First published on ZNet, November 7, 2013 “He’s the President Kennedy of Today” Explaining why his hero Barack Obama was not invited to a liberal rally honoring the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington last August 24th (four days before the exact anniversary date of August 28th), leading black Democratic Party activist and MSNBC talk [...]
Z Magazine (print), November 2013, online version available at http://www.zcommunications.org/budget-slavery-budget-freedom-past-and-present-by-paul-street.html As the fog of Barack Obama’s frustrated air war on Syria receded from the headlines in mid-September of 2013, the most recent round of plutocratic austerity budget politicking moved to the forefront of the daily U.S. news. In the official mainstream media account of the most [...]
ZNet (October 27, 2013) .Upton Sinclair observed more than a century ago that "the two political parties are two wings of the same bird of prey. The people are allowed to choose between their candidates, and both of them are controlled, and all their nominations are dictated by, the same [money] power." Sensing that Sinclair’s view [...]
Counterpunch, October 18-20, 2013. Recently on his syndicated talk show, the power-worshipping interviewer of influential elites Charlie Rose worried that Washington’s latest fiscal crisis sends the world the message that “democracy doesn’t work as well as we thought it did.” [1] What American “democracy” was Charlie Rose talking about? As John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney [...]
Uncle Sam is a Mean, Right-Handed Son of a Bitch. First published on ZNet, October 11, 2013. “Some People Are Essential and Some People Aren’t” The “anti-government” rhetoric of the business and political right in the long Neoliberal era (1975-present) has always been deceptive. The right and its business allies do not hate government as [...]
First published on ZNet, October 2, 2013. Why Now? The “non-essential” federal government is shut down, throwing more than 700,000 public employees out of work, for a number of interrelated reasons. For more than four years now, the radical right Republican Party – falsely described as conservative – and its vast propaganda machine (including FOX [...]
First published on ZNet on September 27, 2013. Some liberals and progressives who opposed Barack Obama’s attempted attack on Syria seemed taken aback and surprised at the president’s readiness to make brazenly illegal, unilateral war on another sovereign nation. I’m glad they helped block the bombing of Syria, but I find surprise at Obama’s imperial militarism [...]
First published on ZNet on September 20, 2013. Academic leftism left can be fun and informative. In some of its professional practitioners’ hands, it can also seem alienating and dismissive towards working class people and progressive activists. Take the eminent British half- or post-Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s [1] essay on the sorry state of U.S. politics, titled [...]
First published on ZNet, September 14, 2013. I could barely make out Barack Obama’s Syria speech to the nation on my old car radio as I negotiated the narrow curves of Route 79 on the western banks of the Mississippi River in central Missouri last Tuesday night. What I could hear sounded very much like more [...]
Published in Z Magazine (September 2013): 36-40. Carter Speaks Last July, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said something that should have been a headline story and a top item on the evening and cable television news. “America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” he remarked at a July 16th event in Atlanta [...]