The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.
"'Hamas has created additional demand': Wall Street eyes big profits from war" —The Guardian, October 30, 2023
As blood soaks the land of old prophets,
New profits are here to be had.
Both sides in this battle need weapons,
And we've got the guns for each lad,
Hamas or Israeli. We're neutral—
Don't care if one's good or one's bad.
Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer, musician, and Oxford comma enthusiast Kent Burnside. His work appears in Light, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, and OEDILF, among others.
A “McCarthyite Backlash” Against Pro-Palestine Speech: From university disciplinary hearings to death threats, supporters of Palestinian rights are facing a wave of reprisals. —Jewish Currents, October 20, 2023. Rick Friedman / Alamy Stock Photo: Students rally for Palestine at Harvard University on October 14th, 2023.
Right to let words fly like leaves from trees, and now new
Edited 19th century pro- anti- Protestant, Catholic is back
Excoriating religions, their people, morphed to
Swarms of crowds, anti- pro- Palestine, Israel, a revived
Partisan diatribe, a pugnacious polemic
Energized by freedom of speech, guns, flags, politicians
Elected to lance wise trees, plant dissent, grow weeds of disquiet,
Champion division and decomposition—while vultures
Hover over words, freedoms, human rights, and
Instantly Wall Street funders plunge down to scarf
Numerous dollars, from universities, they gave, yes,
Donated, but today want to scavenge back, yes
Adamantly against “free” speech they don’t approve…
Names spattered, posted, across media, a strings-attached
Generosity, employment conditional on proscribed screed
Engineered, implanted, into young minds, those abundant in
Rallies on world streets, for freedom. For truly free speech.
Lavinia Kumar’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Poets Choice,Kelsey Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Jersey Journal of Poetry, Tiny Seed.
Like many people, Mr Goxx is dabbling in cryptocurrency, hoping to strike it rich. He's notable for two reasons: first, he is making money, with his lifetime career performance up about 20% –beating many professional traders and funds. Second, Mr Goxx is a hamster. The business-minded rodent has a trading office attached to his regular cage. Every day, when he enters the office, a livestream starts on Twitch, and his Twitter account lets followers know: Mr Goxx has started a trading session. By running in his "intention wheel", he selects which cryptocurrency he'd like to trade, as the wheel spins through the different options. His office floor has two tunnels nearby: one for buy, one for sell. Every time he runs through a tunnel, the electronics wired to his office complete a trade according to Mr Goxx's desires. —BBC News, September 27, 2021
Pronounce F T S E the Footsie way,
Lest others think you're too naive to trade—
Although, as Fur Topped Stock Exchange, you may
Yet stupefy them with the gains you've made!
In Germany, a hamster, Mr. Goxx,
Negotiates his treadmill like a chess
Grand master, moving pieces of his stocks
From here to there to rival the success
Of Footsie and the Dow. By racing through
Opposing tunnels, he can buy or sell
The cryptocurrency whose trade is due
So expertly, he makes his holdings swell ...
It makes you ask why Wall Street bank elites
Earn such high pay—for trades a hamster beats!
Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, The Satirist, The Washington Post, and WestWard Quarterly.
Author’s Note: This poem echoes James Baldwin’s plea to settle for what a vote can get you… maybe not a job, or a loan, or a major reform, but “it may keep [us] here long enough … to see, and use, the turning of the tide—for the tide has got to turn.” (Written prior to the 1980 presidential election in “Notes on the House of Bondage” and quoted in Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.)
Jan Gross is waiting for the tide to turn. She is Professor emerita at Grinnell College, and is co-authoring a collaborative poetic memoir about interracial friendship, Black & White and In-Between.
The human cost of the climate crisis will hit harder, wider and sooner than previously believed, according to a study that shows a billion people will either be displaced or forced to endure insufferable heat for every additional 1C rise in the global temperature. —The Guardian, May 5, 2020. Photograph: An Indian farmer walks across the bed of a pond that has dried out during a water crisis. Credit: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP via Getty Images
Give us a pandemic or a war.
They bring out the best and worst of us.
Survival’s what we’re made for. Give us more.
Set the world on fire, let it roar.
We’ll find a way to put it out, no fuss,
then wrangle a pandemic or a war.
When the oceans breach suburban shores
watch what we do to save the upper crust.
Survival’s what we’re made for. Bring on more.
As for the slow creep of global warming
let science-based predictions gather dust.
We don’t want a pandemic or a war
to wake us up to what’s worth fighting for.
Renouncing fossil fuels would bankrupt us.
Survival’s what we’re made for, nothing more.
Our threatened habitats must be ignored.
Wall Street greed is where we place our trust.
Don’t give us a pandemic or a war.
Bottom line, we’re done for. And we want more.
John W. Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher, assistant editor ofThink: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Essays, and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University, where he studied with Julie Kane, Ernest Hilbert and David Rothman. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming inAmethyst Review, Boulder Weekly, Blue Unicorn, Colorado Sun, Copperfield Review, Heron Clan Anthology, IthacaLit, The Lyric, Mountains Talking, New Verse News, The Orchards, Society of Classical Poets, Urthona Journal of Buddhism and the Arts, and Verse-Virtual.Hewas nominated for a Pushcart prize, wonThe Lyric’s 2017 Fall Quarterly Award, won an award in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and was awarded Special Recognition in the 2019 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. His book reviews have appeared inCha: An Asian Literary Journal, andRaintown Review.
“You can die so
the stock market
can live,”
the Boy answered.
“You can kiss my roots,”
the Tree said to the Boy.
Michael L. Ruffin is a writer, editor, preacher, and teacher living and working in Georgia. He posts poems on Instagram (@michaell.ruffin) and prose opinions at On the Jericho Road. He is author of Fifty-Seven: A Memoir of Death and Life and of the forthcoming Praying with Matthew. His poetry has appeared at TheNewVerse.News and is forthcoming in 3 Moon Magazine and Rat's Ass Review.
Daddy’s awake since
before a light’s been
switched on Wall Street,
All this talk about commodities.
Finances flopping,
unmanageable stress.
I heard the neighbor tied a rope
on a beam in the barn.
Hanged himself.
He tried the suicide hotline,
but the phone rang off the hook.
Denise Sedman is an award-winning poet from the Detroit area. Recent work has been featured in San Pedro River Review, Nassau Review, Gravel Literary and Poets Reading the News. She has a poem in the 2017 Nasty Women anthology by Lost Horse Press. Her signature poem “Untitled” was the source for architect students at University of Detroit Mercy to build a temporary environment in Detroit. The original poem was featured in Abandon Automobile, Wayne State University Press, 2001.
Richard Johnson received a cup of hot gumbo from a Free Hot Soup volunteer in Prospect Plaza Park in Kansas City, Mo., on Nov. 18. City officials say the group’s efforts do not comply with food safety ordinances.Credit: Chase Castor for The New York Times
'Twas the season to open hearts and wallets,
The season to shelter the homeless,,
The season to feed the hungry
'Twas a spell of Sunday spirit in a Monday world.
Those were the days, but they did end,
Authorities now warn us that by
Doing good, we're doing wrong.
You must remember this:
In the hard times of the Great Depression
Those not ravaged by its deprivations
Felt the despair of two million
Surviving in tent cities across the land.
But now, after the Great Recession, after
Wall Street's Ponzi-schemed pillage,
The hearts of the wealthy and the well-off
Are stone cold.
They do not care to understand
Those drowning in hopelessness,
Choking on their own rage and
Left behind by our master The Market.
Pitiless they peer at the plight
Of half a million, sleeping nightly
On cities streets, too close to
Their homes and their offices.
Once our leaders and those who
Whispered in their ears were shamed
Into helping the victims of their follies,
Compelled by morality based on empathy..
Now their hearts and minds remain
Chained to the vantage point of the self, from which
They sneer and snicker at common humanity
As foolish fantasy or fear and fight it as looming nightmare.
But who dares to predict if a society,
Seeking to regain past affluence and power,
Will someday fashion for itself a larger identity,
And one more humane, from the slumbering
Largesse in the hearts of its members?
George Salamon arrived in the United States in 1948 and was struck by the largesse he came across among Americans from different backgrounds and classes. He sees it in action today, but rarely among the rich and powerful or the "best and brightest." He lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.
Congressional Republicans: They more or less held their ground when the government shut down after Friday's midnight deadline passed, and in the end, Democrats compromised way more than Republicans to open the government back up. —Amber Phillips, The Washington Post, January 22, 2018. Photo: Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) clink glasses in a toast Monday on Capitol Hill after senators reached an agreement to advance a bill ending government shutdown. (Andrew Harnik/AP via The Washington Post, January 22, 2018)
Since the Reagan revolution
Bulls have been running our lives.
Swearing to uphold the Constitution,
They dance to a Wall Street beat.
Other political animals are squealing,
They march right up to the bulls
Grunting discreetly under their breath:
Let's make a little compromise,
Just a tiny little compromise,
This time on immigration,
So that just a tiny bit of decency dies.
Whenever you seek to banish the
Better aspirations of this nation,
We'll stand up and fight you
Until we make just a tiny little compromise,
So that we can be sure
Just a tiny bit of freedom vanishes,
A tiny bit of equality is thwarted,
A tiny bit of hope is dashed
Until you kill the people's dream.
For which there may be no compromise.
George Salamon remembers helping voters to the polls in Massachusetts to cast their ballots for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. Were those the days?
President Trump speaks at the American Farm Bureau Federation's annual convention in Nashville, Tenn. on Monday. Photo by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images via NPR
"Farmers are the president's people," Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in an interview with Morning Edition on Monday. "These are the people that elected the president. The president knows that. These are the people the president cares about. And he wants them to enjoy the American Dream just like all the people in the cities." Farm income has suffered in recent years from sagging commodity prices. Net farm income in 2017 was up modestly from the previous year, but still only about half what it was in 2013. —NPR, January 8, 2018
It's too soon to bury the old American Dream,
Riding wobbly in the saddle of our minds.
Put there by the founding fathers,
It grew into the million-dollar salesman
Of Wall Street's enormous con,
The nation's permanent floating crap game
Of wealth and power and fame.
The dream infected our people's soul,
Crushed their spirit, played with their hearts.
It immersed us in flush darkness,
Acquiring new horizons every might,
Yet gaining new followers every day.
It gave us under-educated leaders
Emerging from ivy-covered breeding grounds.
It left no space for nobler visions,
For women who know, for children who care.
It governs our minds through men with no vision at all,
Men with the temperament of their attire,
The stern-browed suits of the old American Dream.
George Salamon watches the pursuit of the American Dream from the heartland in St. Louis, MO.
Two girls, 13 and 14, were shot on the South Side as a violent Christmas weekend came to a close during one of the most violent years in Chicago in decades. A total of 61 people were shot in the city during the holiday weekend, according to data kept by the Tribune.. Seven were killed on Christmas Day alone. "A Violent Christmas in a Violent Year for Chicago: 11 killed, 50 wounded," Chicago Tribune, December 27, 2016
Chicago, once celebrated by the poet
As the Hog Butcher for America,
Proudly singing to be alive,
You have become
The People Butcher of America,
Killing the brawling laughter of youth.
Why has America abandoned the fight
To keep old Chicago's spirit alive?
That spirit and everything else can go to hell
As long as Wall Street is doing well.
People? Who cares if they survive
As long as corporations thrive.
America, when you wake in the middle of the night
And an inner voice calls your name,
Have you no sense of shame?
George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO, which boasts of its own All-American murder rate.
Give thanks with a beholden heart
To 12 million Americans who voted for Bernie Sanders.
Give thanks because of the future we could build with them.
Give thanks with a sympathetic heart
To two of ten Americans whose vision is not electronically enslaved.
Give thanks because they insist on seeing for themselves.
Give thanks with a delighted heart
To Susan Sarandon, celebrity with mouth and mind.
Give thanks because she spoke truth to DNC's power.
Give thanks with an empathic heart
To Mitch Hedges, cattle farmer in Paris, Kentucky.
Give thanks because on November 8 he understood that "there was nobody to vote for."
Give thanks that all Americans
Are neither wolves of Wall Street nor sheep on Main Street.
Give thanks because more of them begin to see through
Slogans touting "change" or "greatness."
Give thanks that some of those duped and disenfranchised
No longer are seduced by circuses performing for them.
Give thanks because they may discredit and dismiss
The folklore of capitalism as provider and protector
Of government for the people.
Let's eat!
George Salamon experienced his first American Thanksgiving at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in Manhattan in 1948. He was asked to slice a turkey and his picture doing that appeared in the centerfold photo section of a New York tabloid, with a caption claiming that the turkey was the first one he had seen. That was correct, but the paper's reporter never asked him if he had ever seen a turkey before. Some things have not changed since then. Salamon now lives and writes in St. Louis. MO.
Somewhere out there, not so far away
from all the inconsolable commuters
solemnly interred beneath a day
they’d warded off on personal computers,
wakes the shadow of catastrophe
and rage. Certainly in Tobyhanna,
Pennsylvania, there is little laughter.
Promise fades into a knotted red bandanna
in Wisconsin on the morning after.
In New Hampshire, Pyrrhic victory
suggests a mere alternative to death.
My morning walk to Wall Street, out of phase,
slow-motion, almost out of breath,
is interrupted by a stranger’s gaze.
And I don’t like the way he looks at me.
A Donald Trump mural painted by street artist Hanksy on Orchard St. between Canal and Division Sts. on the Lower East Side. —NY Daily News Photo by SHAWN INGLIMA
In the blonde hair-skunk, in the barbershop of the mind
where the scissors raise hairs and pat them down
to demand what one wants not needs, the patience of a lion,
ingenuity of a roach, America with a Trump at its head,
the roach motel of the world, on his knees, a nice picture…
what he said to the young woman on t.v.,
a working class woman, it’s a nice picture, you
on your knees. Walled off in the mind, the soul
a mountain range of rage and nowhere to go but
to the streets where a young man bears the likeness
of North America on his bloodied face.
Do we recall the ISIS terrorist in his jeep
happy to drag five corpses? Five corpses
hanging from the moon, five corpses loaded like bullets
into the chamber of a gun, you fire-walker, you brandist,
you woman-basher, you human torture chamber,
you radioactive toad, you lacquered manipulator,
you burnt toast anachronism, you oversexed missile,
you Roman fop, you Towers burning, one man leaps
from a window of the World Trade, martyr man,
L-man, J-woman, moon feces in the shape of Trump,
in the shape of Mar-a-Lago, in the shape of Chris Christie,
piles in the cemetery where Lorca’s body lies forever
falling, never forgetting the artists’ Golgotha
in the rainstorm of human history where Trump’s foot soldiers
come to take Federico away at dawn as the rooster crows
as the apostle drowns his only son as George Washington
steps on the muddy bank as Hamilton takes aim at Burr
as Burr is borne again as the harrowing present grows wings
as the Star-Spangled Banner itself sings as the baseball field
turns to boner flowers or red licorice for wealthy trophy wives
as the hives of the rich enlarge as the states pronounce
themselves more significant than the next. Who comes
in the name of business rats? Who’s driven in Picasso
limousines? Who comes in chariots of designer
water bottles? Who comes in light-clouds Wall Street?
Who comes wagging an Arizona finger? Who comes
riding a marble horse? To eat and leave the night
an empty plate for children to weep, for the landlord
to tie our wrists down in the apex of our city streets
where the thief is arrested, shouting in stressed vowels,
as the helicopter shakes our house out of its safe slumber
and into another broken eight years of politicos and bankers,
eight years of sourceless regrets, eight years of teachers
blamed like communists, eight years of flogging
middlemen, eight years of clown-hog campaigns,
eight years of pornographic magazine covers, eight years
of cigars and neon caviar, eight years of swimming in pools
full of sheep semen. We, it began, we, it finishes, we.
Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love . . .
Embedded into this video is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from the poem "America:” Recording: Copyright Eric Forsythe, 2012–2013. Made available on the Whitman Archive with permission of the rights holder. Audio may be reused for non-commercial purposes, with credit to Eric Forsythe and the Walt Whitman Archive. For more information on this recording, see Ed Folsom, "The Whitman Recording," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 9 (Spring 1992), 214-16.
I.
I see you, Walt Whitman---an American
Rough, a Cosmos! I see you face to face!
I see you and the nameless faceless
Faces in America's timeless crowds of men
and women who you saw in your mind's eye.
I see you crossing the river on your ferry.
I see you walking down the public road
Where everyone is worthy. Neither time,
Place nor distance separates.
II.
You once saw the currents of corruption,
Fast flowing into the land that you loved.
You once saw that which had departed
With the setting sun, half an hour high,
For when another is degraded,
so are you and I.
You once saw what had flowed in with the
Rising flood-tides feverishly pouring---
Tides saturated and soaked with exploitation,
Bribery, falsehood and maladministration.
III.
When you saw the motionless wings of
Twelfth-month sea-gulls, When you walked
Along Manhattan Island---When you watched the
Ships of Manhattan, north and west---
Could you see Wall Street banks
Seizing the homes of your beloved countrymen,
Voyaging in their fragile ferryboats? The carpenters,
Quakers, scientists and opium eaters; The immigrants,
Squaws, boatmen and blacksmiths; The farmers,
Mechanics, sailors and priests?
IV.
Could you see the monstrous megaton corporations
Feasting on America's flesh blood bones, those
Nameless faceless parasites
Sucking the soul from your loved land,
Like a malevolent disease?
V.
For you saw quite clearly the political and
Economic malfunctioning mutant ties that connect us.
Neither time, place nor distance separates.
And you saw very clearly the sickly green sludge
Secreted by lobbyists to their bought and sold
Henchmen soldier baby-kissers, to slow and
Stop the flow of nourishing rushing sea tides
Into your dear, revered democracy.
VI.
You saw the evil dark patches---the clinging selfish
Steadfast pernicious grasp of the flourishing one
Per cent oligarchs, Who lusted, grubbed, lied, stole--
Were greedy, shallow, sly, angry, vain, cowardly,
malignant--Seeking only to hold onto their fool's
Gold and preserve the status quo.
VII.
Each still furnishes its part towards the death of
America's democracy. Each still furnishes its part
Towards destroying her soul. The mocking bird
Still sings the musical shuttle to the tearful
Bareheaded child, and the final word superior for
America may still be her death, death, death,
Death. The sea has whisper'd me, too.
Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer who is currently studying poetry at Boston University, through its Evergreen program, where he previously received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Hoy received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy started writing poetry two years ago. Since then, his work has appeared in Third Wednesday, The Write Room, The Eclectic Muse, Clark Street Review, TheNewVerse.News, Harbinger Asylum, Soul Fountain, The Story Teller Magazine, Eye on Life Magazine, Stepping Stones Magazine, The Penmen Review, To Hold A Moment Still, Harbinger Asylum’s 2014 Holidays Anthology, The Zodiac Review, Earl of Plaid Literary Journal, The Potomac, Antarctica Journal, The Montucky Review and elsewhere.
Don’t ask about earth science
Don’t ask about the poor
Don’t ask about one’s conscience
Such thinking is a chore.
Don’t ask about The Street
Don’t ask about the schools
Don’t ask about deceit
Such issues break our rules.
Do ask if we like kittens
Do ask about the wife
Do ask if we like mittens
Such questions about life.
Do ask if we hate taxes
Do ask if we pray daily
Do ask if we love crises
Such issues never foil us because we always behave like totally deranged assholes
—stupidly.
Ralph La Rosa lives in southern California where he daydreams and writes.
Hey, folks, you old enough to remember
When Labor Day was for America's working stiff?
For the bricklayer, printer, the waitress in the diner.
Well, today our masses celebrate something finer:
The lifestyles of the rich and famous,
The antics of adolescent celebrities and pubescent starlets
Where once, in the decade after Rosie the Riveter
Chester Riley the riveter played the backbone of America.
Those were the days but they did end.
Now Labor Day means hunting for bargains at Walmart
Where working stiffs are stiffed every day
And "organized labor" is dirty talk.
Politicians mumble "working American"
The way TV anchors slur over "sex offender"
Before moving on to the latest thrill
Provided by the Kardashians and their kin.
The blue-collar life is for losers,
An occasional joke for sitcoms' white collar elite,
For the upwardly mobile professionals we
All want to be with fewer than ever making it.
Blue-collar misery, studies tell us, is a
Life-long journey and the American Dream reserved for a few,
For masters of the resume who become priests in the
Church at the intersection of Wall Street and Capitol Hill.
There's nothing to celebrate on Labor Day if
You're toiling on the assembly line or sweating on the loading platform,
If your collar is blue and the music of your life even bluer.
You got sourced out and sold out by business and government.
You are anachronisms fearfully waiting to be replaced by the robots of tomorrow.
So, indulge in a bit of nostalgia on Labor Day and listen to Pete Seeger doing
"Solidarity Forever" or Phil Ochs singing "The Ballad of Joe Hill."
A touch of sweetness for life's bitter pill.
George Salamon taught German literature and culture at several East Coast colleges, served as staff reporter for the St. Louis Business Journal and senior editor on Defense Systems Review. He published a study of Arnold Zweig's novels of Word War One and a reader in German history. He contributes to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.
The digital steel electronic world
wears an overlay of nature, a waxy
mist. If we are lucky, we choose
which world we live in. A cat in
sunlight looks out the door while
the stock market crashes on tv.
Certainly more relaxing to look
at the cat. A FedEx truck goes by,
three deer in the drive, the skunk
has a route and a name: Jackie O
because it’s fun to say: “Jackie O
is at the woodpile.” I have never
felt manipulated, used or bamboozled
by raccoons. Deer paw and nuzzle
at the lick in my trees while sirens
head toward another man-made
disaster. The Dow Jones may fall,
but I’m waiting for bright leaves
underfoot, crunching in that real
way, not like numbers.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske reports here on what is happening in the Midwest.
A free people surrendered to lobbyists,
To hucksters of Wall Street,
To gurus of management,
To an elite empowered by degrees from institutions
Worshipping the con of the market and
Bowing to the mandate from Return On Investment.
Freedom's choices confined to
The aisles of Walmart and Target,
We make do with civic life as theater, its
Message acted out by pompous poseurs
Talking of "folks" and "freedoms"
Abandoned in the sewers of D.C.
"The system works," they proclaim periodically,
Insisting that a blind pig's stumbling upon a truffle
Reveals democracy at work.
And we continue to fool ourselves.
George Salamon taught German language and literature at several East Coast colleges, served as staff reporter on the St. Louis Business Journal and senior editor on Defense Systems Review. He published a reader in German history and a study of Arnold Zweig's novels on World War I. He contributes to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.
Charities are being run by for-profit financial firms. And take our most prestigious universities. It's become an oft-repeated argument that they have become hedge funds with tax-exempt colleges attached. --Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica, Dec. 10, 2014
Nothing is sacred, all is corrupted
From giving to learning
Wall Street money and
Corporate voices
Confer commands.
A people once free and proud
Has been bought and sold,
Hired and fired, outsourced,
Downsized and rightsized,
Sliced up like a salami.
His knife, he attacks with
"Sharklike intensity."
His smile is dazzling.
He's got our bread
And we are his circuses.
George Salamon taught at several East Coast colleges, worked as a business journalist and editor, and now contributes regularly to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.
