Wade Rathke:

New Orleans       P.T. Barnum, the famous 19th century impresario and huckster from Bridgeport, Connecticut is often quoted as saying, “Any kind of publicity is good publicity as long as they spell your name right.”  In that sense, I have read with interest Jim Rutenberg’s piece on the attack on voting in the New York […]

New Orleans      We all know it’s bad, and then we find out that it’s even worse than we imagined.  Sharing the Voter Purge Project’s recently released report on consistent errors in the voter purge lists in states, red and blue, it is clear that this whole “system” of “cleaning” the lists is broken, state […]

New Orleans       We’re on the countdown to the election now.  October 5th marks the last voter registration day for the majority of states.  The flipping of pages on the calendar from now until Election Day on November 5th is a march towards the end of registration for all but those states with same day […]

Pearl River     Tenants all over the world are facing a huge crisis as the dual scourges of the pandemic and economic depression confront them daily.  In some industrialized countries, eviction moratoria have staved off some of the pending crisis, but millions still face the problem and more millions are on the move as they run […]

Atlanta        As always, there are things you know, things you think you know, and then the dreaded assumptions that mask as both, but are neither.  It’s those assumptions that Professor Khyati Joshi of Fairleigh Dickerson University in Virginia surgically attacks in her book, White Christian Privilege:  The Illusion of Religious Equality in America, all […]

Atlanta     You can’t make this stuff up!  What an unbelievable year and election season hammered by both the economic depression and the pandemic.   And, now, darned if the White House isn’t a coronavirus hotspot!  Both Donald and Melania Trump have now tested positive, as has former communications boss and longtime close personal and political aide, […]

Atlanta       What a fiasco! This was no debate.  This was a barnyard brawl.  Once it was over the question was not whether Joe Biden had won, but how much Donald Trump had lost.  Maybe Trump’s base liked his bullyboy show, but it hardly matters at one level because his base shrank literally before our […]

New Orleans      There’s something strange and different happening in the world of protests.  The average bystander is unlikely to have noticed this, but as a practitioner in this trade, I couldn’t avoid recognizing a subtle, but surprising global trend:  marathon protests. Once upon a time, it was all about the numbers.  Crowd claims and […]

New Orleans      We have to take progress where we can get it in these dark days at perhaps the tail end of the Trump administration.  There are scores of last-minute aberrations from muscling an appointment to the Supreme Court to further eroding labor law protections that are hitting fourth gear and heading for the wall.  […]

New Orleans     I had an elementary school teacher whose constant rejoinder was that “the only thing certain in life was death and taxes.”  At a tender age, neither absolute means much.  What are taxes?  When is death?  As we age, we find out way too much about both of these inevitabilities.  It turns out […]