This election year has added a new season to our country’s calendar: The silly season.

What hit the Republican party on election day was… well, the Republican Party.

My newspaper died.

Let me say one word to you: Nuts.

What makes a newspaper great? Many say it’s having street-savvy reporters and editors with the integrity to shine the light of investigative journalism on the power structure’s abuses.

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 rejecti…

The “old homeplace” is a classic theme of Americana, expressed in everything from Norman Rockwell paintings to Woody Guthrie’s powerful folk lament, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore.”

Sen. Joe Manchin — a one-man political steamroller in Washington — is a Democrat. Except when he’s not, which is most of the time. A multimillionaire West Virginia coal executive, he’s the darling of fossil fuel and pipeline lobbyists, as well as Republican opponents of progressive Democrati…

America’s stringent system of corporate capitalism keeps carving out new depths of worker exploitation.

Is it a good deal to sell out your personal integrity for cash from notorious scoundrels?

Although we haven’t even gotten through this year’s midterm congressional elections, it’s still not too early to start examining some of the characters who hope you’ll make them president in 2024. 

In the 1990s, renowned Texas progressive writer Molly Ivins regaled (and appalled) readers with her reports on the tragicomic awfulness of George W. Bush’s two terms as Texas’ governor. His tenure was notable for his deep ignorance, frat-boy arrogance and flagrant servility to corporate inte…

It’s a serious handicap for an elected leader to be a lame duck. Far worse, though, if the “leader” is just plain lame.

What’s the most damning thing about America’s health care system? The system.

When United states Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito’s secret plan for canceling the constitutional right of women to end their pregnancies leaked to the public, Republican politicos went ballistic! Over the leak, that is.

Today, CEOs of big corporations are playing the tricky “Inflation Blame Game!”

For years, as ever-bigger corporate combines grabbed ever-bigger chunks of market power, America’s political, media and academic establishment scoffed at critics, drowning them out with jolly rounds of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” But the concentration of corporate power can no longer be dismissed, …

I think we can now say the obvious: The Republican Party has gone bull goose bonkers. Its leaders have turned the once-proud GOP brand into an unprincipled gaggle of corporate profiteers, hatemongers and screwball conspiracy theorists. They’re so far out that the Hubble Telescope can’t find them!

As we know, “government ethics” can be a very slippery concept. That’s why We The People have insisted that every public official — from Congress critters to dog catchers — swear to abide by some minimum standard of proper behavior. Not that all will honor it, but a code of ethics provides a…

Keep On Truckin’ was an iconic underground cartoon created in 1968 by comic master Robert Crumb. Featuring various big-footed men strutting jauntily through life, the caricature became widely popular as an expression of young people’s collective optimism. “You’re movin’ on down the line,” Cr…

If an inanimate, self-serving monopolistic behemoth like Amazon Inc. can be armed with the legally enforceable rights of a human being, how much more deserving is the Amazon River, which abounds with real life and serves the common good?

Big meat did a collective knee-jerk this spring when Joe Biden proposed a 50 percent cut in greenhouse-gas emissions. While cars and coal plants were the chief targets, gross concentrations of cows, pigs, etc., by industrial ag are also major generators of those gases, so the industry and it…

I never dreamed of growing up to be a political activist/commentator, but here I am, and it’s worked out pretty well for me. I’ve been lucky enough to have a voice in public matters and eke out a modest living running my mouth as an independent populist agitator. Still, I have to confess to …

Corporate America has proudly elevated good moral values to a special place. That place is the trash can.

Some years ago, a young, sorta-hippyish couple knocked on my front door. They had noticed that I had fig trees in the yard, laden with summer fruit. If I wasn’t going to pick them all, they asked, could they harvest some figs? Since I was about to take a trip, I said: Sure, have at ’em.

’Tis the season, right? Traditionally, this time of year celebrates spirituality and festivities — including Hanukkah, Christmas and Kwanzaa. 

Sometimes, when watching Congress in action, I can’t decide whether to laugh, cry or check myself into an insane asylum.

The corporate hierarchy has long tried to diminish labor activism in the United States by insisting that strikes and other workplace agitations have never had broad support or impact because they are fundamentally un-American.

For many people, the animals they adopt and love become more like family members than pets. We have deep relationships, with cats, dogs, parrots, goats, horses and other fellow critters — who at least pretend to love us back, providing comfort and joy all around.

Here are two terms that you don’t expect to see together: “the state of Alabama” and “progressive leader.” And yet — even with its well-earned reputation as a bastion of Jim Crow voter theft, plutocratic anti-worker policies and right-wing nutballism — the Camellia State has flowered as a mo…

‘If you think education is expensive, try ignorance,” the old bumper sticker says; yet for decades national and state lawmakers have flaunted their ignorance of what makes a good society by stupidly shortchanging our investment in our youngest minds.

We’ve got the Academy Awards, the Emmys and Grammys… but what should we call the award for the most extraordinary performance by a corporate profiteer? How about the “Sleazy,” with winners getting a solid gold sculpture of a middle finger? There were so many worthy contenders, but one corpor…

It’s been a hell of a hot summer, exploding the top off thermometers with triple-digit readings across the country. As we’re learning, week after week of this debilitating heat intensifies wildfires, causes electric grids to fail, kills millions of wild animals (including fish!), burns up cr…

As a writer, I get stuck every so often straining for the right words to tell my story. Over the years, though, I’ve learned when to quit tying myself into mental knots over sentence construction, instead stepping back and rethinking where my story is going.

America’s economic and political inequality has led workaday Americans to exclaim: “The system is broken. Let’s fix it!”

Tick-tick-tick… each sweep of Big Tech’s clock enhances corporate power — but its hands also sweep away more of our civil rights.

When I was just a tyke, cowboy actors were marketed as role models for little backyard cowpokes like me, and we could send off to get a certificate making us “Pals of the Saddle” or some such with Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy or others. 

Mega-investor Warren Buffett once held a big portfolio of daily and weekly newspapers, and he specialized in squeezing out competitors so each held a local monopoly. Then he’d chop staff and news content, letting him glean annual profit margins above 30 percent.

Most people believe the American economy is being rigged by and for bankers, CEOs and other super-rich elites, because… well, because it is!

Ralph Waldo Emerson told of a dinner guest who went on and on about the virtue of honesty, offering his own life as a model of perfect rectitude. “The louder he talked of his honor,” said Emerson, “the faster we counted our spoons.”