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 [...]
The Paul Street Report, 10.31.2022 Dear liberals, progressives, and leftists, it’s time for you to stop marching into quicksand and become election deniers and insurrectionists/revolutionists. Don’t get me wrong. The Paul Street Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I’m not saying embrace [...]
The Paul Street Report, 10. 20. 2022 Readers who think that MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan and I are off base when we argue that the mainstream “liberal” media is absurdly loathe to say “the F-word” — fascism — as fascist politics spreads across much of the world should look at a recent Washington Post commentary by that paper’s Berlin bureau chief Marc [...]
The Paul Street Report, 10. 17. 2022 Some preliminary notes on this essay: I put this essay (below) together and scehduled it for today seven days ago because I knew I was going to be wrapped up in multiple administrative and household tasks and thus without time for writing on the weekend of October 15-16. [...]
CounterPunch, 10.21.2022 DAVID BARSAMIAN: What we are facing is often described as unprecedented—a pandemic, climate catastrophe and, always lurking off center stage, nuclear annihilation. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. NOAM CHOMSKY: I can add a fourth: the impending destruction of what remains of American democracy and the shift of the United States toward a [...]
CounterPunch, 10.14.2022 “Democrats we call your bluff, voting blue is not enough!” — chant led by Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights activists at Women’s March rallies across the United States on Saturday, October 8, 2022. The arch-patriarchal Christian fascist war on abortion that rose to new Hellish heights after the United States Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. [...]
The Paul Street Report, 10.6.2022 For years I have made a political commentary sub-career out of mocking the contemptible “It Can’t Happen Here” fascism-denial conducted by mainstream “liberal” media and academia in response to the rise of the transparently fascist Donald Trump and the Trump phenomenon. The fourth chapter of my latest book This Happened Here: [...]
The Paul Street Report, 10.3.2022 Trumpy Before Trump The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s new book The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack Up of the Republican Party (New York: DoubleDay, 2022) shows that we cannot properly grasp the horror of Donald Trump and Trumpism without understanding the last quarter-century of Republican Party degeneration Going back to the rise of Republican [...]