Corporations

Persons of Interest

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:45 -0500

The idea that a certain kind of people are worthy of credit is entirely a social construct based around an idealized vision of society. Those same people who got credit also got all the other benefits of living in postwar America.

Crop to Cup

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:32:45 -0500

Many of the coffee-producing countries still operate as if they are under the rule of a colonizer. You’ve got this country that was ruled from the outside as a production mechanism for the good of other countries, right? And once they gain their freedom, things aren’t going to immediately start working out well, because now they’ve got to develop their own political systems.

Returning

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The fact is, “green” is the way we buried our dead over 150 years ago in the US. It’s the way many Indigenous peoples in North America have cared for their dead. This other, more recent, method is the anomaly.

Uniforms

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran

Home Sick

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Down in the Valley

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.

Sunbeams

Wed, 31 May 2023 04:00:00 -0400

I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Sparrow’s Guide To Business

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 05:05:00 -0500

When you walk on sand, you leave footprints. When you work, you leave “workprints.” The people who come behind you will judge you by your workprints.

Unsheltered

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 05:00:00 -0500

The Martin v. Boise decision stands for the very simple principle that punishing a homeless person for undertaking basic, life-sustaining activities like sleeping or sheltering themselves — when there’s no adequate alternative accessible to them — is cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

from Nickel And Dimed

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 04:00:00 -0400

What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace (and yes, here all my middle-class privilege is on full display) was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and — what boils down to the same thing — self-respect.

Sunbeams

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 04:00:00 -0400

The emergence of intelligence, I am convinced, tends to unbalance the ecology. In other words, intelligence is the great polluter. It is not until a creature begins to manage its environment that nature is thrown into disorder.

Clifford D. Simak, Shakespeare’s Planet

Sunbeams

Tue, 31 May 2022 04:00:00 -0400

To earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow has always been the lot of mankind. At least, ever since Eden’s slothful couple was served with an eviction notice. The scriptural precept was never doubted, not out loud. No matter how demeaning the task, no matter how it dulls the senses and breaks the spirit, one must work. Or else.

Studs Terkel

Falling Behind

Tue, 31 May 2022 04:00:00 -0400

In terms of security and a sense that you can count on a certain career path in life if you do your part — that’s over for most people. You’re on your own.

Sunbeams

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 05:00:00 -0500

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.

Rachel Carson

Something In The Water

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 05:00:00 -0500

The cows were getting sick and wasting away. They were developing tumors. Their teeth were turning black. Calves were stillborn or born with cloudy or deformed eyes.

A Thousand Words

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0500

A new feature in the magazine, A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

High Time

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 04:00:00 -0400

Cannabis is legal in Canada for both adult and medicinal use. Mexico could legalize cannabis by the end of this year. The United States is going to be squeezed on both sides, with Americans vacationing in Cabo San Lucas and Montreal, using legal cannabis, and perhaps wondering why their own country isn’t moving forward with similar policies.

Stay Safe, Be Well

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 17:10:00 -0500

Found poem from the corporate e-mails in my inbox, March 2020 | In these times In these unprecedented times / In these uncertain times In these trying times / You are probably exhausted by all the information. / Rest assured, we are vigilant. / The situation is complex.

October 2019

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Featuring Kathleen Dean Moore, Greg Palast, Shozan Jack Haubner, and more.

Sunbeams

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Government is a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build or you can use a hammer to destroy.

Molly Ivins

May 2019

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Featuring Poe Ballantine, Pramila Jayapal, Paul Hawken, and more.

The Great Work

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Every major advance for justice in our country took no more than 1 percent of adults — around 2.5 million people — with public opinion behind them, mobilizing to change government policy. If you’ve got 2.5 million people, you can recover our country, recover our government, recover our hopes and dreams.

Sunbeams

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0400

One of the first things we must get rid of is the idea that democracy is tantamount to capitalism.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Capitalism And The Wage System

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0400

The modern growth of monopolies in the shape of trusts, cartels, federations of employers and so on has greatly increased the power of the capitalist to levy toll on the community. This tendency will not cease of itself, but only through definite action on the part of those who do not profit by the capitalist regime.

Unfair Advantage

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0400

To think of Amazon as a retailer is to miss the true nature of this company. Amazon wants to control the underlying infrastructure of commerce.

What Little She Had

cow2pie@aol.com — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

It is one thing to be bad with money when you have it, and quite another to be bad with it when you don’t. My mother gave away what little she had, mostly because she had been taught that every poor person she met was the Lord in disguise, testing her love.

Sunbeams

Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

This troubled planet is a place of the most violent contrasts. Those who receive the rewards are totally separate from those who shoulder the burdens. It is not a wise leadership.

Spock, Star Trek

An Embarrassment Of Riches

Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Our economy does not work for all of us. It works for a small handful of elites who are extracting as much wealth from it as they can.

Sunbeams

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

Norman Mailer

Preserve And Protect

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 11:40:00 -0400

We’re on our way to an REO — a “real-estate-owned” property, or foreclosed home — in Dryden, Washington, about an hour’s drive from Ellensburg, where we both live. My dad does maintenance on bank-owned houses. I finished graduate school this past June, and I’ve been his sidekick ever since.