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 [...]
Counterpunch, August 26, 2016 The long-shot United States Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has been telling the large crowds attending his rallies that American workers put in the longest hours in the industrialized world. He’s on solid ground. According to the International Labor Organization, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, [...]
teleSur English, August 24, 2015 A recent volume by a leading left U.S. historian is titled “The Age of Acquiescence.” Its author argues that U.S. workers and citizens have in the last four plus decades lost the will to resist organized wealth and power – a sad departure, he thinks, from their previous long history of [...]
Counterpunch, August 21, 2015 A Curious Defense of Presidential Politicking I’ve been getting some of the same e-mails and other electronic messages from left Bernie Sanders supporters that I got from left Barack Obama supporters back in 2007 and 2008. The basic gist is that it is unfair for me to criticize their favorite Democratic [...]
Black Agenda Report, August 18, 2015, Counterpunch, August 12, 2015 It’s good to know a little history when trying to make sense of current events. “What’s wrong with those people,” the young liberal white campus town woman – a big environmentalist – said to me a month or so ago. “Don’t they know that Bernie [...]
ZNet, August 13, 2015 One of the oddest things about being a “radical” eco-socialist is the way it tends to pigeon-hole you as some of kind of wild-eyed child caught up in a terrible and irrational tantrum. In reality, “radical” eco-socialists just want their fellow human beings to grow up enough to do something conservative: [...]
ZNet, August 11, 2015 To be seriously radical on the Left is, among other things, to be against capitalism – the system that, as Karl Marx noted in 1848, “has left no other nexus between [people other] than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” and “resolve[s] personal worth into exchange value” (hello Donald Trump?). Under [...]
ZNet, August 8, 2015 Serious debates over what the minimum wage should be in various U.S. locales and jurisdictions should start with serious information on what it actually costs to live in the different places where Americans live. One common reference point, the U.S. federal poverty level, is sorely inadequate to the task. It has [...]
Counterpunch, August 7, 2015 Barack Obama is a model and epitome of the triumph of symbol over substance. Take his great show of concern last month for the sickening national crime and embarrassment that is the United States’ shockingly high rate of racially disparate mass imprisonment. Beneath the praise and fanfare this performance evoked, what [...]
ZNet, August 6, 2015 Chilling as it may seem, the frothing uber-narcissistic hate-machine and tabloid-feeding media freak Donald Trump leads the polls in the early campaign for the presidential nomination of one of the United States’ two dominant political parties. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, sites for the nation’s earliest presidential caucus (Iowa) and [...]