The Northcountry Chronicle

Sometimes I don’t know whether to weep uncontrollably, laugh hysterically, or just throw up. I recently did all three when I saw another gusher of greed pouring out of corporate America. This one is especially nauseating, given today’s raging health crisis, for the culprits are major healthcare corporations! One perpetrator is Larry Merlo, CEO of our country’s largest drugstore chain, CVS. In this time of Covid-19, customers are surging into the chains 10,000 stores for everything from medications to masks. Yet, the boss has blithely left many of the pharmacies so severely understaffed that they pose a danger to public health. CVS pharmacists tell of …

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In a few short weeks, the election will be over and, win or lose, we will have to pick up the pieces and move on. How is that possible with all the bad blood and name-calling between the left and the right? In a word, we must have empathy for the other side. What I am going to say, I’ve felt for a long time, alluded to in my pieces, but now have the courage to say it flat-out, buttressing my case with a recent podcast and a book. The podcast is an interview with Arlie Hochschild about her recent book, Strangers in Their Own …

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A recent article in September’s The Atlantic titled “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’” details our current commander-in-chief’s flagrant disrespect for the men and women in our armed forces together with the generations of American service personnel who went before them. I need not repeat the insults and ignominies he heaps upon those who have served their country. You can readily find the article online and read it for yourself, if you haven’t already done so. What amazes me is not what the article says, but the fact that so many people are only now expressing their outrage over Trump’s disrespect …

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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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