One of the less recognized aspects of the American Revolution was its usefulness as a business venture. The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions were all revolts empowered by peasants, but that’s not true for the revolt that created the United States. The American colonists were more affluent, on average, than the populace back in England, […]
Continue readingIt Takes A Neanderthal
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. […]
Continue readingStorage Nation
Seven square feet of commercial storage space now exists for every American. That’s nearly a quarter of a five-by-five self-storage unit for each man, woman, and child in the U.S., or one whole unit for each average family, or over 2 billion total storage square feet nationally, whichever number makes you more queasy. I can’t […]
Continue readingCasualties Of A Different War
My father grew up on a small, family dairy farm in upstate New York. He would get out of bed at four in the morning, milk cows, deliver milk, and then go to school. I have a few old milk bottles imprinted with the label of Dann’s All-Star Dairy. That was back in the 1930s. […]
Continue readingThe Limits of Occupying Wall Street
I’ve been trying to decide what I think about the Occupy Wall Street crowd camped out in New York City’s Zucotti Park. I came of age in the late Sixties, and they remind me a little of that time—a disparate bunch, loosely organized around a sense of injustice, with more than a few joining in […]
Continue readingJesus Didn’t Work At Goldman-Sachs
In 2008, at the height of the banking crisis, Lloyd Blankfein attended a meeting with government officials about the insurance giant AIG. As chairman of Goldman-Sachs, he presided over the purchase of insurance on investments the bank knew would go bad. Along with other banks who did the same thing, they drove AIG, the world’s […]
Continue reading