John Funiciello

The warnings have been sounded for decades to anyone who would listen, but few have been listening. There’s the melting of the ice in the north, there are fewer fish in the sea for commercial fishing, the coral reefs are receding, the climate is warming and changing, there is an unprecedented rate of extinction of…

The African “land grab” continues, even as the United Nations this week called an emergency meeting to deal with the crisis of famine and death in Somalia and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa. Foreign governments have been criticized by advocacy groups for investing in land in South American and African countries, which purportedly would…

The Grand Old Party has come close to its goal of some several decades of “starving the beast” of government, with the country hanging on the brink of a financial meltdown as the Aug. 2 deadline approaches and the debt ceiling has not been raised. Negotiators for Republicans in Congress and President Obama’s White House…

The spectacle of a president facing a so-called double-dip recession if the debt ceiling is not raised in a few weeks and confronted by an opposition party that will not yield in its reckless race to the edge of the cliff is sure to erode what little confidence the people have in their political and…

Some people in America have virtually no influence at any level of our society or government and the plight of farm workers makes the complaints of the middle class about economic and political privation look like a walk in the park. There was a time in this country when the attempts by the working class…

As if the low-wage workers of America aren’t having a hard enough time making ends meet, Rep. Michelle Bachmann has now said that she would favor doing away with the minimum wage, if it would help to eliminate the nation’s economic troubles. Minimum wage workers and all low-wage workers are at the bottom of the…

When, on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the right of more than one million of its women workers to sue Walmart for bias and discrimination in pay and promotions, Corporate America rose to its feet and sang a song of victory. The lawsuit had been years in the making against the world’s…

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, earlier this month called for a politically independent labor movement, indicating a definite move toward cutting off organized labor’s dependence on the political parties for advancement of wage working Americans. For many who have been involved in organized labor and the labor movement, in general, for decades, Trumka’s new…

Across the political spectrum, politicians are promising that their plans and policies will create jobs. Creating jobs is “job one,” they say. While it’s true that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen slightly lower than 9 percent, there are millions of workers collecting jobless benefits, looking for a job in their field of expertise, or…