ZNet, December 24, 2014. The narrow ideological parameters of so-called mainstream media [1] in the United States might make a Soviet state censor blush. Look, for example, at what passes for independent “fourth estate” coverage and commentary on US President Barack Obama’s decision to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba.  Across the painfully limited “left” to right [...]

TeleSur English, December 27,  2014 Among the privileges of power are the rights to violate elementary sense, distort the facts of history, and engage in rank hypocrisy without the slightest hint of shame.  Call it a free pass to tell the world that 2 + 2 = 5. Take the comments of United States President Barack Obama [...]

ZNet, December 16,  2014 “Words Will Not be Sufficient” In October of 2013, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced outrage over the giant global surveillance program conducted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). How could Merkel not have cried foul? Among US whistleblower Edward Snowden’s many revelations about US spying, it was learned in [...]

First published on TeleSur English, December 12, 2014. There has been promise but also danger in every sociopolitical movement I’ve seen in the United States over the last thirty plus years. The new movement that has grown up in response to relentless police killings of mostly young Black Americans — and the exoneration of killer [...]

First published on ZNet, December 4, 2014, Last October I attended a small rally held outside Iowa City’s City Hall in solidarity with Michael Brown and those protesting his killing last August by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Two of the rally’s organizers told the gathering that an unjust police killing of a [...]

First published on TeleSur English, December 5, 2014. Note from author (December 6, 10 AM, CST): This essay was written before news came out of the decision of a Staten Island Grand Jury not to indict the white New York City Police officer who killed the Black man Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold last [...]

Z Magazine, December 2014. Nothing mocks disingenuous, power-serving politicians more than their own past words. President Barack Obama is a remarkable case in point. On the presidential campaign trail in 2007 and 2008, for example, Barack Obama ran on a promise to oversee “the most transparent administration in history,” specifically vowing to shield whistleblowers, whom [...]

First published on ZNet, November 27, 2014. How Throughout its coverage of the drama sparked by the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, US corporate media has framed the basic racial issue at stake as how police carry out their tasks: how they police.  The issue is not minor. How cops do their [...]

Originally published on Black Agenda Report, August 11, 2009 Paul Street, Iowa City, IA.   Good Times for Happy and Affluent White Folks The current recession does not weigh very heavily on Iowa City in Johnson County, Iowa. Iowa City was recently named a “top small metropolitan area” in three career-related areas by Forbes Magazine. It [...]

TeleSur English, November 23, 2014. “The hand-mill,” a young Karl Marx once wrote, “gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.”  The sentence has often been cited to show that Marx was a “technological determinist.”  One can certainly see why. In reality, for what it’s worth, Marx was no [...]