Black Agenda Report, March 12, 2014. Frederick C. Harris, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2014 [2012]) Academic specialization can be a harsh mistress.  Look at the recently re-issued and paperback version of ColumbiaUniversity political scientist Frederick C. Harris’ important and engaging [...]

 First published on ZNet, March 6, 2014.  Recently I was asked if I thought the Obama administration was involved to any significant degree in encouraging civil unrest in Venezuela. My answer begins with a question of its own: do bears shit in the woods? The Obama White House aided and abetted the military overthrow of [...]

 First published on ZNet, March 1, 2014 According to a recent bracing and much-discussed online essay commissioned and published by the progressive talk show host and political commentator Bill Moyers, popular governance – we could even say popular sovereignty – is a myth in the United States.[1] There are, the essay’s author writes, two U.S. [...]

Z Magazine, March 2014. According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the most significant threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat [...]

*A much shorter version of this talk (below) was delivered as a Keynote Address to a University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee Conference on Racial Formation and Racial Blindness sponsored by the UW-Milwaukee History Department Graduate Students on February 14, 2014. First published on ZNet, February 23, 2014. Thank you for inviting me up here to [...]

First published on ZNet, February 20, 2014,  Sometimes you don’t grasp the essence of something until you’ve been removed from it for a while. Take television. I don’t watch a lot of it anymore. I haven’t in quite a few years. It’s not about cultural Luddism. It has to do with the analog-digital switchover some [...]

First published on ZNet, February 12, 2014. The United States’ corporate mass media and political class conduct fake debates and childish presentations of issues for the public – for the deliberately bewildered herd. Meanwhile, honest and candid discussion occurs with within the nation’s business and political establishment, which needs and wants to know what’s actually [...]

First published on ZNet, February 7, 2014 Years ago in another lifetime I went every day for a week to the Chicago Historical Society and combed through every issue published during the 1920s of The Swift Arrow, the company newspaper of the giant Chicago plant of the Swift & Company meatpacking company. It was an early [...]

First published in Z Magazine, February 2014. Capitalism finds some of its most under-acknowledged supporters among liberal and progressive commentators who pile ridicule on some of its most egregious offenders atop the financial sector. Look, for one example, at television personality Dylan Ratigan’s book Dirty Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires From [...]

First published at Counterpunch, January 31, 2014 Diseases and Conditions Obamaphelia: a Short History and Diagnostic Guide by PAUL STREET Obamaphelia, “the Obama disease:”  a delusional belief that Barack Obama is a progressive, peace- and justice-oriented, liberal and even left politician and policymaker.  The belief is maintained despite abundant evidence to the contrary dating to and [...]