ArcaMax

In December 1972, I was part of a nationwide campaign that came tantalizingly close to getting the U.S. Senate to reject Earl Butz, then-President Richard Nixon's choice for secretary of agriculture.

A coalition of grassroots farmers, consumers and scrappy public interest organizations (such as the Agribusiness Accountability Project that Susan...Read more

In building glittery enclaves like Trump Tower, luxury resorts and casinos, our shady dealmaker of a president has routinely used lies, bankruptcies, union busting and plain-old wage theft to stiff the working people who built and staffed them. So, it's no surprise that, while bombastically asserting at rallies that he's the workers' champion, ...Read more

Many years ago, literary critic Dorothy Parker skewered an unfortunate author with her sharp wit: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force!"

That's how a lot of us feel about this presidential election year, which has been distinguished by an incumbent who is so self-centered, incompetent and both ...Read more

There's a mournful Peggy Lee song that asks the existential question: "Is that all there is?" Some progressives are asking that when looking at whether to vote this year -- Biden or Trump ... is that all there is?

First, for me, that's an easy choice if we want to have even a small chance of making any little-d democratic progress in the next ...Read more

Let's say you're a millionaire. That's a lot of money, right? Now let's say you're a billionaire. That's a lot more money! But how much more?

Think of all those dollars as seconds on a clock. A million seconds would total 11.5 days -- a nice stash to have in the bank of time. But how much time does a billion seconds buy you? Nearly 32 years...Read more

Little-known fact: In more and more races, the GOP doesn't have broad enough appeal to fairly produce an election majority, so it has resorted to rigging the system so a minority prevails. As far-right tactician Paul Weyrich once bluntly put it: "I don't want everybody to vote. ... Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the ...Read more

Some people who get elected to Congress grow in office; others just bloat. Rep. Michael McCaul is a bloater.

A self-absorbed, right-wing Trumpeteer, this Texas lawmaker is about the richest guy in the U.S. House, wallowing in some estimated $113 million in personal wealth. McCaul made his money the old-fashioned way: He married it. His wife ...Read more

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump puffed himself up in full Trumpian pomposity to proclaim to us rubes: "We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else."

Well, "nothing else" ... unless you count a record-shattering number of more than 20,000 documented lies that this huckster has uttered in only three-and-...Read more

Is it really so hard? Voting, I mean -- smooth democratic elections with all citizens able to easily cast their ballots and with every ballot fairly counted. Is that too much for people to ask?

After all, the mechanisms for assuring universal suffrage are well known, and the logistics are not exactly rocket science. Speaking of which, modern ...Read more

Until recently, few people considered the sources of their meat. Then, a coronavirus walked into one after another of Meat Inc.'s humongous rural factories, where more than 90% of U.S. bacon, hamburger, chops, wings and other animal parts are processed. Within weeks, the industry's business model -- immense plants, side-by-side congestion, ...Read more

Upton Sinclair's landmark 1905 book, "The Jungle," exposed the food contamination and worker exploitation hidden in the fetid stockyards and meatpacking plants of Chicago and other major American cities. The muckraking journalist dubbed the nasty and brutish meat factories "a monster ... the Great Butcher ... the spirit of capitalism made flesh....Read more

Wow, how about that Dow?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, I mean, Wall Street's up-to-the-minute report on whether corporate stock prices are going up, down or sideways. It's the one economic indicator that our nation's media and political establishment watch religiously, claiming it tells them how our national economy is performing.

Recently...Read more

Wow, what a surprise! Have you seen the Republican Party's official platform?

Perhaps, like me, you would have expected it to be a mishmash of Trumpian miasma, laissezfairyland corporate economics, QAnon lunacy, police state authoritarianism and all the other wackiness that today's GOP has been embracing. But, no. Astonishingly, this 18-page ...Read more