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Thursday, March 29, 2012

From Corporate Watchdogs to Corporate Reformers | Dissident Voice

From Corporate Watchdogs to Corporate Reformers | Dissident Voice:


From Corporate Watchdogs to Corporate Reformers

Corporate America along with its three pawns, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government, are slowly driving our nation to ruination. The signs of the rot and ruin are everywhere, not just from sea to shining sea across our land but on foreign land as well. Corporate America and its pawns for self-serving purposes are directly responsible for murderous imperialism on foreign land, for America among industrialized nations having the worst socio-economic conditions, and for harming Americans sometimes fatally through the services and products they buy, the air they breathe, and the water they drink.
Government reforms would go a long way toward slowing our decline and even reversing it eventually. Government reform could take away the enormous favors it bestows on corporate America, favors sometimes so large that they keep otherwise drowning corporations afloat. But government is intransigent and will continue to be corruptible at the hands of corporate America. More attention therefore needs to be turned toward corporate reform.
Furthermore, while corporate America may be too obtuse or complacent to realize it, their own reform may be


On The Nature Of Self-Defeating Convictions

Although I have resided in New York City for many years, I was born in the Deep South. On a daily basis, I negotiate Manhattan’s gridded streets and avenues, yet, in many ways, the terrain of my heart still winds like an Indian trail through a pine forest. I visit the south on a regular basis; the stain of red clay will never be scoured from my soul.
To this day, I retain close ties to a number of southern friends and contacts who did not venture far from home. As the years trundled on, I’ve witnessed the quality of life and emotional wellbeing of these friends, hailing from


The Great “What Ifs?”

What if Trayvon Martin was a born again Christian white kid, and Zimmerman was a “black as the ace of spades” neighborhood watch captain? Does anyone out there think that the chain of events would have been the same? For all those white neighbors of mine who commented on the overactive crowds that rallied recently in Sanford, Florida: What if a sea of evangelist Christians and angry white folks marched and rallied over that same terrain? On the subject of  “born again Christians”?
What if Tim Tebow was a Muslim, and he, instead of Tebowing (kneeling in prayer during and before and after


Education: Seeing Through the Racket

Some years ago one could still hear the mirthful laughter and pitying disgust when Frank Barone (played by the late Peter Boyle), the curmudgeon father of Raymond in the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, having been accused of not caring about his children’s education responded in his usual cynical manner ‘Let me tell you something: Education is the biggest scam going today’. Fast forward some years later and one may be forgiven for actually giving the old man some credit for insight.
What should one think when several weeks ago officials at Claremont McKenna College admitted that for years a senior administrator had been reporting inflated SAT scores in order to boost the school’s ranking in the U.S. News & World Report annual ranking issue? Or that tuition at public college and universities has skyrocketed 40% from 2001-2006 and that a typical American college graduate leaves school with a debt of $17,500 to go with their degree?
And it’s not just at the university level. About a year ago parents of a four-year-old sued York Avenue Preschool