gallopavo , but leave it to the Spanish explorers to "foul up" the bird's origins...Read more

What hit the Republican Party on Election Day was... well, the Republican Party.

Blow No. 1, of course, was from the party's president and cult boss, former President Donald Trump, who wields his narcissism like a political bludgeon. But then Republicans got an even more damaging gut punch from the party's own Supreme Court majority of six ...Read more

Every election day, media outlets, candidates and political establishments practically shout to us: "Go vote!"

After all, they point out, your vote is sacred; it's your fundamental constitutional right, for God's sake! Well... yes to voting, but most people (including most politicians) would be astonished to learn that America's Constitution ...Read more

Harry Truman said: "No man should be president who doesn't understand hogs." The problem with our recent presidents, however, is that, while they certainly don't know pig stuff about the four-legged varieties, they are expert on the care and feeding of those two-legged oinkers who are the CEOs and lobbyists of global agribusiness corporations.

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With corporations socking away massive profits, and with the labor market fairly tight, why are workers' wages still stuck at miserly and even poverty levels?

One big reason is that corporate boards and CEOs have their heads stuck in a dreamy future. Nearly every economic sector is actually spending vast sums of money on workers -- just not ...Read more

A July appeal on the front page of my local newspaper, The Austin American-Statesman, shamelessly screamed for public assistance: "Tell your members of Congress to support the JCPA and save local news." The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is a modest proposal meant to protect local papers from having their journalism pillaged by such...Read more

Attention, class! Here's our word of the day: "hegemony." The word describes a situation in which some force becomes the domineering power over a society. Think of a gang of schoolyard bullies. Like them, various kinds of hegemonies have arisen throughout history to rule local, national and even global "schoolyards," shoving other interests ...Read more

One particularly noisy piece of the GOP's current "culture war" bunkum is "critical race theory." For 60 years, critical race theory has been a little-known field of study by academics, examining racism's central role in shaping our society. In the last few years though, a covey of right-wing operatives has seized the phrase, shrieking that ...Read more

My newspaper died. Well, technically it still appears, but even when it's delivered it has no life, no news and barely a pulse. It's a mere semblance of a real paper, one of the hundreds of local-journalism zombies staggering along in cities and towns that had long relied on their once-vigorous selves. Each one has a bare number of subscribers ...Read more

Let me say one word to you: Nuts.

Now, let me say a name to you: Ted Cruz.

They've become synonymous, with the Texas senator perennially topping every national list of goofy, right-wing political partisans. He can't really be called a lawmaker, for he's not a serious participant in that process, instead devoting his senatorship to cockamamie ...Read more

For generations, workers have been punished by corporate bosses for watching the clock. But now, the corporate clock is watching workers! They count this as progress.

Called "digital productivity monitoring," it's an integrated computer system including a real-time clock, camera, keyboard tracker and algorithms to provide a second-by-second ...Read more

For more than a year, America's corporate chieftains have been moaning about the "Great Resignation": the recent phenomenon of workers just up and quitting their jobs. And now comes "quiet quitting": workers who don't leave their jobs, but only do what they were hired to do, quietly rejecting the endless extra (unpaid) tasks and weekend ...Read more