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 [...]

Wednesday, January 25, 2012, Chicago, Illinois. Published on ZNet. The presidential election year is here and along with it comes the quadrennial intra-leftist bloodletting on the unpleasant question of how to best respond to the narrow “choices” handed down by the nation’s corporate-managed one-and-a-half party system. I am aware of at least three different, often fiercely [...]

Iowa City, IA, January 3, 2011. Imagine if the United States really was, as a number of my fellow leftists claim to think, “a fascist state.”[1] To fit the description, it wouldn’t be enough for the U.S. to be plagued by:  the fierce co-joining of state and corporate/financial power the persistence and deepening of harsh [...]

Iowa City, IA, December 27, 2011.  Published on ZNet at www.zcommunications.org. Much of the early left commentary on “the Tea Party” – the right-wing Republican Tea Party phenomenon[1] – was quite naïve. A number of prominent liberal and left thinkers and activists in the spring of 2010 advised progressives to reach out to “the Tea [...]

Iowa City, IA. Friday, December 23, 2011. The nationally narcissistic and racist mindset of the American Empire has long found terrible expression in the mouths of executive branch Democrats. When informed of the criminal and unnecessary nuclear annihilation of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August of 1945, Democratic U.S. President Harry Truman referred to [...]

ZNet. Wednesday, December 21, 2011. As he approaches what could be his next-to-last Christmas in the White House, conservative U.S. President Barack Obama is trying to sound and look progressive – like someone Rachel Maddow and the other MSNBC political hosts can be proud to “lean forward” with. Having claimed to understand the popular economic [...]

 December 16, 2011. Iowa City, IA.  Originally published on ZNet.   I’m angry about yes, inequality in this nation or any other. I’m angry at: trashing the environment, war which is different from self-defense because we have an empire that takes other peoples’ resources, plain and simple (George Kennan admitted that), toleration of poverty, homelessness, waste, [...]

Paul Street. Z Magazine (December 2011)  Many in the U.S. corporate media were quick to call the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that spread from New York City’s financial district to more than 800 U.S. locations between mid-September and mid-October as (in the words of Time Magazine’s Michael Scherer) “the Tea Party of the American [...]

Published on ZNet on December 9, 2011. ECO-APOCALYPSE NOW “No Way the World Should Take These Risks” Beneath and beyond the flow of current events, including the rise and repression of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement and the ongoing threat of double-dip recession being sparked by the Euro crisis, the primary threat to a [...]

Published on ZNet on Friday, December 2, 2011. Beneath the False and Coordinated Pretext Iowa City, IA, December 1, 2011. Consistent with recommendations they received from experts in domestic population control at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, big city mayors and police chiefs across the United States have uniformly cited concerns for [...]