Tuesday, October 5, 2010

New Book by Historian, Critic, and Activist Paul Street on Barack Obama and Modern American Politics




http://www.paulstreet.org/

The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power [Paperback]
Paul Street (Author)

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Paradigm Publishers (September 15, 2010)

A sequel to Street's Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008) this new book documents and assesses Obama's newly emergent record on domestic and foreign politics against his original agenda for change. Although mainstream journalists have noted discrepancies between Obama's original vision and reality, Paul Street uniquely measures Obama's record against the expectations of the truly progressive agenda many of his supporters expected him to follow. Taken together, the list of Obama's weakened policies is startling: his business-friendly measures with the economy, the lack of support for the growing mass of unemployed and poor, the dilution of his health reform agenda, the passage of a record-setting Pentagon budget, and the escalation of U.S. military violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Street s account reveals these and many other indications of how deeply beholden Obama is to existing dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines. His new book yields a perspective on Obama and current politics that is scarcely found in mainstream media. No progressive reader will want to miss it!

About the Author

Paul Street

Paul Street is an independent journalist, policy adviser, and historian. Formerly he was Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League. Among his recent books are Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (Routledge, 2005). His many articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune; In These Times; Dissent; Z Magazine; Black Commentator; Monthly Review, Journal of American Ethnic History; Journal of Social History, and other publications.

A sequel to Street's Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, this new book documents and assesses Obama's newly emergent record on domestic and foreign politics against his original agenda for change. Although mainstream journalists have noted discrepancies between Obama's original vision and reality, Paul Street uniquely measures Obama's record against the expectations of the truly progressive agenda many of his supporters expected him to follow. Taken together, the list of Obama's weakened policies is startling: his business-friendly measures with the economy, the lack of support for the growing mass of unemployed and poor, the dilution of his health reform agenda, the passage of a record-setting Pentagon budget, and the escalation of U.S. military violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Street s account reveals these and many other indications of how deeply beholden Obama is to existing dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines. His new book yields a perspective on Obama and current politics that is scarcely found in mainstream media. No progressive reader will want to miss it!


Pre-order "The Empire's New Clothes" on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Empires-New-Clothes-Barack-Obama/dp/1594518459/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277750493&sr=1-2


Street’s writings, research findings, and commentary have been featured and presented in a large number and wide variety of media venues, including The New York Times, CNN, Al Jazeera, theChicago Tribune, The Times of India, Morning Star (England), Al-Alkhbar (The News in Beirut, Lebanon), WGN (Chicago/national), WLS (ABC-Chicago), Fox News, the Chicago Sun Times, theCapital City Times (Madison, WI), and the Iowa City Press Citizen.

Street has appeared in more than 60 radio and television interviews/broadcasts and on the popular live Web book-chat at “Firedog.” Lake

Street possesses a doctorate in modern U.S. History (with an emphasis on the history of industrial and class relations) – a degree that he will soon be marketing on E-Bay – and once hit a 25-foot jump shot over the outstretched arm of Michigan Wolverine basketball great and future NBA veteran Ricky Green.

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 Kapitaland 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 Schoolat 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.