Category Archives: Commentary

In the weeks since the 20th anniversary of 9/11, sensory memories of that disastrous day—things I haven’t thought about in years—came flooding back. Continue reading →

It is sometimes difficult to absorb how much the United States has changed in the past twenty years, and not for the better. When I was in grade school in the 1950s there was a favorite somewhat simplistic saying much employed by teachers to illustrate the success of the American way of life that prevailed at that time. It went “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” and it meant that the U.S. version of a robust and assertive capitalist economy generated opportunity and prosperity for the entire nation. Today, having witnessed the devastation and offshoring of the domestic manufacturing economy by those very same corporate managers, such an expression would be rightly sneered at and considered risible. Continue reading →

The whole progressive world is screaming at Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. Continue reading →

Texas’s cruel new anti-abortion law is more than just an unconstitutional restriction on reproductive choice. It’s also an egregious new frontier in late capitalism. Continue reading →

Last Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that some 4.3 million people had quit their jobs in August. That comes to about 2.9 percent of the workforce—up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting. Continue reading →

On August 29, in the final days of our 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, the United States launched a drone strike, firing a 20-pound Hellfire missile at an aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi as he parked his car outside his home in a residential neighborhood of Kabul. The lethal strike killed Ahmadi and nine members of his family, including seven children, five of whom were younger than 10. The children had come outside to meet Ahmadi as he returned home from his job at an American NGO where he distributed food to Afghans displaced by the war. He and his family had applied for refugee resettlement in the United States. Continue reading →

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions. Continue reading →

Language is politics and politics is power. This is why the misuse of language is particularly disturbing, especially when the innocent and vulnerable pay the price. Continue reading →

The soon to be constructed Barack Obama Presidential Center poses a great danger to the surrounding Black neighborhoods on the South Shore of Chicago. In fact, thanks to this $500 million, 19-acre homage to the 44th president, there may not be any Black people living there much longer. Continue reading →

Here are two terms you don’t expect to see together: “The state of Alabama” and “progressive leader.” (Okay, I’m a Texan, so I have no standing to point at the rank regressiveness of any other state government… but still, Alabama?) Continue reading →

There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into tangibly diminishing Israel’s stronghold over the US Congress, it promises to be of great consequence in the coming years. Continue reading →

The New York Times and other outlets report that most police killings in this country are “mislabeled.” The sanitized language is worse than an understatement because it implies that these murders are categorized improperly due to ordinary human error. In fact, there is a long and sordid history of covering up these crimes. The initial coroner’s report for George Floyd, whose murder was witnessed by millions of people, reported drug use and underlying health conditions as the causes of death. Continue reading →

America’s long-term fascist coup may have begun on November 22, 1963, with the murder of John Kennedy. Continue reading →

President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema. Continue reading →

Corporate ideologues never cease blathering that government programs should be run like a business. Continue reading →

Have you heard about the people in that new condo building over at 432? They’re having quite a spat with the developer. Floods from the plumbing. Scary noises and vibrations. The whole building had to empty out for an overhaul of the electrical system, and plenty of folks living there fear getting stuck—for hours—on the elevators. Such a shame. Continue reading →

“Polarization” is the word most associated with the positions of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The mass media and the commentators never tire of this focus, in part because such clashes create the flashes conducive to daily coverage. Continue reading →

As a full-time substitute teacher in a school system on the Eastern US seaboard, I am assigned to cover for state-certified teachers who are absent from duty. I’ve had many assignments over the past couple of years including working with special education/students with disabilities, and monitoring Spanish, Math, Art, and US History classes. It was the content, or lack thereof, of the US History class that was the impetus for this article. Continue reading →

An urgent task is awaiting us: considering the progression of events, we must quickly liberate ourselves from the limits and confines placed on the Afghanistan discourse, which have been imposed by US-centered Western propaganda for over 20 years, and counting. A first step is that we must not allow the future political discourse pertaining to this very subject to remain hostage to American priorities—successes, failures and geostrategic interests. Continue reading →

Right now, corporations and the ultra-rich are spending millions to derail President Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Behind the scenes, they’re hard at work to keep our elected officials from helping our country recover from the pandemic. Continue reading →

Voters in Berlin not only re-elected a Social Democratic-Green-Left coalition government but also voted for a non-binding referendum that calls for the Berlin government to purchase at a fair market value some 243,000 apartments owned mainly by two German companies, Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen SE. The cost of purchasing the rental units is estimated to be some $45 billion. Housing costs have skyrocketed in the German capital as German real estate companies continue to charge tenants usurious rents. Continue reading →

Just what shape Germany’s governing coalition will take is still unclear in the aftermath of the September 26 election, which saw the Social Democrats (SPD), led by finance minister Olaf Scholz, come away with just over a quarter of the vote, at 25.7 percent. The balance of power in Germany is now held by the Greens and the Free Democrats, which, taken together, received more votes than the victorious SPD or the Christian Democratic Union, the party of outgoing Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel. Continue reading →

The headline at Fox “News” blares: “German Elections: Big Setback for Merkel’s Conservatives as Center-Left Party Comes Out on Top.” In a single sentence, it summarizes everything wrong with how American media and the American public understand what “conservative” means. Continue reading →

The political division in Palestinian society is deep-rooted, and must not be reduced to convenient claims about the ‘Hamas-Fatah split’, elections, the Oslo accords and subsequent disagreements. The division is linked to events that preceded all of these, and not even the death or incapacitation of the octogenarian Mahmoud Abbas will advance Palestinian unity by an iota. Continue reading →

Trump just unleashed an unhinged, barely coherent rant about the possibility President Biden might reveal what was going on in the White House on January 6, the day Trump tried to finally end, once and for all, any possibility of governmental oversight of his ongoing criminal career. He believed he could follow in the footsteps of grifters before him who’ve taken control of and then drained dry countries from Hungary to Russia, Brazil to Turkey and The Philippines. Continue reading →

Washington isn’t quite sure what to do after the chaotic end to America’s ‘forever’ war. Some in Washington bitterly regret exiting from Afghanistan at all, and advocate for an immediate return; some just want to move on—to the China ‘Cold War’, that is. The cries from the initial Establishment ‘melt down’ and its articulation of pain over the Kabul withdrawal débacle, however, indicates the extent to which the almost obsessive focus on ‘Hobbling China’ nevertheless seems like an humiliating retreat to U.S. hawks, habituated to more global, and unlimited interventions. Continue reading →

Just one year after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Republican nominees on the Supreme Court are on the way to overturning Roe v. Wade. But they’re going out of their way to speak out publicly against the partisanship they’re actively engaged in. Continue reading →

When debating immigration policy with people who have deluded themselves into believing that it’s any of their business where other people choose to live or work, I run into a lot of bad arguments. Of all those arguments, probably the silliest is “but they don’t speak English.” Continue reading →

As lawmakers scramble to finalize a historic jobs and infrastructure package, huge fights are underway to figure out how to fund it. Continue reading →

Scenes of thousands of Afghans flooding the Kabul International Airport to flee the country as Taliban fighters were quickly consolidating their control over the capital, raised many questions, leading amongst them: who are these people and why are they running away? Continue reading →

Demographers looking back—years from now—on America’s annual mortality rates are going to find an asterisk on the years 2020 and 2021. The text behind that asterisk is going to give the reason why so many more Americans died in those particular years than the years right before. Continue reading →