Rulers’ Ideas Rule

W.J. Astore I can’t remember where exactly, but I stumbled across this apothegm of Karl Marx: “In every era, the ideas of the rulers are the ruling ideas.” Striving for even more brevity, I truncated it to rulers’ ideas rule. Contrarians of the world should unite to identify and challenge these ruling ideas. When they…

War! What Is It Good For? Profit and Power

I started writing for TomDispatch, a remarkable contrarian site founded and edited by Tom Engelhardt, a fine editor/writer and even finer gentleman, in October 2007.  My first article was on the Petraeus surge and how President Bush and his administration were hiding behind the absurdly bemedaled and beribboned uniform of that general. Tom Engelhardt’s generous…