It’s really hilarious how often it is that some organization or another comes up with a study that concludes that the best place to live or raise a family is a distant suburb in which all there is to do is visit the chain stores in the mall, take drugs and get into trouble. A […]
Read More… from When will media stop trying to sell us on a car- and mall-dependent suburban life?
Everyone should read “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” Naomi Klein’s fine article on a wide range of climate change issues in the November 28 issue of The Nation. First Klein presents a lively history of how the right wing has reduced the percentage of Americans believing in man-made climate change from 71% to 44% in a […]
Franco Harris has become collateral damage in the Penn State child sex abuse scandal. Franco is best known for making one of the four or five greatest plays in professional football history, catching a ball that evidently bounced off the helmets and bodies of other players and then running for a game winning touchdown as […]
During the 2008 elections, when many people, including myself, heard Obama’s view on foreign policy, we focused on his vow to end the war in Iraq and dismantle the Guantanamo prisoner camp, a symbol of our inhumanity to other humans. We did not hear him speak of going to war in Afghanistan, or if we […]
There was more in the news today than Republican candidates’ self-destruction by means of mouth opening and the idle speculation on what will happen to the Occupy movement now that local governments across the country have decided to clear the parks instead of waiting for the snow. Buried in the back pages is the news […]
Now that “The Big Bang Theory” has moved ahead of “Two and a Half Men” into second place among non-football related television shows, I think it’s time to critique what may be the most ideologically-driven entertainment on TV today. In its premise, its characters, its jokes and its plot lines, “The Big Bang Theory” constantly […]
The United States suddenly changed directions in economic policy about 1980 and in doing so transformed itself from a country that had a fair distribution of wealth to one in which the lion’s share of wealth now goes to a very small number of people. The sea change affected everything. Our basic ideology changed almost […]
You may notice a few new links on the OpEdge home page this week: They link to the websites of two well-respected national publications, The Progressive Populist and Jewish Currents. Progressive Populist has started running all the OpEdge blog posts at its website, while Jewish Currents is running the occasional post its editor thinks is […]
When Julien Benda wrote The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (in French: La Trahison des Clercs) in 1927, he defined the “intellectual” (or “clerc”) much as we define the “knowledge worker” today: the professionals who manipulate bodies of knowledge to deliver mostly services, such as university professors, policy wonks, writers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers, engineers and […]
Pew Research Center today released a study showing that the gap in wealth between households headed by those over 65 years of age and households headed by those under 35 has grown substantially since the beginning of the great recession. The older households now have 47 times more wealth than the younger households, double what […]