Crossposted at Huffington Post. Tomorrow is independent journalist Dahr Jamail. - Christian The bonds established between mothers and children are sacred. Mothers provide unconditional love, caring and support, teaching their children to live in the world with a sense of purpose. But life circumstances oftentimes get in the way of relationships and affect the outcomes for better or for worse. In times...
Steinbeck is of the generation that arrives just after the Muckrakers,Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, who thought that fiction was something of a sociological/anthropological tool in getting at the skewed relations between races and classes in a capitalist economy. Some larger truth, discovered by a focus imagination, could get beyond supposition and provide the correct vision for reform....
California Classics The Creative Literature of the Golden State by Lawrence Clark Powell The Ward Ritchie Press Los Angeles (1971) [click to enlarge] Works and authors discussed: Anza’s California Expeditions , by Herbert E. Bolton; The Journey of the Flame , by Walter Nordhoff; Death Valley in ’49 , by William L. Manly; The Land of Little Rain , by Mary Austin; The Wonders of the Colorado...
The mail, on an almost daily basis. One copy of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." One stuffed football from Mardi Gras. One corner of a down filled Woolrich blanket. One lavender throw pillow. The corner of an oak bookshelf. Numerous socks. Four pairs of shoestrings. One dog bed. One iPhone Jam Jacket (iPhone, thankfully, unharmed). One Joshua Chamberlain biography. One pair reading glasses....
One for the Party archives? Abstract propaganda front and centre in The Merry Frinks , a madcap comedy from 1934. And there was you thinking that the Hays Code was enforced in 1934 because of Mae West's single entendres and Joan Blondell showing a bit of thigh. How wrong you were. Jack, Harry and Daryl apparently viewed Utopian Socialism as more dangerous than Upton Sinclair during this time period....
Admittedly I've never thought of global money markets on any terms other than Upton Sinclair's - "Fascism is capitalism plus murder" - but I'm still struggling to work out how the Northern Rock good bank / bad bank is actually supposed to work. Does one half smile encouragingly, build up rapport by offering you cigarettes and keep bringing cups of over-sweetened tea while the other sits backwards...
Publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle followed its serialization in a socialist newspaper by almost 18-months, delayed because of nearly irreconcilable differences over content between Sinclair and the publisher. The book has never since gone out of print and, though a novel, it is universally and deservedly recognized as one of journalism’s heroic achievements. He [...]
HBO’s Rags Time is a documentary about the history of New York’s garment district. Parts of it look like they were produced by Upton Sinclair. Meet your happy, well-paid garment workers:
The "Smart Choices" the U.S. Government Wants To Make For You The short summary: Food makers have combined to work with nutrition experts to develop standards to brand food products in such a way as to communicate that the products comply with the government's dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards. A large number of manufacturers have joined one such program, "Smart...
How’s this for a litany of Wall Street sins and other financial crimes? Stock market manipulation. Insider trading and related pump-and-dump schemes. Use of friends and relatives to provide corporate services. Monopolies and ruthless crimes against rivals. Lethal corner-cutting in the areas of worker safety and defense contracting. Corruption of newspapers. In The Money [...]
When I was in the 10th grade, I took Advances American History with one of the best teachers I ever had in public school. Her lessons were creative and enlightening and often fun. She is one of the inspirations I cite immediately when people ask why I am so good at dealing with teenagers. Anyway, one of the units we covered was Labor Unions (and for a 37 year-old to still remember her Sophomore history...
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. ---Upton Sinclair, US novelist & socialist politician (1878 - 1968) There are few sights more heartbreaking than that of abused humans desperately defending their abusers. PIKEVILLE - Coal miners who were given the day off work, caravans of environmentalists, businessmen and local politicians and...
Remember when Glenn Beck put his art critic's beret on over his tin foil hat and told us all how the artwork in Rockefeller Center connected President Obama to Mussolini through the indoctrination of our children? Of course you do -- who can forget? It was lots of fun, and we all laughed at Beck. A lot. But I'm starting to think Beck was on to something. There's a conspiracy afoot that seeks to undermine...
Upton Sinclair's landmark book, "The Jungle," exposed Americans to the horrors and unsanitary conditions of the nation's slaughterhouses. The New York Times, in a Michael Moss article dated 3 Oct , investigates the causes and consequences of a 2007 outbreak of E. coli in Minnesota, and elsewhere, due to contaminated ground beef marketed by Minnesota ag giant Cargill. The victim interviewed...
"They use everything about the hog except the squeal", joked the guide. He was showing the wonders of the Chicago stockyards and packing plants to a group of Lithuanian immigrants at the start of the 20th. century. In The Jungle Upton Sinclair gives a graphic description of what that joke meant for those who worked in the appalling conditions of the packing plants, and also of what went
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