First published on ZNet on January 12, 2013. Ten years and three months ago, in a Senate speech in support of authorizing George W. Bush to invade Iraq if he wanted to, the right-wing U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) proclaimed the United States of America “the beacon to the world of the way life [...]

By Paul Street, Z Magazine (print), January 2013. It is tempting, perhaps, to see the 2012 presidential election as a triumph for ordinary people over concentrated wealth. There’s some basis for that conclusion. After all, Obama formally ran for re-election on the notions that the rich need to be taxed more, that Medicare and Social [...]

First published at ZNet on December 13, 2012. It’s useful to step back from the dominant terms in political play to examine what’s really going on behind misleading language. An excellent if hardly novel case in point is the evocative phrase “Right to Work,” used by right-wing politicians like Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to provide [...]

First published on ZNet on December 8, 2012 “Some Form of Sacrifice”  You’ve got to hand it to the 1% - they’ve got chutzpah.   Listen to the following proclamation made in a full-page advertisement bearing an image of the Star Spangled Banner in The Wall Street Journal – an ad purchased by the pro-big business [...]

Street's December 1 2012 talk to the Open University of the Left (Chicago, IL) is now view-able on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsfWZFVfmEs&feature=plcp

First published on Truthout on December 4, 2012. It's a hell of a thing to go through life with a felony record in the United States. The consequences are different depending on who and/or what you are, however.  Take a 20-something black American who has just finished serving three years in a state correctional facility [...]

Z Magazine December 2012. By Paul Street. In his November 6 re-election night speech inChicago, Barack Obama made strong claims about “why [American] elections matter. It’s not small,” the president said, “it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy.... And when we…make big decisions as a country, [...]

From a Keynote Address for The Rouge Forum at Miami University, Oxford Ohio, June 21, 2012. The Rouge Forum is an association of radical education professors and other radical educators. This talk is reproduced here in part because it seems especially relevant in the wake of the 2012 election’s abject failure to seriously address anthropogenic [...]

Published on Truthout on November 25, 2012, Last week the "Public" Broadcasting System's (PBS) Newshour broadcast an interview with Mark Bertolini, chairman and CEO of Aetna, a health insurance company with more than $33 billion in revenue and a worldwide workforce of 34,000. Bertolini spoke about newly re-elected president Barack Obama, the US Congress and [...]

Paul Street will speak in Chicago this coming Saturday, December 1st, 2012.   "Paul Street: Elections 2012 and the Prospects for a Decent Future: A Left Perspective" December 1, Saturday, 2:30 pm Open University of the Left Lincoln Park Public Library 1150 W. Fullerton, Chicago Corner Racine Ave., across from DePaul University (Red Line: Fullerton)