First published on Counterpunch, March 27-29, 2015 The Violin Model The late and formerly Left provocateur Christopher Hitchens once usefully described “the essence of American politics” as “the manipulation of populism by elitism”: the cloaking of plutocratic agendas, of service to the rich and powerful, in the false rebels’ clothing of popular rebellion; the hidden [...]
Beyond False Dichotomies: Toward a New American Left, Z Magazine (April 2015) Paul Street I have long registered my agreement with the brilliant socialist philosopher Istvan Merszaros’s dark, environmentally informed 2001 judgment that: “many of the problems we have to confront—from chronic structural unemployment to the major political/military conflicts [of our time], as well as [...]
TeleSur English, March 19, 2015. In justifying his recent absurd declaration that Venezuela poses an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” – a threat so great as to constitute a “national emergency” for the U.S. – U.S. President Barack Obama, recycled standard trumped-up US charges accusing the [...]
Thanks to the childishly ahistorical and amnesia-inducing narratives disseminated by dominant US corporate media, the origins of contemporary issues and dilemmas go back much further in time than is generally understood in the United States. Look at the abominable fundamentalist Sunni-Salafist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — also known as the Islamic State group, [...]
ZNet, March 11, 2015 As I’ve always said about Barack Obama, you’ve almost got to admire his cynical Orwellian chutzpah. Reading some talking points of Empire, the United States President recently told his fellow US-of-Americans that Venezuela – yes, Venezuela – is an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of [...]
Black Agenda Report, March 11, 2015 I am never more than slightly encouraged about white America’s capacity for breaking from the United States’ deeply embedded racism when I hear one of my fellow US Caucasians report that they’ve viewed the Black British director Steve McQueen’s powerful movie Twelve Years a Slave and were “moved” (sometimes [...]
TeleSur English, March 10, 2015 “Sun-Washed” Days Former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert’s recent book Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America (New York: Doubleday, 2014) is one of many recent liberal volumes to pine for the supposedly “golden time” and place that was the post-World War II United States. In [...]
TeleSur English, February 28, 2015 Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). I’ve never quite been a fan of the United States cultural convention called Black History Month (BHM). This is for three reasons. First, it’s always seemed insulting to me that Black Americans [...]
ZNet, February 28, 2015. It’s an odd and perhaps usefully ego-deflating sensation to feel invisible, in my case to write books and essays and give speeches and talks that can seem like they never existed, as if they were never penned, typed, or spoken. That’s how the celebrated liberal author, Harpers’ Magazine essayist, Salon writer, [...]
TeleSur English, February 21, 2015. Through much of 2002 and into the spring of 2003, the United States corporate media helped the George W. Bush administration and the bipartisan Washington war lobby sell fateful lies to the United States citizenry. It helped the White House and Pentagon advance the criminally mendacious claims that the government [...]