By Paul Street.  Published on ZNet, March 18, 2012. Pity poor “progressive” President Obama and his struggle to raise enough cash to keep up with the big bad business-friendly Republican money machine! According to the New York Times last week, campaign workers in the corporation-like Obama headquarters in downtown Chicago are having a hard time [...]

By Paul Street. Orginally published on ZNet on March 14, 2012  Barack Obama was right last week to move the annual rich nations’ confab called the G8 Summit from its originally scheduled venue of Chicago to a cloistered compound outside Washington DC – the president’s official retreat in Maryland’s secluded Camp David – next May. [...]

By Paul Street. Published at Black Agenda Report (March 14, 2012). This article previously (minus one small addition) appeared in Counterpunch  An Officially Counter-Intuitive Position I have argued from the beginning that the “first black presidency” of the deeply conservative Barack Obama is a detriment for black America and the cause of racial justice. The [...]

ZNet, March 8, 2012. Unlike the current U.S. President, author of two books about himself to date, I’ve never been all that awed by Barack Hussein Obama. My first impressions of the future president (in my role as a race relations and social policy researcher and advocate in and around Chicago from the mid-1990s through [...]

Iowa City, March 2, 2012  Originally published on ZNet. It is a testament to United States political culture’s deadly marginalization of environmental concerns that Barack Obama’s liberal defenders incessantly trumpet his administration’s bailout of General Motors and the auto industry as a shining and unalloyed success. Many Democrats pumped their fists in triumph when Obama [...]

This article first appeared on Counterpunch, February 24, 2012. Long after its leading encampments have been torn down – often with brute force and (educationally enough) by predominantly by Democratic mayors and with the approval and involvement of a Democratic White House – the populist Occupy Movement deserves major credit for changing the United States’ [...]

First published on ZNet, Feruary 15, 2012. The disproportionately nonwhite city of Oakland, California has more than its share of poverty and unemployment. According to the 2010 Census, 17 percent of the city’s population, including more than a quarter of Oakland’s children, live beneath the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. Eight percent of Oakland’s [...]

Iowa City, IA, February 12, 2012. ZNet. A handwritten note stuck on the message board of an old Occupy site I know reads as follows: “If you want to make God laugh, make a plan.”  The message is clear: plans are for chumps. How sad. That message is part of how the 1% rules.  From [...]

Iowa City IA, February 05, 2012, ZNet.  My e-mail in-box this morning contained an interesting invitation from the low-cost bus-line Megabus: a reduced-rate fare from Iowa City to Indianapolis, home to the 2012 Super Bowl this Sunday.  “Going to the Super Bowl?” the add reads: “Let Megabus be your designated driver to Indianapolis for the big [...]

The Primaries: Mapping the Terrain, by Alex Doherty, Paul Street, New Left Project, January 25, 2011 Paul Street is an activist and author whose works include Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power, and Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to [...]