No Liberal Rallies Yet for the Children of Yemen by Paul Street + The U.S.-Backed War That Is Tormenting Yemen by David Moulton

Image by Alisdare Hickson via Flickr

Updated: August 11, 2018, added a poem by Luis Lazaro Tijerina

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
August 8, 2018

Hundreds of thousands of people showed up across the United States at more than 600 gatherings three weeks ago. They came out to protest Donald Trump‘s “zero tolerance” immigration policy in highly choreographed, Democratic Party-affiliated “Families Belong Together” rallies and marches. Liberal celebrities marched and spoke. Local, state, and federal Democratic Party politicians and office-holders gave passionate speeches denouncing Trump’s separation of Central American migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border.

The Same Old Know-it-all Neoliberal Obama by Paul Street

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
August 4, 2018

Until he was tapped as a shiny new national and global asset by the white American ruling-class and catapulted to rock star status in the summer of 2004, then Illinois state senator Barack Obama was not particularly popular in the Black Chicago South Side that he deceptively called “home.” Besides being an outsider from Honolulu and Harvard Law, he was an aloof and arrogant part-time law professor over at the conservative and heavily white University of Chicago, an institution long known for displacing and lording over Black South Side communities.

Leo Panitch: Obama Defends Global Capitalism in Mandela Lecture, Parts 1-2

Image by Doug Geisler via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

Obama Joins Club of the Super-Rich – Defends Global Capitalism in Lecture (1/2)

TheRealNews on Jul 29, 2018

Prof. Leo Panitch and Paul Jay discuss Obama’s Mandela lecture; Obama wants the impossible – a world where the super-rich give up “a little” and there is no massive inequality.

None of Us are Free if One of Us is Chained by Paul Street

Image by Derek Goulet via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
July 2, 2018

The road to total tyranny is littered with tests — moments when those atop reigning oppression structures learn how far they can push the boundaries of decency without sparking potent people’s resistance. One such moment was when the demented jackass and imperialist butcher George W. Bush marched down a red carpet to screw up his evil, moronic face to announce the U.S. invasion of Iraq on openly false pretexts including the shamelessly idiotic claim that Saddam Hussein’s government had been involved in the September 11, 2001 jetliner attacks and the equally bogus charge that Iraq possessed a threatening stockpile of “weapons of mass destruction.” The president and his team of Orwellian Neocon war pigs faced two days of mass protest across the country and around the world. Still, they were not deterred from launching a brazenly criminal invasion and occupation that would kill more than a million Iraqis, displace millions more, and devastate Iraq almost beyond recognition.

Denial and Mass Hysteria: The Liberal Loses It by Arthur D. Robbins

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

by Arthur D. Robbins
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained
April 16, 2018

If one had wanted to create a psychosocial experiment to study the liberal political mentality, one could not have come up with a better solution than to have Donald Trump follow Barack Obama as president of the United States: one a blank screen, the Archangel, the other, the Antichrist, a raging volcano. The Archangel departed from office to a fond and teary-eyed farewell. The Antichrist was greeted with anger and outrage. There were protests around the country. There were attempts to prevent his election. He is probably the first president in American history to be docketed for impeachment before he even took office.

The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony by Paul Street

Image by Danny Hammontree via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
March 7, 2018

There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. global power—to the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world.

Guantánamo, Torture and the Trump Agenda + The Hideous Pointlessness of Donald Trump’s Executive Order Keeping Guantánamo Open by Andy Worthington

Image by Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr

by Andy Worthington
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Andy Worthington, website, Jan. 25, 2018
February 7, 2018

I’m delighted that the video is now available of my speaking event, “Guantánamo, Torture and the Trump Agenda,” at Revolution Books in Harlem, which took place last week as part of my annual visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison on and around the anniversary of its opening — on January 11.

Lazy-Minded Liberals and “The Trump Effect” by Paul Street

Image by Don McCullough via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
January 13, 2018

*This essay (below) was published on Counterpunch on Friday, January 12, 2018. It was written and submitted before I learned about Donald Trump’s sickening racist comments calling Haiti and Africa (home to 48 nations) “shithole countries.” Trump’s racist remarks have led me to alter and add text (seen in italics) in this essay’s next-to-last paragraph.

Liberals and other Democrats are getting dumber by the day. I keep running into them and hearing the same story over and over: things are bad because Trump is the president.

Chris Hedges: The Decline of the American Empire and The Rise of China

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

RT America on Nov 26, 2017

Alfred McCoy, Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains the decline of the United States as a global power and the rise of the Chinese empire.

Michael Hudson: The Class War is Still in Business

Image by fotdmike via Flickr

with Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Michael Hudson
November 19, 2017

RT on Nov 7, 2017

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss 100 years of humiliation and unintentional self-parody as one empire goes and another, perhaps, rises again. In the second half, Max interviews Dr. Michael Hudson of michael-hudson.com to discuss the Democratic party in an era of dodgy pee-pee dossiers and no economic policies.

John Pilger: Media On Trial

Image by Josh Bartok via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with John Pilger

Frome Stop War on Nov 1, 2017

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
235 Shaftesbury Ave, WC2H 8EP London, United Kingdom

Abby Martin and Rosa Clemente: Electoral Politics Never Saved Anyone

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below

Dandelion Salad

with Abby Martin

teleSUR English on Oct 11, 2017

Renowned Afro-Latinx activist and scholar Rosa Clemente sits down with Abby Martin to discuss her experiences running for Vice President, organizing under Obama versus under Trump, advice for new activists, identity politics and more.

Race v. Class? More Brilliant Bourgeois Bullshit from Ta-Nehesi Coates by Paul Street

Image by Rodney Dunning via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, Sept. 21, 2017
Previously published at Counterpunch, Sept. 15, 2017
September 25, 2017

Numerous correspondents sent me the latest lengthy Atlantic essay by the brilliant and eloquent but bourgeois Black Identitarian Ta-Nehesi Coates and asked for my reflections. I reluctantly agreed to read and comment on Coates’ long treatise.

Chris Hedges: My Goal Is The Utter Destruction Of This Corporate Kleptocracy, interviewed by Joe Sacco

Image by Lorie Shaull via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

KBOO Radio on Jun 7, 2017

Truthdig columnist & Pulitzer Prize–winner Chris Hedges and Portland-based award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco spoke at The Aladdin Theater in Portland, Oregon on May 27th, 2017 — the day after the horrific hate crime occurred on the MAX.

Obama: A Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class Ideas by Paul Street + Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama and the Limitations of Liberal Criticism

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, June 6, 2017
June 8, 2017

A “Hollow” Man Who Was “Unwilling to Fight the Good Fight”

What on Earth motivated the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor David J. Garrow to write an incredibly detailed 1078-page (1460 pages with endnotes and index included) biography of Barack Obama from conception through election to the White House? Not any great personal affinity for Obama on Garrow’s part, that’s for sure. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is no hagiography. On the last page of this remarkable tome, Garrow describes Obama at the end of his distinctly non-transformative and “failed presidency” as a man who had long ago had become a “vessel [that] was hollow at its core.”