teleSur English, October 2, 2015 This is an age of eco-Orwellian cognitive dissonance. Three years and three months ago, then United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Norway to negotiate increased U.S. access to the Arctic’s vast oil reserves. She sailed on a research vessel to see in person the melting of the Arctic under the [...]
ZNet, September 30, 2015 A significantly shorter version of this paper was delivered in Havana, Cuba on April 7, 2015 “Homeland” Distortion Consistent with its possession as a leading and money-making asset of the nation’s wealthy elite, the United States corporate and commercial mass media is a bastion of power-serving propaganda and deadening twaddle designed [...]
Counterpunch, September 25, 2015 Leftish Democrats can’t seem to stop quoting something the nominal “democratic socialist” and (to use an old but in this case accurate Lenninist term) “social chauvinist” Bernie Sanders has been saying about Barack Obama since at least last May. Here’s a useful synopsis of Sanders’ take on Obama from an interview [...]
Black Agenda Report, September 22, 2015 “Join the Political Revolution” American liberal and “progressive” Democrats often inhabit insular, white, and middle class worlds that dull their appreciation of the broader oppression systems of class, race, and empire that shape their privileged lives and those of less fortunate people, many of whom live in remarkably invisible [...]
Counterpunch, September 16, 2015 “The United States,” the left historian Lawrence Shoup reminds us, “is a particular type of class society, a racialized one, where some groups are stigmatized as inferior because of their race, a belief spreading to all segments of society. One this oppressive idea becomes widespread, the resulting divisions within the working [...]
Counterpunch, September 14, 2015 Picturing Papal Petrification The reigning politics and media culture of the United States is not without moments of high comic relief. Three weeks ago, for example, CNN’s Chris Cuomo presented the buffoonish Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a bizarre hypothetical situation. What would Trump do, Cuomo asked, if he met [...]
teleSur English, September 12, 2015 United States voters could provide bases for more than the nation’s two reigning state-capitalist political organizations – the Republicans and the Democrats – if the country moved to a multiparty political and elections system. Imagine an expansion to four relevant parties, including one to the democratic-socialist left of the Democrats [...]
Counterpunch September 9, 2015 Embarrassed and Horrified Upon hearing that the Johnson County Board of Supervisors recently voted to begin a process of approving Iowa first’s countywide minimum wage ordinance and thereby raising the local minimum wage up from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour by 2017, I didn’t know whether to respond with embarrassment or [...]
Counterpunch, September 4-6, 2015 We live in strange Orwellian, Islamophobic, and eco-cidal times. A comrade from the great burning Northwest tells me the following story: “I had a Sunday dinner a few weeks ago at the house of my dad’s and stepmom’s neighbors. The man and woman of the house are in their 60’s and [...]
Counterpunch, September 2, 2015 The leading national Democrat and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says some strange things and some sensible things too. The sensible statements are not hard to discern. They include reasonable observations about: the moral obscenity and undemocratic political consequences of the extreme over-concentration of wealth and income in the United States; the [...]