teleSur English, November 4, 2015 “Recall,” Barack Obama intoned during his first Inaugural Address, “that earlier generations [of U.S. foreign policymakers] faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to [...]
teleSur English/ZNet, October 29, 2015 A few months ago, I received a statement of anthro-exceptionalist hubris from an American academic: “I love and respect the life, beauty, and intelligence of other animals, BUT, as the American Museum of Natural History reminds us, ‘Our intelligence and creativity go well beyond those of any other animal. Humans [...]
Counterpunch, October 28, 2015 On October 16, 1946, shortly after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials, ten prominent members of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany were marched to the gallows. Some of the former elite Nazis did not die quickly of an intended broken neck but strangled slowly. Since the trapdoor was [...]
ZNet, October 26, 2015 So there was another big Republican-orchestrated Congressional hullabaloo last week over Hillary Clinton and what she did or didn’t do as Secretary of State to prevent the deaths of US Libyan ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. diplomatic staffers in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. Was it about [...]
Counterpunch, October 20th, 2015 Left critics of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign inside the dismal, dollar-drenched, corporate-neoliberal and imperialist Democratic Party were born out by the first Democratic presidential debate in Last Vegas last week. In his first exchange with the CNN host Anderson Cooper and Hillary Clinton, Sanders spoke in terms consistent with Bruce Dixon’s [...]
Counterpunch, October 16, 2015 Some Darkness Behind the “Sun-Washed Days” There is a tendency among senior and middle-aged liberal and progressive United States intellectuals to sentimentalize the post-World War II “golden age” of American and Western capitalism between 1945 and the early to middle 1970s. The inclination is understandable. During those “sun-washed days” (liberal author [...]
Open University of the Left, Chicago, Illinois, December 12, 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5CG3tDsxkY
ZNet, October 16, 2015 The presidential candidate Ben Carson should be relegated before long to the dunce-bin of political history. Before he disappears, however, we might take a closer look at his bone-chilling and tone-deaf suggestion that the victims of the recent mass shooting in an Oregon community college were complicit in their own deaths [...]
Counterpunch, October 9, 2015 In their historic 1848 Communist Manifesto, the great radical thinkers Karl Marx and Frederick Engels offered a curious dialectical celebration of rapacious industrial capitalism. To be sure, Marx and Engels had no illusions about the evil of that system. They observed that “the bourgeoisie” (the capitalist investors and manufacturers of the [...]
Counterpunch, October 6, 2015 Contemporary history is neither a series of random occurrences nor the predetermined plaything of a small cabal of super-empowered conspirators. The truth is somewhere in-between. A sizeable cadre of class- and system-conscious deep-state and imperial planners from the heights of concentrated private and governmental power join together to shape the outlines [...]