Counterpunch, February 25, 2019 An “Accurate Translation” of the “Anti” Charge “One commonly hears,” Noam Chomksy wrote thirteen years ago, “that carping critics [on the Left] complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: ‘they present solutions and I don’t like them.’” Chomsky’s point was and remains well [...]
Black Agenda Report, February 20, 2019 “I want my husband home. I need him to be safe.” – Tiffany Van Dyke, wife of Jason Van Dyke, the murderer of Laquan McDonald Among the many different forms taken by 21st century U.S.-American racism, one is the curious way in which white-owned corporate media and the criminal [...]
Counterpunch, February 18, 2019 A Wannabe Strongman’s Brown Menace Straw Man Everyone with five functioning gray cells knows that the aspiring fascist strongman Donald Trump’s Declaration of a National Emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border is absurd. There is no “national security crisis” of illegal immigration on the southern United States border. Illegal crossings are not [...]
Counterpunch, February 15, 2019 “Someone,” my Finnish-American socialist great-aunt Mary used to say in the late 1960s, “ought to teach these assholes a lesson.” By “these assholes,” she meant the people who own and run the United States. Mary died many years ago. I thought about her the other night while watching Donald Trump lie about [...]
Counterpunch, February 8, 2019 Recently a correspondent from overseas wrote to ask me how it is that Donald Trump perseveres with his absurd nativist demand – replete with threats of a second government shut-down or a Declaration of National Emergency – for a completed wall to stop a fake and racist brown menace on the southern United [...]
Truthdig, February 6, 2019 [...]
Counterpunch, February 1, 2019 Commercials are the State of the Union Two Sunday mornings ago, sitting in an apartment equipped with cable television, I happened upon a CNN broadcast called “State of the Union,” hosted by the perpetual scowler Jake Tapper. I figured I’d better look at a show with such a solemn and important title. The [...]
Counterpunch, January 28, 2019 Idle Capital Through Disruption As the partial federal shutdown moved into its third week, I found myself thinking about the late left economist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi’s concept of “workplace bargaining power” (WBP). By WBP, Arrighi meant the ability some strategically placed workers possess to idle capital and harm profits by bottle-necking the [...]
Truthdig, January 23, 2019 American telescreens broadcast an endless theater of the politically absurd. Take, for example, the ongoing saga over the government shutdown and President Donald Trump’s border wall that has been playing out on screens across the nation for weeks. Recently, news channels showed Trump telling reporters he can empathize with 800,000 federal [...]
Counterpunch, January 23, 2019 Here are seven things you won’t hear much if anything about in the reigning corporate media regarding the ongoing record-setting partial shutdown of the United States federal government: 1: The Longstanding Neoliberal War on “Big Government”: a proper understanding of the shutdown in relation to the longstanding capitalist project of what the [...]