Stephen D. Shenfield | Author and Translator
On yachts and eye diseases
- Published on 16 August 2019
- Hits: 465
Huge numbers are hard to visualize. A billion dollars, let’s say. That’s the sum you have to accumulate to get yourself listed as a billionaire in Forbes magazine and denounced by Bernie as a member of the ‘billionaire class.’
Start with a wad of twenty $100 banknotes. That makes $2,000. Then imagine a suitcase packed with 500 of those wads. That makes a million. Then imagine entering a big storeroom with 100 of those suitcases lined up on shelves. That still gives us only one tenth of a billion.
Or we can tackle the problem in another way. We can ask what can be done with a billion dollars. What can be bought with that much money? What can be achieved?
Waste and want: Grapes of Wrath revisited
- Published on 01 August 2010
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In his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25), John Steinbeck described how food was destroyed during the Great Depression:
Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.
The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges… A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships… Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them…
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot.
The strange existence of Las Vegas
- Published on 08 September 2019
- Hits: 92
Las Vegas is Spanish for The Meadows. A settlement was established there in 1905. Before that it was just an oasis in the Mojave Desert.
Nothing strange about an oasis in the desert. A well with water for the weary traveler and his camels. Trees to shade them from the hot sun while they rest. I see it in my mind’s eye.
New website: clemency for Joe R. Hopkins
- Published on 23 August 2019
- Hits: 79
My friend Joe R. Hopkins has been in prison in Florida for 28 years. He is in for life. He is a socialist and a member of the World Socialist Party of the US. Several of his articles have appeared in The Libertarian Communist, which is archived on this website.
It is my conviction that Joe's sentence was disproportionate to the gravity of the crime that he committed and failed to take proper account of several mitigating circumstances. He should now be released as an act of clemency.
Memories of a childhood in mental hospital
- Published on 24 January 2019
- Hits: 839
Even today children are locked up in mental hospitals where they are deprived of loving care and normal social interaction and subjected to cruel pseudo-treatments like psychiatric drugs and electro-convulsive therapy. The author, currently a prisoner, recalls the two years that he spent in such an institution as a young child.
