A Cautionary Tale A Short Story Souls on ICE Henry Hitz They weren’t the best neighbors, Jorge Rodriguez, his wife Mercedes, and their three kids. The three-year-old Jesus screamed a lot, especially at night when it was time to sleep, as if their houses were too close together. Valarie, eleven, seemed relatively together in her blue and white Catholic school uniform, but she was a serial litterer, leaving candy wrappers and empty Dorito bags strewn along the sidewalk as she walked home from school. And then there was Alberto, sullen but mature at 15, with what looked to Mike like […]

We need to ensure that the children of Gaza haven’t died in vain. Their deaths and the brutal genocide that caused them is inspiring an international movement to end the cynical nonsense of war. We might be approaching a revolutionary moment. Is it 1904 in Russia? The people lost that war the next year but established the foundation of their victory in 1917. Biden and his ilk have seriously fucked up, exposing their beloved capitalism as a genocidal monster. You see what he’s saying in Gaza: to maintain our imperial hegemony, we will do anything, no matter how horrendous. Biden will lose […]

No. Go ahead and mourn. We need to mourn the magnitude of Israeli genocide. But we need to get beyond lamentation. As the leader of the US ruling class, Biden is showing us just how far they will go to keep their imperial hegemony. It’s not a new message. They repeated it in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, South and Central America, Iraq, Libya, Afgahnistan. It doesn’t matter that the US “lost” those wars, it’s the message of utterly cynical committent to genocide. Linden Johnson said it best in his address to the troops in Vietnam. “They want what we got, […]

YEMEN MARCHES FOR PALESTINE Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times this week entitled “A Titanic Geopolitical Struggle is Underway.” The column clarifies the neoliberal imperialist view of Israel’s Gaza genocide, as well as the Ukraine war. Before reading it, my conclusion was that it Bibi must have pictures of US politicians on Epstein’s island for Biden and his Democratic colleagues to pursue a policy of supporting genocide that will almost certainly cost them the election in November.  But Friedman puts the genocide in context. The “titanic” struggle (will it sink too?) he describes is between what […]

Palestinian and Israeli unity: https://www.facebook.com/reel/223627420611350/ Just to be clear, I am 100% in favor of a ceasefire, a free Palestine, and against Zionist genocide. I was weaned on antisemitism, drank it in with my mother’s milk. My uncle used to “joke,” “Hitler was half right. He should have killed the other half.” My mother scoffed, but didn’t argue with him. I think most US and European gentiles have been inculcated with antisemitism almost as much as with anti-Black racism. And, as with racism, white gentiles need to own our prejudices which persist despite our arduous efforts to contradict them and […]

War is the midwife of social change goes the cliché, butchering what Marx said. Russia after World War I, China after World War II.  The war in Gaza has triggered something worldwide. Where it goes remains to be seen, but there have been more people in the streets for Palestine than for any cause, at least since the Vietnam War, if even then. My Facebook feed is full of all kinds of people supporting Palestine and attacking the Zionists. I haven’t yet seen much of a class analysis, so let me venture there. The world has been in class warfare, […]

Buried in the New York Times´ rave review (by Phillip Maclak) of the superb series, Boots Riley’s “I’m a Virgo,” is this sentence: “Riley, himself an avowed communist, has always been an unabashedly political artist.” It’s refreshing to see the word “communist” used so casually. At the same time it reflects the weakness of the  US communist movement, no longer considered a threat, at least in the US neoliberal media.  With the notable exceptions of China, Vietnam, Cuba and perhaps India, communist parties have become mere shadows of their former selves. Most leftists squirm at the use of the word. Between […]

It’s time to do something. Humanity is facing an existential emergency – this is not news. War, climate collapse, and global wealth inequality are fanning the flames of an apocalyptic catastrophe – if we – the people of the world, the 99% – don’t act now. The person who came up with the idea that “we are the 99%,” David Graeber. was one of the founders of the Occupy movement in New York (2011-12). He was also co-author with David Wengrow of the Dawn of Everything, and died weeks after finishing this groundbreaking book, subtitled A New History of Humanity. Let’s make this […]

The Godfather of Harlem, a series currently on MGM+ and Hulu, is among the best shows on television since The Wire. It’s the story of real-life gangster Bumpy Johnson, played brilliantly by Forrest Whittaker, navigating Harlem in the early sixties (1963-65), between his friend Malcolm X, his sometime ally Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and the five Italian Mafia families. Nearly all the characters are historical.  Each episode, especially in the first two seasons, is finely crafted with parallel plots between the Mafia families, Bumpy’s family, and Malcolm’s family. The episodes are often centered around historical events, like the 1963 March […]

This seems so obvious it hardly needs explanation: the cause of impending climate collapse is capitalism. As I said in my blog last week, one step we can take is transforming the public schools to educate the next generation in combatting climate collapse. But beyond that, we need to advocate vigorously for our governments to do what it takes to curtail the continued spewing of greenhouse gasses by the fossil fuel and energy sectors of the economy, which most likely will ultimately require nationalization of those sectors. We need to plan for a post-capitalist society. The term “Socialism” has such a […]