The nation and world are in dire straits as US president Barack Obama prepares to address “the homeland” (a revealingly imperial term) tonight (I am writing on the morning of Wednesday, September 10, 2014). As Obama acknowledged on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” 95% of the nation’s income gains went to the nation’s top [...]
TeleSur English, September 11, 2014 Unmentionable Blowback History has a nasty way of repeating itself when its lessons go unprocessed. Take the US Global War on Terror, formally sparked by the al Qaeda jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001. By early 1998, seven years after Washington inflicted a one-sided imperial slaughter of Iraqis known in US History texts as [...]
TeleSur English, September 4, 2014 The national United States holiday called Labor Day has for me traditionally been a time for reading on the beach, for saying goodbye to summer, and for reflecting on the history of workers and unions [1]. This recent Labor Day (two days ago) found me nowhere near a beach, but I did [...]
First published at the Fars News Agency (Tehran), September 3, 2014: http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13930609001300 FNA: Kindly explain about the role of US in forming and bringing ISIL into existence. Is this a plot orchestrated by US and its allies? If so, why? Street: ISIL is in fact a Frankenstein created largely by US imperialism. Still, it’s too [...]
Z Magazine, September 2014 It has become fashionable among some U.S. “progressives” to attribute contemporary U.S. social problems to the misbehavior of “sociopaths”—people who have no conscience and could do just about anything without a hint of remorse. Corporate CEOs, military commanders, industry publicists, leading pundits, top financiers, leading politicians, the president, and various other [...]
ZNet, August 27, 2014 Should United States Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent, VT) come to Iowa and run in the US presidential 2015-2016 Caucus race here, as many Progressive Democrats are urging? He seems interested. In less than three weeks, “Bernie” will visit three Iowa Cities (Dubuque, Waterloo, and Des Moines) to hold “town halls” in [...]
ZNet, August 23, 2014 By the calculations of the White House, beheaded journalist James Foley’s life wasn’t worth the annual “earnings” of a top US corporate CEO. It wasn’t worth a tiny fraction of the money paid out by the federal government to giant corporations and their filthy well-off CEOs in the form of cost-plus “defense” contracts [...]
teleSur English, August 22, 2014 This essay was written on Wednesday, August 20, 2014. Numerous developments in the fast-moving Ferguson situation will certainly have occurred in intervening days and nights prior to this essay’ s publication. No Mystery Last Monday evening on the “Public” Broadcasting System’s nightly Newshour, Brian Fletcher, the white former mayor of Ferguson, Fletcher, said that [...]
First published on ZNet, August 17, 2014 Many United-States-of Americans like to think that they are fortunate to live a nation where the military is prohibited from interference in domestic civil affairs. Thanks is often given to the 1875 Posse Comitatus Act (hereafter “PCA”), commonly seen as prohibiting the use of the US Armed Forces [...]
teleSur English August 17, 2014 Imagine having a cousin who insists on drinking a bottle of vodka and smoking three packs of cigarettes each day. He eats the majority of his meals at fast-food restaurants and never exercises. He lurches from one terrible health crisis to another, something he likes to talk and complain about at great [...]