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Paul L. Street is the author of six books to date: Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008, described by John Pilger in The Guardian in 2009 as “perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44^thpresident of the United States”);  The Empire’s New Clothes:  Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, forthcoming in July 2010); and Crashing the Tea Party Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO Paradigm. 2011, co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio).
 
Street has published a large number of articles, essays, reviews, and editorials in numerous outlets, including ZNet, Z Magazine, CounterPunch, Black Agenda Report, the Chicago Tribune, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of Social History, Mid-America, Critical Sociology, Chicago History,Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Studies in History and Politics, History of Education Quarterly, Monthly Review,  Iowa City Press-Citizen, In These Times, Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai, India),  Tinabantu: Journal of African National Affairs (Cape Town, South Africa),  Synthesis/Regeneration, International Socialist Review, Dissent, Capital City Times (Madison, WI),  Black Commentator, Tom’s Dispatch, History News Network, MRZine, Dissident Voice, and Monthly Review.   

Street has also published a large number of book chapters and project studies, including the widely read reports The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois and the Nation (Chicago Urban League, 2002) and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Class, Poverty and Policy in Chicago (Chicago Urban League, 2005).  
 
Street’s writings, research findings, reviews, and commentaries have been cited and quoted in a large number and wide variety of media venues, including The New York Times, CNN, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, the Chicago Tribune, The Progressive, The Indypendent (NYC), The Times of India, Morning Star (England), Al-Alkhbar (The News in Beirut, Lebanon),  Canal da Imprensa (Brazil), Real Clear Politics,  NBC-New York City, WGN (Chicago/national), WLS (ABC-Chicago), Press TV (Iran), Fox News, the Chicago Sun Times, Illinois Issues, and theCapital City Times (Madison, WI),and theIowa City Press Citizen. Street has been featured in more than 70 radio and television interviews and broadcasts, and on the popular live book salon at “Firedog Lake.”
 
Street has a doctorate in U.S. History at Binghamton University and has taught at numerous colleges and universities in and around Chicago.  Street was the Director of Research and Vice President for Research and Planning at The Chicago Urban League from 2000 to 2005. Street is currently an independent policy researcher, historian, journalist, activist, political commentator, and speaker based in Chicago, Illinois and Iowa City, Iowa.
 
Street has appeared in more than 60 radio and television interviews/broadcasts and on the popular live Web book-chat at Firedog Lake

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

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Featured ZMag Articles

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• Saturday, Dec 05, 2009
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  Paul Street: Saving Capitalism

  

  

  ZMag Article

  Orin Kramer defines Obama's duty to America

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Tuesday, Sep 01, 2009
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  Paul Street: Corporate Democracy

  

  

  ZMag Article

  Health reform prospects in the age of Obama

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Friday, May 01, 2009
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  Paul Street: Obama's Violin

  

  

  ZMag Article

  Tamped down populist anger versus a new popular movement

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Jan 07, 2009
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  Paul Street: No Dividend

  

  

  ZMag Article

  The likely continuation of empire and inequality under "Brand Obama."

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Tuesday, Jan 01, 2008
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  Paul Street: Largely About Oil

  

  

  ZMag Article

  The White House got it right when they initially gave their immoral incursion the acronym OIL (for Operation Iraqi Liberation). “Oil” is the main reason that a rapid and thorough U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and true Iraqi freedom and independence ar...

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Dec 01, 2007
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  Paul Street: Corporate Democrats

  

  

  ZMag Article

  Do you hate and/or fear the authoritarian, regressive, intolerant, messianic, militarist Republican Party? Would you like to see that terrible political organization swept into the dustbin of history?

  Paul Street ZSpace page
• All Featured ZMag Articles

Recent Audio

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• Wednesday, Dec 01, 2010
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  Paul Street: Tea Party & Democrats

  

  

  Audio

  Paul Street on the Tea Party, the dismalness of the Dems, and Obama’s elegant personal fit with that dismalness.

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Sep 19, 2009
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  Paul Street: Ringmaster

  

  

  Audio

  An interview with Paul Street, one of Mr. Obama's earliest critics from the left, who had the opportunity back in Chicago to see him in action. Total runtime an hour and one minute.

  Paul Street ZSpace page
• All Recent Audio

Commentaries

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• Wednesday, Jan 25, 2012
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  Paul Street: Reflections on the Quadrennial Extravaganza

  

  

  Commentary

  What you do or don’t do on Election Day is a tiny matter compared to what we can and must do together to build left movement capacity and presence

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Jan 04, 2012
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  Paul Street: Fascist America? Not Exactly

  

  

  Commentary

  The American elite already gets the basic regressive and authoritarian outcomes of fascism without having to unleash the full brutality of fascist dictatorship

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Tuesday, Dec 27, 2011
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  Paul Street: Tea Party Republicans are Petit-Bourgeois Militarists

  

  

  Commentary

  The first error was to think that many if not most of the Tea Party supporters came largely from the working class progressive base

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Friday, Dec 23, 2011
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  Paul Street: “The Price is Worth It”

  

  

  Commentary

  Before their deaths can be called “worth it” in some venues, most of America’s officially unworthy victims are sent down Orwell’s memory hole

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Dec 21, 2011
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  Paul Street: Obama’s Sinister Silence

  

  

  Commentary

  Is Obama aware that his silence on the great popular, grassroots struggles for change sends a deafening message of corporatist, fake-progressive hypocrisy

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Friday, Dec 16, 2011
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  Paul Street: A Happiness That Harms

  

  

  Commentary

  There is, of course, nothing new about the false and noxious notion that the rich have “earned” their wealth through merit

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Friday, Dec 02, 2011
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  Paul Street: Urban Neoliberal Racism, Poverty, and Repression of Occupy

  

  

  Commentary

  Four of every ten black Americans experienced unemployment during the 2008-09 Great Recession

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Monday, Nov 28, 2011
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  Paul Street: Repressing Occupy as Corporate Welfare

  

  

  Commentary

  One can only guess at the taxpayer expensive involved in the quasi-totalitarian crackdown conducted in the name of public safety

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Nov 24, 2011
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  Paul Street: A Banker on the Danger of Leisure

  

  

  Commentary

  Sometimes the most chilling authoritarian thoughts take a seemingly innocent form

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Tuesday, Nov 22, 2011
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  Paul Street: The Empire Strikes Back in Futility

  

  

  Commentary

  Occupy has changed the air of the nation’s political discourse

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Nov 16, 2011
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  Paul Street: Seven Reasons to Reject Condescension

  

  

  Commentary

  Ultimately, OWSers want a world turned upside down

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Oct 19, 2011
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  Paul Street: We Are Not Aimless

  

  

  Commentary

  The occupy movement has struck a radically democratic populist chord that resonates with tens of millions across the restrictive red-blue map of U.S. political geography

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Sunday, Oct 09, 2011
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  Paul Street: In Praise of Occupy Wall Street

  

  

  Commentary

  Here’s to the OWS activists and supporters and the wisdom and energy they are bringing to current American history in an age of savage empire

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Monday, Oct 03, 2011
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  Paul Street: Ozzie’s Icy Water

  

  

  Commentary

  I’ve never understood greed. I never will

  Paul Street ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Sep 29, 2011
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  Paul Street: Liberalism’s Death Rattle in Iowa

  

  

  Commentary

  Will dread of the GOP will be enough to the get Obama a second term?

  Paul Street ZSpace page
• All Commentaries