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Since the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy (and the Vietnam War that had much to do with all three) it has been hard for historically-literate and open-minded Americans to generate much patriotic fervor on the Fourth of July. But they should have been skeptical long before those idealism-shattering events. My own seriously deficient high school education in world and American history has necessitated decades of catch-up reading and research in order to find the truth about the dark, covered-up  underbelly of America.

The killing of a Muslim family on June 6 in Ontario, Canada, again presented an opportunity for Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, to brand himself as a voice of reason and communal harmony. However, Trudeau’s amiable and reassuring language is designed to veil a sinister reality which has, for many years, hidden the true face of Canadian politics.

When former US President Barack Obama used an old cliché to denigrate his political opponent, the late US Senator, John McCain, he triggered a political controversy lasting several days. 

“You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” Obama said at a campaign event in 2008. The maxim indicates that superficial changes have no bearings on outcomes and that modifying our facade does not alter who we really are.

American politicians are an authority on the subject. They are experts on artificial, rhetorical and, ultimately, shallow change. Once again, Washington’s political make-up artists are busy at work. 

I was planning to go on a trip to Venezuela as an international delegate from the US working class section for “The Congress of the Peoples (El Congreso de los Pueblos)” conference, which was also the bicentennial for an important battle for the independence of Venezuela, led by the liberator Bolivar, the Battle of Carabobo in 1821. People from all over the world were coming, not just from this hemisphere, I was especially looking forward to meeting comrades from Libya, a country whose history I have studied extensively, and which is still suffering the consequences of the NATO invasion 10 years ago. It is interesting to note that June 23rd Micaela Bastidas, who is mentioned in the speech, and I was unaware of till after writing it, had her birthday. The conference was from June 21st-24th. I also mention Evo Morales, who I later found out was present at the conference. There were logistical problems in the last moment and I could not go, but I plan to go in the fall. This is the speech I would have gave had I been able to go. There were many speakers, I did a video reading it, but it was unable to be shown.

In that “the show must go on” spirit, live theater is returning to Los Angeles’ stages. On what used to be its adjoining parking lot, The Fountain Theatre has built an impressive Outdoor Stage, an open air, socially distanced 99-seater. So, to reverse Joni Mitchell’s admonishment in “Big Yellow Taxi”: “They paved a parking lot, And put up a playhouse.” Along with the excitement of seeing old familiar faces who’d survived the plague year-plus, your humble scribe looked forward to reviewing his first play, in person, in about 15 months.

"Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." -- Anonymous

The infamous decision of the NeoConservative, pro-corporate, US Supreme Court in their infamous “Citizens United” decision in 2010 has further strengthened the already powerful and over-privileged status of the corruptible, purely profit-mitivated, multinational corporations that control most everything in the United States. The 5-4 decision has made into law the absurd notion that corporations deserve the same rights as individual human citizens.

Cleveland has been spiraling downward. It’s one of the poorest cities in the country, beset by worsening violent crime, poverty and decaying infrastructure. Now, 42 years after the end of his first term as mayor, Dennis Kucinich is ready for his second.

Kucinich won a race for mayor of Cleveland at age 31 and promptly infuriated the power structure, which could not accept his insistence that the city’s electric utility should remain under public control. Mayor Kucinich challenged and mocked the greed and anti-democratic zeal of the banks that drove the city into bankruptcy when he refused to accede to the corrupt demands that the Municipal Light Plant be sold off. After defeating a recall campaign in 1978, he lost a bid for re-election the next year -- but left an enduring legacy.

On May 25, famous American actor, Mark Ruffalo, tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

 “I have reflected and wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding, “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”

 But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of ‘hyperbole’?

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is as much American as he is Israeli. While other Israeli leaders have made their strong relationship with Washington a cornerstone in their politics, Netanyahu’s political style was essentially American from the start. 

Netanyahu spent many of his formative years in the United States. He lived in Philadelphia as a child, graduated from Cheltenham High School and earned a degree in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. He then opted to live in the US, not Israel, when he joined the Boston Consulting Group.

“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.”

I offer these words of Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose 2019 essay is part of the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” to the Heritage Foundation and the horde of Republican politicians currently trying to update the look and feel of American racism (a.k.a., “the lie”), to make it, you know, respectable and politically correct, so that it fits seamlessly into the mores of the 21st century.