The Northcountry Chronicle

When I was young, success was not being rich but being a person of good repute: honest, hardworking, and willing to help others. We were taught stories in school about how presidents should be honest and of good character: stories about how George Washington confessed about cutting down the cherry tree and Abe Lincoln walking 3 miles at night to return 6 cents he had overcharged a customer. Also, we held religious stories in common, like how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven. Yet now we have elected a rich …

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How nasty is the Republican Party’s massive campaign to thwart democracy? Ask the good people of Florida. This was one of only three states that permanently took away the voting rights of felons—who’d completed their punishment. In 2018, though, a whopping 65 percent of Floridians voted for a state Constitutional amendment that finally struck this malicious bit of legal ugliness from the books, thus restoring the political personhood of about a million people who’d served their time. But, led by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s right-wing goose of a Governor, the GOP demanded that an appeals court of hyper-partisan federal judges overrule 2018’s landmark vote by the …

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by Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams When the Business Roundtable issued a statement on corporate purpose and promised to “deliver value to all of…our stakeholders” in 2019, some applauded the attention paid to social and environmental concerns by 181 CEOs as a significant improvement from neoliberal economist Milton Friedman’s 1970 dictate that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” which marked the beginning of an era of shareholder primacy. But a study published Tuesday by the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative showed that amid 2020’s disastrous public health, economic, social, and environmental challenges—the coronavirus pandemic, massive unemployment and worsening inequality, persistent police …

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Ray Duckler recently wrote a disturbing column in the Concord Monitor about Pittsfield, one of New Hampshire’s property-poor towns, struggling to provide an adequate education for their kids. He quotes one of Pittsfield’s high school students, who addressed the Senate last summer: “every year, we’re set up to lose more and more, and at some point, there’s just going to be nothing left.” I have many fond memories from attending Pittsfield High School many years ago and received, at that time, an education good enough to get into Columbia. But, over the years, our educational system has become increasingly unequal, hamstringing property-poor towns, increasingly unable …

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Covid-19 has been a doubly-deadly disaster for millions of Americans, destroying both life and livelihoods. But one of the most heartening responses to the crisis has come from the least-expected place: Corporate executive suites. This spring, numerous CEOs made headlines by showing some class solidarity. If we’re having to wallop our workers because of a pandemic, these bosses told media interviewers, the least we can do is cut our own salaries. Yes—all in this together! Only…not really. An analytical firm looked at the books of nearly all major U.S. corporations, finding that a mere fraction had made any cuts to senior executive pay, and the …

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