Counterpunch, April 6, 2016 A Rap Sheet Fades Behind the Extravaganza I wonder if anyone is enjoying the current endless quadrennial presidential electoral extravaganza more than Barack Obama. With the United States’ corporate-managed media and politics culture fixated on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, the Republican National Committee, Ted Cruz, and even sometimes the nominal socialist [...]

Counterpunch, March 31, 2016 I am starting to think that I may be off base on one of my political calculations. In the course of arguing that Hillary Clinton would be more electable than Bernie Sanders in a general election contest with Donald Trump next November (whatever match-up polls may say now), I have reasoned [...]

teleSur English, March 22, 2016 and (expanded)  Counterpunch, March 28, 2016 Never confuse prestigious intellectual awards and positions awarded by the United States and Western establishment with real intelligence. And never assume that an intellectual is a real progressive just because they say they so. Take the leading “progressive” U.S. economist Paul Krugman, once described [...]

Counterpunch, March 25, 2016 A Nice Surprise It’s not very often that you hear or see a salaried U.S. corporate media employee defend Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Cuban Revolution and its accomplishments. That’s why I did a double take when I read a recent opinion piece titled “Cuba’s Success Lost in Media Frenzy” in [...]

Counterpunch, March 24, 2016 When “Berniebros” attack it can be disturbing. It’s been a bracing experience to be told by older white male leftists that I (no spring chicken myself) am some kind of “ultra-radical” “purist” attached to “abstract notions of perfection” (just a few of the charges I’ve gotten from Sanders supporters via e-mail) [...]

Counterpunch, March 18, 2016 The Guy Trump is Paying Legal Fees For” Five days ago, during a corporate cable news “town hall” in Columbus, Ohio, Bernie Sanders had an interesting moment when CNN’s Jack Tapper asked him about Donald Trump’s call for “Bernie [to] keep your people in line.” “The Donald” was referring to the [...]

Counterpunch, March 15, 2016 “GET TO KNOW HIM, Lazy Ass!” One of the more irritating and disturbing things about some of the older white, middle-class and stereotypically pony-tailed Berniebros I regularly overhear in person and online is the grumbling they do about the difficulties their nominally socialist hero Bernie Sanders has had with the Black [...]

Counterpunch, March 11, 2016 What are we to make of the arch-authoritarian, white-nationalist Donald Trump phenomenon? We should not fool ourselves about its dangerous nature. As the New York Times opinion writer Roger Cohen recently noted in a column titled “Trump’s Il Duce Routine”: “…Trump retweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to [...]

Counterpunch, March 8, 2016 Iowa City, Iowa Liberals and progressives in the United States are stunned and horrified by the success that the blustering arch-misogynist white nationalist Donald Trump has enjoyed in rallying white U.S. working class people behind his call to build a “giant wall” (and “make Mexico pay” for the southern portion) to [...]

Black Agenda Report, March 8, 2016 Listening to white Americans talk about race and Black people makes my brain hurt. How many times have I heard U.S. Caucasians recoil against the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” proclaiming with eye-rolling exasperation that “all lives matter”?  But who in the Hell said that white and-or Asian and/Latino and/or [...]