We spent six weeks in January and February in Ford City, Pennsylvania, my hometown. We stayed with my mother, in the house in which I grew up, and slept in the twin beds in my old room. Fifty years ago, I would pull up the covers and listen to faraway AM stations on my father’s… | more |
The Obtuseness of the "Left Establishment"
Recently a group of U.S. left-wingers, myself included, signed an open letter to certain members of the “left establishment,” urging them to come into open opposition to the Obama administration. Among those to whom the message is directed are Michael Moore, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Bill Fletcher, Tom Hayden, and Jesse Jackson, Jr., all of whom… | more |
I applaud the release of the first of hundreds of thousands of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. Hopefully, they will be an eye-opener for those who believe that their government officials are the world’s good guys. What they show is that no country is too small to escape U.S. meddling in its affairs,… | more |
Change We (Were Foolish to) Believe In
The U.S. 2010 midterm elections are over, and the postmortems have begun. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the influential liberal magazine the Nation and a frequent guest on television talk shows, said in a recent fund appeal, Dear Nation Reader, There’s no disguising it, the results of the midterm elections were, with few exceptions, grim,… | more |
Fear and Loathing at Saint Vincent College, An Update
Last December, I wrote an essay about my alma mater, Saint Vincent College, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. In it, I describe some troubling events. Ever since the ascendancy of the current archabbot, Douglas Nowicki, in 1991, the college has moved steadily to the right, culminating in the appointment in 2006 of James Towey, formerly head of… | more |
[This first appeared in counterpunch on August 17, 2010. This version includes hyperlinks.]. Sometimes events conspire to make you think that things are worse than you imagined. On August 3, Marilyn Buck died. Marilyn was a fighter in the struggle for racial justice and against the most virulent pestilence in the world—United States imperialism. Unlike… | more |
The motor force of capitalist economies is the accumulation of capital—the drive by businesses to make as much profit as possible and use as much of this profit as they can to expand their operations. The growth of capital is built into the nature of the system; it is relentless and never-ending. To justify this… | more |
What I Wrote in 2002 about the FARC in Colombia and the Maoists in Nepal
Below is an excerpt from Naming the System. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC is the Spanish acronym) is the oldest revolutionary army in Latin America. Since 2002, it has been under some of its severest attacks by the Colombian government under the right-wing president Álvaro Uribe, aided by considerable U.S. military aid and personnel, who are… | more |
"Support the Troops?" No!: A Review of The Deserter's Tale by Joshua Key
The United States is the most warlike nation on earth and has been for a very long time. It would take too much space simply to enumerate all of the places where the United States is involved today in wars of one kind or another. Not only are U.S. troops actively fighting in Iraq and… | more |
Throw the Reactionary Rulers of Iran onto History's Rubbish Heap
Nearly all of the world’s people, who are overwhelmingly wage laborers and peasants, endure oppression. Of course, societies vary considerably in both the degree and openness of this oppression. Sweden is no doubt a less repressive nation than is the United States, and the latter is less coercive than is Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, the lot… | more |