Michael Blim The story was buried on page 24 of The Financial Times: “US Carmakers Step Up Russian Drive.” Ford and General Motors are the leading car sellers in the new Russia. Inwardly, I rejoiced. Maybe American carmakers, via foreign markets at least, can survive. While losing billions at home, they are making money in…

Build It and They Will Come: Massachusetts Universal Health Insurance Michael Blim Last time, I wrote about a world without the rich. Among other things, I pointed out, not too originally I thought, that the rich do as much as they can to make society work for them, the effect of which is to make…

Michael Blim Can you imagine a world without the rich? You might say that the rich we have had as long as we have had the poor. As the incredulous swell in an old wine commercial said to the ingénue: “How do you think I got so rich?” Most Americans today accept the rich as…

Michael Blim “What has that got to do with the price of wheat in Russia?” This was my father’s way of saying that an argument had nothing to do with his. So too says the Federal Reserve and the financial community, except they ask the question in reverse: What does the price of wheat in…

Count them up: a bridge collapse, sleazy mortgage-writing, record home foreclosures, killer pharmaceuticals, deathly toys, a stock market meltdown, e. coli and salmonella outbreaks. Would you like to add to my list? Even if you believe in nothing positive about the role of government, doesn’t this litany give you pause? This side of sanity, there…

Michael Blim An elderly couple is at the piano, the wife playing and the husband standing next to her turning the pages of the music. They have been to see their doctor. The husband has Alzheimer’s disease, and he has been prescribed Aricept. The result: he can follow a piano score and turn pages on…

Michael Blim There is something odious about privilege. In this case, white privilege. On June 28, the Supreme Court ruled in Parents Involved in Community Schools versus Seattle School District No.1 that using race as the sole criterion for assigning children to one elementary school or another violated the equal protection clause of the 14th…

Michael Blim I lost my family doctor last week. Or rather, he has decided to undertake a boutique practice, and I can’t afford the annual fee. So, in a way, he is leaving me, and I am not happy about it. Last week a friend of mine received a “Dear John” letter from her family…

Nobody loves a pedophile. No one. Not even their mothers. American society prefers them dead – done in by fellow inmates incarcerated in some human inferno of a prison. If that doesn’t work, it’s perpetual ankle bracelets or indefinite incarceration. Out of shackles and out of prison, a registry of their names is kept, their…

“Going home. Going home. I’m a-going home.Quiet-like some still day, I’m just going home. Mother’s there expecting me, Father’s waiting, too.Lot’s of folks gathered there. All the friends I knew.” Paul Robeson. The voice was unmistakable. Light snow falling. The comfort of Chicago’s last classical music station waking me at dawn. I was home. Dad’s…

CSI, Law and Order, 24, Cold Case Files, Without a Trace, Criminal Minds, The Shield, Crossing Jordan, The Wire. I learn a lot about life. For instance, there is evil, sometimes petty, sometimes monstrous, but always deadly. There is good: the police, the prosecutors, and their beleaguered, but heroic witnesses. Of course, there are the…

The trek to downtown Boston from Jamaica Plain, the city neighborhood where I live and where once lived the mighty maestro Serge Koussevitzky and the mendacious James Michael Curley, is a rather mundane affair. Thanks to Michael Dukakis and his far-sighted technocratic flair, a subway line now serves us instead of a broken-down trolley line.…

A month ago in 3QD, I argued that microfinance wouldn’t eliminate poverty or do much in advancing global economic equality. Two weeks ago, I proposed that it’s no use thinking you can eliminate global poverty without achieving economic equality, something now supported by even the World Bank. Equality eliminates poverty, but poverty elimination doesn’t achieve…

Michael Goldfarb, reviewing Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s new book Imperial Life in the Emerald City in the December 17 New York Times, remarks: “Regardless of how the war ends, Iraq is not Vietnam.” Wanna bet? Engaged once more in a fantastic imperial over-reach, we are retracing the steps that led to the final defeat and withdrawal from…

Nine days ago, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus, Bangladeshi economist and spark plug of the worldwide microcredit movement. In a nutshell, community organizations and non-profit organizations loan poor people bits of money so that they can start or improve their tiny businesses. Microcredit is widespread in poor and not so poor…

The United States spends 15% of its public monies on education. Yet more of its gross domestic product is spent on providing and consuming private education. It is, in all, a tidy sum. The overall results, though, are not very consoling. A new report issued this week by the National Center for Public Policy and…

Over the course of Italy’s search to understand its lengthy encounter with domestic terrorism, people began to characterize the period of its florescence and decline as Italy’s “anni di piombo,” its years of the bullet. In English, however, we have the opportunity to accept the direct translation, while adding a second sense of our own.…

I have spent a lot of time in libraries. Some of it was joyous. The library in our town when I was growing up provided the books that transported me into mythic worlds where I found my heroes among ancient Greeks, baseball starts, and even of the occasional great politician. Fastballers, spear throwers, and great…

Michael Blim In Turkey, they call it “the deep state.” Inside their state, Turks believe, is another state composed of key people spread throughout its military and civil administrations that conspire to move Turkish society in directions they prefer, regardless of what the nation or its politicians want. If the deep state considers that Kurds…

At first, I thought it was an item from that old underground favorite, Tales of the Weird. But no, it was from the Boston Globe, under an April 18 byline by Globe staffer Carolyn Johnson: “First came the nannies, the dog walkers, the housecleaners, and landscapers. Now crews are handling another outsourced home task: removing…