CounterPunch, 6.15.2022 Nobody on the Left should deride as insignificant the current public US House hearings on Donald Trump’s effort to stay in power ultimately through violent means in the wake of Joe Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 presidential election. Unimportant? Only to someone inured to the difference between previously normative bourgeois democracy and [...]
CounterPunch, 6.10.2022 What has been happening in Germany is a matter of the gravest portent for the whole civilized world…The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too [...]
CounterPunch, 6.7.2022 Remarkable bird, id’nit, squire? Lovely plumage! – Michael Palin in the Monty Python “Dead Parrot Sketch,” December 7, 1969 I shoulda quit you, baby, long time ago …If I had’a followed, my first mind I’d a been gone, since my second time… And I wouldn’t have been here, down on the killin’ floor [...]
CounterPunch, 6.3.2022 Seven days in the drought (the “worst the West has seen in 1200 years”) -, war-, and inflation-plagued month of May 2022 were emblematic of US-American fascitization – the self-described “world’s greatest democracy’s” creeping descent into a fascist white and Christian nationalist state beyond previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law. May 2: “Literal Enslavement” [...]
CounterPunch, 5.27.2022 Imagine this as a draft dystopian script for a Netflix series or a Hollywood movie: An orange-hued ex-United States president who was accurately described as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” by the world’s leading intellectual runs free, with no serious threat of meaningful prosecution after he tried to overthrow the government [...]
CounterPunch, 5.25.2022 We need protests not endless millions of dollars poured only into elections. The majority support access to abortion but can’t see themselves as a majority without demonstrations. The autocrats in SCOTUS can’t feel their illegitimacy without protests. We can’t rebuild a movement without movement in the streets. * Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, May 3, 2022 Don’t [...]
CounterPunch, May 20, 2022 Real resisters and revolutionaries calculate and plan, but they aren’t about the crystal ball. They aren’t about the betting odds. They are about human agency and revolutionary praxis to change the odds for the better. The Ugly Foreseeable: Six Dark Predictions It shouldn’t be so easy to predict future terrible events. [...]
CounterPunch, May 13, 2022 So when does MSNBC talking head and former US Senate staffer and hit show West Wing writer-producer Lawrence O’Donnell call for a referendum to call a Constituent Assembly to re-write the 18th century aristo-republican charter that disastrously governs US politics and policy in the 21st Century United States? Having recently returned [...]
CounterPunch, 5.11.2022 F*#k the Courts and legislators, women are not incubators * Chant heard during a Chicago abortion rights march of thousands (disgustingly reported as “hundreds” by local media) on May 7, 2022 It’s time. This is not a drill. The time is now to step outside what Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) calls the “killing [...]
CounterPunch, 5.6.2022 The treaty of Brest-Litovsk was an unexampled practical display of Marxist morality, a vindication of that class-oriented and anti-nationalist world view which the treachery of the Second International had almost destroyed. Lenin gave up to the German Empire a good share of the Russian Empire – land, people, and industrial resources – in [...]