ZNet, May 8, 2015. A shorter and earlier version of this essay appeared today on TeleSur English Last February 19th, Vermont’s “socialist” U.S. Senator, the nominally independent Democrat Bernie Sanders, spoke to an enthusiastic crowd in a downtown Iowa City bookstore. He had come to explore his potential prospects in Iowa’s upcoming “first-in-the-nation” Democratic Party [...]
TeleSur English, April 30, 2015. May First, or May Day, is, as leftists know, the real Labor Day. It marks the struggle of the international working class against the selfish capitalist rulers, who enjoy unimaginable opulence on a planet where nearly 3 billion struggle to survive on less two dollars a day. But let me [...]
Z Magazine, May 2015. Like other radical Left writers and activists who have spent considerable energy criticizing Barack Obama and his corporate-imperial Democratic Party, I am sometimes accused of downplaying the danger posed by the U.S. Republican Party (GOP). As an author of two books and countless essays that have strongly disparaged and denounced the [...]
Fars News Agency TEHRAN (FNA), April 27, 2015 – Dr. Paul Street, an American journalist, historian and political commentator, says the Saudi kingdom is following the lead of its US-Zionist masters in attacking Yemen, describing Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh as three war criminals totally unaware of the calamities that lie ahead of the poor nation [...]
TeleSur English, April 18, 2015 I am personally opposed to the death penalty. Still, I’d be lying if I said I cared a great deal about the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. Tsarnaev and his brother committed a hideous crime that cost three innocent people their lives, blew limbs off of seventeen [...]
Z Magazine, March 2015 Imagine the outrage that would arise within and beyond Germany if one of that nation’s professional soccer clubs named itself “The Fighting Jews,” “The Rabbis,” or “The Battling Hebrews,” and placed an exaggerated, cartoon-like image of an old Jewish man from 1930s Berlin on its players’ jerseys and jackets. Such an [...]
ZNet, April 16, 2015. "We have very different views of how society should be organized.” So said US President Barack Obama on his recent meeting with Cuban President Raul Castro at the Summit of the Americas in Panama. “I was very direct with [Castro],” Obama added, “that we are not going to stop talking about [...]
Counterpunch, April 10-12, 2015 At one point last year, United States President Barack Obama declared that he “believe[d] in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” It was hardly a surprising or remarkable thing to hear. In US political culture, faith in “American exceptionalism” has long been doctrinally mandatory for top politicians, policymakers, and [...]
TeleSur English, April 10, 2015 Having just visited Cuba to deliver a paper on the dangers of United States corporate media, one impression I took from my trip is that we should never underestimate the intrinsic positive significance of social equality. Does Cuba have significant problems and contradictions? Seguro!…of course it does. Paint is peeling [...]
TeleSur English, April 1, 2015. Like many who write for ZNet, Telesur English, and other Left venues, I suspect, I often feel torn between (A) more activist and positive, change and action-oriented energies (relating to the question of “what is to be done?”) on one hand and (B) more intellectual, academic, Mandarin-like and critical, often [...]