Originally published on ZNet, July 29, 2004. I come from the same Chicago neighborhood (Hyde Park) as the nation's official new political rock star Barack Obama. I work in urban policy and civil rights and I've recently been telling leftists to engage in "tactical" presidential voting - for Kerry in undecided states and for leftists [...]
First published on ZNet, January 24, 2014. Getting radical anti-capitalist ideas wrong and ignoring those ideas completely are timeworn traditions for U.S. intellectuals. The habits go back a long way and have continued through the current millennium. The consequences can be deadly, as is seen with two short books printed by leading U.S. publishing firms [...]
First published on Counterpunch on January 17-19, 2014. Last summer I happened upon a neat find in a used book store. I found an original edition of Martin Luther King’s posthumously published book The Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) – a compilation of five lectures King gave over the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) [...]
First appeared on ZNet on January 10, 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 US was [...]
First published on ZNet, December 21, 2013 An “Unsung Triumph” Never underestimate the dastardly state-capitalist depravity of the dollar Democrats. Take Larry Summers, the leading Wall Street Democrat and Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University. During a recent appearance on the power-worshipping Charlie Rose show, Summers hailed the rise of domestic fracking as [...]
Why I am an Eco-Socialist Open University of the Left December 14, 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buHmNaTGanU&feature=c4-overview&list=UUIZ_969hFecsMFl7N7ERP3Q
First published on ZNet on Friday, December 13, 2013 Lost in the minutiae of indexing a book last week, I missed the latest of Barack Obama’s many oratorical monuments to what the formerly left Christopher Hitchens once described as the “essence of American politics…the manipulation of populism by elitism.”[1] It was a real doozey. In a [...]
First published on ZNet, December 11, 2013 “Business’ Election Role to Grow” Never underestimate the ability of establishment journalists and other elite opinion-shapers to distort and even invert reality in accord with the interests of the business elite. Look, for example, at a recent “news” item penned by Gerald Seib, the longstanding Washington Bureau for The [...]
Black Agenda Report (December 3, 2013) and ZNet (November 28, 2013) One of the many ways in which corporate news media functions to serve concentrated wealth and power is to focus the coverage of current events on relatively superficial matters removed from core questions relating to the fundamental problem of who owns and rules society. [...]
First published on ZNet. Friday, November 22, 2013. The Left commentator Edward S Herman once (applying a phrase from the anthropologist Lisa Peattie) usefully described a key function of the corporate mass media as “normalizing the unthinkable.”[1] Another and related function of that media might be called “de-contextualizing daily and current events.” An excellent example [...]