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. [...]
Counterpunch, November 17, 2017 Big Brother in the Aisles of HyVee Repeat a lie often enough, the conventional Nazi propaganda wisdom ran, and it will become an accepted truth. This last Veterans Day weekend, I couldn’t watch a sporting event, listen to a car radio, or even go shopping at the local grocery store without [...]
New York Journal of Books, November 2017 Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, November 2017). Americans are regularly told that they live in a great majoritarian democracy. The reality of American political life is very different. As [...]
New York Journal of Books, November 2017 In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017). This is a remarkable and dazzlingly original account of the rise and potential near-term fall of the American Empire. A veteran and distinguished American foreign policy historian, Alfred McCoy opens [...]
Truthdig, November 14, 2017 “Insubordinate elites,” as the distinguished American foreign policy historian Alfred W. McCoy calls them, have long been a problem for the United States empire. They privilege their own personal interests and/or concept of serving their own nations above fealty to the United States, its allies and the Western-based multinational corporate and [...]
Counterpunch, November 10, 2017 It doesn’t take much, just a sentence or a turn-of-phrase, sometimes even just a word or two, to give the game away. “Homeland Defense” Take these words that became ubiquitous among U.S. media and political elites referring to the United States of America in the wake of 9/11: “the homeland,” “defense [...]
Counterpunch, November 3, 2017 I’m almost tempted to feel sorry for the campus-town Democrats I know, some of whom still have Obama bumper stickers on the back of their Volvo and Priuses. Every day brings a new horrible outrage from the noxious orange-tinted beast who drags his knuckles though the White House, sending liberals into [...]
Truthdig, October 29, 2017 The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and [...]
Truthdig, October 18, 2016 When I hear the phrase “white working class” (WWC), my mind turns to the tragic story of the Essex—an inspiration for Herman Melville’s famous novel “Moby-Dick” and a maritime tragedy as mythic in the 19th century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the next one. On Nov. 20, 1820, [...]
Counterpunch, 10-20-2017 Time as a Democracy and Socialist Movement Issue Working-class and pro-working-class socialists and left anarchists have long fought for shorter working hours (with no reductions in pay) for some very good radically democratic reasons. It isn’t just that workers’ everyday lives and collective marketplace and workplace bargaining power are enhanced when they are [...]