August Wilson wrote 10 plays chronicling Black life in the 20th century. His favorite, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, is set in 1911 in a boarding house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The play’s title comes from “Joe Turner’s Blues,” written in 1915 by W. C. Handy. That song refers to a man named Joe Turney, the brother of…
Ideology is political religion, said the conservative sage Russell Kirk. And what is the defining dogma of the political religion, or ideology, of America in 2022? Is it not that, “All men are created equal”? Yet, as with every religion, a basic question needs first to be asked and answered about this defining dogma of…
“There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,” is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson. Clients of the late Bernie Madoff, however, might take issue. Over four decades, Madoff, acclaimed as the greatest fraudster of them all, ran a Ponzi scheme…
The death spiral of the American Empire will not be halted with civility. It will not be halted with the 42 executive orders signed by Joe Biden, however, welcome many are, especially since they can, with a new chief executive, be immediately revoked. It will not be halted by removing Donald Trump, and the crackpot…
As the US stock market continues to set records, and the economy creates millions of new jobs, many Americans are forced to settle for low-paying work and meager benefits. How long can the inequality continue? The sound of popping champagne bottles will soon echo across Manhattan this holiday season as corporate America is in decidedly…
Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today’s thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that’s hiding in plain sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and Darwinian components to it. In terms of Newton’s first law of motion: those…
