Focus groups have told Hollywood that the annual glut of adaptations has turned Mr. Dickens’ beloved novel into a stale artifact in sore need of a 21st-century update.
Plans by one studio for a star-studded heartwarming holiday blockbuster have been postponed because of the coronavirus, but a treatment for the movie has been leaked.
Pour yourself a cup of eggnog, throw another fruitcake in the fireplace, and read on.
Stave One
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Or so it seemed after Old Marley retired to Sarasota and stopped texting.
Ebenezer Scrooge was a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping…
Demand Ranked Choice Voting. And stop letting Democrats take our votes for granted.
In the past month, we’ve seen a small flood of open letters and articles from environmental leaders and leaders on the left (Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and others), all with the same basic message: “Vote for Biden in 2020, Fight Him Later.”
It’s hard to argue with them. Donald Trump needs to go. Sure, we’ll need to challenge Joe Biden to do the right thing if he wins. The authors and signers are all too aware that Biden’s campaign platform and troubling record as senator promise another Democratic administration dedicated to war and Wall Street.
That brings us to the…
(Field Guide Included)
By Scott McLarty
By now, most of us have noticed a paradigm shift that has made traditional political labels obsolete.
Red versus Blue (Republican conservative right-wing versus Democrat liberal left-wing) seemed to work for the last century, but it’s not working for the mess we’re in now.
The binary opposition began to fall apart late in the 20th century, when the Cold War between capitalist west and communist east came to an end. The alleged triumph of capitalism, celebrated as the End of History, allowed U.S. …
Do working people have any reliable friends on the political field? We’re long past the point where Democrats can claim to be the party of workers. Republicans have never been sympathetic, except in their most mendacious flights of campaign rhetoric.
The spectacular victory of the public school teachers’ strike in West Virginia, in which they won all their demands, occurred without major-party support. (The West Virginia Mountain Party, affiliated with the Green Party, endorsed it on Feb. 18.)
The record of mainstream Democrats isn’t much better than Republicans on supporting public sector workers. In 2011, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New…
Scott McLarty
Scott McLarty (@ScottTMcLarty) is former media director of the Green Party of the United States. He lives in Washington, DC.
