Articles by Richard Estes

Credit: commons.wikimedia.org Shock waves reverberated through Sacramento with the recently announced closure of a Comcast call center and an iconic Campbell’s Soup plant that has employed lower middle-income people here since 1947. Campbell’s Soup employed 700 people who made as much as $20 an hour as members of the Teamsters Union. Comcast eliminated 300 call center jobs in the Natomas area just north of the Sacramento River, but unlike Campbell’s Soup, Comcast at least offered these workers...

Credit: commons.wikimedia.org Born into privilege, Gore Vidal lived 5 lives simultaneously. I can barely get to work everyday, raise my son and emotionally participate in my family, while Vidal was a novelist, socialite and periodic politician with an acute sense of American history and culture. Vidal published numerous novels, nearly got punched out by William F. Buckley on national television during the 1968 Democratic convention, got head butted and punched by Norman Mailer after calling him...

Credit: images.wikimedia.org Much has been made of Mitt Romney's purported gaffes during his recent trip abroad. Press coverage of his trip to Israel, Poland, and the United Kingdom induces one to believe that, as President, he would display the ineptitude that Rufus T. Firefly did as leader of Freedonia, absent the frenetic humor. Dull and incompetent, you can't get much worse than that. In fact, Romney remained aware that he was speaking to a particular domestic audience, and, despite some c...

Credit: wikimedia.org On Saturday, I was shocked to learn that Alexander Cockburn, founder of the influential hard left political website Counterpunch,  had died of cancer. Despite my disagreement with him on subjects like global warming and Occupy, I respected his intellectual independence. Cockburn rightly pilliored the emphasis that some on the left place upon hostility towards religion, correctly observing that the US is one of the most Christian countries in the world. You aren't going to ...

Yesterday was July 4th, that fateful day in 1776 when John Hancock stepped forward to be the first to sign the Declaration of Independence, and oddly enough, it induces many to sing the praises of what came afterwards, the US Constitution. Odd, because the Declaration remains, along with the much longer Communist Manifesto, a compelling expression of the irrepressible human desire for liberty, while the US Constitution created the legal foundations of a liberal nation-state that would ensure tha...