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.

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

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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.

Chris Hedges: American Prophets of Social Justice

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below

Dandelion Salad

Previously published April 1, 2017

with Chris Hedges

RT America on Apr 1, 2017

On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges is joined by Professor Albert Raboteau, author of American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice. They discuss the theological and ethical motivations of prophetic figures and their importance in an age of radical evil. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the legacy of Dorothy Day who established the Catholic Worker Movement.

Chris Hedges: The Illusion of Democracy

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Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

RT America on Mar 25, 2018

Peter L. P. Simpson, a Professor of Classics & Philosophy at the City University of New York, discusses the nature of democracy by deconstructing the political philosophy of liberalism.

Liberals These Days are Largely Cold Warriors by William Blum

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by William Blum
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Killing Hope
February 8, 2018

“Fake news” is fake news.

The people who created Facebook and Google must be smart. They’re billionaires, their companies are worth multi-multi billions, their programs are used by billions around the world.

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 Failings of the American Left–Why No Mention of Capitalism?

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Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

RT America on Jan 6, 2018

Charles Derber, Author and Sociologist, discusses the failings of the American left through intersectionality.

Against Identitarian and Generational Divide and Rule by Paul Street

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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
Previously published at Counterpunch, December 29, 2017
December 31, 2017

The Occupy Wall Street movement that spread across the country six-plus years ago lacked proper organization and strategy, but it deserves credit for having the right enemy – the corporate and financial ruling class. The same can be said to no small degree about the sadly Democratic Party-captive Bernie Sanders campaign, which targeted “the billionaire class” as the main culprit behind the miseries of life in the brutally class-disparate United States. Both populist phenomena – Occupy and the Sanders “movement” – failed to build lasting people’s organizations and failed to properly situate the “One Percent”/“Billionaire Class” within the specific historical contexts of capitalist class rule and capitalism’s “evil twin” imperialism. Neither offered anything like a revolutionary alternative to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of wealth and empire. Still, both demonstrated a reasonable opening understanding of who calls the shots under what Noam Chomsky is right to sardonically call “really existing [U.S.] capitalist democracy, or RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked’”: the U.S. corporate and financial oligarchy.

9-11 Commemoration Garbage Was Nothing But More War Justifying Propaganda by Daniel N. White

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by Daniel N. White
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
December 11, 2017

Bernard Fall, the great French-American writer on the wars in Vietnam, wrote a piece in his Street Without Joy about his early days in Vietnam, during the French war there. One day Fall was in Cambodia doing interviews and research, and afterwards went with a pair of French officers that he’d interviewed to the local club tennis courts, and watched them, in their spotless tennis whites, play a full match of tennis. Early on in their game, a Cambodian NCO came up to the court and attempted to get one of the officers to sign some papers he had. The NCO got a brushoff—the French officers were busy with their game—and so the Cambodian NCO just went off to the sidelines, squatted on his haunches the way Cambodians do, full out in the tropical sun , and waited while the two French officers in their tennis whites batted the ball back and forth. Fall watched, with a feeling of dread coming over him, as the post bugler sounded Last Post, the colors were lowered, the Cambodian standing to attention while the French officers continued playing tennis. Fall wrote:

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

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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.”

Chris Hedges: The Rise of Trump

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Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

Earthbound on Mar 15, 2017

Truthdig columnist and Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges addresses fascism and the rise of the Trump war machine in the keynote speech at the “After Trump and Pussy Hats” event in Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 3, 2017.

Chris Hedges: It’s The Failure of the Democratic Establishment To Cope With Why They Lost + Arrest of RT America Journalist

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

goingundergroundRT on Jan 28, 2017

We talk shop with former UK business minister Vince Cable over Theresa May’s attempts at post-Brexit damage control. We speak to the Director of a new Oliver Stone-exec produced film about mainstream media parroting government lies. We ask Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges about why if you are a journalist who cares, you don’t get a promotion.

The Enemy is Not Trump, It is Ourselves by John Pilger

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Dandelion Salad

by John Pilger
John Pilger, Jan. 17, 2017
January 21, 2017

On the day President Trump is inaugurated, thousands of writers in the United States will express their indignation. “In order for us to heal and move forward…”, say Writers Resist, “we wish to bypass direct political discourse, in favour of an inspired focus on the future, and how we, as writers, can be a unifying force for the protection of democracy.”

Chris Hedges: Fascism vs Neoliberalism

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Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

Watching the Hawks RT on Jan 11, 2017

Award winning journalist and host of RT’s On Contact Chris Hedges enters the Hawks Nest to discuss the future of the United States in the hands of Donald Trump and what is next for the neoliberal supporters of Hillary Clinton.

Chris Hedges: Liberal Elites Spoke The Language Of Values While Thrusting A Knife Into The Backs Of The Underclass

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Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

RT America on Jan 7, 2017

On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses strategies of resistance with Michael Gecan, author of “Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action”. RT Correspondent reports on the godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky.