Truthdig, May 3, 2017 One of my little online entertainments this year has been to ask my social media network a question: “So, what’s Obama up to lately?” I want to know, but I haven’t had the stomach to follow the man once he left the White House. Truth be told, I burned out on [...]
Truthdig, May 1, 2017 May Day, or May 1, has many meanings, in my experience. When I was a grade-schooler in Chicago, it was the day on which the officially Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union paradedits military might in Moscow’s Red Square. It was a reminder that there was another military superpower on the planet besides the [...]
CounterPunch, April 28, 2017 I imagine I’m not the only political and media observer sickened by the dominant (“mainstream”) corporate media’s habitual reference to xenophobic, right-wing, white-nationalist, and neo-fascist politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen as “populists.” Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule [...]
New York Journal of Books, April 21, 2017 James Forman Jr.’s new book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, April 2017) tells an all-too-hidden and tragic part of the story of the rise of the racist mass incarceration state in the United States. Forman is [...]
Counterpunch, April 21, 2017 The Ruling Class Reserve Tag One of the many irritating things about the dominant United States corporate media is the way it repeatedly discovers anew things that are not remotely novel. Take its recent discovery that Donald Trump isn’t really the swamp-draining populist working class champion he pretended to be on [...]
Counterpunch, April 14, 2017 As I pointed out back in July of 2015, U.S. Senator Bernie Senator (“I”-VT) is not the independent left politician many progressives claim he is. He’s a Democratic Party company man. That was been clear from his long Congressional record of voting with the neoliberal, dollar-drenched Democrats and accepting their seniority-based [...]
Counterpunch, April 10, 2017 I had five thoughts the minute I heard last Thursday night that the Orange-Tinted Freak Show – the “Unbelievable Baby Man” (Tom Tomorrow) – in the White House had launched 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria as a response (supposedly) to the Syrian regime’s (alleged) chemical bombing of innocent civilians in the [...]
Donald Trump railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during his presidential campaign. But he failed to mention how the measure forced vast swaths of Mexico’s farm population off their land and into the United States by flooding the country with cheap, subsidized, U.S. agricultural imports. It was a curious deletion, given Trump’s [...]
Counterpunch, April 3, 2017 Iowa Nasty In a recent Truthdig report, titled “What’s the Matter with Iowa?,” I reflected on how the now fully Republican-controlled state government of Iowa is involved in a vicious, multi-pronged assault on working people of all genders and sexual identities. This ferocious right-wing attack is not very “Iowa nice.” It [...]
Counterpunch, March 31, 2017 I’m not a Truther and never have been. I don’t obsess over the JFK assassination, which (however) always sort of struck me as a CIA and/or Mafia and Cuban exile hit. My interactions with conspiracy theorists over the years since 9/11 have been ugly and close at times to violent. I [...]