Counterpunch, 6-11-2021 A Childhood Memory When I was a grade-schooler in the mid-late 1960s my parents used to rent a lake cottage in the Indiana Dunes for a month or so each summer. Somewhere in the woods behind the lakeshore there lived a bitter old white guy and property owner named, literally, Miser. Miser liked [...]
Counterpunch 6-09-2021 Yes, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (Demublican-WV) is a repugnant reptile who richly deserves your contempt. His vapid, fascism-enabling opposition to ending the Senate filibuster and to passing the We the People Act (H.R.1) is despicable. The filibuster, which requires 60 of 100 Senate votes to hear and pass a bill, is an arch-reactionary [...]
Paul Street Counterpunch, June 4, 2021 The sense of relief that came over many Americans after the malignant pandemo-fascist Donald Trump’s removal from power seems increasingly misplaced. The feeling of relaxation is understandable. The pandemic is in significant retreat inside the U.S. as summer dawns, thanks in part to the Biden administration’s vaccination efforts. The [...]
Counterpunch, 5-28-2021 The Next Civil War The Trump Republicans are a neofascist party. They sought to subvert and then nullify a presidential election under cult command of an authoritarian racist who encouraged talk of “civil war” and instigated an attack on the US Capitol in an open attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s [...]
Counterpunch* 5 -22- 2021 *New title here and new endnote (see below) The wrongheaded but ubiquitous notion that the Republican Amerikaner Trump base is the (um, white) “working-class” drawn to “populism” has been disproven in study after study showing that the Trumpenvolk are relatively affluent, not proletarian and poor, and driven by an ugly, mutually [...]
Counterpunch, 5-02-2021 I am told that a leading senior and radical American historian quipped last year that a second Trump administration might have given the American Left a chance to gather together – under armed guard “in Yankee Stadium.” A bit of excessively paranoid dark humor? Maybe. But maybe not entirely. Consider. As President of [...]
Counterpunch, 4-23-2021 Slavery lives on in U.S.-American life, crippling “our” supposed grand “democracy” in numerous ways. The massive wealth, income, and health gaps between Black and white Americans and the related persistent segregation and mass arrest and incarceration of Black Americans cannot be properly understood without reference to the two and a half centuries in [...]
Counterpunch, 4-20-2021 Since most U.S.-Americans know little about social and political reality beyond their own limited experience and bubbles, powerfully deceptive narratives and images disseminated by the corporate media easily distort public perceptions. The election and presidency of Barack Obama fed the dangerous illusion that racism no longer posed barriers to Black advancement and equality [...]
Counterpunch, 4-16-2021 Much of America’s chatterbox class is aghast at the authoritarian racism on ugly display on the white-nationalist Amerikaner FOX News right. The Don Lemons, Anderson Coopers, Rachel Maddows, and Joy Reids et al. shake their heads and roll their eyes at the nauseating idiocy of the Republifascist Caucasians who advance and support measures [...]
Counterpunch 4-9-2021 Something stinks in the wall-to-wall broadcast of every detail in the Derek Chauvin trial. The hegemonic (in a Marxian sense) result of drilling down so microscopically on one racist cop’s super-transgression, treating the killer as a rogue anomaly, is to disappear the broader mass-carceral white supremacist police-state and the underlying system of racialized class oppression [...]