The Coming Storm

               ** This article was published on  Counterpunch  August  30, 2018 ** Humanity faces a multi-faceted crisis. Endless  wars   of imperial aggression, both overt  and   covert – from Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan to Yemen, Palestine and Central and South America. These conflagrations compel those at the bottom of the economic pyramid to fight and die to protect the wealth and privileges of those at the top. These wars destroy human beings and our natural environment, but also opportunities and resources that could be allocated to human betterment. Nuclear  arsenals   remain on  hair trigger   alert, with fearsome destructive potential, one accident or a single myopic policy decision away from wiping out the entire human race.  Economic inequality , having already reached  obscene proportions , is showing no sign of slowing down or reversing course. Racism, xenophobia, sexism and other forms of hate-filled discrimination are used to distract and divide those victi

The U.S. and its Gulf and NATO allies have been fighting a war of aggression against Syria for  over five years . Plans to replace the Syrian government with one more subservient to the needs of U.S. corporate interests began  well before that . The Pentagon has spent $41.1 billion in Syria since 2001,  according to a study  by Brown University. U.S allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar have funneled huge  additional sums  to  ISIS and Al-Qaeda  affiliated “rebels” in Syria since at least 2011. The Pentagon, prone to understating its footprint,  admits to 2,000  uninvited soldiers currently stationed in Syria against the will of the Syrian people. The real number is likely more than  twice that  when one accounts for secret operatives, contractors, support operations and the like. Meanwhile, the U.S. currently  occupies 30%  of Syrian territory against the will of the Syrian people, including significant water, oil and natural gas reserves. As with Iraq, Libya and a  long list of other wars

               ** This article was published on  Counterpunch  December  28, 2017 ** Real unemployment in the U.S. today hovers around 8.3% , afflicting more than 17 million people. This is roughly equivalent to the combined populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. Over one third of the working age population has given up looking for work. On top of this, pundits project that many more jobs will be lost to automation in the near future, with computers and robots replacing as many as 49% of the jobs now done by humans. The mechanization of dirty, dangerous, repetitive, mind-numbing tasks should be a blessing. Instead, the future is described in apocalyptic terms. Why? The problem is rooted in the disingenuous narrative we are fed. Jobs, so the story goes, are mysterious, ephemeral things, whose comings and goings are largely beyond our control. The number of available jobs has to vary independently from the work that needs to be done and the number of p