First published at TeleSur English, October 18, 2014 The nightmare totalitarian state envisaged by George Orwell in his famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four was one of endless war. The subject populace of “Oceana” was kept in a perpetual state of militarized hatred and fear regarding a shifting array of always supremely evil foreign others. Endless war drove Oceana’s [...]
Beyond the City of Ferguson” According to a recent report from Reuters, “Missouri authorities” are meeting three times a week. They are asking local police departments around the country for intelligence on “out-of-state” activists (“agitators”). “Missouri law enforcement officials,” Reuters observed, “have been in contact with police chiefs in Los Angeles, New York, Florida, and [...]
First published at Black Agenda Report, October 15, 2014. The liberal left’s bourgeois and identity-politicized buffoonery over the Obama administration persists long after the president has become a lame duck. Look for example, at the Nutty Professor Michael Eric Dyson’s recent defense of resigning US Attorney General Eric Holder’s epic non-prosecution of Wall Street criminals. Dyson’s [...]
First published on TeleSur English, October 10, 2014 Living in the middle of the United States of America, I sometimes find myself wondering: is this nation a living version – a mélange perhaps – of the authoritarian dystopias that various novelists and others have tried to warn us about in the past? The once futuristic [...]
Z Magazine, October 2014 According to a long-dominant “mainstream” (corporate state) media narrative in the United States, Washington and the nation’s politics are crippled by terrible partisan “gridlock.” This reigning media meme says that the deadlock in Washington reflects deep “polarization” between “red” (older, whiter, more male, traditional, religious/Christian, rural, gun-owning, and Republican) and “blue” [...]
Iowa City Press-Citizen, October 1, 2014 According to a long-dominant “mainstream” media narrative in the United States, the nation’s politics and policy are crippled by terrible partisan “gridlock.” This reigning media meme says that the deadlock in Washington reflects deep “polarization” between “red” (older, whiter, more male, traditional, religious/Christian, rural, gun-owning, and Republican) and “blue” [...]
First published on TeleSur English, September 27, 2014. Prepare for an Alien Invasion Just because someone has a PhD, a Nobel Prize, a prized Princeton professorship, and a regular columnist position at The New York Times doesn’t mean they’re really all that clever. Take the leading US liberal and partisan Democrat Paul Krugman, blessed with [...]
First published on ZNet, Septemeber 26, 2014 If They Were Serious What if Barack Obama and the US foreign policy establishment and US corporate media were actually serious about ending the dire threats – real and/or merely perceived – posed by Islamist terrorism to US citizens and “interests” at home and abroad? How would they [...]
Originally published on TeleSur English, September 20, 2014. A “Routine” U.S. Coast Guard “Mission” in “the Gulf” Just when I thought the news couldn’t get any stranger three weeks ago, I saw the following Associated Press (AP) headline on Yahoo News: “U.S. Coast Guard Fires on Iranian Boat in Gulf.” The Coast Guard? My initial reaction [...]
First published on ZNet, September 14, 2014, and Black Agenda Report on September 17, 2014. The Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, a predominantly Black St. Louis suburb, were injured and insulted in at least eight key ways this summer. First there was the execution-style murder of Michael Brown, gunned down with his hands in the [...]