US politics

Dear Royal Baby: You had an ancestor named King George III that we Americans said a lot of nasty things about, and we’d like to apologize to you, since you seem like a nice baby and anyway, we’ve gotten over our dissatisfaction with your Highness’s family. We wonder if you’d like to take back over […]

Chris Hedges interviewed on The Real News : Excerpt of the transcript: “JAY: But, see, that’s what I’m concerned about as a citizen, I mean, whatever the journalist hat is supposed to be here, which is–. I was at dinner the other night with some people having somewhat similar conversation, why isn’t there a mass […]

In a disturbing development, the Associated Press has revealed emails in which former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels advocated banning the use of Howard Zinn’s text, “A People’s History of the United States” in the state’s educational systems. What’s troublesome is not dislike of a book but that Daniels seems to have been willing to misuse […]

Small protests were held in about 100 cities throughout the US on behalf of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old unarmed victim in a shooting incident in Florida whose armed killer was found not guilty this week. Some were demanding that the acquitted killer, George Zimmerman, be charged with depriving Martin of his civil rights. Martin’s parents […]

President Obama has spoken out on the Trayvon Martin case, saying that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” He spoke of how African-Americans are marked in US society as objects of special scrutiny, followed for no reason by security in department stores or reacted to with the body language of fear. He […]

The big question is whether Detroit’s bankruptcy and likely further decline is a fluke or whether it tells us something about the dystopia that the United States is becoming. It seems to me that the city’s problems are the difficulties of the country as a whole, especially the issues of deindustrialization, robotification, structural unemployment, the […]