An "Oldy But Goody" from February 2019

"Thirty-One Actual National Emergencies"

Dear Paul Street Report readers: I’m on a short writing vacation to relax and catch up on some reading, but it strikes me that some of you may be interested in some of the many hundreds of essays of mine that have been published online and elsewhere since 9/11. I am going to put some of what I think are a handful of my better pre-Substack essays here this and next week. Here is one I did in mid-February of 2019 - a response to then president Donald Trump’s racist-nativist declaration of a “national emergency” on the southern US border in early 2019. Looking back on this piece four plus years later, it strikes me that I should have specified attacks on abortion rights underway in Red states. I’m less comfrotable these days with the “guns v. butter” narrative (#28) insofar as it seems to imply that the primary victims of US imperialism are US-Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. And if I were writing this fresh today, I would make this my primary national and global emergency: the capitalist-imperialist system and the urgent need to radically replace it with revolutionary socialism.