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 [...]
Black Agenda Report, September 3, 2013; first published on ZNet, August 30, 2013. It's like, 'OK, you get a president, you get nothing else. You got him so you don't need to eat, you don't need education.' It's just almost worse… -Judith Hawkins, Washington D.C. I’m not a big fan of the British Broadcasting [...]
First published on ZNet on September 7, 2013. A friend who shares my alienation from U.S. major party electoral politics and imperial foreign policy likes to remind me that some of the nation’s self-proclaimed liberals in elected office do occasionally behave in decent ways. I don’t know how right he is, but I do want [...]
First published on ZNet on September 4, 2013. Barack Obama’s endless mendacity was on rich display during his surprise weekend announcement that he would seek Congressional approval for his planned air attack on Syria. The attack, he says, is intended to punish the Syrian state for “flouting international rules” and outraging “the global community” by [...]
Counterpunch, August 30-September 1, 2013 WEEKEND EDITION AUG 30-SEP 01, 2013 The Orwellian World of Empire The War Train to Syria by PAUL STREET A United States military attack on Syria appears to be imminent. Imperial U.S. and British warships are in position in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, loaded for “surgical” acts of [...]
This essay is based on a talk Street gave at a panel on “The Marginalized Left” at the Left Forum in New York City last June. The final section of his talk (deleted here for reasons of length and because the author has addressed the section’s topic numerous times on ZNet and elsewhere) focused on [...]
First published on ZNet, August 9, 2013. “Those Unwilling to Work…” Driving around Chicago with my car radio on recently I had the misfortune to hear the ranting of the arch-reactionary Rush Limbaugh. The target of Limbaugh’s venom during the 3 minutes I could stand of him was a standard right-wing whipping boy – all [...]
Published at New Politics (August 3, 2013), ZNet (August 1), and Black Agenda Report (August 8). There is not a Black America and a White America….there’s a United States of America.” So proclaimed Barack Obama, to wild applause, at the launching of his national and global celebrity in his instantly lauded 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote [...]
Originally published on ZNet, July 28, 2013 Race and Booker T. Obama: “Things Are Getting Better” The vacuous, repressive, deeply conservative, and neoliberal nothingness of Barack Obama – and the utter disgrace of liberals who still claim to see a progressive lining in his presidency – is becoming harder to deny. One week ago today [...]
By Paul Street. First published on ZNet, July 25, 2013 Stripping SNAP, Sucking Up Subsidies Beneath the latest headline story about Egypt, Syria, the Zimmerman verdict, or the newborn English “royal baby” the United States financial plutocracy and the savage economic inequality on which it rests just grind along in full “mainstream” media view. Three [...]