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       Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, and speaker based in Iowa City (IA) and Chicago (IL). He is the author of five books:The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (July 2010) order at www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=243410;  Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics  (October 2008)

      Street's essays, articles, reviews, and commentaries have appeared in numerous outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, Capital City Times, In These Times, Chicago History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Social History, Review of Educational, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Dissent, Black Agenda Report, Dissident Voice, Black Commentator, Monthly Review, History News Network, Tom'sDispatch, AlterNet., and (above all) ZNet and Z Magazine. From the base of ZNet, Z Magazine, and Black Agenda Report, his essays are picked up and reproduced (often in numerous languages) across the planet/World Wide Web in venues too numerous to track and mention. 

      Street's writings, research findings, and commentary have been featured and presented in a large number and wide variety of media venues, including The New York Times, CNN, Al Jazeera, the Chicago Tribune, The Times of India, Morning Star (England), Al-Alkhbar (The News in Beirut, Lebanon),  WGN (Chicago/national), WLS (ABC-Chicago), Fox News, the Chicago Sun Times, the Capital City Times (Madison, WI),and the Iowa City Press Citizen.

      Street has appeared in more than 60 radio and television interviews/broadcasts and on the popular live Web book-chat at "Firedog." Lake

      Street possesses a doctorate in modern U.S. History (with an emphasis on the history of industrial and class relations) - a degree that he will soon be marketing on E-Bay - and once hit a 25-foot jump shot over the outstretched arm of Michigan Wolverine basketball great and future NBA veteran Ricky Green.

      Street has taught various aspects of U.S. history at a large number of Chicago-area colleges and universities.  He has been strongly attached to Left political and intellectual culture since he read Volume 1 of Das Kapital and Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution (the first at a snail's pace) in the basement of a house in DeKalb, Illinois in the spring of 1978.   He was the Director of Research at The Chicago Urban League from 2000 through 2005.  

      Street is a (sixth-grade) graduate of (the original John Dewey) Laboratory School at the University of Chicago but it was all public schools after that. Teenage delinquency may have saved him from ruling-class indoctrination/socialization at one of the nation's elite universities or liberal arts colleges and put him on a fateful path to the once-exciting "little red schoolhouse on the prairie" - the formerly Marxist History Department of Northern Illinois University.  The best childhood education he received came from the social movements of the 1960s - a pedagogical engagement that begin with hearing Martin Luther King, Jr, speak at Chicago's Soldier Field during the long hot summer of 1966. Much of Street's writing revolves around criticism and exposure of what King called "the triple evils that are interrelated": racism, economic exploitation (capitalism), and militarism-imperialism. He thinks that other and related evils, including sexism and ecocidalism (and authoritarianism more generally) deserve equal consideration

    • Theodosis: Talking 'Conscious Capitalism' with the Boss
    • Rosen: A Shattered Country
    • Street: Our Sacrifice for Iraq
    • Spannos: USSF 2010
    • Wetzel: Austerity Challenges
    • Roblin: AFRICOM
    • Blum: Things Which Don't Go Away
    • Goodman: Eve Ensler
    • Street:
    • Albert: Re: Re: ZCom Sucks - ...
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  • Commentaries

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    • Friday, Jan 29, 2010
    • Commentary
      Street: The People's Historian
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
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    • Monday, Dec 28, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Fight the Rich
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    •  
    • Thursday, Dec 03, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Obama's West Point Speech
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    •  
    • Saturday, Oct 24, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: True Crime
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      Commentary
      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.
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    •  
    • Wednesday, Aug 12, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Blue Dogs
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
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    • Friday, Jun 26, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Business Liberalism
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    •  
    • Friday, May 22, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Radical Hope
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      Commentary
      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.
      Paul Street ZSpace page
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    • Wednesday, Apr 22, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Obama & Torture
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      Commentary
      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.
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    •  
    • Monday, Mar 23, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Suicide Prevention
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    •  
    • Sunday, Mar 01, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Corporate Democracy
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
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    • Sunday, Jan 04, 2009
    • Commentary
      Street: Obama-Gaza
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      Commentary
      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.
      Paul Street ZSpace page
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    • Friday, Dec 12, 2008
    • Commentary
      Street: Chicago Stories
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    •  
    • Tuesday, Nov 25, 2008
    • Commentary
      Street: David Brooks
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    •  
    • Monday, Oct 13, 2008
    • Commentary
      Street: Fear McCain
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      Commentary
      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...
      Paul Street ZSpace page
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    • Wednesday, Sep 17, 2008
    • Commentary
      Street: Heartbeat Away
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      Commentary
      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.
      Paul Street ZSpace page
    • All Commentaries
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