LEFT IN EAST DAKOTA

I wrote a piece on the trainwreck that is Obamacare for Counterpunch. Read here!

The following is a passage from the late Alexander Cockburn's last book, A Colossal Wreck. It is available here . May 2 "A loan-at-interest is the only known thing in the entire universe that does not suffer entropy. It grows with time. All other things, ourselves included, fade and die." Those of you maxed out on your credit cards but still making those monthly payments at some outrageous rate know this as well as I (who have learned by dint of bitter experience not to have credit cards at all). Those first three sentences came from an informative letter that Stan Lusby of Otago, New Zealand, sent to one of my favorite newspapers, Catholic Worker , a while back. Lusby commenced his discussion of capitalism with some personal disclosures. He had, Lusby confided, known all his life that lending money at interest was intrinsically wrong. "I came late in life to Christianity, and it was a great source of comfort to verify my intuition through scripture, although I...

Republicans don't have the popular support to realize their antebellum era/gilded age utopia, so they exploited the silly rules of a anti-democratic and outdated Constitution in order to shut down the government in an attempt to extort something from their jellyfish rival party of capital. That's why the federal government is shut down.

I wrote a brief history of al-Shabaab for Counterpunch. Read it here!

There are plenty of things wrong with Obamacare. Namely, it subsidizes rather than abolishes the parasitic insurance industry. That said, this campaign (I found this propaganda poster near my apartment at a bus stop off University Ave. in St. Paul) is disgusting. You don't have to be terribly clever to see the undertones of this smut. Black people, bus stop. We get it. In the generalized world of demographic based advertising, that group of "takers" are the ones who will be using the subsidies offered to lower income people, so we'd rather you not have any healthcare than participate in government supported access to private insurance. And that's the kicker. The fucking insurance is private! Since when do these shitheads have a problem with government money going to private industry? Their ham-fisted ideology somehow tells them a market exchange for private insurance is "big government." They are lying to people with the hope they don't receive...

There is a fairly wide swath of people who refuse to believe government (local, state, and federal) when it comes to issues where the government either has no credible incentive to lie, or it would take a magnificent conspiracy across many levels in order to fudge the truth. Issues like localized public safety, public schools, or even basic economic data have become "controversial" to many people purported to be exercising a healthy distrust of power. Yes, governments need to be kept in check regarding these issues, but most often agencies that handle this sort of stuff are made up of public servants who do great work.  Meanwhile, when it comes to questioning US military power, where the government has lied repeatedly and been proven to do so (with the results being millions of deaths), many of these same people are the first ones to blindly cheer on every single American imperial military adventure (they usually call it "the troops") and cast self-ri...

"Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the va...