Counterpunch, July 21, 2017 A recent Washington Post and ABC poll finds that just 37 percent of Americans think that the Democratic Party “stands for something.” Fifty two percent say it’s about nothing more than opposing Trump. The 37 percent is right. The Democratic Party stands for something, alright. It stands for the socio-pathological system of class [...]
Black Agenda Report, July 18, 2017 Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow is properly understood as a classic text on and against the regime of racist mass incarceration and criminal- (felony-) marking that arose and became deeply entrenched in the United States during the last third of the previous century. There were three key problems, however, [...]
Truthdig, July 15, 2017 “So, my boss, I shouldn’t say this. … Just to give you some context, Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half, we covered the climate accords. … The CEO of CNN [Jeff Zucker, the network’s president] said in our internal meeting ... ‘Good job [...]
Counterpunch, July 14, 2017 There’s something really wrong with “Public” Broadcasting System “NewsHour” host and Council on Foreign Relations member Judy Woodruff. Nearly every weekday night she participates in the corporate state media’s elevation of the dubious, politically motivated charge that the ridiculous Insane Clown President Donald Trump is a Russian agent who stole the 2016 presidential [...]
Truthdig, July 7, 2017 When a false narrative becomes pervasive, ask cui bono? Who benefits? Take the notion that Donald Trump rode into the White House on a great upsurge of support from poor, white working-class voters drawn to the Republican candidate’s “populist” pitch in key Rust Belt states. This conventional “Rust Belt rebellion” wisdom was pronounced on [...]
Counterpunch, July 4, 2017 My fellow U.S.-Americans, we’ve never had a revolution. It’s true that slaveowner Thomas Jefferson’s July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence (DOI) articulated the revolutionary notion that the people have the right to dissolve a government that no longer serves their interests. But the “American Revolution” was a national independence movement led [...]
Counterpunch, June 30, 2017 The More Effective Evil I’ve cast presidential ballots for the Green Party from the at least technically contested state of Iowa in the last three elections. I’ve long and consistently used a metaphor from the original version of Upton Sinclair’s famous Socialist novel The Jungle, describing the Democrats as one of “two wings [...]
Counterpunch, June 16, 2017 When the bitter Bernie Sanders fan James T. Hodgkinson shot up the Republican congressional baseball team on a practice diamond in fashionable Alexandria, Virginia this last Wednesday, five great American pastimes – baseball, bad politics, deadly gun violence, the sensationalist news cycle, and the police state – came together with great [...]
Truthdig, June 23, 2017 Why, a correspondent recently asked me, is there so much animosity between the United States and Iran? On Iran’s side, it goes back to 1953, when the U.S. engineered a coup against the secular and democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammad Mossadegh. After the coup, there followed a quarter-century of dictatorial [...]
Counterpunch, June 13, 2017 Summer’s here and the time is right for sacrilege in the streets. Here are twelve blasphemous thoughts for the current Russo-phobic season, likely to be a real carbon- and (see below) capital-cooked scorcher. Wouldn’t That Have Been Russia’s Job? Forget for now the question of whether the Kremlin intervened to any [...]