CounterPunch, 5.5.2022 It’s been amusing to watch keyboard warriors and commentators claim to know why an early draft was leaked of the right-wing United States Supreme Court (hereafter “the Court”) decision to abolish women’s constitutional right to an abortion and to place the legality of abortions completely in the hands of state governments. One school [...]
CounterPunch, 4.29.2022 Trumptrocities Writing the third chapter of my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America, was an exhausting and soul-chilling experience. Titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21,” this chapter attempted to catalogue, categorize, and cross-reference the transgressions of the malignant ogre Donald Trump as US president. It [...]
CounterPunch, 4.15.2022 And the Nominees Were… A month or so ago, I put up an informal online social media survey on what events could possibly knock the war carnage in Ukraine off the top of the cable news cycle. My own and others’ morbid leading nominees went something like this: + a US mass shooting [...]
CounterPunch, 4.22.2022 The moral hypocrisy on display in the West’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is stunning. The West is quite naturally shocked and appalled about the misery criminally inflicted on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s incursion but has no remotely comparable concern for the misery criminally inflicted on: the people of Gaza by [...]
CounterPunch, 4.8.2022 Fear of the Mob: The Liberal Mis-leadership Class United States “democracy” is plagued by the presence of an elitist liberal mis-leadership class that fears the “mob” and “rabble” – everyday citizens and the working-class majority – more than it worries about right-wing (now neofascist) rule. This liberal “elite” is militantly opposed to popular movements. It [...]
CounterPunch, 4.1.2022 US Americans, as products of television and Hollywood, want good guys and bad guys. So who have been the good guys in the Ukraine War and the politics surrounding it? Not Putin and the Kremlin Certainly NOT the fascistic dictator Vladimir Putin and those who back his ugly invasion of Ukraine. His assault [...]
CounterPunch, 3.25.2022 I’ve been darkly amused by the large number of people I’ve seen and heard dismissing the possibility of nuclear World War III emerging from the Ukraine War: “That’s unthinkable, it would never happen.” So I have been told both by blue and yellow flag-waving Ukraine fans demanding a recklessly provocative US/NATO No-Fly Zone [...]
CounterPunch, 3.24.2022 It has been darkly amusing to watch one Pavlovian “Enemy of Enemy is my Friend” buffoon after another among what CounterPuncher Eric Draitser calls those “terminally online leftists who push a pro-Kremlin narrative about [Ukrainian] Nazis” line up behind Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in the names of anti-imperialism and anti-fascism. No love (and [...]
CounterPunch, 3.18.2022 *This essay is an updated version and partial reconfiguration of a presentation I gave online to the Chicago chapter of the national organization Refuse Fascism last Monday night. Thanks to the war in Ukraine, we are now closer to nuclear holocaust than any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. To quote Bob Dylan, “let [...]
CounterPunch, 3.11.2022 Is it inherently wrong to ask, “what about” X’s crimes and evil when confronted with Y’s crimes and evil? Is that “what about-ist” rationalization of Y’s crimes and evil? Not necessarily. Not when: one does not cite X’s crimes and evil to excuse Y’s crimes and evil; X’s crimes and evil are relevant [...]