Apr 23 2010
You all, I hope, have read Paul Street’s and Anthony DiMaggio’s piece on MRZine, “What ‘Populist Uprising’?”, about the actual identities of the participants in “Tea Party” movement. This actually reveals something interesting about Street himself — that someone who actually wants to “resist empire” is willing to admit that the only resistance to make it to the TV screen is, in fact, a charade.
(crossposted at Orange and at Firedoglake)
Jun 17 2009
The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left
by Paul Street, May 30, 2009
Five Key Lessons Beyond the Gnashing of Radical Teeth
LEGITIMATE LEFT ANGER
There has been a lot of left-wing teeth-gnashing over the policies of the United States’ fake-progressive president Barack Obama. Left-progressives’ anger with the Obama administration is understandable given the new White House’s actions to (for example):
* Significantly expand the reach and intensity of imperial violence (replete with the mass slaughter of civilians and the related escalation of targeted assassinations) in South Asia.
* Promote a notorious assassin and death-squad leader (Lt. General Stanley A McChrystal – former chief of the military’s special Joint Special Operations Command) to the position of Commander of U.S. Forces in the newly merged “Af-Pak” war theater. [1]
* Sustain the criminal occupation of Iraq beneath rhetoric of withdrawal. [2]
* Increase “defense” (empire) spending, consistent with the following statement in a report issued by the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley one day after Obama’s presidential election victory: “As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.”[3]
* Revive military commissions.
* Continue the practice of renditions.
* Maintain secret prisons for persons “held on a short-term, transitory basis.”
* Continue the unspeakable torture of prisoners by an “extrajudicial terror squad” (Jeremy Scahill’s description of the Pentagon’s sadistic “Immediate Reaction Force” in Cuba) at Guantanamo Bay. [4]
Aug 10 2008
The first, Obama’s Letters of No Apology by Paul Street via dissidentvoice.org asks:
Should Barack Obama’s volunteers mail “Letters of No Apology” to survivors of the large number of people killed by U.S. imperial assault in Iraq and Afghanistan?