Sometimes even a little bit of digging unearths truths that the mainstream media is either too lazy or too afraid to report.

The profit motive can corrupt even something as simple as a ball game.

Even as recent announcements proclaimed the technical end of the Great Recession for Wall Street, the rate of unemployment in the United States passed the ten percent mark, reflecting a level of misery our local California Street had not borne since 1983.

The for-profit health care industry has been spending approximately 1.4 million dollars a day to defeat reform of the U.S. health care system. Their spending levels may be up, but the quality of their message is definitely down.

The Pencil Warrior's roots run deep, as he discovers at a recent family reunion where he reflects not only on his family history, but the history of our nation. Will we learn from our mistakes, or are we destined to repeat them?

“One million, four hundred thousand dollars a day,” said my friend Dick, as we stood on the sidewalk in front of New Mexico senator Jeff Bingaman’s Santa Fe office. “A DAY.” That’s the amount, according to a July 6 story in the Washington Post, the for-profit health care industry is spending to quash any congressional action that would allow citizens to sign up for a public health care system, let alone a single payer option along the lines of Medicare.

In the choice between a health care system that rewards waste, fraud, and denial of service and one infinitely better, they’re betting we’ll sit still while they ram the former down our throats. But we won’t – will we?

Despite what you've heard, not all restraints on what you can do are a violation of your "freedom." Sometimes your rights end where someone else's begin.

Previously, the Pencil Warrior asked the question, "what is an economy for?" - this week, he ponders the question "who is an economy for?"

The benefits of the booms of recent decades never “trickled down” to the middle and lower classes because they were not designed to. The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else was a signal that a different kind of economy was now in place, but the big picture was ignored by self-serving Wall Street interests and a complicit news “industry.” Nowhere was the most fundamental question asked: “What is an economy for?”