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Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in 10s of millions of dollars’ worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have c...
In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was lambasted for supposedly endorsing policies of wealth redistribution. The right feared that under an Obama presidency, Washington would use federal power to take money from some Americans and give it to others. Yet, only a few years later, the most explicit examples of such redistribution are happening in the states, and often at the urging of Republicans. The most illustrative example began in 2012, when Kansas’ Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a landmark bill that delivered b...
Within hours of last week’s tornado disaster in Oklahoma, I (like many others) received emails from the President of the United States and my U.S. Senator. With impassioned language, they both claimed to care deeply about yet another community devastated by a cataclysm, and then said the best way for America to respond is to support private charities. The work of non-governmental organizations, no doubt, is critical, and contributing money to them is laudable. But there is something troubling about government leaders i...
Can you hear yourself think? Can you manage more than bursts of confusion and anger? Can you feel your own humanity anymore? I’ll admit it — I’ve had trouble this week, too. After an explosion like the one in Boston, it is indeed hard to hear one’s own internal monologue, much less meditate on such horrific events. Polluting that sacred quiet of the mind is both the haunting boom of the bombs themselves and even worse, the noisy coda that we’ve become so accustomed to. Sensory overload, of course, is the deafening effect of...
