Awakening From Obama's Seductive Spell. by by Gary Olson “Street’s book demolishes any remaining misapprehension that Obama is anything other than a Wall Street/military-friendly, seductive-sounding servant of concentrated wealth and power.” President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, expected to cost more than $1 billion, is underway. Given incumbency and likely opponents, he'll probably win. Of course [...]

When the profits system (capitalism) is properly understood for what it is really and only about (investor profit and nothing more) at the end of the day, then there is nothing paradoxical about its failure to serve working people and the common good in the U.S. or anywhere else. If corporate profits are high, the [...]

It’s good to have your written work supported and sometimes to have it challenged by future developments. Last February, ZNet published an essay in which I cited the social-psychological theory of cognitive dissonance in arguing that many right wing elites probably don’t believe much of the propagandistic nonsense they put out on the political airwaves, including [...]

March 26, 2011, Iowa City, IA. .Recently on a car trip to New York City, I tuned briefly into a National “Public” Radio news show called “The World.” A middle-aged newsreader was interviewing a younger female activist in the Middle Eastern island Kingdom of Bahrain, where 1500 troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) [...]

Paul Street deserves some kind of prize for being the first on the left to deliver the goods on Obama. While people like Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald deserve credit for exposing Obama as a charlatan not long after he began appointing people like Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Rahm Emmanuel to key posts, Street [...]

The smack to my head came late on the day of my second trip to Madison in support of public sector workers and their struggle against rightist Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s epic assault on union rights there. It didn’t come in the form of a state trooper’s swinging baton in or of a brick thrown [...]

Paul Street is speaking alongside panelists Lance Selfa (of Socialstworker.org and International Socialist Review), Glen Ford (Executive Director Black Agenda Report), and Pam Chamberlain of Political Research Associates in a Left Forum panel on "Understanding and Responding to the Tea Party Threat" at Pace University in lower Manhattan (NYC) at 10 AM, Room E308. Here is a brief [...]

If you pay attention and dig around a little in the newspapers and online you can mark the outlines of a global stirring of popular revolt - a burgeoning springtime of peoples blooming in advance of the technical onset of spring, 2011. The revolt has spread to the eye of the world capitalist hurricane – [...]

“For years, I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”  So said General Motors CEO Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson to the U.S. Senate when President Dwight Eisenhower nominated him for Secretary of Defense in 1953. A Senator had asked Wilson if as secretary of defense he could make [...]

Civility for the Few, Brutality for the Rest. Preparing for a radio interview on Barack Obama’s upcoming State of the Union Address (SOUA) last Tuesday morning, I nearly became overwhelmed by some of the multiple and interrelated Orwellian absurdities at the heart of United States’ reigning media-politics culture....Take the Kabuki drama of peace and harmony planned [...]