In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equal...
This is the apotheosis of capitalism, the divine sanction of the free market, of unhindered profit and the most rapacious cruelties of globalization. Corporations, rapidly turning America into an olig...
The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christ...
The cri de coeur of this lost generation, orphans of global capitalism, rises up from deindustrialized cities across the nation. This generation has been cast aside by a society that views them as cog...
Slot machines cater, like the games on computers and phones, to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt, social stagnation, and a dysfunctional political system....
Sandy illustrated the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services, and abandons the wider po...
If anyone knows how fixed the Pulitzers are, it’s the editors at the Times. I was part of a New York Times team that won the Pulitzer for our coverage of global terrorism. I watched the Times rig them...
As long as the powers that be are in control, the oppression isn’t going to go anywhere, he said. It’s really going to take people to unite worldwide, not just in America, not just in St. Louis, not j...
The sack of kittens sinking in the icy creek increases the cold
When you’re violent you undermine everything.
We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people...
Today this key component of revolution—the gap between what people want, and indeed expect, and what they get—is being played out in the United States and many states in Europe during a new age of mou...
To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the...
Moral cowardice like Starbuck’s turns us into hostages. Mutiny is the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. And mutiny is our only salvation.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe we were wrong in choosing to cultivate life instead of worshipping death. But we made the choice without listening to those on the outside. Without listening to those who always...
The Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They...
The radical left and the radical right, each made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war. Their marginalized lives, battered by economic m...
Politicians, a moribund labor movement, and the mass media—either cowed or in the service of corporate power—assure the population that the old prosperity is still attainable, but via a different rout...
Many of the urban poor have been crippled and broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards, and police to randomly seize poor peopl...
Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious.