I’ve written often about my conviction that getting big money out of politics is the necessary precursor to anything like a meaningful democracy in the United States. Most recently, it was in “The Impasse”: I continue to believe that purging the electoral system of private money is the key to everything. If big business and …
Father’s day on Facebook is filled with sweet smiles and tributes. I am touched by my friends’ photographs and texts, but that’s not what brings tears to my eyes this morning. My father died suddenly just after my tenth birthday. “The last day of my childhood,” I always say, because he was the tenuous tie …
I spoke last night at the Diekeou Collection in Denver, the venue for a talk on cultural policy cosponsored by WESTAF and Arts for Colorado. My subject was “Getting Our Hopes Up: Envisioning Art at The Center,” an exploration of the fear of disappointment and how it has shrunken our vision of art’s public purpose, …
If the question had been put outright, my friend and I agreed, a supermajority would have voted on our side: Do you want to live in a nation where a few ultra-rich individuals own as much as everyone else put together, have carte blanche to use their wealth to shape public policy, yet feel completely …
Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and globalization critic, has a must-read essay in the current Vanity Fair, excerpted from his forthcoming book. He analyzes the consensus among plutocrats that our ever-widening wealth disparity is a jolly good thing, and concludes that for their own good, they had better reconsider the flimsy …