CounterPunch Weekend Edition, July 22 / 24, 2011 How Pundits and Politicians Miss the Real Source of Madness in Washington Blaming the Tea Party By PAUL STREET and ANTHONY DiMAGGIO It’s easy to blame “the Tea Party” for the ever more insane rightward drift of American politics and policy that is on such ugly display [...]
Iowa City, IA. July 20, 2011. Published on ZNet on July 22, 2011. Recently the liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow did something unusual in elite U.S. media. He acknowledged in a serious and respectful way the existence and struggles of non-affluent working class Americans. In an interesting column titled “They, Too, Sing America,” [...]
Don’t look now but American politics and policy have gone so far to the right – consistent with more than three decades of starboard drift – that we might as well formally rename the United States “Empire and Inequality, Incorporated.” Read further...
Paul Street July 8, 2011 The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them… - Mutinous citizen in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1609), Act 1, Scene 1 As the current epic crisis of capitalism – the first crisis of capitalism [...]
Deletion of essential context and information is one of the many ways in which American corporate news media works to take the risk of American democracy for the rich and powerful. Take a recent front-page Chicago Tribune story titled “Obama Looks to Lock Up Big Money "......read further
Iowa City, IA. June 24, 2011 . Published on Black Agenda Report on July 5, 2011. Few aspects of America’s authoritarian, corporate-managed political culture[1] are more pernicious than its narrow fetish of candidate- and office-holder identity. Consider the current state of political and economic opinion in Black America, long the United States’ most skeptical and leftmost ethno-cultural segment [...]
Obama’s top image-molder David Axelrod claims to reject “the notion of a political brand….’We’re not an iPod or a box of soap,” he tells USA Today, adding that “a campaign gives you a chance to talk to people…without cloudy filters. You can speak directly to them through advertising…You get a chance to communicate your story [...]
Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio wouldn't dispute the Tea Party's impact, but they aren't buying the media spin. Their Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics systematically dismantles the notion that the Tea Party represented a genuine independent political movement. And they document the role of the major media [...]
The popular neo-Keynesian Cambridge (United Kingdom) economist Ha-Joon Chang is a clever man who might do well to think and/or care more about the ecological catastrophe that the modern disaster called capitalism1 has all too characteristically cooked up for humanity – and a few other things about that system along the way....Read further.
The historically preserved Old South Meeting House in downtown Boston --- “Old South” --- is most well known, historically speaking, for its role in the Boston Tea Party protest of December 16, 1773. Asked if the Old South historical site (preserved as a museum in the 1870s) has seen more foot traffic than usual with the rise of [...]