Featured Op-Ed Writer

Kris Broughton Kris Broughton combines searing opinions with emotionally engaging commentary to provide insightful and provocative criticism of today's social and political events. A passionate populist, his view of the political process and its players vividly champions the humanity of the everyday American citizen. Kris Broughton's work has been featured in The Chicago Sun-Times, Reuters, The Post Tribune, Beacon News, Computer Shopper and TV One Online. He also maintains the influential blog Brown Man Thinking Hard.

Sample Full Length Columns A Nation Of Outsiders Obama Should Take Wall Street Road Trip Cigar Shop Foreign Policy Our Magic Wands In The Age Of Obama Foot Soldiers With No Guns And No Bullets

       

Subscriber Title     April 6, 2009:        Obama Needs To Treat Bailout Companies Like His Kids

You raise your children to look out for each other. You constantly remind them that "they are all in this together." You show them how their interests, as separate as they may seem to them as individuals, are all intertwined. You punish them when they are selfish and refuse to share with their siblings. You train the older, stronger, wiser ones to care for the younger, weaker ones. You teach them, when there is a family crisis, to rely on one another's strengths and battle their weaknesses as a unit. This is not just an American phenomenon, it is a human one, practiced all around the globe.

So here we are, with a banking industry so far underwater you could call the mortgage derivatives they wish they'd never seen ".357 magnum liabilities", because the hole these debts would make in their balance sheets upon exit would be much, much larger than the holes they made going in - this is the very same banking industry who is now ready to turn around while we are still giving them their own bailout money and become "holier than thou" about the the few billion dollars worth of their corporate brethren Chrysler's debt they control. their corporate brethren Chrysler's debt.

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Subscriber Title     April 1, 2009:        No Degrees Of Separation Between Big Three and You

I grew up in a plant town.

The largest manufacturer back then in my small Southern hometown was a lawnmower plant that made riding mowers for Sears. Over two thousand people worked there. We had other plants - a division of Hughes Aircraft, a division of Ashland Chemical, a plant for Purina Dog Food, a subsidiary of General Electric, a manufacturing plant owned by Utica Tool, an assembly plant for Kirsch window treatments - but the lawnmower plant was the biggest.

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Subscriber Title     March 24, 2009:        Wall Street Bankers - Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?

An outward show of respectability and an inward money lust, urges that exist in us all to some degree, were magnified unequally in these financial Jekyll and Hyde's. The derivative potion that the Dr. Jekyll side of the bankers created worked so well at generating cash that its success seemed to inflame the Mr. Hyde in them. Just like in the story, as time wore on it took more and more of the derivative potion to achieve the same profitability. So the sincere Dr. Jekyll side had to go to work, utilizing all of his considerable charm and established goodwill to get government officials to remove the boundaries of common sense from SEC and banking regulations, in order that his Mr. Hyde side might partake more freely of the derivative potion.

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Subscriber Title     March 16, 2009:        The Rest Of America Is Angry About AIG Bonuses

The Obama administration seems to insist that we all tiptoe around our troubled Wall Street banks and insurers, as if they are swaddling babies we’ve finally gotten to go to sleep and we don't want to wake them. But this isn’t playing at all in the mythical Peoria that the "Yes We Can" camp calibrated their campaign for last fall.

As a matter of fact, it isn't playing in Philadelphia or Portland or Phoenix either.

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Subscriber Title     March 9, 2009:        Between A Rock And A Very Hard Place

The billions of dollars we are putting into A.I.G., the multinational insurance company that appears to have a tapeworm in its coffers, are like the electricity flowing through the meter box from the power company that is affixed to the side of your house. If the little metal disc behind the glass covered opening in the meter ever stops twirling, nothing inside the house that requires electric power will work.

But the house in this analogy doesn't represent the United States - it is a metaphor for the entire world economy, one we are all connected to whether we like it or not.

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Subscriber Title     March 2, 2009:        Don't Worry, Too Happy: Black Pride Makes Some Whites Feel Guilty

There seems to be a little too much smiling going on in Afro – America Land these days, a little too much chest puffing, a few too many heads held high. Black people from coast to coast are proud 24 hours a day right now, even as they brave the possibilities of layoffs, smaller paychecks, and retirement accounts that have evaporated. All of this positive energy appears to be unnerving a small but vocal subset of Americans:

"I am sick and tired of being made to feel guilty because I am white."

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Subscriber Title     February 25, 2009:        Nation's Media Cowards Ignore Ty'Sheoma Bethea

Eric Holder was absolutely right. Not only are we cowards when it comes to talking about race, but those in the media who drive our national narratives have developed a peculiar form of selective vision, the kind that allows them to do little more than pay obligatory lip service to the image of Ty'Sheoma Bethea, the brown skinned little girl from Dillon, South Carolina who sat next to the First Lady Tuesday night as the president addressed both houses of Congress.

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