The rubber era was so violent that it lives on in the myths of Amazonian oral traditions. Daughters and granddaughters of women who were raped by rubber overseers are sometimes also raped when they work as maids for today’s rich descendants of rubber barons. Modern spinoffs include human trafficking, child sex tourism, oil spills, and habitat destruction. Another aspect is that the border zone between Peru and Brazil has the largest concentration of isolated Indigenous peoples. This is no accident. Many are descendants of people who fled into the deep forest to escape the violence.

More

The post Amazonia and the World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

It is the season of annual shareholder meetings for giant corporations when CEOs go through the motions of elections for their Board of Directors and approval of other resolutions. People who own stock in General Motors (GM) receive the “GM Meeting Information” in an envelope emblazoned with this disingenuous message: “Your Voice/Your Vote/Be Heard. Every More

The post Inverted Corporate Capitalism – Blocking Their Owner-Shareholders appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Even back in 1989, it was not every day you came across a banking chief who wanted to be a philosophy professor. It was certainly not every day you came across one who was assassinated when you were supposed to be with him. I was thinking about all this with a heavy heart recently after […]

More

The post Killing Herrhausen appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The post appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

"Whenever there’s...national solidarity, we always see this narrative of 'outside agitators' being used to discredit the entire movement."

The post ‘Charging Domestic Terrorism Is Intended to Make the Cost of Protesting Too High’ appeared first on FAIR.

If you want people to think a country resistant to US leadership is a festering doomscape, just underexpose the hell out of your photographs.

The post Underexposure Exposed appeared first on FAIR.

Many corporate news reporters seem unable to present a labor action as other than an unwonted interruption of a natural order.

The post Eric Thurm on the Hollywood Writers’ Strike appeared first on FAIR.

What’s the use of William Blake? Or for that matter, what’s the use of any art and literature in an age of climate change, proxy wars, nuclear threat, pandemic, and the rise of fascism? Rather than study and enjoy works by long dead poets or painters, shouldn’t we focus on the emergency? If the museum is on fire, do we stroll the galleries, admiring the masterpieces or rush in and douse the flames? More

The post What’s the Use of William Blake? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In recognition of the institutional political biases operating against people of color, the NAACP has issued a travel advisory against Florida, lamenting Governor Ron DeSantis’s “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”  The organization bluntly declares that “Under the leadership of Governor DeSantis, the state of Florida has become hostile to Black Americans…before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.” More

The post “White Protectionism” is White Supremacy: A Bait and Switch as Old as History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Over 815 homeless people have died in public places in New York since 2022, most recently and notably Jordan Neely, whose obstreperous destitution offended a fellow subway rider, Daniel Penny, who strangled Neely to death. Penny is white, Neely was Black, though ex-marine Penny claimed May 20 that he is not a white supremacist. The media and mayor Adams downplayed the viciousness of this crime, because, according to Adams, “there were serious mental health issues in play here.” What else would you expect from a former cop? When called to assist people cracking up, police routinely shoot and kill them. Adams unwittingly implies that the Nazi response to schizophrenics is acceptable: murder them. More

The post The Death Penalty for Homelessness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Hillary Clinton has never addressed her role in the midnight pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. In fact, she’s rarely been asked her opinion on the free pass given to one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, a man who violated embargoes against Iran and South Africa and fled the country rather than face trial More

The post The Clintons and the Rich Women appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

On the edge of Washington state, just a few miles from the great Columbia River, boiling radioactive sludge is seeping out of a huge underground tank known as B-109. Another tank, B-111, was found to be leaking a similarly noxious soup back in 2011 and has been polluting the soil and groundwater ever since. The More

The post Accountability Needed at the Country’s Most Toxic Site appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Though the United States remains a strong supporter of Israel, there are some indications that the supposed ‘unbreakable bond’ with Tel Aviv is faltering, though more in language than in deeds. Following the provocative ‘Flag March’ on May 18, which is carried out annually by Israeli Jewish extremists in the Occupied Palestinian city of East More

The post Not On Our Dime!’: Why US Democrats Are Growingly Challenging Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are the new nuclear craze, especially with the U.S. Congress, as America’s representatives see SMRs as a big answer to energy needs and reduction of greenhouse gases, advertised as a green deal for clean energy that skirts the heavy costs of paying the Middle East billions upon billions. However, the devil More

The post Nuclear Turns Fashionable appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

According to the recently published Harvard / Harris poll of the political views of Americans, 70% believe that the US intelligence agencies are 1) rigging American elections and 2) should be prevented from doing so in the future. This view finds support in the recently released report from Special Counsel John Durham that concluded that More

The post The Russiagate Fraud Revisited appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

I recently celebrated my 85th birthday, an event that clearly lands me in “the valley of the shadow of death,” as King David or his scribe so neatly put it.  Friends of mine are falling ill and dying at a rate rapid enough to justify Philip Roth’s grim reference to “the holocaust of my generation.”  More

The post Against Involuntary Death appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

America’s premiere sexuality research center, the Kinsey Institute, has been defunded, even as American Perma Wars—at home and abroad—are super-funded. Bi-partisan billions keep rolling in for the War Machines—thanks to the Military Industrial-Congressional Complex, the Cops and the Gun Industry—that destroy lives at home and abroad, yet there’s nothing but slander and censorship, fire and More

The post Kinsey Defunded, Perma Wars Mega-Funded, Humanities Up in Smoke appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Among the 2,500 years’ old moral philosophies, the morality of artificial intelligence (AI) broadly falls into the area of machine morality. Within this, there is even a website called Morals & Machines. Its next conference is scheduled for 25th of May in the German city of Munich. The more astute reader of moral philosophy tends More

The post AI and Human Autonomy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion released last week revealed that the FBI violated the constitutional rights of 278,000 Americans in 2020 and 2021 with warrantless searches of their email and other electronic data. For each American that the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the FBI illicitly surveiled almost a thousand additional Americans. More

The post FISA is the “Trust Me, Chumps!” Surveillance Act appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Belafonte in the Sun Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine in the final scene of Island in the Sun (1957) After the first installment of my planned two-part tribute to Harry Belafonte, who died a month ago at the age of, two weeks of nonsense intervened. First came the coronation of Charles III—the pomp and circumstance More

The post Belafonte in the Sun appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In this insightful discussion, Vijay Prashad, a prominent Indian historian and commentator, shared his valuable insights on various subjects, including the role of the Indian diaspora in shaping global perspectives on Indian politics and culture, his motivation to study the intersections of imperialism, capitalism, and globalization, and the enduring effects of colonialism on India and More

The post Colonial Legacies and Post-Colonial Realities: Vijay Prashad in Conversation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In 2015, after you were done gawking at the statue of Princess Di in the world’s largest department store, Harrods in London, you could head on over to the world-famous food halls where you could buy, among other high-priced indulgences, a type of tea branded “Ambootia Snow Mist.” At $7,864 per kilogram—enough to make about 300 cups—Snow Mist regularly made appearances More

The post The Deplorable Work Conditions Behind Harrods’ $7,000 ‘Ambootia Snow Mist’ Darjeeling Tea appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

While few of the world’s governments seem to care about Palestine, at least their officials will occasionally pay lip service to the extreme violations of human rights and international law that the apartheid regime of Israel commits against the people of Palestine on a daily basis. Sometimes, following a particularly egregious crime, there will even More

The post Kashmir in the Shadows appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

One thing I was grateful for during the pandemic was masks — and not just for safety reasons. I’m on Medicare for disability, which unfortunately doesn’t cover dental care. At 60 years old, I’ve lost many of my teeth. It was nice hiding behind a mask for a while. But I was grateful for another More

The post The SNAP Expansion Helped Me Lead a Dignified Life on Disability…Now It’s Gone appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The news sure makes it sound like President Biden and Republicans have been haggling over the national debt. But that’s not what’s really happening — not at all. President Biden wants to spend more money and run up the deficit, the story goes. Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wants to rein the Democrats’ “addiction to More

The post There’s No Debate About the Debt, Only Political Priorities appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Germany is a country of sensible shoes. And, I might add, supremely comfortable ones. Germans do buttery leather as well as they do beer. Germany’s energy policy is similarly sensible. Germans see no reason to choose the slowest, most expensive, most dangerous and decidedly non-renewable energy source with which to address the climate crisis. Consequently, More

The post Germany’s Non-Nuclear Path to a Carbon Neutral Future appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In the Blindman’s Buff variation of tag, a child designated as “It” is tasked with tapping another child while wearing a blindfold. The sightless child knows the other children, all able to see, are there but is left to stumble around, using sounds and knowledge of the space they’re in as guides. Finally, that child does succeed, either More

The post America’s Continuing Quest to Hide Torture appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is an ultra-right (I would say fascist) organization founded in India in 1925. Its primary goal is to establish a Brahmin Hindu nation in India. Although it was marginally involved in the struggle against British colonialism before India’s 1947 independence and partition, its emphasis on Hindu supremacy meant it had More

The post Killing Gandhi: The Legacy of an Assassination appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

 “Why Kiev needs those F-16 fighters” and “Bloody days of clawing back ground at Bakhmut” are recent front page New York Times headlines with details of the weapon’s possibilities and the battles “grinding combat” in the following articles. Also included are quotations from those involved in the fighting and Ukrainian government officials overseeing the war. Where More

The post Why No West Point of Peace? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This is the fifth part in a series about travels in Saudi Arabia, along the line of the Hejaz railway. Uber took me to my Jeddah hotel, which I had booked for its proximity to the Corniche, a residential suburb with a promenade along the Red Sea. I thought I might be able to walk More

The post Letters From Saudi Arabia: Jeddah to Lawrence’s Yanbu appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president from 1999 until 2013, inspired and led a “Bolivarian Revolution” that sought independence from U.S. domination, regional integration and so-called socialism of the 21st century. Obstacles are many: capitalism in control of the national economy, unrelenting rightwing political opposition, U.S. intervention – and longstanding political divisions among left forces. Worker empowerment More

The post Worker Empowerment Stalls in Venezuela as Left Unity Fractures appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Medical doctors and therapists surrounded Beat luminary Allen Ginsberg. But not until now has a single MD turned to the written word to describe a singular literary genius who shifted the course of American poetry. Dr. Stevan M. Weine does that in Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness, a new book More

The post Allen Ginsberg: Unsafe at any Speed appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Dr K will be celebrated today for his heroism and wonderful taste in women that made Mao laugh for hours and share jokes about dumplings dipped in yo soy sauce.  There’ll be no talk at the celebration table of Cambodia or the darkside of the Peace Accords, or the Nobel Prize for that matter. [Place More

The post Kissinger at 100 (A Prose Poem) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

When I saw that two of the country’s most prominent economists (Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson) wrote a book (Power and Progress) on “our 1000-year struggle over technology and prosperity,” I expected a lot. I was disappointed. To be clear, there is much here to like and I’m sure that most readers will get much from it, More

The post We Can Do Better With a Thousand Years: On Power and Progress appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art Christopher Knight, an art critic for the Los Angeles Times, took a recent walk through LACMA and found it unpleasant. LACMA is the Loss Angeles County Museum of Art. He said LACMA used to be one of the country’s most interesting museum of historical art, exhibiting a tremendous More

The post Weaponizing Modern Art appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Arriving for my bone density test at a downstate New York hospital, I’m delighted to again find Belinda in Radiology. When she does my annual mammogram, I learn more than about cancer. Although she readily shares her own breast cancer experience as she prepares her half-million-dollar machine. How she delights in describing its new features. More

The post A Reality Check on Our Polarized Lives (From My Radiology Exam) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Are you worried about the rising political power of violent white nationalists in America? Well, you’ve got plenty of company, including U.S. national security and counterterrorism officials. And we’re worried, too — worried enough, in fact, to feel that it’s time to take a look at the experience of India, where Hindu supremacist dogma has More

The post The Violent Urge for Supremacy in the World’s Two Largest Democracies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Jordan Neely was kind of a weird kid. If you ever saw him, you would know what I mean. There was just something profoundly ‘other’ about his spirit and through the right set of eyes, it was something beautiful to behold. He looked just like Michael Jackson back when Michael Jackson still looked like Michael More

The post Queering Mental Illness into a New Revolutionary Consciousness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Corporate anti-competitive power and Cold War fears lead the government to contemplate censoring media now available to 80 million Americans.

The post Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China appeared first on FAIR.

U.S. Ambassador Robert O’Brien, the former National Security Advisor of Donald Trump, told Steve Clemons, an editor at Semafor, at the Global Security Forum in Doha, Qatar, on March 13, 2023, “The United States and its allies are never going to let those [semiconductor] factories fall into Chinese hands.” China, O’Brien said, could build “the new OPEC of silicon chips” and thereby, “control the world economy.” The United States will prevent this possibility, he said, even if it means a military strike. More

The post How the U.S. War on Taiwanese Semiconductors Might Benefit Japan appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Trans Legislation Tracker reports that as of May 2023, 543 anti-trans bills have been proposed in 49 state and 71 have passed; of these, 59 have been signed into law while 12 others have passed but haven’t been enacted.  Last year, 26 bill were passed out of 174 proposed bills. Oklahoma’s OK SB129 is More

The post The Great Panic: Trans-Sexuality and the Erosion of Patriarchy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In the release of nuclear energy, humanity has finally achieved a power on the order of volcanoes. Nothing is so much like a volcanic eruption as a nuclear explosion. In fact, the mushroom cloud that formed on the horizon when Tahonelatclah (Mt. St. Helens) erupted with an estimated 20 megatons of force caused many to believe war had broken out. With a nuclear war, humanity could even mimic the effects of a supervolcano, soot from the fires reducing sunlight enough to cause years of winter-like conditions and global famine killing more people than the nuclear exchange.  In the face of the volcano, we can see our own.  We are the new volcano.  Our powers might well consume us. More

The post Becoming Our Own Volcano: the Fires of Nature and Humanity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

When the new House majority passed its grab bag of government spending cuts last month, setting up an on-going game of chicken with the White House over any federal debt limit increase, they also directed their fire at essential services for military veterans, a constituency long courted by their own party. Included in the “Limit, More

The post Amid Debt Ceiling Debate: VA Cuts Passed by House Give Corporate Dems Political Cover appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The US is a violent society. The violence is not solely a domestic issue, but extends outward over the world, which is like a US plaything of empire. Clichés like the US has noble intentions is pablum for consumption here, with over 800 military bases and rumors of war and war, in which the US More

The post Like the Handwriting on the Wall appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the physician-turned-economist François Quesnay devised a quantitative model of the economy, among the first of its kind and a precursor to present-day GDP. Quesnay is famous today as among the leading lights of an economic theory known as Physiocracy. Like other Physiocrats, Quesnay placed land and agricultural output More

The post GDP and the Idolatry of Growth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

I’m sure most of my readers are familiar with Jamie Dimon, the longtime CEO of JP Morgan. He pocketed $34.5 million last year. If he sticks around for another three years as CEO, he stands to earn another $50 million, in addition to his normal compensation. That’s pretty good pay by almost any standard, so More

The post Should Jamie Dimon Get a Government Salary? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Things are not looking up at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a global professional services firm piratically free in sharing confidential tax information gathered from government clients.  Then again, the firm’s expertise is not so much to look up to a principled heaven as down to a tax-proof Hades, buried in the scrambling minutiae of accounting and deception. More

The post Rogue Consultants: PwC, Tax Evasion and Getting Clients appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

I’ll be turning 67 at the end of this month. I’d love to be able to retire on my birthday. I’d celebrate by spending the afternoon at the mall with my daughter and then start planning little trips to visit relatives. But even after working for our nation’s largest employer — Walmart — for 22 More

The post A Walmart Worker’s View on the Retirement Divide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Durham report has been released but nobody really cares, nobody on the left anyway it seems. This report is damning, very damning and viewed from an unbiased, discerning position the reader, in anything like “normal circumstances”, would be quite alarmed with the corrupting influence and out and out extreme interference in the electoral process. More

The post Sorry, I Just Can’t Go For That appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The United States’ astronomical levels of economic inequality are poised to become further entrenched in the coming years as what The New York Times described Sunday as “the greatest wealth transfer in history” gets underway, with the richest members of the Baby Boomer generation set to pass trillions of dollars in assets on to their descendants—often paying More

The post Runaway Inequality About to Get Worse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

PINEDALE, Wyo.— The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service’s authorization of the killing of up to 72 grizzly bears on public land just outside of Yellowstone National Park violated federal law. Meant to accommodate private grazing operations in grizzly habitat, the 2019 grazing authorization would have allowed More

The post Court Overturns Federal Authorization to Kill 72 Grizzlies Near Yellowstone appeared first on CounterPunch.org.