We’ve all heard rags-to-riches stories about successful individuals who “pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.” Certainly, many successful business people owe their good fortune to hard work and innovative thinking. But, to describe those people as “self-made” would be to dismiss a big piece of reality—the role of the commons.
Ubuntu and The Self-Made Myth
Thursday, March 15th, 2012Taxing the Rich Isn’t Enough: Family Dynasties in America
Monday, December 12th, 2011My family has been wealthy for hundreds of years – with a lot of government help along the way.
Have pity on the rich
Monday, November 14th, 2011Rich people must protest the way they are treated here in the US of A. And Marin County is THE place to start, cuz we got a LOT of rich people here. Why, just recently we were proudly cited as one of THE richest counties in the US. Filthily so. It’s clear that the rich have been horribly mistreated. Let us recount the many, many, MANY ways:
Responding to an anti-immigrant email
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011An old friend sent me an unbelievable poem, probably not realizing it would offend me. It was titled “Mexican Poem.”
Middle Class Traitors: Who Are They?
Thursday, May 5th, 2011I recently came up with a phrase that other than one fleeting reference was not to be found in Google. It seemed to me to really describe a recent phenomenon that I found quite disturbing: the demographics of the electorate who voted for right wing conservatives in the November 2010 elections both on the federal level as well as in many states across the country. The phrase I coined was “Middle Class Traitors.”
So Wrong, It’s Not Even Close to Right
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011This crass advertisement for a “unique luxury resort” in Las Vegas assaulted my eyeballs from the pages of the January issue of Architectural Digest. The photo and copy (“I love hard labor – I could watch it all day”) imply: “enjoying the finer things in life is only part of the fun; up here, we bask in working-class suffering as well!”
Chickens in Every Pot? Or Bentleys in a Few Garages?
Monday, November 29th, 2010Lawmakers are really in a bind over whether to let the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire at the end of this year. After all, they owe those millionaires a lot after all those campaign contributions this fall.
It’s Not Butter: The Other Tax Spread
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010Congress and the White House are wrangling over the future of the Bush tax cuts, which expire this year. Much has been written about how the 2001 and 2003 cuts widened the gap between the very wealthiest 2% of Americans and the middle and working classes. But far too little notice has been paid to the other spread caused by the tax cuts: the growth of the economic divide between white Americans and people of color in the 2000′s.
Gisele Bundchen’s clueless classist comments
Monday, September 27th, 2010Supermodel Gisele Bundchen was quoted in the September Harper’s Bazaar UK as saying, “There should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breastfeed their babies for six months.”
