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The United States federal government in 2020 embarked on a grand and beautiful experiment: expanding the use of tax dollars to help stave off poverty. That experiment has now largely ended in a shocking return to business-as-usual. One critical component of the experiment was to ensure that public school students had free lunches via the More

The post Kids Shouldn’t Have to Pay for School Lunches appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Even to the extent the Bush Administration torture program was just a desperate and ill-considered attempt to create an effective bureaucratic legally-protected apparatus of medicalized abuse and torture to “save American lives”, the details of the program’s more shameful horrors have weighed down any benevolent intentions the program may once have had (or not). These details include health professionals subjecting minor children to “enhanced interrogation”, the occasional homicide-by-torture, calculated sexual humiliation and abuse, and even the systematic infliction of medical rape—with forced enemas, “rectal feeding”, and “rectal rehydration” on the menu of medically unnecessary traumatizing procedures to be used as “control measures.” More

The post The Interrogation Psychologists Come Home to Roost appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just More

The post The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Washington Post, like other elite news outlets, is always happy to beat up any real or perceived market intervention that benefits ordinary workers, however, it insists it cannot see the more costly interventions that benefit many corporations and highly-educated workers. Specifically, it virtually never raises any questions, either in news articles or opinion pieces, about the costs imposed by government-granted patent monopolies and related protections. More

The post Washington Post Columnist Charles Lane Wants Autoworkers to Lose Their Jobs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

CONTACT editortherednation[at]gmail.com WHAT THE RED NATION RESPONDS TO RACIST ATTACK ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE WHERE/WHEN SEPTEMBER 28, 2023 RIO ARRIBA COUNTY ANNEX BUILDING WHO CALLING ON ALL NATIONAL, STATE, TRIBAL, COUNTY, AND CITY OFFICIALS, AND MOVEMENT ALLIES, TO CONDEMN THIS RACIST ATTACK AND DEMAND THE PROTECTION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE WHY An agitator opened fire on a prayerful celebration More

The post The Red Nation Responds to Racist Attack on Indigenous People appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

A commotion (more like a tempest in a teapot) has broken out over a recent Holocaust-related statement by President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is head of Fatah, the secular nationalist party that runs the Palestine Authority (PA). It should be noted that Fatah is practically powerless, often functioning as a client of the Israelis and much More

The post The Holocaust Becomes a Palestinian Issue appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Suella Braverman has made beastliness a trait in British politics. The UK Home Secretary, fed on the mush and mash of anti-refugee sentiment, has been frantically trying to find her spot in the darkness of inhumanity. Audaciously, and with grinding ignorance, she persists in her rather grisly attempts to kill the central assumptions of international More

The post Cruel Prerogatives: Braverman on Refugees at the AEI appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

A dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though someone had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well. ~ Sherlock Holmes A reader of the “news” should pay as much attention to omissions as to what is reported. More

The post The Dog That Didn’t Bark: Nazi in the House appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Many consider the second season of Star Trek TOS to be its finest, and one of my favorite episodes from this season is “Obsession”, the story of Kirk’s desire to get revenge on “a strange gaseous creature” composed of dikironium that killed more than 50% of the crew of Kirk’s former starship, the USS Farragut, More

The post Captain Kirk’s “Obsession” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In the midst of so much bad news in the media, it is always good to be alert to rays of sunlight that civic action can build upon. First, let’s start with the sun, which is receiving increased respect these days by Earthlings. Various forms of solar energy – thermal, photovoltaic, wind, and passive (architecture) More

The post Good News – Big Opportunities on the Horizon appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Suella Braverman has made beastliness a trait in British politics. The UK Home Secretary, fed on the mush and mash of anti-refugee sentiment, has been frantically trying to find her spot in the darkness of inhumanity. Audaciously, and with grinding ignorance, she persists in her rather grisly attempts to kill the central assumptions of international More

The post Cruel Prerogatives: Braverman on Refugees at the AEI appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Shaken America Syndrome. Image: JSC and AI Art Generator.

In 2002, Robert Roberson raced his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, to a hospital emergency room in the east Texas town of Palestine.  Nikki was limp, her skin blue.  Roberson told the emergency room doctors and nurses that the two had been sleeping when he awoke and found Nikki on the floor, having fallen off the bed. The child was unresponsive. Nikki Curtis never regained consciousness and died a few days later.

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The post Shaken America Syndrome appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

Conditions for working people continue to get worse. The right to strike, or to join a union, is denied by increasing numbers of the world’s governments. The 2023 Global Rights Index report issued by the International Trade Union Confederation makes for grim reading, as has consistently been the case for the decade that the ITUC has issued its yearly reports.

Once again, there is no country on Earth that fully protects workers’ rights, the Global Rights Index report informs us. Nothing new here, as this was the case in the 2022 report, and all the reports before that. Neoliberalism does not have a human face.

More

The post It’s a Capitalist World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Net neutrality is the ability to monitor and regulate hugely powerful companies’ control over an essential element of public life.

The post The FCC Restores Its Responsibility to Oversee Corporate Control of Internet appeared first on FAIR.

"The whole thing is designed to make you think anytime workers take action, they're the ones at fault. They're the ones causing trouble."

The post ‘These Are Demands for the Whole Working Class’ appeared first on FAIR.

News media muddy the waters, encouraging public apathy by focusing on protesters’ tactics at the expense of their demands.

The post Bloomberg Muddies Climate Protests’ Vital Message: End Fossil Fuels appeared first on FAIR.

The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted are, at best, backdrop.

The post Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment appeared first on FAIR.

I’ve been re-reading with great pleasure John Le Carré’s mid-80s novel A Perfect Spy, which is a kind of roman à clef about the writer’s turbulent relationship with his father, Ronnie Cornwell, an extravagant trickster and confidence artist, who, in one of his most elaborate hoaxes, ended up running for Parliament. But Le Carré’s twisty tale of fraud and duplicity among the English moneyed classes (and those who would exploit their greed) can’t really hold up to the career of New Jersey’s own apex con man, Robert Menendez, whose personal embellishments and political fictions have become so labyrinthine that now that he’s been caught with gold bars in his closet, he can’t even get his own life story straight. More

The post Roaming Charges: Our Man in Jersey appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

March 2024 will be the seventieth anniversary of Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 See It Now program that kicked McCarthy’s butt all over the TV screen. Murrow ended with these words: “The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it – and rather successfully.” My father woke me that evening—I was 12—to tell me about Murrow’s blast and to predict McCarthy’s downfall. He would indeed be censored by his colleagues in the US Senate, but “McCarthyism” and anti-communism survived and even thrived all through the 1960s. They followed me and millions of other Americans. More

The post “I Am Not Now, Nor Have I Ever Been”:  Musings on Communism and Anti-Communism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The United Auto Workers have struck now for two weeks. Using a novel strategy to keep management on its toes, namely walking out at various plants at unexpected times, a new, different union leadership hopes to wrest some benefits from the claws of a monstrously greedy industry that has already raked in $21 billion this year. Its CEOs pull down millions of dollars annually, while the average worker’s pay has long stagnated. More

The post More at Stake for Auto Workers Than Wages and Benefits appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023, Subhas Govin Prabhakar Nair, the Indian Singaporean rapper more commonly known as Subhas, was found guilty on four counts of “promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of race and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony” under section 298A(a) of the Penal Code 1871. On September 5, 2023, Subhas More

The post The Trial of Subhas Nair: Race, Class, and Ideology in Singapore appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The game of musical chairs is popular with children. If the child’s game is based on successfully sitting on a chair when the music stops, recent diplomacy at the U.N. has been focused on empty chairs. Empty chair diplomacy goes back to French President Charles de Gaulle when the French boycotted European institutions in July More

The post Empty Chair Diplomacy 2.0 at the United Nations appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

“Climate breakdown has begun. Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. (Source: 2024 Likely to be Hottest Year on Record, Phys.org, September 6, 2023) A report from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) released by the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Berlin in the spring of 2023 More

The post Antarctica Hits Records as Global Heat Looms Large for 2024 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

All too often Black, brown, indigenous and Muslim passport holders have been denied admission to the US long before arriving at its shores when their applications for visas have been denied by US consulates and embassies in their native lands following interrogations by junior State Department staff. This is particularly true for the stateless and other refugees fleeing oppression at the hands of their own governments (often US proxies) or, in the case of Palestinians, by an occupier which seeks to eradicate them in their entirety and which, once again, has been amply rewarded for it.   More

The post Welcome to the US, Land of Unvetted Occupiers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

If the “doctrine” of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) means anything[1], then it applies to the tragedy unfolding since 2020 in the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, better known as Nagorno Karabakh. The illegal aggression by Azerbaijan in 2020, accompanied by war crimes and crimes against humanity, as documented among others by Human Rights Watch[2], constituted a More

The post Responsibility to Protect the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This fall, I’ve been starting my sociology classes by asking my students to share some uplifting news they’ve come across. On Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023, they were abuzz about Taylor Swift’s appearance at the Kansas City Chiefs game on Sunday. Swift and Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce had left Arrowhead Stadium together in Kelce’s convertible, More

The post Taylor Swift and the End of the Hollywood Writers Strike: a Tale of Two Media Narratives appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Two weeks ago cyclone  Daniel swept across northern Africa. In Libya, it obliterated two dams above  Derna, sweeping away the Libyan city, and drowning unknown thousands of people. The dams were built by  Muammar Ghadaffi, who was born a  goat-herder, near Derna. Rising through the military, he engineered a  successful coup in 1969 against colonially-appointed King Idris. Gaddafi was a More

The post America and the Drowning of Derna appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

When conservationist Aldo Leopold persuaded the U.S. Forest Service in 1924 to establish the nation’s first federally approved wilderness of more than 500,000 acres around the headwaters of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, he did not anticipate that this priceless pristine land would be invaded by cattle. This problem would take root around More

The post The Beef Industry is Destroying the American West and Worsening the Climate Crisis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Paola Andrea Cats may get health benefits from vegan diet, study suggests. So says a recent column by a science correspondent at the Guardian, describing new research comparing how cats fare when eating “vegan versus meat-based cat food.” In that research, published through PLOS One, authors Andrew Knight, Alexander Bauer, and Hazel Brown More

The post Vegan Cats Do Not Exist appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The promotion of illusionary conspiracies remains a vital means by which the ruling-class throws sand in the eyes of ordinary people – a history taken up in Colin Dickey’s enlightening book Under the Eye of Power: ​How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (2023). In introducing this legacy of elite-backed paranoia Dickey argues that: “At nearly More

The post The Political Power of Conspiracies  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This is the third part in a series about Bosnia-Herzegovina thirty years after its civil wars. During the two years of the pandemic, I did not return to Sarajevo, although our informal band of brothers in Geneva shipped thousands of books there amid the global gloom. A New Life for the European Enlightenment One collection More

The post Return to Bosnia-Herzegovina: Night Train Across Melania’s Slovenia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Nearly twice as many Americans believe that smoking cigarettes is more hazardous to your health than smoking marijuana. They’re right. Numerous studies assessing the long-term health impacts of cannabis smoke exposure belie the myth that marijuana is associated with the same sort of well established, adverse respiratory hazards as tobacco. For example, federally funded research at the University of California, Los Angeles More

The post The Science is Clear: Marijuana is Safer Than Tobacco appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Across the globe, people are turning to the courts to combat the worsening climate emergency. Since 2015, cases around the world have doubled to over 2,000, according to a recent United Nations report. They are also on the rise in the United States. In a landmark trial in Montana, a judge ruled this summer that the state had violated the young plaintiffs’ More

The post Suing for a Livable Climate appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The nation and its 335 million citizens are facing a federal government shutdown due to the inability of Congress to govern. But if politicians think the people support their endless bickering and inability to do their job, they best check a new poll from the Pew Research Center with shocking results that show Americans have More

The post Americans Have had it with Our Broken, Dysfunctional Political System appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Few serve truth in truth because only a few have a pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the will to justice; and the most terrible sufferings have come upon man precisely from a drive to justice which lacks power of judgment. – Nietzsche Separated from the sphere of labor More

The post Fighting Banal Evil with the Truth of Trauma   appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

“I’ve seen lots of funny men,” Oklahoma troubadour Woody Guthrie once sang about outlaws. “Some’ll rob you with a six gun / Some with a fountain pen.” That could apply today to Clayton Bennett, a multimillionaire Oklahoma City banker who’s regularly wielded his fountain pen to loot public funds for his private gain. Bennett is More

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Jericho does not belong to the Palestinians alone. It belongs to the whole of humanity. For Israel, however, the recognition by UNESCO of Jericho as a “World Heritage Site in Palestine” complicates its mission of erasing Palestine, physically and figuratively, from existence. The decision was described by Israel’s foreign ministry as a “cynical” ploy by More

The post Ghosts of the Past: For Israel, War on UNESCO is an Existential Battle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The United States of America has been the pre-eminent country on Earth for over 40 years.[1]  There are many competing analyses of these developments, different understandings, etc., and with all kinds of various intellectual ramifications from these.  However, along with genuine efforts to accurately understand this period, there is much misinformation, obfuscation, and plain lying More

The post The United States in the World:  Making Sense of the Past Forty Years appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The National Association of Piano Dealers reported 364,545 sales of new instruments in the United States in 1909. That was four times the number of automobiles manufactured in the country that same year. This output of pianos is an astounding figure, especially when measured against America’s population of 80 million. The majority of these instruments More

The post What to Do With the Old Piano? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Donald Trump has to be stopped. The man is a menace to democracy with an insatiable appetite for debauchery, a geriatric career gangster with a rap sheet longer than his Freudian phallic tie. The bastard has left a gruesome trail of mutilated corpses in shallow graves from Atlantic City to Jerusalem and has grievously molested More

The post The Lesser of Two Evils is a Democracy for Psychopaths appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Human history is all-too-full of ghastly acts of cruelty and torment. They are our ultimate downfall. But 80 years ago, the people of Denmark—-often a great personal risk—-saved some 8,000 Jewish Danes from occupying Nazi murderers. On October 1– 1943’s Jewish New Year– Denmark’s King and its underground resistance helped mobilize the nation to ferry More

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Donald Trump claims that no one was harmed when he lied about the value of his assets on statements he made to lenders, because loans were paid off with interest. New York Times columnist, Peter Coy takes this claim far more seriously than he should. The key point that Coy misses is that lenders base More

The post Yes, Trump’s Lies on Financial Statements Did Cost Businesses Money appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

One might think after losing a number of lawsuits in a row for blatant violations of the law the Forest Service might think twice about going forward with illegal logging, burning, and road-building projects. But no, this rogue agency plows ahead to serve the timber industry and denude what’s left of the old growth forests in the More

The post Alliance for the Wild Rockies Challenges Massive Clearcutting and Burning Project in Montana Grizzly Bear Corridor appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” –Upton Sinclair Whose Expertise Is Dead? In The Death of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns that knowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace it with popular ignorance. Though this is not More

The post The Death of Expertise appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

It was a growing season for the record books, globally the hottest since we’ve been measuring such things: Featuring too much heat and too much rain—— nearly a year’s worth over one summer. And as a capper, Covid came calling again. My wife caught it and so I tended to the customers at the vegetable More

The post Bam Bam Bamboozled appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would were we at war.” –Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president 1933-1945, in a fireside More

The post Democracy at Stake appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

If the right gets its way, maybe in a decade or two, the United States will be free of its slave-owning past. All gone – gone with the wind. It’s just not taught anymore. Yeah, we had a civil war – about “states’ rights” – and then we moved on: We conquered the West, saved More

The post The Truth May Hurt, But We Still Have to Face It appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Done with violence? So are we. October 2nd marks Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday and the International Day of Nonviolence. Known for achieving India’s independence from British colonial rule, Mohandas K. Gandhi brought the philosophy and practice of nonviolence to global recognition. Close to 100 years later, nonviolence is an idea whose time has surely come. There More

The post Who Needs Nonviolence? Everyone. appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The news headlines these days could give the impression that the world is falling apart. Subtending it all is a sense that we humans have reached a tipping point in terms of our impact on the planet and on each other, due to a combination of our sheer numbers and the power of our technology, both of which have More

The post Lost in the Forest appeared first on CounterPunch.org.