The Paul Street Report, 12.5.2022 The Handmaid Court of Their Dreams One year and four days ago, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson, a case sent to the Court with the purpose of undoing women’s half-century constitutional right to an abortion. Dobbs was the case that women-hating Christian fascists had been viciously [...]
CounterPunch, 12.2.2022 Trump is a symptom and not a cause…This is a problem that goes well beyond one person. — Ian Bassin Yes, Donald Trump’s chances of being the Republicans’ 2024 presidential candidate have taken a hit. On top of and related to all his, um, legal problems, there’s the defeats suffered by numerous candidates [...]
The Paul Steet Report, 11.28.2022 “There But for a Different Social History Go I” Middle-class liberals who can’t fathom how a white working-class person might fall for the racist and indeed fascist “great replacement theory” never worked like I did as a red-shirt packaging line employee at the Iowa City Procter & Gamble (P&G) plant in the [...]
The Paul Street Report, 11.21.2022 It’s the worst time of the sports year for me – the time when too many eyes and radio talk shows are focused on the vicious, hyper-violent brain-crushing and body-maiming blood sport that is US American football. It’s also the moment when we are furthest out from spring training for the beautiful, [...]
CounterPunch, 11.23.2022 Liberals and some progressives are feeling smug and self-satisfied over the mid-term elections. How grotesque. Yes, there was no red wave. The at least non-fascist major capitalist party, the Democrats, will keep the US Senate for two more years. MAGA candidates backed by the malignant narcissi-fascist Donald Trump did badly, something that is [...]
The Paul Street Report, 11.17.2022 Dear Readers: I have made numerous small corrections to last Thursday’s post. It appears that I put up a second draft when I needed to post a third one. Please see the corrected version here. Here, as a follow up to last Tuesday’s Paul Street Report (“Purple Haze: Seventeen Takes on the Mid-Terms”) are [...]
The Paul Street Report, 11.14.2022 It was so nice NOT to be writing about contemporary United States politics – an ugly topic, to say the least – last week. I will be making more and more of a habit of focusing on other subjects going forward. But the mid-term elections were hard to avoid, and I [...]
CounterPunch, 11.15.2022 Last Tuesday, November 8, was the 80th anniversary of my 23-year-old Army corporal Uncle Connie’s uncelebrated and at first officially unacknowledged death on the opening day of a massive United States-British invasion of northwest Africa code-named Operation Torch. From “The Fields of Golden Grain” Connie was the devoutly Catholic draftsman son of a [...]
The Paul Street Report, 11.3.2022 Some Workers’ Party Three cheers for Terri Gerstein, a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute. She has made it onto The New York Times editorial page with the discovery that the Republicans aren’t really the party of the proletariat they pretend to be. [...]
CounterPunch, 10.31.2022 Recently The Nation published an interview with the great left intellectual Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian that first appeared on TomDispatch.com. Below I write up some critical reflections expanded from my notes in the margins of my print-off of this interview. They are I hope instructive on some of what distinguishes a modestly accomplished revolutionary Marxist (myself) from a [...]