Craft in NYC. Waiter! Please tell Arianna I'm over here at the bar.

Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive.

— Chris Hedges in Truthdig, regarding the sale of Huffington Post to AOL

The next time you see Arianna Huffington stroking Bill Maher and making noises about poor Third World-ers, please tweet or e-mail her regarding this piece in The Raw Story. Ask her if the fortune she made selling Huffington Post to AOL will now be used to pay the many freelancers who wrote for free and helped make HuffPo so valuable.

I asked Arianna this question recently and thought we mght arrange for her to be interviewed by me at Craft, her favorite restaurant, the next time she’s in New York, but I haven’t heard from her yet. If you have questions for her, please send them to me and I’ll pass them along.

Maybe she’ll get back to The Newspaper Guild, which is also curious about this issue.