Counterpunch, April 20, 2018 “Solving Other People’s Problems in the Middle East” Establishment journalists and politicos write and say the darndest things, advanced as common sense under the sway of reigning nationalist and imperial ideology. Take the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent Peter Baker. In a page-one “news analysis” last Sunday, Baker wrote the [...]
Truthdig, April 18, 2018 I recently heard on cable news that special counsel Robert Mueller wanted to interview some “Russian oligarchs” about their supposed influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Liberal talking heads at such organizations as MSNBC and CNN keep warning that nothing has been done yet to protect the integrity of our [...]
Counterpunch, April 17, 2018 1/ Donald Trump’s April 11 missile-attack-promising reference to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as a “Gas Killing Animal who kills his own people” reeked of moral hypocrisy in at least three ways: * Trump had just hosted his “good friend” the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a leading architect of the arch-reactionary Saudis’ [...]
Counterpunch, 4-11-2018 Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (Twelve, March 13, 2018) Do you like complicated mystery novels that make you keep a list of names and dates so as not to get overwhelmed by clues and complex chronologies (unless you have [...]
Counterpunch, April 6, 2018 Two Right-Wing Coups in the Americas You’ve got to hand it to Hillary Clinton. In 2016, she helped put the right-wing racist, sexist, nativist, authoritarian, and nationalist oligarch Donald Trump in the White House. She and her operatives did this in two ways: (1) by rigging the presidential primaries against the popular progressive [...]
Truthdig, April 4, 2018 Noam Chomsky’s 2016 book “Who Rules the World?” contains a passage in which the great left thinker asks readers to “imagine you’re a historian a hundred years from now—assuming there are any historians a hundred years from now, which is not obvious—and you’re looking back on what’s happening today.” This reflection [...]
Black Agenda Report, April 4, 2018 Two Murders I do not pretend to know the full stories behind the assassinations or executions of either John F. Kennedy (JFK) or Martin Luther King, Jr., the latter killed in Memphis, Tennessee, exactly 50 years ago today. Were one or both them killed by lone gunmen? By the [...]
Counterpunch, March 23, 2018 Beneath the endless madness of the Today in Tangerine Satan (TITS) show, aided and abetted by the Radically Regressive and Reactionary Republicans (the R4 Party), it’s easy to forget that the Inauthentic Opposition Party (IOP, also known as the Democratic Party) installed the malignant presidential apprentice in the White House in [...]
Counterpunch, March 21, 2018 There’s been an interesting debate over the years about the relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even compatible? I won’t be pursuing this because I’d like to discuss a different system – what we could call the “really existing capitalist democracy,” RECD for short, pronounced “wrecked.” — Noam [...]
Truthdig, 3/20/2018 World peace is none of your business You must not tamper with arrangements Work hard and simply pay your taxes Never asking what for Oh, you poor little fool Oh, you fool World peace is none of your business Police will stun you with their stun guns Or they’ll disable you with tasers [...]