Published in Z Magazine, May 2013. In a story that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with business rule as usual in Washington, U.S. military contractors will suffer no great or particular loss from the federal austerity fiscal policy called sequestration. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA)—the top lobbying and public relations arm of the nation’s high-tech corporate [...]

First published on ZNet, May 3, 2013. Yesterday (I am writing on May 2, 2013), millions around the world hit the streets to protest state-capitalist austerity, plutocracy, and exploitation on a planet where the world’s richest 100 people “earned” $240 billion in 2012 (enough money to abolish extreme global poverty four times over)[1] and 2.4 [...]

First published on ZNet, April 19, 2013. When you hear corporate media news broadcasters talk about “the economy” and “recovery,” always ask yourself whose economy and whose recovery they have in mind.  According to the New York Times’ economics writer Nelson Schwartz, “it’s tough to make sense of the economy these days.” In what he [...]

Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain(New York: Springer, 2012) Think of the values and ideas we left progressives tend to identify with and defend and advance against those rapacious “1%”’ masters of capital, for whom the Golden Rule is that “those who have the gold deserve to rule.” Words that first come [...]

First published on ZNet on March 30, 2013. “This is Not Dick Cheney We’re Talking About” Questioned by a handful of Senate Democrats on his secret killer drone program earlier this month, Barack Obama said “This is not Dick Cheney we’re talking about here.” “No Mr. President,” one of those Senators should have retorted (none [...]

First published on ZNet on March 21, 2013. To appreciate the power of the dominant imperial ideology in the United States it is best to examine commentary at the “leftmost” outposts of establishment opinion. It is at the “liberal” New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, and the “public” broadcasting system where the most relevant [...]

First published on ZNet on March 8, 2013. 1. Michael Albert: First, can you tell folks just a bit about where you are from, how you became radical, and what your current focuses are?  Paul Street: I became radical in part by growing up in a very liberal middle class family in the University of Chicago [...]

First published on ZNet, February 22, 2013.  It appears that Superstorm Sandy did not direct enough of its global warming-fueled fury at the headquarters of The New York Times last October. Last Sunday, an historic mass demonstration on behalf of a more sane environmental policy took place in Washington D.C. Forty thousand environmentalist activists and [...]

First published on ZNet on February 16, 2013. Barack Obama is receiving accolades from liberal environmentalists for saying progressive-sounding things about global warming in his fifth State of the Union Address (SOTUA) last Tuesday. The reason for this praise is not mysterious. The President made some minimally decent comments about the leading issue of our [...]

By Paul Street.  First published on ZNet on February 6, 2013.In the final quarter of election year 2012, the northeastern United States was hit by two terrible tragedies linked to the word “Sandy.” One week before the election, tropical super-storm Hurricane Sandy killed 263 people across 7 countries, caused U.S. damage of at least $64 [...]