Posting will be lighter than normal until Jan 5, 2015.  This blog is a lot of work and I need a break.  My SO thinks I am looking weary.  I...

...and on earth peace, good will towards men. Luke 2:14—the absolute central message of Christmas Yes, I know, there are plenty of people...

In the spring of my first year of at the University of Minnesota, I got to watch the collision of the supporters of Hubert Humphrey and Euge...

As someone who can vividly remember some of the more gruesome details of the Cold War, (like when UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson demanded his...

It would be easy to assume that Minnesota would not be a place for water problems—either quantity or quality.  I grew up in a state where dr...

On Dec 21, 1943, my parents got married in a big North Minneapolis church.  While it was a large and happy affair, it was not expensive beca...

It's hard not to admire the French—mostly because they excel at those facets of life that are improved by caring, such as food, clothin...

Denying history is probably the most prominent American habit of thought.  Gore Vidal would talk about The United States of Amnesia.  I was ...

A guy by the name of Jason Bordoff was on The Colbert Report last night gloating over the economic problems facing Russia because of the c...

It takes two tons of tar sands in Alberta to yield a barrel of oil (300 pounds or 13+:1 by weight).  That's a lot of strip mining to get...

As someone who has marveled over the staying power of neoliberalism, I am far from convinced that some new day has dawned for the global eco...

It must be really odd to cover the global climate change debate for German state television.  You live in a country where climate change has...

Because of its cost structure, the fracking industry is extremely vulnerable to an organized attack.  Now there is no way for me to know who...

Perhaps the most significant difference between the Leisure Class and Producer Class management styles is the subject of motivation.  The be...

Arguably, the most successful exercise of "soft" power is the intellectual triumph of neoliberalism.  The best current example is ...

The first of these conferences, held in Berlin, was actually both promising and exciting.  The German manufacturers of green tech threw a tr...

James Petras is a known commodity.  He has written over 60 books so it is easy to figure out where he stands on things.  In the last few yea...

Energy prices present an perfect example of a Producer-Producer conflict .  While the people who produce energy naturally want prices (at le...

As someone who believes that neoliberalism is one of history's more impressive examples of collective insanity, I tend to look for signs...

These days, I am working on a video that deals with the subject of agricultural runoff.  Not surprisingly since only a tiny minority of the ...

Most of the time, the financial casinos are harmless.  It is mostly a zero-sum game where the winners equal the losers in a high-stakes vide...