*This essay (below) was published on Counterpunch on Friday, January 12, 2018. It was written and submitted before I learned about Donald Trump's sickening racist comments calling Haiti and Africa (home to 48 nations) "shithole countries." Trump's racist remarks have led me to alter and add text (seen in italics) in this essay's next-to-last paragraph. Liberals [...]
Counterpunch, 1/5/2018 Most of the media’s attention on journalist Michael Wolff’s “explosive” new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House has focused on the disclosure that Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon used the words “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” to describe Donald Trump, Jr. and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s infamous June 2016 meeting with [...]
Counterpunch, December 29, 2017 The Occupy Wall Street movement that spread across the country six-plus years ago lacked proper organization and strategy, but it deserves credit for having the right enemy – the corporate and financial ruling class. The same can be said to no small degree about the sadly Democratic Party-captive Bernie Sanders campaign, [...]
Truthdig, 12/22/2017 I rode a Trailways bus from Iowa City to Chicago’s Near West Side Greyhound station two weekends ago. I was traveling to my past and future home city to give a presentation on the state of American politics to the Open University of the Left. For 4½ hours, most of my fellow passengers [...]
Counterpunch 12/22/2017 In an important commentary in The New York Review of Books last March, the anti-Putin Russian dissident Masha Gessen tried to warn U.S. liberals and progressives against putting their anti-Trump eggs in the Russia basket. Gessen felt that the Russiagate gambit would flop, given a lack of smoking-gun evidence and sufficient public interest, [...]
Counterpunch, 12/15/2017 There’s something happening here, but ya don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? Roy Moore was removed from his position as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in November 2003 by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for refusing a federal court’s order to remove a marble monument of the [...]
Truthdig, December 10, 2017 The arch-plutocratic tax cut Washington politicians are working on this holiday season ought to be a call to arms for the United States’ populace. The nation’s economy is already so savagely unequal that the top 10th of its upper 1 percent owns as much wealth as its bottom 90 percent. Its [...]
Counterpunch, December 8, 2017 Watching the first ten minutes of the “Public” (Petroleum and/or Pentagon?) Broadcasting System (“P”BS)’s NewsHour two nights ago, I was overcome by a sense of the surreal. The first news item was the Insane Clown President’s (ICP) idiotic (if base-pleasing) announcement that the U.S. embassy in Israel will at some point [...]
Counterpunch, December 1, 2017 You can’t tell a book by its advance press. Take Donna Brazile’s new 2016 campaign memoir Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House (released three weeks ago). To say that Brazile brings an insiders’ view to the 2016 election is an [...]
Truthdig, November 30, 2017 The passivity of the American populace in the face of the endlessly outrageous presidency of Donald Trump is chilling to behold. There were some meaningful outbursts of mass anger over and against his patently discriminatory travel ban and against early Trump-led Republican efforts to throw millions of Americans off health insurance. [...]