SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
social media
What Americans Need to Know About St. Patrick's Day
It's not about shamrocks and beer.
Mar 17, 2025
St. Patrick's Day is celebrated by millions of Americans every year.
It's a recognition of the shared heritage of two great countries.
But the meaning of St. Patrick is something most Americans get exactly wrong.
This misunderstanding reveals why these two nations—once so similar—are now worlds apart.
Here's what Americans need to know.
***
[Sound of a bullet chambered, waves breaking in indifference.]
Venice Beach, twilight.
I'm minding my own business when—
[Flash]
A gun is pointed at my face.
Random violence. Pointless. American.
But this isn't just about crime. It's deeper.
In America, violence isn't a national crisis—it's a block-by-block lottery. You're safe until you're suddenly not.
I grew up in Ireland, and we simply don't live this way.
Why?
Because violence isn't just about guns—it's about trust.
The Real Heist
[Cut to marble floors, quiet handshakes, silent theft.]
While Americans are busy fighting each other—left vs. right, immigrants, tariffs—the real robbery happens quietly:
- Trust gutted—institutions hollowed until safety nets snap.
- Inequality weaponized—the rich feast; everyone else fights each other over crumbs.
- Desperation manufactured—crime, addiction, despair—all intentional side-effects of profit-driven division.
Ireland is no saint. But this desperation doesn't dominate, because trust—even when imperfect—remains intact. Arguments rarely become instant death sentences. Less inequality means fewer people forced into despair. Institutions still hold, even when they falter.
The difference? People in Ireland still expect their institutions to function. Americans expect them to fail.
Trust itself is being deliberately dismantled, turning neighbors into threats instead of allies.
And when trust collapses, what and who fills the void?
Manufactured Chaos
[Cut to your uncle, veins bulging, shouting about "libtards!"]
Left vs. Right: the puppet show you can't stop watching.
- Two-party spectacle: a staged distraction from real theft.
- Media outrage: addictive scrolling keeping you blind to what's really happening.
- Global chaos: Siding with dictators, up is down, bad is good.
Your neighbor isn't robbing you.
They are. Slashing the federal government, agencies, medicaid, SNAP under the guise of efficiency and long-term good to turn billionaires into trillionaires while consolidating power. All the while…
Pulling your strings.
Carjacking your anger.
They aren't just feeding your fear—they're refining it into a weapon.
St. Patrick's Fire: A Moral Inferno
[Cut to 433 AD. Hilltop. A forbidden flame.]
The Irish High King had one rule: No fire before mine.
Then Patrick lit his fire—a flame of open defiance.
The Druids warned: "If that fire isn't put out, it'll never be extinguished."
They were right. It burned through an empire for 800 years.
So, what's America's fire?
- It's not partisan warfare.
- It's not scapegoating migrants.
- It's a moral stand against those profiting from fear—against those robbing your fundamental right to live without fear.
Who Are the Real Snakes?
Patrick banished snakes from Ireland—but there were no snakes. They were poisoners of trust, hope, and community.
America's snakes?
- Social media owners who profit from, and shape, fear.
- Politicians who weaponize division.
- Corporate interests dismantling your safety to line their pockets.
President Donald Trump isn't fighting snakes—he is the snake. But he's not alone. They're everywhere, wearing different skins, exploiting the fear they manufacture.
The Only Question That Matters This St. Patrick's Day
Forget distractions. Forget the puppet show.
Ask yourself this:
Do I feel safe?
Not just from violence—
- Safe from losing healthcare overnight?
- Safe from sudden joblessness?
- Safe enough to trust your community, your future?
America doesn't have to be this way.
They built it like this.
Which means you can unbuild it. And trust can be rebuilt.
But you must see the snakes. If you don't, you'll never fight the right battle—you'll fight each other while they watch and profit.
***
St. Patrick was a slave. He defied a corrupt king. He lit a fire.
That fire was truth—a moral truth against injustice. And it can't be put out.
It burned through 800 years of oppression, famine, and war.
He didn't just bring religion—he brought something far more powerful.
St. Patrick's Day isn't about shamrocks or beer.
It's about your resistance.
This year, don't just celebrate.
Act.
Light. Your. Fire.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Crime of the Century: An Old Soundtrack to Our Current Nightmare
How Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem foreshadowed 2025’s catastrophe.
Mar 16, 2025
Listening to Supertramp’s album Crime of the Century in 2025 is like dusting off an old diary and realizing you were right about everything.
Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem was not meant to be trapped in a decade drowning in idealism. Rather, it was a collection of elegies that resonate with me more now, in our current nightmare, than when I first listened to it. The mournful melodies and plaintive lyrics (by Richard Davies and Roger Hodgson) speak of the crises of vague spiritual thirst, self-loathing, money culture, schools churning out compliant citizens, and unabashed corruption.
It came to a head in the 2025 inauguration of an American president with the grand unveiling of a well-worn power system but with a staggering level of audacity. Near the president and out of the shadows, there stood magnates of seemingly incurable hubris who reached their bliss points, invited to take reign of sensitive policy and firing authority and gain access to the country’s secrets and public money. A new administration wasted no time unveiling a “billionaires’ row” of insatiable elites who aren’t just playing the game. They own it. Collectively worth $1.35 trillion, they have become brands in human flesh, more recognizable than the corporate empires they built.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture.
And somehow, it’s all there… in the album.
Four years after its release, I came across Crime of the Century in a used album store on the main strip of Carbondale, Illinois, during my undergraduate years at Southern Illinois University. Every other week or so, I’d walk to the music store that always smelled like stale cannabis and was managed by a large man with cannabis-stained teeth and a lot of opinions. He was clearheaded enough to have promised me that he’d keep an eye out for Supertramp cassettes and vinyls.
Back in the apartment, I had Crime on repeat for longer than I will confess. Somewhere in the silage of existential angst, I decrypted the pangs that augured the coming of a novel strain of corruption and indifference capable of shaking the moral foundations of anything in its path, including a nuked-up, power-bloated country, exulting in its hegemonic dominance, yet hanging on to conceits of global moral leadership.
There were plenty of suspects to point fingers at back in the 70s, but the hardest part—which the album still dares us to do—was staring down ourselves, we the self-satisfied searchers, critics, and activists with bell-bottoms, inebriated by our magical thinking of independence and convincing ourselves that we were above the detritus and contributed nothing to the collective rot. You’ll find this indictment in the concluding lines of the title track, “Crime of the Century”:
Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let’s see
But that's not right, oh no, what’s the story?
Look, there’s you and there's me
I can’t say I saw today’s condition coming when I was 20. But it does seem close to a kind of Bayesian reasoning, where you have an initial, under-substantiated certitude about something and then see new evidence that confirms your most primitive claims and worries.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture. Former President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Vice President Kamala Harris have exited the stage, but their hollow-point scruples remain contagious, repurposed by their successors. What we are witnessing is not a change in direction but a seamless handoff, a continuation of the same imperial prerogatives, now dressed in different rhetoric.
The Oval Office openly covets resources and land that belong to other people. The perverse logic of supremacy and strange level of entitlement (epistemic assumptions of Empire) are rubber-stamped by compromised elected and appointed men and women of Pharaonic arrogance, who have narcissistic visions of taking Gaza’s seashore and gas fields, Greenland’s minerals, Canada’s lumber and oil, Ukraine’s massive rare earth reserves, and Panama’s canal.
So do we need more proof of active colonial appetites?
The existential dread of Crime of the Century should have shown us an imp squatting on the chest of a defeated counterculture that my generation thoughtlessly held on to. The costumes and performance of rebellion ultimately became products themselves, mass-packaged and sold back to consumers, as the edited book Commodify Your Dissent painfully argued a bit too late in 1997. To identify with grunge or goth moods, for example, subsequent generations purchased the look from fashion brands who created inventories, price points, and a market that preyed on real feelings of alienation and disillusionment in youth culture.
At the heart of Crime of the Century is a troubling accusation: We’re complicit in the corruption we claim to despise. It’s easy to cast blame on political elites, but the rot runs deeper. Media personalities, especially the high-profile journalists of broadcast celebrity and late-night comics, make their careers selectively criticizing these very figures and what they represent—only to rub shoulders with them at off-camera galas, clink wine glasses, invite them onto their shows, and turn critique into entertainment.
Each day, the celebrity reporters and broadcasters spew hundreds of thousands of words to demonstrate their erudition, apparently depleting their allotment of verbiage for the day, leaving no room for “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
The oligarchs of influence thrive because, in part, we fund them. We engage the platforms, consume and share the storylines, and chase virality. We freely give away the inventories of our privacy. We do this knowing that the details of our inner sanctums are the products that social media giants are trafficking for great profit. The hard truth is, no one’s fully off the grid. We’re entangled in the wires we trip over and then curse at them like podcasters.
So, what do we do? Keep spinning the album and nervously thumb prayer beads (misbaha, in colloquial Arabic), cowering in the album’s pastel and gloomy brilliance?
With the exception of those who dared to speak truth to power (mainly through alternative presses that captured the right kind of radical), my generation watered the tillage that sprouted our current conundrum. One of the tracks of Crime exposed many for what they were: “For we dreamed a lot / And we schemed a lot / And we tried to sing of love before the stage fell apart.” That’s right, we were cantors of phantom ideals that were about to fall apart early in the 1980s, when John Lennon was murdered in New York City and Ronald Regan sired trickle down economics, which “foolishly trusted the collective greed of a people” to care for the needy and marginalized.
Songwriters like Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, and Rick Davies, along with scholars like Christopher Lasch, sounded the alarm early, but most of us dismissed it, assuming the warning had to be for someone else. In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch saw through the cracks of idiot-proof idealism and noticed the shape of social and psychological narcissism that soon enough would be given the key to the Oval Office.
My generation’s surviving tenants need to stop lecturing and stop recounting imagined glories of the past. It’s time to move out of the way, especially for the generation of young people now whom we bitterly complain about, but who actually are better positioned to succeed where we failed. They have ideals but are not idealists, and they are jaded, but not overly so, just enough. Former and current students of mine, they are not content with just listening. With hunger and the right kind of impatience, they will write new songs. Can’t wait to hear them, for if we’re still noticing the crimes of 1974 in 2025, it can only mean the crime never stopped. It just learned to dress better.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Capitalism’s Free Speech Trap: Bezos Shows How Billionaires Set the Boundaries of Debate
The Washington Post’s shift toward free-market advocacy is not simply an editorial decision; it is a strategic move to reinforce the dominant ideological framework that benefits the billionaire class.
Feb 27, 2025
The recent directive by Jeff Bezos that The Washington Post editorial section should promote “personal liberties and free markets” is a stark reminder of how freedom under capitalism often boils down to the freedom of economic elites to dictate the parameters of public discourse. While Bezos has suggested that social media provides alternative perspectives, thus absolving his newspaper of the responsibility to represent diverse viewpoints, his decision is part of a broader trend of billionaire media ownership shaping acceptable discourse.
This phenomenon is visible across digital platforms as well. Elon Musk’s control over X (formerly Twitter) has demonstrated how ownership can shape public debate—both through direct interventions, such as the alleged suppression of progressive perspectives, and through more subtle changes to platform algorithms. Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has faced repeated allegations of privileging certain political narratives while suppressing others, including ending its “fact checking” policy that could challenge far-right viewpoints.
Perhaps the most glaring contradiction in Bezos’ advocacy for free markets is the extent to which he, and other billionaires like him, have benefited from state intervention as part of an intentional strategy of “corporate welfare.”
In each case, the rhetoric of “free speech” is selectively applied. While these platforms and newspapers claim to support open debate, their policies ultimately reflect the ideological preferences of their owners. This demonstrates a fundamental truth: In capitalist societies, freedom of expression is often contingent on the interests of those who control the means of communication. The Washington Post’s shift toward free-market advocacy is not simply an editorial decision; it is a strategic move to reinforce the dominant ideological framework that benefits the billionaire class.
The Myth of Meritocracy and the Far-Right’s War on DEI
Bezos’ framing of free markets as inherently linked to personal liberties exposes a deeper ideological assumption—namely, that economic success is the result of individual talent and merit rather than systemic privilege. This assumption is not unique to Bezos but is foundational to the way many economic elites understand their own wealth and influence.
The logic behind Bezos’ editorial direction is similar to the arguments used by the contemporary far-right to attack Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The opposition to DEI is rooted in a desire to preserve the myth that success is determined purely by hard work and ability, rather than by racial, gender, or class privilege. By rejecting policies that acknowledge structural inequalities, The far-right seeks to uphold a narrative that justifies existing economic and social hierarchies.
This worldview is deeply intertwined with the ideology of neoliberalism, which insists that markets are neutral mechanisms that reward the most capable individuals. However, history shows that markets are anything but neutral. The barriers faced by marginalized groups are not simply the result of individual shortcomings; they are the product of centuries of systemic exclusion. The far-right’s attack on DEI serves to obscure these realities, just as Bezos’ insistence on free markets seeks to erase the role of privilege and power in determining economic outcomes.
By positioning The Washington Post as a champion of free markets, Bezos is promoting the idea that capitalism functions as a pure meritocracy. This serves not only to legitimize his own position but also to delegitimize calls for policies that challenge structural inequality, whether in the form of DEI programs, labor protections, or wealth redistribution measures.
The Illusion of the Free Market and Its Political Implications
Perhaps the most glaring contradiction in Bezos’ advocacy for free markets is the extent to which he, and other billionaires like him, have benefited from state intervention as part of an intentional strategy of “corporate welfare.” The notion of a truly free market, where economic actors compete on equal footing without government interference, is a fantasy. In reality, corporations like Amazon have thrived not because of unregulated competition, but because of significant government support.
From tax incentives to government contracts, Amazon has received billions in subsidies that have allowed it to dominate the retail and logistics industries. Moreover, the U.S. government plays a critical role in enforcing corporate-friendly trade policies, suppressing labor movements, and protecting the interests of multinational corporations abroad. These interventions are rarely acknowledged in discussions of free markets, yet they are crucial to understanding the power dynamics of contemporary capitalism.
If freedom under capitalism ultimately means the freedom of the wealthy to dictate the terms of discourse, then the very concept of free speech is in jeopardy.
Politically, Bezos’ editorial directive at The Washington Post serves to strengthen a broader ideological alignment between neoliberal economics and far-right nationalism. By framing free-market capitalism as an essential component of personal liberty, Bezos is laying the groundwork for a political agenda that fuses economic libertarianism with nationalist conservatism. This is significant because it provides an ideological foundation for challenging emerging economic policies that deviate from neoliberal orthodoxy—such as the rise of protectionism in response to globalization.
This alignment between free-market ideology and far-right nationalism is not new. Historically, neoliberalism has often coexisted with reactionary politics, as seen in the economic policies of figures like former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Today, this synthesis is being revived as right-wing populists seek to defend corporate interests while simultaneously appealing to nationalist sentiments. Bezos’ intervention in The Washington Post should be understood within this broader context: It is not just about shaping editorial policy but about consolidating an ideological framework that benefits economic elites while limiting the scope of acceptable political debate.
The Dangers of Billionaire-Controlled Media
Bezos’ decision to impose a free-market ideology on The Washington Post is not an isolated event; it is part of a larger trend in which media ownership is used to shape public discourse in ways that serve elite interests. This phenomenon extends beyond traditional journalism to social media platforms, where billionaires like Musk and Zuckerberg wield immense power over the flow of information.
At its core, this issue is about more than just media bias—it is about the fundamental tension between democracy and concentrated economic power. A truly free and open society requires a diversity of perspectives, yet the dominance of billionaire-controlled media threatens to constrain the range of acceptable debate. If freedom under capitalism ultimately means the freedom of the wealthy to dictate the terms of discourse, then the very concept of free speech is in jeopardy.
The consolidation of media power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy individuals raises urgent questions about the future of democratic debate. If we are to challenge the ideological hegemony of economic elites, we must first recognize the mechanisms through which they shape public discourse. Bezos’ editorial mandate is not just about The Washington Post—it is a reflection of the broader struggle over who gets to define the boundaries of political and economic debate in the 21st century.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular