Truthdig, July 29, 2018 “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” This famous socialist slogan, adapted from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto,” struck Noam Chomsky as a poor fit for most people in the world’s rich nations almost half a century ago. “There is no doubt,” Chomsky [...]
Counterpunch, July 27, 2018 One of the more darkly amusing narratives in current establishment Democratic Party positioning for the 2018 mid-term elections and the 2020 presidential contest is the claim that the Bernie Sanders tendency represents a radical “socialist” threat that will tip the races to the Republicans and Trump. Never mind that the progressive [...]
Black Agenda Report, August 3, 2018 Until he was tapped as a shiny new national and global asset by the white American ruling-class and catapulted to rock star status in the summer of 2004, then Illinois state senator Barack Obama was not particularly popular in the Black Chicago South Side that he deceptively called “home.” Besides being [...]
Counterpunch, July 24, 2018 Flipping through the cable news stations last Saturday morning, I came across an amusing sight at Russia- frenzied MSNBC. There was the stern host Joy Reid (“#AM Joy”) giving a concerned and sympathetic interview to William Browder, a worried multimillionaire financier who said that Vladimir Putin wants to murder him. “Are [...]
Truthdig, July 22, 2018 Paul Street’s column will appear in Truthdig each Sunday through Aug. 12. Its regular schedule will resume when Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges returns from vacation. The noted North Korean political commentator Kim Jong Un got it right last year: Donald Trump is a “mentally deranged dotard.” Consider the U.S. president’s bizarre [...]
Counterpunch, 7-20-2018 Hundreds of thousands of people showed up across the United States at more than 600 gatherings three weeks ago. They came out to protest Donald Trump‘s “zero tolerance” immigration policy in highly choreographed, Democratic Party-affiliated “Families Belong Together” rallies and marches. Liberal celebrities marched and spoke. Local, state, and federal Democratic Party politicians and office-holders gave passionate speeches denouncing Trump’s [...]
Counterpunch, July 13, 2018 The People as a Problem to be Contained As the United States’ depressed, distracted, disorganized, and demobilized populace watches the vicious white-nationalist and authoritarian Donald Trump and the arch-reactionary Republican Party craft a Supreme Court yet further to the right of majority public opinion, the worst of the nation’s slave-owning Founders [...]
Truthdig, July 11, 2018 Scott Pruitt, the now-former, scandal-plagued Environmental Protection Agency chief in the Trump administration, got off easy. The spoliation of the commons by those who pursue private profit and what Western economists call “development” is no small matter. Consider the case of the white “settler” William Davis in northern Illinois in the spring of 1832. Two [...]
Posted August 2, 2018, as a supplement to what was then a forthcoming Truthdig essay in which I examined U.S. President Donald Trump's epic and pathological lying and misstatements against the backdrop, and in the context of, past U.S. presidential deception and the broader panoply of false narratives that have long been ubiquitous in U.S. [...]
Black Agenda Report, July 11, 2018 “People Have a Right to Go Into a Restaurant and Have Dinner” Bernie Huckabee-Sanders said he did not support being rude to “people” when he was asked about incidents in which Trump administration officials were publicly harassed because of their vicious policy of kidnapping migrant children at the southern [...]