Victor Margolin Let’s be clear. The folks on Wall Street and others who work in the financial and banking industries don’t make anything. They create pieces of paper that encode the bad deals they have foisted on American consumers or they buy and sell these pieces of paper among themselves. How many letters have each [...]
Victor Margolin and Sylvia Margolin Americans are witnessing the birth of a new spectator sport – political football. It’s played with two teams – the Democratic Donkeys and the Republican Elephants. The intensity of the competition is similar to regular football but it differs in that the contact is ideological rather than physical. The rules [...]
Victor Margolin In some parts of the world, taking a taxi or catching a cab is a simple matter. You simply hail a cab on the street, get in, arrive at your destination, and pay the fare indicated on the meter. The transaction is straightforward and free of deception. In Britain, for example, taxi drivers [...]
Victor Margolin No wonder that American airline passengers are in an uproar. To get on a plane they are obliged to choose between exposing their bodies as x-ray forms or getting patted down and groped by TSA employees. When confronted with the growing passenger rebellion, the TSA falls back on its mantra that nothing is [...]
Victor Margolin In recent years the once spontaneous exchange between buyers and sellers has become increasingly mechanized. This has occurred in a number of ways. As one example, the Internet became a prime source of goods and buyers learned to follow standardized protocols to select their merchandise and pay for it. Another form of mechanization [...]
Victor Margolin One of the fastest growing industries in the United States is surveillance. Municipalities, retail emporia, banks, and condominium associations are spending millions of dollars on video cameras to record the actions of citizens. As if there were not enough to view on network TV, cable, and You Tube, some of us are spending [...]
Victor Margolin Mr. Shinkey by Lucien Stairs, age 5 Writing an e-mail to a friend recently, I happened to mention the word ‘pornography’ in my note. The word turned red as I wrote it. Then the words that followed reverted to black as I moved on with my thoughts. This struck me as odd and [...]
Victor Margolin For years, George Orwell’s novel, 1984, has embodied the dystopian vision of a society where technology has gone awry and fallen into the hands of malevolent rulers, who use it to keep to keep a docile population under their thumbs. The essence of the novel is that people are controlled against their will [...]
Victor Margolin Illustration by Lucien Stairs As a remedy to the current economic downturn, economists tell us that we have to spend more money to keep the financial system from collapsing. This advice is on a collision course with the admonition to conserve resources for ecological reasons and save money for future needs. Should spending [...]
by Victor Margolin Anyone with doubts about Barak Obama’s ability to lead the United States should look at how he has run his campaign. Whereas John McCain’s considerably smaller organization has imploded more than once and is now in the process of self-destructing – riven with accusations and recriminations from within – Obama’s army of [...]