John Funiciello

Newt Gingrich just keeps on talking, and it doesn’t seem to matter that what he says doesn’t make much sense. Last week, in an interview with the National Review, he hit one of his favorite themes – that America is being brought to a kind of condition that combines secularism and socialism. He’s on a…

Transnational corporations are consolidating their stranglehold over food and food production, not just in the U.S., but also around the world. Our own country is a very important market for them, since it is the most lucrative market, but there is trouble brewing in the food system and it involves strange diseases and maladies among…

Through much of the Bush-Cheney Administration, there was pressure from officials in the White House and elsewhere to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a place awesome in its size and wildness. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the 19.2-million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge “supports the greatest variety of…

During the turmoil, anguish, and grief that was the rescue operation at the Upper Big Branch mine owned by Massey Energy in southern West Virginia last month, the first press reports said that Massey’s safety record was “spotty.” Turns out that “spotty” was the grossest of understatements. Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers…

States, counties, cities, and school districts are having budget problems. It’s not so surprising, since the economic recovery in America is being accomplished without any meaningful job creation. No jobs, no paychecks. No paychecks, no taxes. No taxes, and you get budget problems. Americans can’t seem to hold on to their jobs or their homes.…

The propaganda coming over the past 30 years from Corporate America and similar groups in the “developed” world has been constant and consistent: We can’t feed the world with low-tech agricultural methods. What is not said is that the high-tech agricultural methods are controlled largely by a handful of transnational corporations, based in the developed…

Early this month, there was a small story in a local paper in upstate New York about the arrests at a local bar for alleged sale of drugs, along with a charge against the bartender for “acting as a loan shark.” The formal charge for the “loan shark” is usury and it was jarring to…

It’s as if we didn’t have the power and the technology to stop most tragedies in the mines of America, but it’s obvious that we lack the will to do so. Monday’s mine disaster in southern West Virginia killed 25 miners and left four missing at a Massey coal mine in Montcoal, W.Va. It was…

So, former president Bill Clinton has apologized for advocating and fighting for policies in world trade that brought Haiti’s farming sector to its knees and made it nearly totally dependent on outside help in the wake of this year’s most devastating earthquake. “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but…