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Commentary Street: How Much Arab Democracy Can America Stand?

Commentary, May, 04 2011 Paul Street
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Obama, the Middle East, and the Re-Branding Game at Home and Abroad

Commentary Street: Gut Check in Madison: Is Labor Ready to Fight for its Life?

Commentary, March, 12 2011 Paul Street
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Governor Scott Walker and his right Republican allies in the Wisconsin legislature might be a bunch of plutocratic, Koch-funded thugs, but...

Commentary Street: Obama, Egypt, and Universal Values: Some History

Commentary, February, 06 2011 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

The recent remarkable and revolutionary unrest in the Arab world and particularly in Egypt has created an awkward dilemma for Barack Obama and his administration.

Commentary Street: The Real Issue to be Faced: King Day Reflections on the State of the Union and the World

Commentary, January, 17 2011 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

In his speech commemorating the victims of the mass murderer Jared Loughner in Tucson, Arizona, Barack Obama turned to the Bible.

Commentary Street: Health Care as a Commodity: On the Irony of the Hudson Decision

Commentary, December, 19 2010 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

So a key part of U.S. President Barack Obama’s health “reform” bill was declared “unconstitutional” last week by the right wing federal district court judge Henry E. Hudson in Virginia.

Commentary Street: Howard Zinn: The People's Historian

Commentary, January, 29 2010 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

The news of Howard Zinn's death hit me like a ton of bricks. I did not expect to cry and then about 10 minutes after getting the e-mail…it hit me - three times. The last time I looked down and saw that I was standing in my den about one foot aw...

Commentary Street: Fight the Rich, Not Their Wars

Commentary, December, 28 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

The following remarks were delivered on Friday December 18, 2009, at 5 PM in front of the Wells Fargo Bank building in downtown Cedar Rapids, IA, after a vigil and march called by the Cedar Rapids branch of Socialist Alternative and Iowa Women for...

Commentary Street: Obama's West Point War Speech: A Quick Response

Commentary, December, 03 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

War President Barack Obama's Afghan "surge" address from West Point [1] last night was unsurprising, given the fact that, as Alexander Cockburn has noted, "Obama has...surrounded himself with the same breed of intellectuals who persuaded Lyndon Jo...

Commentary Street: True Crime: White Privilege and a Police Killing in an Obama-Mad College Town

Commentary, October, 24 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

Imagine, if you will, a small, predominantly white city with growing poverty and crime in a small, highly segregated black section of its South East side.

Commentary Street: Blue Cross and Blue Dog Democrats: Reflections on "Health Reform" Under "The Unelected Dictatorship of Money"

Commentary, August, 12 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

The United States' "representative democracy," crippled by "too much [corporate and military] representation and too little [actual popular] democracy" (Arundhati Roy) abounds with Kafka-esque, Orwellian, and Vonneguttian absurdity. Take, for one...

Commentary Street: "Business Liberalism": The Real Meaning of Obama's "Pragmatic" Reluctance to "Tilt at Windmills"

Commentary, June, 26 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

Early last April the New York Times published an article with an ironic title: "In Cuba , Change Means More of the Same." This "news" item reported that "rather than dismantling Cuba 's socialist framework," Cuba 's President Raul Castro "seems t...

Commentary Street: It Could Still Be a Good Thing for Lefties that Obama Won the Election: On Historical Irony and Radical Hope

Commentary, May, 22 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

Here is a statement that may surprise some of my more regular readers (yes, all four of you): it's a good thing that Barack Obama won the presidential election last fall.

Commentary Street: Barack Obama, Torture, and Habeas Corpus: Unsurprised but Shocked Nonetheless

Commentary, April, 22 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

The liberal and progressive civil libertarians I know who strongly supported Barack Obama's "change" campaign last year are having a difficult time processing some deeply disturbing recent developments in Washington.

Commentary Street: Anti-Capitalism as Suicide Prevention: Personal Worth Against Exchange Value and Corporate Thought Control

Commentary, March, 23 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

Recently I spoke to an acquaintance who happens to be a psychiatric nurse at a major hospital. She reports an epidemic of distraught people coming and brought into her facility's emergency room in the wake of mental breakdowns and, often, suicide...

Commentary Street: Invisible: On Left Non-Existence and Corporate-Managed Democracy

Commentary, March, 01 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

One of the many ways in which the United States' incipiently totalitarian corporate-managed democracy (see Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pr...

Commentary Street: Obama-Gaza: No Surprise

Commentary, January, 04 2009 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

In the last week of 2008, Palestinian children in Gaza were blown apart by Israeli bombs and missiles. The air machinery used to kill those children - including American-made F-16s and Blackhawk helicopters - was supplied by the United States.

Commentary Street: Two Chicago Stories: Hope and Shame

Commentary, December, 12 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

As we prepare for the historic presidential inauguration of the formerly Chicago-based politician Barack Obama, two recent Chicago news stories deserve consideration in relation to the fate of American democracy and hopes for change under the next...

Commentary Street: David Brooks' Pragmatic Illusions and the New Administration

Commentary, November, 25 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

In a recent Times column and on "P"BS's News Hour, the Republican Brooks heaped praise on the members of the Obama transition team ("more impressive than any other in recent memory," he says) for being "pragmatic" and "not ideological." He also a...

Commentary Street: Fear McCain

Commentary, October, 13 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

According to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, some voters in the critical political battleground state of Pennsylvania are leaning towards Barack Obama because economic matters are trumping candidate "character" in determining their choice...

Commentary Street: One Heartbeat Away: Reflections on the Palin Nomination

Commentary, September, 17 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate is one of the most transparently crass and cynical moves in United States political history.

Commentary Street: Beijing Reflections

Commentary, August, 14 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

Nineteen years and two months ago, hundreds of peasant soldiers in Red China's "People's Liberation Army" (PLA) bivouacked in the world's largest McDonald's in downtown Beijing. Followed by the vapid gaze of Ronald McDonald, the troops marched ou...

Commentary Street: Ryan Lizza’s “Left” and the Narrow Spectrum of U.S. Political Culture

Commentary, July, 30 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

You know you are living in a totalitarian political culture when a respected mainstream journalist at the center of that culture tells you that a politician whose consistent career theme is personal accommodation to existing power relationships is...

Commentary Street: Barack Obama's Deceptive Left Impression

Commentary, July, 15 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

The deception conducted by political "elites" is about more than specific factual lies. It is also and perhaps more significantly about the creation of a sense, a feeling, an impression, an atmosphere, and/or even a mood.

Commentary Street: "Systemic Rather Than Superficial Flaws": Reflections on Candidate-Centered Elections and U.S. Political Culture

Commentary, June, 07 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

I put the best book of the last few years down for a moment and turned on the television last night (I am writing on the morning of Wednesday, June 4th, 2008). It was Barack Obama, who has become something like Ronald Reagan (whom the conservative...

Commentary Street: Americans' Progressive Opinion vs. "The Shadow Cast on Society By Big Business"

Commentary, May, 15 2008 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

Barack Obama and John McCain are preparing to wage a hotly contested battle in which neither heavily business-sponsored presidential candidate will question the underlying fundamentals of corporate-neoliberal rule and United States world-supremaci...

Commentary Street: Note to Liberals: The Right Does Not Hate "Government"

Commentary, December, 11 2007 Paul Street
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Note to Liberals: The Right Does Not Hate "Government"

Commentary Street: none

Commentary, November, 16 2007 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

Here are 49 words to inspire dismay and disgust...

Commentary Street: A Very Narrow Spectrum: Even John Edwards is Too Left for the U.S. Plutocracy

Commentary, September, 03 2007 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

You know a nation's political culture is dangerously captive to business power when John Edwards is "too left" for its ruling media and electoral system.

Commentary Street: George Bush I's "Tender Heart" and His "Little Leaguer's Rough Game": More Missing Irony at the New York Times*

Commentary, August, 24 2007 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

TEARFUL MEMORIES OF A TERRIBLE DEFEAT

Commentary Street: "I Know How Black Folks Think": Reflections on an Outrageously Non-Scandalous Remark From Bill Clinton

Commentary, April, 24 2007 Paul Street
Street's ZSpace page

Imagine that George Bush Senior was heard to say this about why the Jewish-American vote went a certain way in a New York City mayoral election: "well, that doesn't surprise me because I know how Jews think."

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