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How About a General Strike Against Dollar General?

Dollar General may well be, as a Bloomberg reporting team last week put it, the “worst” retail employer in the United States today. Why does that charge so matter? Dollar General has become “America’s most ubiquitous retailer,” with more outlets than Walmart and Wendy’s combined. Dollar General’s core mantra, as Bloomberg sums up: “Build as many stores as possible, pack them with tons of stuff while using as little warehouse space as possible, and spend as little as possible on everything else.” More

Flagging Support: Zelenskyy Loses Favor in Washington

Things did not go so well this time around. When the worn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned up banging on the doors of Washington’s powerful on September 21, he found fewer open hearts and an increasingly large number of closed wallets. The old ogre of national self-interest seemed to be presiding and was in no mood to look upon the desperate leader with sweet acceptance. More

A New Cold War on an Ever-Hotter Planet

Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything. More

Kids Shouldn’t Have to Pay for School Lunches

The United States federal government in 2020 embarked on a grand and beautiful experiment: expanding the use of tax dollars to help stave off poverty. That experiment has now largely ended in a shocking return to business-as-usual. One critical component of the experiment was to ensure that public school students had free lunches via the More