Counterpunch, 3/16/2018 Julian Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, March 13, 2018). The Old Over the New Professional historians are a conservative crew (with a nice number of great exceptions) for the most part – in a “liberal” and Democratic Party kind of way. Part of this [...]
Counterpunch, 3/9/2018 El Presidente needs to feel strong and liked. He wants to feel like a popular man of independent action. He doesn’t like feeling weak and hated, like a hemmed-in punk and loser. He doesn’t like being told what to think or do by fancy-shmancy know-it-all professor and lawyer types. Boss Tweet is his [...]
Julian Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, March 13, 2018) A somewhat shorter version of this review appeared at the New York Journal of Books on March 14, 2018 This new collection of essays looking back on the Barack Obama White House is an interesting [...]
Counterpunch, 3/9/2018 Climate Crisis, Not “Climate Change” My next-to-last CounterPunch essay (“Someone Tell a Reporter: the Rich Are Destroying the Earth”) elicited a smart criticism from a senior scientist: “Please stop using the phrase ‘climate change.’ I am a 78-year-old, Ph.D. physicist who has been talking about the CLIMATE CRISIS for more than 35 years. To me, the mild, [...]
Truthdig, 3/8/2018 After the usual shock and horror, my reaction upon hearing about the latest United States mass shooting perpetrated by a demented white male with an assault weapon was, sad to say, “Here we go again.” I waited for the standard cycle to run its depressing course. The venues and details are different each [...]
Counterpunch,3/2/2018 www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/02/someone-tell-a-reporter-the-rich-are-destroying-the-earth/ Paul Street "I Said 'Why"? They Said They Didn't Know" Let history record that on Wednesday, September 6, 2017, 14 days after climate change-fueled Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas and 4 days before Hurricane Irma hit southern Florida, the climate-denying President of the United States Donald Trump went to North Dakota to [...]
Black Agenda Report, 2/28/2018 They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.” --- Hillary Clinton, 1996 The latest Marvel Comics science-fiction movie “Black Panther” is stealth ruling-class propaganda, consistent with [...]
Counterpunch, 2/23/2018 The Russians were…flocking to Bernie Sanders Facebook sites, and they were saying to Bernie Sanders supporters…’if you voted for Sanders, you have to understand Hillary Clinton is crazy, she’s a murderer, she is terrible,’ all kinds of horrible, horrible things, about Hillary Clinton….it was an effort to undermine American democracy and to really say horrible things about Secretary [...]
Truthdig, 2/20/2018 There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline [...]
Counterpunch, 2/16/2018 Donald Trump’s dysfunctional, dangerous, and deeply unpopular presidency is one of the most bizarre chapters in United States history. Imagine that a seasoned and clever journalist was given access to the inner workings of this wacky White House and permitted to observe its activities like “a fly on the wall,” with “something like [...]