Image by Collin Anderson via Flickr
by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
August 17, 2018
“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” This famous socialist slogan, adapted from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto,” struck Noam Chomsky as a poor fit for most people in the world’s rich nations almost half a century ago.
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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
August 12, 2018
One of the more darkly amusing narratives in current establishment Democratic Party positioning for the 2018 mid-term elections and the 2020 presidential contest is the claim that the Bernie Sanders tendency represents a radical “socialist” threat that will tip the races to the Republicans and Trump.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Image by Derek Goulet via Flickr
by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
June 12, 2018
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Signed by the United States and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, the document was a great and shining step forward in the articulation of how human beings might organize their social and political systems in accord with democratic and civilized ideals.
Image by Doug Geisler via Flickr
with Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 5, 2018
and with Glen Ford, Chris Hedges, Bruce Dixon
Other Voices, Other Choices on June 4, 2018
Event Organizer: Paul L. Street
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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
April 18, 2018
You’ve got to hand it to Hillary Clinton. In 2016, she helped put the right-wing racist, sexist, nativist, authoritarian, and nationalist oligarch Donald Trump in the White House. She and her operatives did this in two ways: (1) by rigging the presidential primaries against the popular progressive Democrat Bernie Sanders, the Democrats’ best chance to prevail over Trump; (2) by mounting a dreadfully uninspiring and transparently tone-deaf, neoliberal general election campaign – a reflection of her massive funding by the nation’s corporate and financial establishment, including big business money normally slated for Republican presidential candidates.
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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
March 26, 2018
World peace is none of your business
You must not tamper with arrangements
Work hard and simply pay your taxes
Never asking what for
Oh, you poor little fool
Oh, you fool
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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
March 20, 2018
Climate Crisis, Not “Climate Change”
My next-to-last CounterPunch essay (“Someone Tell a Reporter: the Rich Are Destroying the Earth”) elicited a smart criticism from a senior scientist:
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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
March 12, 2018
“I Said Why? They Said They Didn’t Know”
Let history record that on Wednesday, September 6, 2017, 14 days after climate change-fueled Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas and 4 days before Hurricane Irma hit southern Florida, the climate-denying President of the United States Donald Trump went to North Dakota to deliver a “tax reform” speech before hundreds of workers and managers at a major oil refinery. The president made comments so senseless and stupid that one must read them twice to believe they were uttered:
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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.
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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
January 26, 2018
With the news cycle taken over by the latest madness emerging from the mouth or Twitter feed of the childish “orange one” in the White House, could we step back from the circus to reflect like adults on the social and historical forces that produced the clown presidency? Haymarket Books’ new collection of essays by leading left political analysts, US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality, is required reading for anyone interested in such reflections on Donald Trump.
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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.
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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
Previously published at Counterpunch
January 6, 2018
Most of the media’s attention on journalist Michael Wolff’s “explosive” new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House has focused on the disclosure that Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon used the words “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” to describe Donald Trump, Jr. and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s infamous June 2016 meeting with Russians claiming to possess damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
