profit margins

  • Dirty Harry Does Diversity.2: Indicting Invictus

    (Like the original Magnum Force, this post is a sequel to the first Dirty Harry.) Of all of Clint Eastwood’s “Sympathy for the Other” movies, Invictus was the most popular in the Land of the Liberals.  J. Edgar (gays), Million Dollar Baby (women), and Gran Torino (SE Asians) all did well but received more criticism than…

  • Algebra: The Root of All Evil?

    As the deadline for my current Kickstarter campaign draws near, math is on my mind.  We’ve got until noon on Tuesday to raise another $650.  Math has also been on my mind as the school year has started up in my work as a teacher. Two weeks ago, I attended a workshop for teachers who…

  • Corporate Welfare.10: Wrestelmania

    I just read an incredible article by Dan O’Sullivan in Jacobin magazine about the abuse of wrestlers by their promoters, and in particular, by Vince McMahon and the WWE, (World Wrestling Entertainment.)  I recently wrote about the film The Wrestler as a depiction of how wrestling performs the abuse of workers outside the ring by amplifying…

  • The Battle of the Basket

    Sometimes magazines surpass your expectations.  I click on a lot of links that my friends post about social issues on Facebook, but I can’t say a lot of them lead to Esquire magazine.  Yet the other day, I followed a link posted by a former teaching colleague of mine to an excellent article Esquire ran by…

  • World on a Wire

    As I keep track of the unfolding struggle over the FCC’s proposed creation of a corporate “fast lane” on the internet that would regulate non-corporate media to second class status online, I’m reminded of the film World on a Wire by Rainer Fassbinder, which I watched on DVD a couple of months ago.  Despite being…

  • Corporate Welfare.8: Twitter Takes

      There’s a new story out today from Julia Wong of In These Times about how Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco “have become a symbol of gentrification and displacement for housing activists and community organizations in the city. ” I asked a friend of mine who had moved from the Bay Area to New York fairly recently…

  • Corporate Welfare.7: Walton Welfare

    Tens of thousands of protestors participated in some 1,500 strikes initiated by the organization OURWalmart against the largest private employer in the country yesterday, which of course was Black Friday, known as the “Super Bowl of Shopping” in this country.  To mark the occasion, Amy Goodman interviewed Catherine Reutschlin, a policy analyst at Demos who…

  • Corporate Welfare.6: Pulling a Fast One

    UC Berkeley’s Labor Center has published a new study on the role public subsidies play in the business model of fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s.  Like the other corporations in this series of posts, it turns out that these firms surreptitiously pocket billions in public subsidies while preaching the doctrine of…

  • Corporate Welfare.5: Pigskin welfare

    Some corporations, like GE and Bank of America, have to resort to creative accounting to make it look like they lost money to avoid paying federal taxes.  The National Football League is not one of them.  A recent Change.org petition reads as follows: “Despite the fact that it is a $9Billion/Year industry, the National Football…

  • Top 40 Over 40.13: Weird Al’s “Party In the CIA”

    I can think of few more unlikely candidates for creative growth after 40 than Weird Al Yankovic.  Back when I was in grade school, he came on the pop culture radar with “Eat It,” his parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”  His string of similar Dr. Demento style hits willfully sucked all of the sexual…