Wade Rathke:

New Orleans      Ok, let’s be clear, everything about the pandemic sucks, alright?  For the most part we don’t hate our homes, but we definitely don’t like being told we have to stay at home.  Attach the word, “order,” to it and it brings out the deep vein of anarchism that is normally masked as […]

New Orleans       I didn’t know Rev. William Barnwell or his family well, but I knew them for a long time and in many different capacities. I first met Barnwell and some of his family when we were organizing the Household Workers Organizing Committee, a union of domestic workers in New Orleans in 1978-79.  The […]

Pearl River     The stimulus bill overs some expanded rights for workers at companies with under 500 workers.  What do you do if your employer has over 500 workers and is refusing to do the right things to protect workers, including those exposed to the coronavirus? Employees caught in exactly that situation at Instacart, a tech […]

Pearl River     Ten percent of Americans have absolutely, flat-to-the-bone, no health insurance.  Many others have Trump-plan insurance with high deductibles, covering nothing much at all, but maybe catastrophes up to certain lifetime payment levels.  Many of these same people are exactly the people who have to work, rain or shine, not because they are delivering […]

Pearl River     In the Age of Trump and the Time of the Coronavirus, there seems to be constant speculation about what changes in our society, habits, and government might be permanent given our collective experience.  Much of this is hyperbole.  One pundit argued that he went “to sleep in America and woke up in democratic […]

Pearl River     The draft was a central issue in the opposition to the Vietnam War.  It touched all young men from eighteen to twenty-six, and the families that loved them.  It was a terribly unifying horror that was shared throughout the country, forcing life changing, and often life and death decisions at a very, very […]

New Orleans       In the Age of Trump, we biscuit cookers get used to hearing disassembling, tall tales, falsehoods, exaggerations, spin, or, not to mince words, lies, on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.  These are dangerous days in the White House.  After many moons with a drought of press conferences, now there is one on […]

New Orleans       Recession is here.  Layoffs are in the millions.  The service industry is hammered.  Small businesses are underwater, while the Senate Republicans are only listening to big corporations.  Trump is trying to elbow Dr. Fauci out of the way for getting too much attention as a truthteller at his fabricated daily press conferences spinning […]

New Orleans         Airbnb is in trouble.  The Wall Street Journal reports that “bookings last week were down year-on-year around 95% in Asia, 75% in Europe – the company’s biggest market – and 50% in the US…”  They added that a “report last week by Airbnb-analytics firm AirDNA also showed bookings tanking in big cities […]

Pearl River     There are so many things about the response to the coronavirus crisis that remind me of the response to Hurricane Katrina and its devastation of New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast.  Mostly, that’s not a good thing, because the governmental response was horrifically bad.  It was the nadir of George W. […]