The Northcountry Chronicle

Monopoly Is What’s For Dinner

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No longer just a parlor game, monopoly is what’s for dinner. Practically every commodity and every step in producing our families’ most essential consumer purchase is in the tight grip of four or fewer global conglomerates: Four chemical giants control more than two-thirds of the world market for commercial seeds. Tyson Foods and three other meatpackers control 60 percent of the U.S. poultry market, while just three global packers control 85 percent of the U.S. beef market and 71 percent of the pork market. Four multinational grain trading powers control 90 percent of all grain (corn, wheat, rice, &c.) marketed in the world. John Deere …

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Rediscovering Who We Are

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I’ve written about this before in this space: We think we act rationally with the cold logic of a computer, but beneath, we remain mere animals driven by instinct, habit, geography, time, and mystery. Toward that end, there’s even a new book entitled How to Be Animal. We are not solitary but social animals, though not always the cuddlesome creatures seen on “Animal Planet.” We can get swept up in the moment and do terrible things, prompted by something sociologists call “social contagion.” There’s a new book about that also, entitled The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups.* Examples include the mass …

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Forget Trickle-down BS—Let’s Push Percolate-up Economics

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The past year proves that a lot of conventional economic wisdom is neither true nor wise. For example: “We don’t have the money.” The power elites tell us it would be nice to do the big-ticket reforms America needs, but the money just isn’t there. Then a pandemic slammed into America, and suddenly trillions of dollars gushed out of Washington for everything from subsidizing meatpackers to developing vaccines, revealing that the money is there. “We can’t increase the federal debt!” Yet, Trump and the Republican Congress didn’t hesitate to shove the national debt through the roof in 2017 to let a few corporations and billionaires …

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Welcome to the Shooting Gallery

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Welcome to the Shooting Gallery, folks, at the Great American Firearms Bazaar! Step right up and win your sweetheart a Kewpie doll! No background check required! No waiting period! Just plunk down your $$$$$, pick up a gun, and start blasting away! It’s easy! It’s fun! Guaranteed to win a prize every time! Just when we thought things were looking up—coronavirus vaccinations increasing by the week, Cadet Bone Spur relegated to Maybe-Lar-Gesse and facing dozens of law suits and maybe some criminal prosecutions too, a real president in the White House, and the crocuses and daffodils beginning to bloom—we get forcefully and depressingly reminded that …

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Now, Robots are Coming for White-Collar Jobs

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In CorporateSpeak, there are no “job cuts.” Instead, firings are blandly referred to as “employment adjustments.” Now, though, corporate wordsmiths will need a whole new thesaurus of euphemisms, for masses of job cuts are coming for employees in the higher echelons of the corporate structure. Don’t look now, but an unanticipated result of the ongoing pandemic is that it has given cover for CEOs to speed up the adoption of highly-advanced RPAs (Robotic Process Automation) to replace employees once assumed to be immune from displacement. As one analyst told a New York Times reporter, “With RPA you can build a bot that costs $10,000 a …

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The Advantages of Being Useless

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This essay is about learning how to be useless. As such, it dovetails nicely with a recent piece I wrote on these pages about striving for idleness. I agreed with Mark Taylor’s Buddhist notion that “idleness allows time for the mind to wander to places never before imagined and to return transformed.”⁠1 Being useless, like idleness, is often equated with being old. And, indeed, that is what I am. I spend a lot of time in reverie, which most would call idleness. I have to keep pulling myself back to the present. However, I’m not meditating but practicing what has been called the curse of …

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