Free Republic

Amid a surge in some New York City violent crime, Wall Street bigwigs continue to encourage younger staffers to come into the office — but to do so with caution. At Bank of America, senior executives have quietly encouraged younger employees to “dress down” to attract less attention as they make their way to B of A’s tower at 1 Bryant Park. These execs have told their staffers that dressing up, or wearing anything with a Bank of America logo, could make them a target. One bank employee told On The Money he is on high alert after he spotted...

Forgive me for asking…but what is so wrong about raising taxes to some negotiated extent on the most wealthy taxpayers in the US? While I know this question violates conservative orthodoxy, there are a lot of folks in the US who make a lot of money…some of it easily earned (inherited), some of it by talent (professional athletes), some of it by luck (actors and lottery winners) and some of it by a lot of hard work and perseverance. Now I agree that $250,000 is not the place to start, but maybe 5 million (or some other negotiable figure and...

RALEIGH, N.C. - Crystal Lee Sutton, whose fight to unionize Southern textile plants with low pay and poor conditions was dramatized in the film "Norma Rae," has died. She was 68. Sutton died Friday in a hospice after a long battle with brain cancer, her son, Jay Jordan, said Monday. "She fought it as long as she could and she crossed on over to her new life," he said. Union organizers had targeted J.P. Stevens, then the country's second-largest textile manufacturer , because the industry was deeply entwined in Southern culture and spread across the region's small towns. However, North...

Fat is not a feminist issue, as Susie Orbach once claimed. Fat is a class issue. Rich, educated people are not fat; you see almost no children in private schools who are overweight. Fatness and obesity are directly related to lower education and lower incomes. What is sad is that at a time when this country is richer than ever and ought to have better schools than ever, we have far more fat people than ever — a dangerous explosion of flab. Last week the Department of Health issued a report grimly called Forecasting Obesity to 2010 and its findings...

Federico de Jesus owes Victor David Hanson an apology. De Jesus, a staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, falsely accused Hanson, the distinguished author of the just-published book "Mexifornia," of racism and xenophobia at a recent Capitol Hill briefing. During his introduction, Hanson, a scholar of ancient Rome and Greece, was aptly described as "a classicist." De Jesus somehow interpreted that to mean that the author had a white "classist" bias against immigrants. Pelosi's aide, who somehow earned a diploma without being able to make a distinction between a classicist and a classist, got ugly with Hanson and stormed...