First published at ZNet on July 17, 2013. People ignorant of history and an informed sense of themselves as historical actors and agents are often a danger both to themselves and others. They are cut off from key lessons – both positive and negative – on how to interact with their fellow human and sentient [...]

Originally published on ZNet, July 4, 2013. One hundred and fifty years ago today (I am writing on July 3, 2013) there occurred a pivotal moment in the collapse of the southern Confederacy’s military struggle to preserve and expand black chattel slavery in the United States. The two great armies of the North and South [...]

Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed Democracy (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2010). Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past - George Orwell, 1984 Origiinally published on ZNet, July 2, 2013 .We are approaching the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther [...]

Originally published on ZNet, June 27, 2013.  The U.S. Citizenry v. the U.S. Government on Snowden  I would like U.S. corporate media to stop saying that “the U.S.” is “pressing” and “lashing out at China and Russia” (I use a typical quote from New York Times headlines yesterday) in its effort to extradite the “national [...]

Originally published on ZNet, June 23, 2013. Two weeks ago I sat with 742 others to hear leading left intellectual Noam Chomsky address the annual Left Forum in New York City. His speech was billed by the forum as “a major address” that would “speak to the theme of ‘Mobilizing for Ecological/ Economic Transformation.’”  “Wrecked”  [...]

Originally published on ZNet (June 12, 2013). Three or so weeks ago I read a mainstream news commentary on how the Obama administration was challenged by “three big scandals this spring”: (1) the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged special targeting of Tea Party organizations; (2) the continuing brouhaha over the State Department and White House’s early [...]

First published at Z Magazine, June 2013. Remember when Barack Obama threw his white maternal grandmother under the bus of his lust for the presidency while throwing his former black preacher Reverend Jeremiah Wright more completely under that bus in the spring of 2007? That was cold, but it’s nothing compared to the president’s current [...]

Mr. Street delivered these remarks at Black Agenda Report’s “Black Politics at the Tail End of Obama” session at the Left Forum, in New York City, June 9, 2013. Orginally published at Black Agenda Report. The wonderful radical commentator John Pilger said something important about the dawning age of Obama in July 2009.  “The clever [...]

First published on ZNet, May 14, 2013. By now, perhaps, you have picked up a media report claiming a recent and almost miraculous comeback for United States manufacturing – one that is, to quote a recent Time magazine cover story, “defying the narrative of the nation’s supposedly inevitable manufacturing decline.”  “Made in the USA”  There is [...]

Published in Z Magazine, May 2013. In a story that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with business rule as usual in Washington, U.S. military contractors will suffer no great or particular loss from the federal austerity fiscal policy called sequestration. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA)—the top lobbying and public relations arm of the nation’s high-tech corporate [...]