On vultures and Chelsea Manning

I had two pieces published recently that I have yet to tell you to read. They are:

1) A piece for Al Jazeera English on the bipartisan transphobia that followed the announcement that the whistleblower known as Bradley Manning wishes to identify as a woman named Chelsea.

2) A piece for Inter Press Service on a recent US court ruling that, if not overturned by the Supreme Court or overruled by the Obama administration, will make it easier for so-called vulture funds to buy up developing-world debt for cheap and then force said countries to pay them back tens, sometime hundreds of times what they originally paid.

Good day to you.

The liberal presidency

Go read my latest piece over at Al Jazeera, where I argue that his progressive fans are right: Barack Obama really is a liberal.

Bigotry for broadcast

What's it like meeting hatemongers such as Pamela Geller and the folks from Westboro Baptist Church? I tell you in my latest piece for Al Jazeera.

The West goes to pot

In my latest piece for Al Jazeera, I recount how a trip to a Hollywood plastic surgeon led to me embracing alternative medicine and Adult Swim. Check it out.

Preying on the prayerful

The attack came early. Like any coward, the killer wasn't interested in a fair fight, and chances are he didn't even know whom he was killing. Having stalked his prey for reasons that even now aren't entirely clear, he struck when his victims were most vulnerable: as they prayed in their house of worship. Within minutes, a once-peaceful place became a war zone, blood-smeared floors littered with the lifeless bodies of worshipers. And for what?

Read the rest at Al Jazeera.

Is the Democratic Party a vehicle for radical change?

Los Angeles, CA - By this fall, the two major political parties in the United States will have spent around $10bn this election cycle to persuade an increasingly sceptical US public that there is more than just a stylistic difference between a Republican and a Democrat. Naturally, this campaign will focus primarily on the superficial (is Mitt Romney too weird to be president? Is Barack Obama too cool? And who loves America/Israel more?), as maintaining the facade of electoral choice requires obscuring the broad areas of bipartisan agreement: bailouts for the rich, prisons for the poor, and drone strikes for the poor and foreign.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera.

The conservatism of Rachel Maddow

Once upon a time - say, three years ago - your average Democrat appeared to care about issues of war and peace. When the man dropping the bombs spoke with an affected Texas twang, the moral and fiscal costs of empire were the subject of numerous protests and earnest panel discussions, the issue not just a banal matter of policy upon which reasonable people could disagree, but a matter of the nation's very soul.

Then the guy in the White House changed.

Now, if the Democratic rank and file haven't necessarily learned to love the bomb - though many certainly have - they have at least learned to stop worrying about it. Barack Obama may have dramatically expanded the war in Afghanistan, launched twice as many drone strikes in Pakistan as his predecessor and dropped women-and-children killing cluster bombs in Yemen, but peruse a liberal magazine or blog and you're more likely to find a strongly worded denunciation of Rush Limbaugh than the president. War isn't over, but one could be forgiven for thinking that it is.

Given the lamentable state of liberal affairs, Drift, a new book from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, is refreshing. Most left-of-centre pundits long ago relegated the issue of killing poor foreigners in unjustifiable wars of aggression to the status of a niche concern, somewhere between Mitt Romney's family dog and the search results for "Santorum" in terms of national importance. So in that sense, it's nice to see a prominent progressive at least trying to grapple with the evils of militarism and rise of the US empire. It's just a shame the book isn't very good.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera.

'Foreclosing on the commons'

Check out my latest column for Al Jazeera, where I look to Peter Kropotkin for advise on addressing the US foreclosure crisis.

When Spanish isn't enough to sell a war

Check out my latest column for Al Jazeera, on Spanish-language broadcaster Univision's sudden shift to producing English-language war propaganda.

Bradley Manning and the American empire

My first of what I'm hoping will be a regular bi-weekly column is now up over at Al Jazeera. Read it. Tweet it. Love it.