Counterpunch Weekend Edition June 5-7, 2015 by PAUL STREET The election frenzy…seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls. — Howard Zinn, April 2008 [...]
ZNet, June 7, 2015 One of the many ways in which the capitalist press serves the owning class has to do with story placement – where it places a report. Considers the recent story titled “Inequality Troubles Americans Across Party Lines” in the New York Times last Thursday. It’s a remarkable news item for anyone [...]
teleSur English (shorter version), May 31, 2015 and ZNet (this version), June 1, 2015 In a foreword to John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney’s important book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (New York: Nation Books, 2013), U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders wrote that, “we cannot govern our own affairs when [...]
TeleSur English, May 25, 2015 Hopey-Climate-Changey If want to keep up with United States political culture, you’d better have a strong stomach for the absurd. Four days ago (I am writing on Sunday, May 24th), for example, U.S. President Barack Obama made a stirring speech to graduating U.S. Coast Guard cadets about the scientifically proven [...]
Counterpunch, Weekend Edition May 22-24, 2015 Imperial Omissions The Not-So Nordic Bernie Sanders by PAUL STREET Speaking to George Stephanopoulus on ABC News’ “This Week” three weeks ago, the recently declared Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders identified himself with the “the democratic socialism” of Scandinavia. In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Sanders told Stephanopoulos, politics [...]
Z Net, May 20, 2015 Gabriel Kolko, Another Century of War? (New York: New Press, 2002) Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of the Islamic State (New York: Verso, 2014) More Like Wise Guys One of the worst ideas I picked up from certain academic historians and political scientists when I was an undergraduate history major in [...]
teleSur English, May 21, 2015 We all make mistakes. In 1996, I ventured a silly notion at the end of a grant-funded project study that criticized the over-optimistic labor market assumptions behind U.S. “welfare reform.” Welfare “reform” was a euphemism for the elimination of poor families’ entitlement to basic family cash assistance in the name of [...]
Counterpunch, May 15-17, 2015 "Fact and Scrutiny” So this is how Barack Obama is moving into the final 20 months of his dismal neoliberal presidency, which he once (proudly) described as ideologically akin to the Eisenhower White House. He is nauseating much of his own Wall Street-captive party’s electoral base by trying to push through [...]
Black Agenda Report, May 13, 2015 The reluctance of “mainstream” United States media to deal forthrightly and seriously with U.S. racism deeply understood can be quite pronounced. Consider the “Public” Broadcasting System’s nightly Newshour episode for Thursday, April 30, 2015. It aired one day after Baltimore’s Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise the Orioles took the [...]
ZNet, May 12, 2015 "The Essence of American Politics” Fifteen years ago, the then still left Christopher Hitchens published a short and pungent study of Bill and Hillary Clinton titled No One Left to Lie to: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 1999, 2000). The book’s first chapter, titled “Triangulation,” contained a memorable passage [...]