CounterPunch, April 28, 2017 I imagine I’m not the only political and media observer sickened by the dominant (“mainstream”) corporate media’s habitual reference to xenophobic, right-wing, white-nationalist, and neo-fascist politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen as “populists.” Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule [...]
New York Journal of Books, April 21, 2017 James Forman Jr.’s new book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, April 2017) tells an all-too-hidden and tragic part of the story of the rise of the racist mass incarceration state in the United States. Forman is [...]
Counterpunch, April 21, 2017 The Ruling Class Reserve Tag One of the many irritating things about the dominant United States corporate media is the way it repeatedly discovers anew things that are not remotely novel. Take its recent discovery that Donald Trump isn’t really the swamp-draining populist working class champion he pretended to be on [...]
Counterpunch, April 14, 2017 As I pointed out back in July of 2015, U.S. Senator Bernie Senator (“I”-VT) is not the independent left politician many progressives claim he is. He’s a Democratic Party company man. That was been clear from his long Congressional record of voting with the neoliberal, dollar-drenched Democrats and accepting their seniority-based [...]
Counterpunch, April 10, 2017 I had five thoughts the minute I heard last Thursday night that the Orange-Tinted Freak Show – the “Unbelievable Baby Man” (Tom Tomorrow) – in the White House had launched 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria as a response (supposedly) to the Syrian regime’s (alleged) chemical bombing of innocent civilians in the [...]
Donald Trump railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during his presidential campaign. But he failed to mention how the measure forced vast swaths of Mexico’s farm population off their land and into the United States by flooding the country with cheap, subsidized, U.S. agricultural imports. It was a curious deletion, given Trump’s [...]
Counterpunch, April 3, 2017 Iowa Nasty In a recent Truthdig report, titled “What’s the Matter with Iowa?,” I reflected on how the now fully Republican-controlled state government of Iowa is involved in a vicious, multi-pronged assault on working people of all genders and sexual identities. This ferocious right-wing attack is not very “Iowa nice.” It [...]
Counterpunch, March 31, 2017 I’m not a Truther and never have been. I don’t obsess over the JFK assassination, which (however) always sort of struck me as a CIA and/or Mafia and Cuban exile hit. My interactions with conspiracy theorists over the years since 9/11 have been ugly and close at times to violent. I [...]
Counterpunch, March 22, 2017 The orange-tinted freak-show that is Donald Trump should be removed from the White House and sent to some filthy, rat-infested dungeon with a sentence of Life Without Twitter. The same goes for the rest of his racist, eco-cidal, arch-plutocratic, and shockingly Christian Fascist administration. They should be forced to work sunup [...]
Truthdig, March 22, 2017 What is the real cost of being poor? The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a cruel joke. If it had kept pace with increases in U.S. labor productivity since the 1970s, it would be $19 an hour today. Assuming full-time, year-round employment, the current minimum wage yields $15,131 [...]