Counterpunch, December 22, 2015 In its endless, candidate-obsessed coverage and discussion of the already seemingly interminable U.S. presidential horse race (the actual presidential election is still more than ten months away), U.S. corporate media fact-checkers, reporters, and commentators have had a field day finding inaccuracies, offensiveness, and absurdities in the statements of the current Republican [...]
Counterpunch, December 18, 2015 Shit That Hit the Metropolitan Fan Chicago’s “Mayor 1%” Rahm Emanuel is in trouble with his city’s 1%. Here is an interesting report from Crain’s Chicago Business, a leading journal of the Chicago corporate and financial elite: “At the kind of civic soirees where Mayor Rahm Emanuel normally would fit right in [...]
ZNet, December 7, 2015 Are you surprised to learn that the recent San Bernardino massacre was (by the statistical reckoning of the Washington Post) the 355th mass shooting episode to occur in the U.S. in 2015, well on pace to transcend 2013, when 363 such episodes occurred? You shouldn’t be. This terrible data is the [...]
teleSur English, December 4, 2015 Among the many ludicrous things spouted on the U.S. right, few assertions are more ridiculous than the commonplace reactionary idea that United States universities and colleges are leftist hotbeds. Trust me, I know. I have a Ph.D. (in U.S history) along with a large number of academic publications, seven published [...]
Counterpunch, December 4, 2015 Beneath a carefully constructed pretense of concern for racial justice, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has long been a dedicated corporatist “law and order” enemy of Black America. During his time as a top political operative in the arch-neoliberal Bill Clinton White House, the notorious bully Emmanuel (later to be nicknamed “Rahmbo”) [...]
teleSur English, December 1, 2015 Some time ago, I suggested in one of my many critiques of the corporate-neoliberal, imperial, and eco-cidal Obama administration that Obama’s ultimate signing off on the Keystone XL Pipeline (KXL) – meant to carry highly toxic Tar Sands oil from Alberta, Canada the Gulf of Mexico in the southern U.S. [...]
Counterpunch, November 20, 2015 In politics as in medicine, excessively mild remedies are typically based on overly placid diagnoses. Look, for example, at the highly esteemed Columbia University historian Eric Foner’s recent letter of congratulations and advice to Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in The Nation. As I have argued in a previous CounterPunch [...]
Counterpunch, November 17, 2015 Hillary Clinton said something remarkable and out of the blue during the second Democratic Party presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa, last Saturday – something that ought to lead to the suspension of her quest for the White House. The comment came in response to a CBS debate moderator and Bernie [...]
ZNet, November 17, 2015 Some news stories just sicken the soul. Here, below, is one that did that for me recently[1]. “News story” may the wrong term for the item that I found so disturbing. It was more like a White House propaganda film inserted into the middle of the evening news. Halfway through the [...]
Counterpunch, November 11, 2015 The white working class has never had it easy in American history. It’s been viciously exploited, disrespected, deceived, divided, repressed, and otherwise and generally abused from the United States’ colonial origins through the present day. If you want to glimpse some of what I mean, read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), [...]