Counterpunch 2/9/2018 Donald Trump has been struggling with historically unmatched low approval ratings – in the middle and high 30s for the most part – across most of his presidency. That is hardly surprising, given Boss Tweet’s relentlessly racist, sexist, plutocratic, eco-cidal, narcissistic, childish, and militantly un-presidential behavior. Like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush before [...]
Truthdig, 2/4/2018 My first political memory is the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). I was 5 years old, home from kindergarten on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. I was in the living room in a small apartment in the liberal, racially integrated neighborhood of Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago. The [...]
Counterpunch, February 2, 2018 Donald Trump’s many critics like to note that he has been struggling with epically low approval ratings – in the middle and high 30s for the most part – across most of his presidency. That is hardly surprising, given Boss Tweet’s relentlessly un-presidential behavior, which helps make a laughingstock out of [...]
Counterpunch, 1/26/2018 Capitalism moves through long waves and shorter-term cycles of growth and stagnation, boom and bust, rising and falling asset values, mounting and dropping profit rates, job creation and job elimination, increasing and declining investment. It always has, and it always will for as long as it exists. The operative forces behind these fluctuations [...]
Truthdig, 1/24/2018 With the news cycle taken over by the latest madness emerging from the mouth or Twitter feed of the childish “orange one” in the White House, could we step back from the circus to reflect like adults on the social and historical forces that produced the clown presidency? Haymarket Books’ new collection of [...]
Counterpunch, 1/19/2018 As the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s violent death (on April 4, 1968) grows closer, you can expect to hear more and more in U.S. corporate media about the real and alleged details of his immediate physical assassination (or perhaps execution). You will not be told about King’s subsequent and ongoing [...]
Counterpunch, 1/16/2018 Most of Donald Trump’s vicious and moronic statements are best ignored. Some, though, are unavoidable. Where to begin in processing the horror and idiocy of Donald Trump’s comments during a meeting with U.S. congresspersons late last week? Trump ripped immigration to the U.S. from “shithole countries” like El Salvador, Haiti and “Africa.” “Why [...]
Truthdig, 1/10/2018 The Trump administration’s recent move to permit oil and gas drilling in 90 percent of the federal government’s offshore land presents an opportunity. With vast protected areas of the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic under threat, now is a good time to challenge some of the myths working against Americans’ willingness and ability to [...]
*This essay (below) was published on Counterpunch on Friday, January 12, 2018. It was written and submitted before I learned about Donald Trump's sickening racist comments calling Haiti and Africa (home to 48 nations) "shithole countries." Trump's racist remarks have led me to alter and add text (seen in italics) in this essay's next-to-last paragraph. Liberals [...]
Counterpunch, 1/5/2018 Most of the media’s attention on journalist Michael Wolff’s “explosive” new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House has focused on the disclosure that Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon used the words “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” to describe Donald Trump, Jr. and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s infamous June 2016 meeting with [...]