Z Magazine (July-August 2014). As the United States’ giant, globally unmatched, and racially hyper-disparate mass-incarceration regime exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, the reigning U.S. penal doctrine underwent a significant change. It shifted from the goal of “rehabilitation” to the objective of “incapacitation”—from prisoners’ societal redemption, restoration, and re-entry to their punitive disablement and exclusion. [...]
Originally published on ZNet, June 22, 2014 “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.” So said US Senator (D-MO) and future US Vice President and President Harry Truman on the [...]
First published on ZNet (June 19, 2014). Misleading as the right-wing US Republican noise and politics machine might be, there is more than a kernel of truth in that machine’s notion of Democratic Party’s politicos as a bunch of manipulative, fake-populist elitists. Sometimes those corporate politicos drop the Machiavellian ball and give away their game [...]
ZNet, June 13, 2014. “I am sorry for everything. The horror of America,” Bowe Bergdahl wrote to his family via e-mail before disappearing in eastern Afghanistan five years ago, “is disgusting.” A case in point is the right-wing feeding frenzy over the possibility that Bergdahl may have deserted his post – a frenzy so furious [...]
ZNet, June 11, 2014. One thing I’ve learned over many years of trying to read between the lines of “mainstream” corporate US media reports is that the best information often comes at the end. Look, for example, at a recent ABC-Yahoo Top Line report on a liberal documentary film about the big money behind the [...]
ZNet June 8, 2014. As a political science major with grand ambitions at Columbia University during the early Reagan era, Barack Obama certainly studied Niccolo Machiavelli’s famous treatise on Renaissance statecraft The Prince (1532). The following passage from that slim volume surely passed his eyes: “How praiseworthy it is for a prince to keep his [...]
Largely United States (US)-provoked events that could lead to regional and even global war are unfolding in Eastern Europe, sparking talk in the reigning US media-politics culture of a “new Cold War” and a return of “great power conflict” between the “democratic” United States and “autocratic Russia.” At the same time, significantly US-generated developments are [...]
Z Magazine (June 2014). It is no accident that many United States citizens seem bewildered when it comes to current events. It’s hard to make sense of a complex world when huge swaths of reality are denied serious and honest coverage and commentary in the nation’s reigning corporate “mainstream media” (“MSM”). It’s not for [...]
ZNet, May 14, 2014. The corporate-Orwellian absurdity of the Barack Obama administration never ceases to inspire awe. In recent years, Obama has tried to rally the Democratic Party base by claiming that he is a friend of working people in their struggle for higher wages and benefits. He has also worked to position himself as [...]
ZNet, May 2, 2014. I’m a little embarrassed to say that I have only just recently watched An Unreasonable Man (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492499/), the excellent film documentary about the life and career of Ralph Nader. The movie was released in 2007, after all. What can I say? I don’t watch a lot of movies. But this one was very [...]