corporate abuse

2016 TURNED OUT to be the year that the American people woke up and realized that most of them hadn’t had a real pay raise in more than 40 years while the oligarchs in our top 1 percent had been making out like bandits. As a result, millions of our fellow Americans voted for a democratic socialist presidential candidate. But, as you may have noticed, even more just got really mad, then went to the polls and did something really crazy.

Sadly enough, we all could have avoided many of our current problems if we had just been reading In These Times magazine for the past 40 years.

That’s the takeaway from the recent book The Age of Inequality: Corporate America’s War on Working People, a Forty-Year Investigation by In These Times, edited by ITT contributing editor Jeremy Gantz. The book compiles chronologically arranged excerpts from the Chicago-based publication’s coverage of labor and the economy from its 1976 launch through the dawn of the Trump era. The result is a sweeping chronicle of the slow-motion coup by which the billionaire class seized all the levers of power in our erstwhile democracy and used them to siphon wealth upward from ordinary workers to the corporate elite.

Stephen Boykewich 11-11-2011
Coconut vessels. Images via Wylio.

Coconut vessels. Images via Wylio.

It's a clear sign something's wrong when talks on "free trade" turn an island paradise into an armed camp.

Hawaii is on lockdown this week while the U.S. tries to hammer out a regional trade agreement that's being called "NAFTA for the Pacific." While some mean this as a compliment, Hawaii's faith and labor leaders are lifting their voices against an agreement they believe will put profits for banks and corporations above workers' rights, indigenous culture, and local communities. Those leaders are drawing on the Pacific region's indigenous "Coconut Theology" to provide an alternative vision of the common good.

"Coconut Theology came out of our contextual understanding of the Gospel in the Pacific," said Rev. Piula Alailima, pastor of Wesley Methodist Church in Honolulu and a core leader in the community organizing group Faith Action for Community Equity (FACE). "When we break the body of the coconut and partake of the juice, it's a symbol of the body and blood of Christ, of sacrifice, of community and the common good."

John Gehring 4-27-2010
As financial reform legislation stalls in the Senate for the moment and embattled Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein testifies today before a congressional subcommittee, faith-based organizations an