Joe Bageant

Reading Joe's essays on an iPhone

(Note from Ken Smith, web grunt here at Bageant Central.)

Joe is taking a short break from writing, so I'm using this opportunity to explore a technical issue. This may be of interest only to a small percentage of Joe's online readers. Or, we might be surprised to learn that many people want to read Joe's essays on mobile devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Nokia and other handhelds.

I recently installed a new traffic counter called Clicky. Among many other things, Clicky tracks the total and type of mobile phones accessing this site. I was surprised to learn that on some days up to 2% of the traffic is coming from mobile devices, and two-thirds of those are site visits from Apple iPhones. The 30-day average of readers accessing this site on mobile devices is about 1.5%. This is a surprisingly high percentage, considering that the site is not optimized for the smaller screens.

So, we are testing two systems that optimize this site for mobile.

The Devil and Mr. Obama

Barack promised change -- and sure enough, things changed for the worse

(Note: Patrick Ward, associate editor of the UK's Socialist Review asked Joe to write a piece for the party publication. This is the unabridged text of Joe's submission.)

By Joe Bageant

Well lookee here! An invite from my limey comrades to recap Barack Obama's first year in office. Well comrades, I can do this thing two ways. I can simply state that the great mocha hope turned out to be a Trojan horse for Wall Street and the Pentagon. Or I can lay in an all-night stock of tequila, limes and reefer and puke up the entire miserable tale like some 5,000 word tequila purged Congolese stomach worm. I have chosen to do the latter.

As you may know, Obama's public approval ratings are taking a beating. Millions of his former cult members have awakened with a splitting hangover to find their pockets turned inside out and eviction notices on the doors of their 4,000 square foot subprime mortgaged cardboard fuck boxes. Many who voted for Obama out of disgust for the Bush regime are now listening to the Republicans again on their car radios as they drive around looking for a suitable place to hide their vehicles from the repo man. Don't construe this as support for the GOP. It's just the standard ping ponging of disappointment and disgust that comes after the honeymoon is over with any administration. Most Americans' party affiliations are the same as they were when Bush was elected. After all, Obama did not get elected on a landslide by any means; he got 51% of the vote.