Nicholas von Hoffman | The Nation

When General Motors goes down, it will take us all down with it.

Among the superrich, there's a growing desire to freeze themselves and
their bank accounts in hopes of rising again. Talk about Groundhog Day.

The stampede is on in corporate America to freeze or pare back pension
benefits. And that will leave most of us out in the cold.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is suing Kellogg and Viacom for using cartoon characters to brainwash kids into consuming mass amounts of junk food.

The toxic food industry is fueling a preventable epidemic of diabetes. Most
vulnerable are poor children, barraged with ads urging them
to eat the sugar and grease-laden food that will eventually kill them.

We're on our way to being a society of economic zombies, half dead and half alive, buried in debt but prevented by credit card companies from declaring bankruptcy.

There ought to be a law about bribery in America, but there isn't--not a real one. Bribery is so central to our political culture that it's virtually impossible that any politician ensnared in the Abramoff scandal will actually be convicted of the corruption that makes Washington work.

The Vatican is about to close limbo, the theological netherworld where
unbaptized babies, prophets and philosophers were believed to reside in
lieu of heaven. This is causing a whole new set of problems.

General Motors is dimming the headlights on its industrial utopia in
Spring Hill, Tennessee. The cutback at the visionary Saturn plant,
where workers and managers once shared decision-making and cooperated as equals, is the latest affront to US autoworkers and American self-esteem.

Under pressure from Wall Street, newspaper journalism is being
frog-marched out of the media marketplace. And once it's gone, how will
we know anything?