This essay first appeared on ZNet on May 9, 2012. Eager to find and amplify signs of mass radical potential in a period when the capitalist rich are ever more clearly destroying democracy and the Earth – the chances for a decent future –we on the United States left are understandably prone to underestimate the [...]
Paul L. Street May 4, 2012. This essay (part of a symposium on the left and the 2012 elections) was published at New Politics on May 4, 2012, The quadrennial presidential election extravaganza is here and along with it comes the quadrennial intra-U.S. leftist bloodletting on the unpleasant question of how to best respond to [...]
By Paul Street, first published on ZNet on Wednesday, May 02, 2012 *A version of this essay was read as a speech in downtown Iowa City, Iowa, on May 1, 20012 Thank you Occupy Iowa City for inviting me to talk on the day recognized around much of the planet as the true workers’ day [...]
Originally published on ZNet on April 24th, 2012. There’s nothing like the hypocritical narcissism of the elite neoliberal Democrat. It’s something to see. First he elegantly embraces and advance “free market” doctrine that distributes wealth and power upward while spreading misery amongst the populace and destroying the Earth. Then he wants to be accorded progressive [...]
First published on ZNet on April 13, 2012. The Miami Marlins’ Venezuela-born manager Ozzie Guillen has long been a major league jackass. As the manager of the Chicago White Sox (my favorite major league team since I grew up on the South Side of Chicago) he was notorious for endless narcissistic media rambles that all [...]
First published on ZNet on April 11, 2012 There has not been some massive expansion of social programs, programs that help the poor, environmental programs, education programs. That’s not our problem. --- Barack Obama, comments to the Associated Press, Washington D.C., April 3, 2012 The late, formerly left political provocateur Christopher Hitchens earned disgrace among [...]
First published on ZNet on April 7, 2012. It’s nothing new for American politics to be subordinated to the dictates of capitalism and the business elite beneath and beyond the charade of popular governance. Sixty four years ago a brilliant young historian named Richard Hofstader noted that “the fierceness of [American] political struggles [past and [...]
“If I had a son,” the President of the United States said last week, “he’d look like Trayvon.” It’s hard to know exactly what to make of Barack Obama’s comment on the “stand-your-ground” chase and gun-murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a white neighborhood watch captain in the central Florida town of Sanford. We can [...]
Originally published on ZNet, March 28, 2012. "Did We Even Have Winter?" I do not recall my attic den being too hot to work in during the late-winter month of March. I head out to find a comfortable indoor space and behold bikini-clad students and Magnolia trees in full bloom – in mid-March. I note [...]
by PAUL STREET. Published at Counterpunch (March 23-25 2012 edition). Vetoed by the recent White House announcement that the 2012 G8 meetings had been moved to Camp David, the original and provocative idea of combining the G8 and the NATO summits in Chicago this May belonged to the city’s authoritarian, militaristic, and left-loathing corporate-Democratic Mayor [...]