Counterpunch, 10-06-2017 I’m no fan of bullfighting or rodeo, but those two “sports” provide some useful metaphors for how the United States ruling class rules. Think of the U.S. citizenry as a penned bull, the U.S. capitalist “elite” as a matador or a rodeo bull-rider, and the U.S. president as a red cape or, alternately [...]
Truthdig, 10-4-2017 Being a socialist (which I’ve been since age 19) committed to the democratic transformation of society doesn’t mean rejecting all reforms that fall short of thorough societal reorganization. Serious and substantively progressive reforms are critical to left movement-building and to the meeting of human needs in the here and now. This is particularly [...]
Counterpunch, 10-4-2017 It’s long past time to start understanding the giant mass shootings that have become part of the new-normal fabric of life in the United States as terrorist attacks on the U.S. populace conducted by the nation’s plutocracy through one of its key and rightward campaign funding, lobbying, and policy organizations – the National [...]
Truthdig, 9/20/2017 A worker in a costume representing world capitalism during a 2017 May Day rally in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Dita Alangkara / AP) The neoliberal, arch-capitalist era we inhabit is chock-full of statistics and stories that ought to send chills down the spines of any caring, morally sentient human. Nearly three-fourths (71 percent) of the world’s [...]
Black Agenda Report, September 27, 2017 White America, for the most part, makes a critical distinction between “good” and “bad” Black Americans – and a related distinction between “good” and “bad” Black behavior. It goes way back. During the 1960s, for example, Muhammad Ali was a “good Negro” when he seemed to be just a [...]
Counterpunch 9/22/2017 This Essay is an Experiment How Ken Burns and Lynn Novick became the semi-official film documentarians of United States history is an interesting question. Part of the answer lay in the way they manage to whitewash the criminal record of U.S. imperialism. One example of this came in their 2007 “Public” Broadcasting System [...]
Counterpunch, 9-22-2017 Numerous correspondents sent me the latest lengthy Atlantic essay by the brilliant and eloquent but bourgeois Black Identitarian Ta-Nehesi Coates and asked for my reflections. I reluctantly agreed to read and comment on Coates’ long treatise. “The Mind Seizes” There is plenty to concur with and even applaud in Coates’ prolonged reflection, which bears the provocative title [...]
Counterpunch, September 9., 2017 When “mainstream” (corporate) media talks about the terrible role that hate is playing in American political life the discussion is usually about partisan contempt between Democrats and Republicans or heated conflicts between “radical extremes” like the alt-right and the so-called alt-left (Antifa). You don’t hear much about the longstanding and dripping contempt the [...]
ZNet, September 9, 2017 In the late summer of 2017, the United States was hit by two epic hurricanes, each of which took lives and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Record-setting wildfires raged on the nation’s West coast and a devastating drought plagued much of the nation’s northern Great Plains. Like Hurricane [...]
Truthdig, 9-6-2017 Editor’s note: This essay was written before Hurricane Irma emerged in the Caribbean. Irma is another historic superstorm whose fury is significantly fueled by climate change. I naturally disapprove strongly of the virulent white racists who gathered to violently defend Confederate “slave power” statues in Charlottesville, Va., two weekends ago, but I’ll say [...]