Gadfly

Will April Be Cruel?

April 5th, 2020

The 14th Century Black Plague Started Something Beyond Thoughts And Prayers

I see Donald the Lyin’ King has decided that Easter will not be a good time to fill churches--but maybe April 30 will be. King Donald had talked so much about the virus and April he reminded me of the words of one of my favorite poets T.S. Eliot in his first lines of “The Wasteland,” an epic poem about humankind: “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of a dead land, mixing memory and desire,…

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A Banana Country—And We Don’t Even Grow Them

March 29th, 2020

Fact: In 1979 We Had 19.5 Million Manufacturing Jobs; Today, 12 Million
That’s just one of the startling statistics revealed in two books reviewed by Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books. The titles indicate the subject: “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and “We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America” by Jennifer Shea. These books should be read by anyone eligible to vote in the 2020 elections.…

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Who’s That Zombie in the Political Window?

March 18th, 2020

Why, It’s Joe Biden, Stumbling Through Debates and Billionaire’s Pockets
Brian Michelz and his wife Sarah in Madison, Wisconsin are saddled with medical and college student debt, and like half the families in the United States, can’t come up with $400 to cover an emergency although both are working, she as a nurse, he in an auto parts store. A great economy? my a--. They can’t afford to have children. Mrs. Michelz pays off a $100,000 debt from nursing school $800 a month at a…

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Predators vs. Victims

March 11th, 2020

photo by Sabrina Hornung

photo by Sabrina Hornung

This Is How We Stop The Trumplicans’s Predatory Capitalism

In Gallup’s large Midterm Election Benchmark Poll conducted between October 15-28 of 2018, Republican and Democratic registered voters were asked to identify “Extremely/Very Important '' political issues. The polled picked the following top six issues in this order: Healthcare-80%, Economy and Inequality-78%, Immigration-78%, Treatment of Women in U.S. Society-74%, Gun Policy-72%, Education and…

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American Families Are Losers

March 4th, 2020

Here’s Why We Need Single-Payer Medicare-For-All
Utah teacher Ann Lovell flies to San Diego and then is escorted across the border to Tijuana every few months to buy drugs to control her rheumatoid arthritis. Her flights are paid for by the state of Utah’s insurance carrier because, even with the flights and costs related to it, it’s much cheaper for her insurance company to buy her drugs in Mexico instead of Salt Lake City. An escort picks her up at the airport and takes her to a…

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A Prisoner of Paper

February 26th, 2020

One Day In The Life Of A News Junkie
A column or two ago I used Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel “One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich” to paint a picture of Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1940s. He served an eight-year sentence in the slave-labor gulags across Russia for writing derogatory comments about Stalin in letters to friends, so he knew all about totalitarian oppression and survival in the absolutely brutal conditions. In contrast, I am an addicted slave to news each…

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Avaricious Locusts and Plutocrats

February 19th, 2020

Two Devastating Swarms

‘Tis the season when billions of locusts swarm across Northern Africa and Southern Asia creating famines. A single swarm with as many as 70 billion who transform themselves from avoiding other locusts to a “gregarious” state, can cover 450 sq. miles of territory and consume as much as 300 million pounds of grain in a single day. We have another devastating swarm of marauder locusts, those who fly into Davos, Switzerland each year on their private jets who do…

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Archipelago Of Terror

February 12th, 2020

Who Will Be The First Trumplican To Stop Applauding?
Watching the State of Trump, the National Prayer Breakfast for Trump, and the White House Celebration for the “perfect” Trump, I recalled a HPR column I wrote about Joe Stalin’s days as Russia’s Trump back on November 11, 2007 titled “An Archipelago of Terror: Don’t Ever Be The First To Stop Applauding!” I am going to repeat some of it in order to make a point about the behavior of Trumplican congressmen and supporters…

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Abuse of Power

February 5th, 2020

President Roosevelt: “The Malefactors of Great Wealth Are Against Worker Rights”
He also believed that the Declaration of Independence declared that “the rights of the worker to a living wage, to reasonable hours of labor, to decent working and living conditions, and to freedom of thought and speech and industrial representation---in short---in return for his arduous toil, to a worthy and decent life according to American standards. Progress results not from the crowding out of the…

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A Nutcase ‘Genius’

January 29th, 2020

art by Mark Robinson

art by Mark Robinson

The Crazy Nutcase In the Basement Is Now Presiding In The Oval office
There is no doubt in many minds that the impeachment of King Donald and the 2020 presidential election are the two most consequential actions in the 224-year history of the United States because we have an uncertified nutcase sitting near a nuclear button that can destroy worlds. We have dozens of issues to debate which I will list later, but when a malignant narcissist, a person who thinks only of…

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