Dr. John Hayakawa Torok

The successful politician Barack Obama published two memoirs before being elected President of the United States. It is said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Others in American history who have used memoir to political effect include Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, and John F. Kennedy. Sarah Palin is on a national book tour for…

Something is rotten in the State of Our Union. One in five Americans lacks the “privilege” of health care so that “our” private health insurance companies can make their billions. They spend over half a billion dollars annually to buy Congress and confuse the people with their false advertising. This industry “earns” $400 billion a…

One of my mentors in civil rights law, discussing busing as a remedy in school desegregation litigation, said “green follows white.” He meant by this that in public schooling, money flows where the white students go. Black students bused from racially identifiable black districts to racially identifiable white districts benefited because their educational experience was…

Afghanistan’s Taliban under Mullah Omar allegedly harbored Osama bin Laden and his guerilla fighters before the September 11, 2001 attacks. If US mass media representation of US national security discourse is to be believed, then the Taliban (Pashto / Arabic loan word for “students”) is an armed, male supremacist movement that favors immuring Afghan and…

This modest proposal’s premise is that increasing inequality within and beyond nation-states will require enhanced efforts to protect the propertied within global cities, and to improve border security between rich and poor countries and regions. In the 21st Century the global security industry will include a continuing, perhaps vestigial public, and a growing private, sector.…