In one of the poorest neighborhoods of Bogota, Belen, I saw two people bleeding in the middle of the road. One person was clearly dead. A group of onlookers was moving frantically, shouting loudly. There was an attempt to resurrect an injured man. I asked the driver to inquire whether our help was needed, but...
Read MoreIn May of 2014, Frank Bruni wrote an article for the NYT titled ‘America the Shrunken’, in which he detailed what he called “the downward arc of a diminished enterprise” that was the USA, quoting friends who claimed their children would live in a more impoverished America, that the reign was over and the slide...
Read MoreIn July of 2013, Rose Aguilar wrote a wonderful article for al-Jazeera [1], in which she discussed the dire hunger crisis that envelops the US today. In her article, she brought back a memory of something I had long forgotten, an event that so outraged the American public that the government was temporarily forced to...
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My writing on society and politics has made me quite a few friends, some I’ve been able to visit on their home turf, from Scranton to Burgazada, to Leipzig. Others have come to me. In July of 2018, just before I left the US for good, I had a few beers with Bill, who drove...
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In 2017, Chuck Orloski’s 27-year marriage collapsed. Chased from his home and broke, he had to take refuge at Lighthouse, a Scranton group home run by a blind, 54-year-old nun, Lindy Morelli. That Thanksgiving, I took a four-hour bus ride from Philly to stay five days with my friend, Chuck, at the Lighthouse. The rolling...
Read MoreIncreasingly, social science is dominated by Leftist ideologues who use the remaining respect that academia still has among the public to inculcate students and public alike with their equalitarian dogmas. But there are honorable exceptions. One of these: Peter Turchin, a Russian who is professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. Turchin, who...
Read MoreThe US government and Western media enjoy accusing China of producing unreliable numbers, but it is widely recognised that there are no national economic statistics in the world as deliberately unreliable and misleading as those of the US. Yet one more feature of the Great Transformation was the US government’s innovativeness in fabricating statistics that...
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Tires are burning, smoke is rising towards the sky. It is October, the 18th day of the month, the capital city of Lebanon, in the past known as the “Paris of the East”, is covered in smoke. For years I was warning that the country governed by corrupt, indifferent elites, could not hold together, indefinitely....
Read MoreTed Rall • October 26, 2019 • 1,200 Words
In 1991, demographers Neil Howe and William Strauss published their awkwardly titled tome "13th Gen," about Generation X — the Americans born between 1961 and 1981. If Xers had paid attention, they would have committed suicide. "Child poverty, employment, wages, home ownership, arrest records — in every category, this generation, the 13th since the American...
Read MoreThirty-eight years ago when I was in charge of United States domestic economic policy, the US Treasury and President Reagan believed that the purpose of economic policy was to serve the country, not Wall Street and the banks or the corporations or any of the various organized interest groups. Our idea was that policy could...
Read MoreA Total-Returns Profile of Economic Polarization in America
Based on work with Dirk Bezemer, with charts by Howard Reed Polarization in America, 23 September 2019 Those who praise the post-2008 economy as a successful recovery point to the fact that the stock market has soared to all-time highs, while the unemployment rate has fallen to a decade-low. But is the stock market a...
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Trust the late Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would. Following his Jack Kerouac wanderlust, Bourdain had arrived in Seattle to spotlight the manner in which high-tech was changing the city, draining it of its character and of the many quirky characters that made Seattle what it...
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As writer or thinker, Jack London can’t touch George Orwell, but he’s nearly the Brit’s equal when it comes to describing society’s bottom. To both, being a writer is as much a physical as an intellectual endeavor. Wading into everything, they braved all discomforts and dangers. This attitude has become very rare, and not just...
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If you’re a member of the working class, 1/3 of your pay has been stolen from you. You would think this would be front page news every day until the problem is fixed. Not only is that a huge amount of money for a huge portion of the country, but you would expect our left...
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There is a dearth of writing about work, its variety, tedium and grind. This is understandable, since most writers have devoted much of their time to writing and reading, and not painting houses, cleaning toilets, washing dishes, planting crops or performing mind numbingly monotonous tasks on an assembly line, etc. This blind spot or ignorance...
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Many have already noticed: The U.S. really, really doesn’t feel like the world leader, or even as a ‘first world country’. Of course, I write that sarcastically, as I detest expressions like ‘first world’, and the ‘third world’. But readers know what I mean. Bridges, subways, inner cities, everything is crumbling, falling apart. When I...
Read MoreThere are stories that are unrelated to the news, but can explain much better than many combat reports, why people like me are fighting against the Empire and imperialism, with such determination and vehemence. Not all stories are ‘big’ or ‘heroic’; not all include famous people or iconic struggles. Not all take place on battlefields....
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America as Others See it
Americans are brought up to believe that the United States is a shining city on a hill, a light to mankind, that the world envies us for our values and freedoms, and hates us because we have them. This is ground into us from birth. Those of us now long in the tooth remember the...
Read MoreThe big issue at Sister’s shamba is the construction of the fish farm. The water is there during the rainy season. All that is necessary to produce fish is building three terraced retention ponds at the back of the property which slopes gradually and then abruptly into a ravine which is dry during most of...
Read MoreOn May 28 I wrote that “the Western world is collapsing so rapidly that I am afraid that I am going to outlive it” ( ). My article was about the rising demonization of white people that is producing a collapse in their confidence. Inculcated guilt is making whites willing to accept discrimination against them...
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I’ve spent 13 of the last 17 months outside the USA, and have no plan or wish to return. I wouldn’t mind an honest cheeseburger now and then, however, but each version I’ve had here has been awful, with the worst something that came in a plastic bag, with the “burger” a brownish orange paste...
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Aristotle in blue. The consensus among political and economic leaders today is that we must maximize economic growth. This assumption affects virtually the entire political spectrum, with the exception of a radical minority of anti-growth Greens advocating décroissance (“de-growth”). Everybody would like more money in their personal pocketbook, on their company’s balance sheet, and/or the...
Read MoreI was listening while driving to rightwing talk radio. It is BS just like NPR. It was about the great Trump economy compared to the terrible Obama one. The US hasn’t had a great economy since jobs offshoring began in the 1990s, and with robotics about to launch Americans are unlikely ever again to experience...
Read MoreVirtually every memory that Sister Jean has of her childhood is suffused with an awareness of her family’s grinding poverty. Sister Jean was born in 1982 in a village called Lirembe in the western part of Kenya near Kakamega, the county seat, the second of seven children and her parents’ first female child. She was...
Read MoreThe one million people living in the south Wales valleys, a place that was once the engine room of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, are poorer today than the population of parts of Bulgaria, Romania and Poland. Unsurprisingly, they have few good things to say about anybody in authority – the EU in Brussels, the...
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Life History Theory and the Crisis of the White Working Class
One of the best-selling nonfiction books of 2012 was Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.[1] It was widely reviewed, including an informative essay by Roger Devlin in this publication.[2] As stated in the subtitle, Murray focused on White Americans, and he saw a growing class divide among this demographic. Paradoxically, by...
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I painted houses for a decade, and on our crews, we always knew of each other’s relative competence, willingness to work, sense of responsibility, substance addictions, if any, and, ultimately, character. My roommate, Jay, for example, really didn’t give a fuck, for he was often late, but somehow always rehired, for our boss, Joe LeBlanc,...
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The word 'catastrophe' has several meanings, but in its original meaning in Greek the word means a "sudden downturn" (in Greek katastrophē ‘overturning, sudden turn,’ from kata- ‘down’ + strophē ‘turning’). As for the word "superpower" it also has several possible definitions, but my preferred one is this one "Superpower is a term used to...
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The first time I ever heard of the new young author, J.D. Vance, I was listening to National Public Radio (NPR) sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign, and he was the subject of an interview. The NPR interviewer seemed to love the guy and his message. The subject at hand was his newly published book...
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My first book, Fake House (2000), was dedicated to “the unchosen,” and by that, I meant all those who are not particularly blessed at birth or during life, just ordinary people, in short, with their daily exertion and endurance. Further, I’ve always considered losing to be our common bond and bedrock, for no matter how...
Read MoreEcological economists, such as Herman E. Daly, stress that as the external costs of pollution and resource exhaustion are not included in Gross Domestic Product, we do not know whether an increase in GDP is a gain or a loss. External costs are huge and growing larger. Historically, manufacturing and industrial corporations, corporate farming, city...
Read MoreNot to Americans
The housing market is now apparently turning down. Consumer incomes are limited by jobs offshoring and the ability of employers to hold down wages and salaries. The Federal Reserve seems committed to higher interest rates—in my view to protect the exchange value of the US dollar on which Washington’s power is based. The arrogant fools...
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Céline half joked, “If you stay anywhere long enough, everyone and everything will stink up, just for your special benefit.” Without this pungency, however, there is no real understanding of anything, and Céline knew this as well as anyone. With tremendous physical and mental courage, the man endured. He survived being wounded in WWI, a...
Read MoreDon’t believe them
For two decades the offshoring of American jobs to Asia and Mexico has destroyed the careers and incomes of tens of millions of US citizens, the pension tax base for state and local governments, the federal tax base for Social Security and Medicare, and the opportunity society that once characterized the United States of America....
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In the United States of Inequality
So effectively has the Beltway establishment captured the concept of national security that, for most of us, it automatically conjures up images of terrorist groups, cyber warriors, or “rogue states.” To ward off such foes, the United States maintains a historically unprecedented constellation of military bases abroad and, since 9/11, has waged wars in Afghanistan,...
Read MoreIn these years, much attention has been paid to the rise of the national security state and little indeed to what TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon calls the national (in)security state. The Trump administration and a Republican Congress have, of course, given a remarkable gift, a tax “reform” bill, to the already fabulously wealthy and are...
Read MoreThe Poor in America
Imagine this: every year during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 there were nearly four million home foreclosures. In that period, with job losses mounting, nearly 15% of American households were categorized as “food insecure.” To many of those who weren’t foreclosed upon, who didn’t lose their jobs, who weren’t “food insecure,” to the pundits writing...
Read MoreWhen you come from the South Bronx, you have the option of writing about different kinds of characters than those who so often inhabit the universe of fiction we’re used to. That was true of Beverly Gologorsky’s first novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, which focused on the lost vets of the...
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I was just interviewed by two Temple journalism students, Amelia Burns and Erin Moran, and though they appeared very bright and enterprising, with Erin already landing a job that pays all her bills, I feel for these young ladies, for this is a horrible time to make and sell words, of any kind, and the...
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Last Saturday, five eternally misunderstood and oppressed gentlemen fired 41 shots at a crowd at 20th and Susquehanna, killing one and injuring four others, including a 5-year-old boy. The TV news reported that the deceased was a “standout basketball player.” North Philly is generally not good for your health and happiness. Though neighborhoods have cute,...
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I’m sitting in a spacious bar, Love City, that was once a factory. Too slicked up, it’s not quite a ruin bar, of the kind you find in Budapest. The patrons are mostly hipsters and yuppies, but with a handful of Joe Sixpacks thrown in. Looking like contractors, they’re probably fixing properties in this rapidly...
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I’m back in Philly to wrap things up, return my apartment, give a paid talk and say goodbye to my friends. With Felix Giordano, I’ve hit bars in the Italian Market, Point Breeze, Pennsport, Fishtown and Whitman. Soon, we’ll run over to Billy Boy’s in the Pine Barrens, where the owner/cook makes some of the...
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Introduction Nero played his fiddle, Obama shot baskets and Trump twittered while their empires burned. What makes empires decay and what makes empires expand has everything to do with their relations between rulers and the ruled. Several factors are decisive. These include: (1) rent, land and housing, (2) the direction of living standards, (3) the...
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Introduction During his recent visit to New Hampshire on 3/20/18, President Trump declared once again that the US is facing a ‘drug epidemic’. This time he advocated the death penalty for criminal drug dealers as the solution to a national crisis that has killed over 1 million Americans since the 1990’s (when the blockbuster prescription...
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Indoctrinated for decades by relativism, we’re supposed to consider all life styles equal and never pass judgments. There must be legitimate reasons for a culture to embrace, for example, child marriage, bride kidnapping, female circumcision, Oprah Winfrey, or universal, all day long access to pornography. Shit, though, is a hard sell, thus open sewers or...
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At age 18, Theo volunteered for the Marines and was sent to Vietnam. Based near the demilitarized zone, he saw much fighting and lost most of his left arm in 1968. Post war, Theo learned karate, opened a dojo, married, fathered three children, got his college degree and became a high school teacher. The Philly...
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As we move into 2018, I am swinging away from the Republicans. I don’t support the Paul Ryan “Better Way” agenda. I don’t support neoliberal economics. I think we have been going in the wrong direction since the 1970s and don’t want to continue going down this road. Opioid Deaths: As we all know, the...
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With their vast parking lots and chain stores, strip malls may appear generic, impersonal and characterless, but each harbors an intense web of social interactions, with an infinity of stories to tell, but to even state this is redundant, for there’s no man, woman, child or dog who isn’t, by his lonesome, asshole self, a...
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On Thanksgiving, I came to Scranton to stay with a 65-year-old friend who’s going through a cage fight kind of divorce, though only one side is dishing out the sharp elbows and knees. Just hearing Christmas music at the Dollar Store was driving him mad, Chuck confessed. The four-hour bus ride from Philly stopped in...
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To go home, I had to take a taxi to Saigon’s airport, fly to Hanoi, then on to Hong Kong, where during a 5 ½ hour layover I’d take a train to Central to hang out a bit, then back to the airport to fly to JFK, then hop on two trains just to get...
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