Counterpunch, 10-26-2018 Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings…are…a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. – Frederick Douglass, July 4th, [...]
Counterpunch, 10-19-2018 You Made a Superman Cape for Me” Who needs dystopian political fiction in the age of the orange-tinted monstrosity that calls itself Donald Trump [1]? Two Thursdays ago, as news came in of fatalities and massive destruction caused by a record-setting hurricane that slammed into the Florida Panhandle and Georgia the previous night, cable [...]
Counterpunch, 10-12/2018 It is disgusting almost beyond words that the onetime sexual predator and obvious dissembler Brett Kavanaugh will render judgement on matters of solemn legal, political, and societal relevance in Superpower’s most preeminent judicial body. Troubling as the noxious Kavanaugh’s personal history and untruthfulness are, however, it was even more depressing to see the [...]
Truthdig, 10/16/2018 So often, underlying structures and institutions of oppression escape serious scrutiny amid our country’s most high-profile political dramas. Take the recent conviction of Jason Van Dyke, the white Chicago police officer caught on tape four years ago firing 16 shots into 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. From its soul-numbing kill tape to McDonald’s family shown and quoted [...]
Counterpunch, 10/5/2018 Absurdity Reigns in the terrible time of Donald Trump. Just five days apart, the tangerine miscreation went from calling the right-wing Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh’s primary accuser, Dr. Christine Blassey Ford, a great person and a good witness to openly mocking her painful recollections of sexual assault in front of thousands of laughing white [...]
Truthdig, 10/5/2018 Truthdig update: A Chicago jury on Friday found Police Officer Jason Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder in the shooting of Laquan McDonald. My earliest memories of growing up in Chicago are steeped in racial tension and political violence: a street covered with Chicago police cars because Malcolm X was speaking under threat of assassination [...]
Truthdig, 9/24/2018 The instantly famous Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed (ATOE), published Sept. 5, in which a senior Trump administration official complained about the brutish awfulness and incompetence of Donald Trump and claimed to be working with other White House officials to check Trump’s worst impulses, has evoked a range of responses on so-called social media. “The [...]
Counterpunch, 9/21/2018 As the brilliant left cultural theorist and social critic Henry Giroux noted more than a decade ago, the dominant neoliberal ideology “collapses” the nation’s “pervasive racial hierarchies…into power-evasive strategies such as blaming minorities of class and color for not working hard enough” and “refusing to exercise individual initiative.” Even as racism “functions” as [...]
Black Agenda Report, 9/19/2018 Things could get very ugly in Chicago if the cop that killed Laquan McDonald is set free by a jury that includes only one Black person. “Van Dyke and his wife have been presented as if they are the real victims.” Sometimes you can only shake your head in dumb amazement [...]
Counterpunch, 9/7/2018 Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin [...]