Joe Costello has decades experience in politics, energy, environment, and communications. Traveled and worked across the planet. Long a student of democracy, its demise, possible revitalization.
Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is without exception a small variation on an established design, one that owes its distinctive character to the aforementioned brevity of the financial memory. The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over
The “money question” passed out of American politics essentially through self-censorship. This result, quite simply, was a product of cultural intimidation. In its broader implications, however, the silencing of debate about “concentrated capital” betrayed a fatal loss of nerve on the part of those who, during Populism, dared to
"Thus in depending on the future of invention to extricate us from the situations into which the squandering of our natural resources has brought us we are manifesting our national love for gambling and our national worship of the gambler, but in circumstances under which no intelligent gambler would
“There's a very real danger in this country of bowing down before the brazen calf, the idol is the gadget. I know very great engineers who never think further than the construction of the gadget and never think of the question of the integration of the gadget with
I'm going down to the Dew Drop Inn See if I can drink enough There ain't much to country living Sweat, piss, jizz and blood Sweet Home Alabama Play that dead band's song Turn those speakers up full blast Play it all night long
Life in the 21st century is reader supported, please subscribe and make life sustainable. Well, I do this with some trepidation and loathing, but it's per a request. Yes folks, I do requests. Couple days ago, I was heading back from golfing 18 in southern Michigan. Inflation has
Life in the 21st century is reader supported, please subscribe and make life sustainable. SUBSCRIBE Nigeria is a beautiful country populated by a wonderful people. Through oil, it has been directly and detrimentally connected to the US for decades. I did two elections in Nigeria, the first in 2015 and
Come on, Come on, Come on Yeah, Yeah, Yeah And they slag off Noel as lyrically incompetent. Say what you will about the Mancunian brothers Gallagher, they are both funny fucks for one, but in 1994 they were as good a rock and roll outfit as ever took a stage
Life in the 21st century is reader supported, please subscribe and make life sustainable. SUBSCRIBE Over the years reading Roman history, it took some time to understand most writers, both ancient and modern, were quick to dismiss the republic's plebeian assemblies, either ignoring them or claiming various structures
“In the broad application favored by Populists, the ‘money power’ symbolized much more than the gold standard, private national banks, or the ‘lordly capitalists’ of Lombard and Wall streets. The money power was corrosive because it was changing the rules under which Americans acted politically. The new politics of centralized
"How money was created, and on what basis it circulated, defined in critical ways the relationships of farmers, urban workers, and commercial participants in the emerging industrial state. The answers would go a long way toward determining who controlled the rules of credit and commerce, who shared in the
Life in the 21st century is reader supported, please subscribe and make life sustainable. SUBSCRIBE Back decades ago, only from obscure, mostly, though not totally, right wing civil liberties cranks would you ever hear anything about the Posse Comitatus Act. Today, it’s used by the State of California in