Days before the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2023, U.S. officialsclaimed that China was considering providing Russia with lethal weaponry to support its military campaign. China denied the accusations, and on the anniversary of the invasion instead put forth its 12-point peace plan to end the conflict. These events More

The post Why China’s Actions Toward Ukraine and Russia Could Shape the Course of Future Geopolitics appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Ukraine has become the locus of a conflict that, willy-nilly, pits Russia against the West — which means against the United States. How far can Washington push Putin before he tries to retaliate in some fashion against his primary adversary? Does President Biden even recognize the urgency of that question? If he does, he’s chosen not to share his concerns with the American people. More

The post Missing Dr. Strangelove appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

“Well, I think it’s justified,” US president Joe Biden said of news that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russian president Vladimir Putin and “children’s rights commissioner” Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova over their actions in Ukraine. “[The ICC’s jurisdiction is] not recognized internationally by us, either. But I think it makes a very More

The post International Criminal Court: Sauce for the Goose … appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finds herself in a very dubious position. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary was given increased powers to oversee financial stability in the U.S. banking system. This increase in power came in response to the 2008 financial crisis – the worst financial collapse since More

The post The Next Bomb to Go Off in the Banking Crisis Will Be Derivatives appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

When Australia – vassal be thy name – assumed responsibilities for not only throwing money at both US and British shipbuilders, lending up territory and naval facilities for war like a gambling drunk, and essentially asking its officials to commit seppuku for the Imperium, another task was given.  While the ditzy and dunderheaded wonders in More

The post Spent Matters: The AUKUS Nuclear Waste Problem appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Wow, “Former High-Profile Lawyer Is Charged With Embezzling More than $18 Million”! Who would have predicted a high-profile lawyer would behave so unethically? Turns out pretty much anyone, according to opinion polls that consistently rank lawyers near the bottom among professionals. A recent Gallup poll was celebrated in an article the title of which is More

The post What’s to be Done With Lawyers? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

We have been getting conflicting data on inflation in recent days. The February consumer price index was not great, showing a one-month rise of 0.4 percent in the overall index and 0.5 percent in the core. Combined with the last couple of months’ data, it indicates a modest acceleration over the rates seen in the More

The post How Can Inflation be Out of Control with 3.6 Percent Wage Growth? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The global economy hit a new milestone in 2022 by surpassing $100 trillion. This expansion, which has experienced only the occasional setback such as the 2020 COVID shutdowns, has been accelerated by trade. The world trade volume experienced 4,300 percent growth from 1950 to 2021, an average 4 percent increase every year. This linked growth More

The post Free Trade or Just Green Trade? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

I really, really want Left organizations to rethink “back to normal” in the pandemicine. I can’t tell you how demoralizing it is to see announcements of meetings or other events that I might want to go to, but for which I  see no information about Covid precautions.  Is it virtual? or hybrid?  Will people be More

The post Rethinking ‘Back to Normal’ in the Pandemicine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In a hypothetical race to claim the mantle of biggest threat to humanity, nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, rising authoritarianism, and new pandemics are still well in front of the pack. But, look there, way back but coming on fast. Is that AI? Is it a friend rushing forward to help us, or another foe rushing More

The post Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The 1970s were a disastrous decade for the USAF. Having failed to defeat North Vietnam, there were serious issues that persisted. In his 2022 book And I Lived To Tell The Tales: The Life of a Fighter Pilot, retired USAF Lieutenant Colonel Ed Cobleigh, who flew the F-4 in Vietnam, said: “By the mid-1970s, USAF More

The post In the 70s the USAF and RAF Were Both Tired, But RAF Pilots Were Better Off appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Of all remaining “unoccupied” grizzly bear habitat in the lower 48 States, the enormous Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness has the best potential for grizzly bear recovery. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies is thrilled and grateful to announce that a federal court in Montana recently ruled in our favor and has forced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife More

The post Alliance for the Wild Rockies Scores Court Win for Grizzly Bears appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

If we’re going to fight something, we need to know what it is. If a crime is to be prosecuted, we must know what the crime is. At first sight, and in its dictionary definition, ecocide seems to be fairly straightforward: “the destruction of large areas of the natural environment as a consequence of human […]

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The post Ecocide and Ecoside appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The My Lai Massacre, where American GIs murdered 502 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, occurred 55 years ago this week. Around 11:30 on March 16, 1968, Captain Ernest Medina ordered a ceasefire of US troops under his command in the south Vietnamese village of My Lai 4. After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There […]

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The post The Last Child of My Lai appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Astonishingly, two years into the Biden administration, a two-to-two deadlock means Trump still more or less runs the FCC.

The post ACTION ALERT: Trump Rules Remain at FCC as Democrats Cave to Big Cable, Fox News appeared first on FAIR.

The corporate press corps seems intent on pressing a vital, important situation into old, tired and harmful frames.

The post Kamau Franklin on Cop City Protests appeared first on FAIR.

The very public failure of SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) is raising concerns of a renewed wave of bank failures that threatens Western economies. The subtext is residual fear that the earlier (mid-2000’s) bank crisis was never adequately addressed. The very bankers who sank the banking system back then were handed trillions in public largesse to cover their losses, but the system of Wall Street provision of credit to fuel capitalism was never reconsidered. As then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner put it, ‘the US doesn’t do nationalization (of banks).’ More

The post This is Fascism, SVB Bailout Edition appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Child labor is back. That’s because rich corporations and their political parasites want it back. What better way, they doubtless imagine, for penniless, unaccompanied migrant children to spend their time than performing dangerous tasks in slaughterhouses or moiling with toxic cleansers in factories? What else are these kids going to do with their time? Go to school? Not likely, if our oligarchs have it their way. More

The post Child Labor is Back…with a Vengeance! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Al Gore waddled forth to condemn Biden's approval of the mammoth Willow Oil Project on the North Slope, calling it, "recklessly irresponsible." Gore makes a compelling case. There's just one problem. It was his own administration which first opened the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to drilling. Both Gore and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt lent their environmental credentials (such as they were) to drilling on the very tundra where Conoco-Phillips now plans to drill 200 oil wells. Here’s how it happened. More

The post Teapot Dome Redivivus: How Clinton and Gore Opened the Alaskan Arctic to Oil Drilling appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

I first heard of Hanford after I graduated from college in the early 2000s, while working for a nonprofit environmental group. One summer, I was tasked with the job of hiking up hidden, jagged canyons to survey the tributaries of Oregon’s North Fork John Day River in search of salmon habitat. Hanford was just two hours north of where I bunked up for those few weeks in a small Forest Service cabin. Around the campfire, there was often talk that Hanford was a tough, toxic place. A couple of the crew members had even worked there in their younger years. “Don’t bother with it,” I remember one old-timer warning me, “I know people who died from working at Hanford. It’s not worth the trouble.” More

The post A (Bad) Trip to the Most Radioactive Place in America appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Sometimes it is hard to know who is worse: the Christian white nationalist neofascists who keep pushing the nation further right or the hollow and passive resistance of the fake-opposition Weimar Democrats who keep accommodating the ever more mainstreamed far right. But we don’t have to choose.  The fascisation of US politics and policy reflects, More

The post Fascists in the Courts and the Need to Abandon Liberal Surrender and Complicity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

While the Ukraine-Russia war rages on, President Joseph Biden has set his sights on preparing for a much bigger conflict—an economic and political, and potentially military, war against the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Over the past several months tension between the U.S. and China has escalated rapidly to a host of issues as seemingly, More

The post “One China,”Taiwan, U.S. Power, and Biden Saber-Rattling into a Crisis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Notably absent until now from the Western narrative regarding the current war in Ukraine and how it might end has been any suggestion that the wishes of the people who lived prior to February 24, 2022 in the four eastern and southern oblasts whose sovereignty has since September 2022 been formally contested between Russia and More

The post A Democratic End to Ukraine’s War? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The leading endeavor of U.S. foreign policy is now containment of the rise of China, “our most consequential strategic competitor,” as the 2022 National Defense Strategy notes at its start. The response to this “pacing challenge” includes confrontation over Taiwan and obstruction of technological progress, while China’s burgeoning network of economic alliances is singled out More

The post The Anti-China Offensive appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

A new 40-year study discovered the eye-opening fact that what happens in the Amazon Rainforest impacts the entire Earth system. This puts an exclamation point on the fact that the Amazon Rainforest, the planet’s most crucial source of life support, is in deep trouble mainly because of massive deforestation. The Amazon River Basin is the More

The post Amazon Rainforest Destabilizes the World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

As hundreds of thousands, throughout Israel, joined anti-government protests, questions began to arise regarding how this movement would affect, or possibly merge, into the wider struggle against the Israeli military occupation and apartheid in Palestine. Pro-Palestine media outlets shared, with obvious excitement, news about statements made by Hollywood celebrities, the likes of Mark Ruffalo, about More

The post Mass Protests and False Hope: Israel’s Supreme Court is No Friend of the Palestinian People appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The great earthquake that suddenly destroyed Lisbon in November 1755 was perhaps the most disastrous  natural phenomenon to strike Europe since the Mt. Vesuvius explosion of the first century—at maybe 9 on the Richter scale it virtually leveled  the largest of the continent’s  great capitals, with the immediate deaths of perhaps 50,000 people and the More

The post The Lesson of the Lisbon Earthquake appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Perhaps the most agonizing thing in my final days as a trial lawyer—at the D.C. Public Defender Service, over a decade ago—was the long hours spent trying to persuade young Black male teenagers, some charged as adults, some legally defined as adults (despite still-tender ages), to plead guilty in carjacking cases—the least awful option they More

The post Biden’s Betrayal of D.C.’s Black Youth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Most of us who were alive then remember where we were on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. As we mark the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War this March, I wonder how many also remember where we were that day. On 9/11, I was a Catholic school eighth grader. I’ll never forget my teacher, More

The post What Did the Iraq War Really Cost? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, turned 20 this March. It was launched in 2003, right around the time I moved to the United States from the Philippines at age 6. I didn’t yet know the impact this gargantuan department would have on my life. I loved my life as a new American. I More

The post Immigration Policy Doesn’t Have to be This Way appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Members of Congress have begun drafting the 2023 “Farm Bill,” and they’ll be wrangling over it through most of the year. This legislation, passed into law anew every fifth year or so since the 1930s, has had far-reaching influence on food and farming in the United States. Each version of the bill is given its More

The post Climate Policy’s on Shaky Ground in the Farm Bill appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

How can we measure what our leaders value? One way is to look at their budgets. On March 9, President Biden rolled out a budget proposal that he’ll ask Congress to consider. Presidential budget proposals seldom pass in the form they’re presented, but they offer clues about what the White House is willing to fight for. By More

The post The Values of Budget appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Denver conservative radio host Mandy Connell publicly changed her party affiliation from Republican to independent on her program this Monday, a week after giving a thoughtful and largely apolitical interview to Talkers Magazine publisher Michael Harrison on his podcast. On her own program she was blunt: “As much as I hold conservative ideals and values More

The post What Can Americans Do About Having a National Political Party Built on Hatred? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

He was standing before a lectern at Downing Street.  The words on the support looked eerily similar to those used by the politicians of another country.  According to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Stop the Boats was the way to go.  It harked back to the same approach used by Australia’s Tony Abbott, who won More

The post Trashing Asylum: the UK’s Illegal Migration Bill appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The pro-government deputies approved in early January the tenth extension of martial law that allows the government, among other things, to hide information on public spending. The exception regime includes the suspension of the constitutional guarantees of Salvadorans and the use of the military in public security. Since March 2022 when El Salvador’s government began More

The post El Salvador Under a “State of Exception:” Human Rights Violations and Suspension of Freedoms appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

What’s the difference between an American movie producer and an American secretary of state?  The one dreams of winning an Oscar, the other makes sure the awards go to the right global players. American foreign policy has long been committed to flooding the world with Hollywood films. Inseparable from this open market ideology is the More

The post Blinkin’ with Blinken at Oscar’s Big Screen appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

On March 14, a Russian SU-27 fighter brought down a US MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea. The exact details of where and how remain a mystery even after the release of drone video showing what appears to be a dump of jet fuel onto the drone, but those details don’t matter much. The More

The post Cacophany, Not Harmony: US Foreign Policy’s Terrible Tune appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

…the question likely to define us from young adulthood is whether we place ourselves on the political left or the political right….[P]olitical alignment seems to be the one remaining marker that is inescapable and eternal, even natural and inevitable, defining the core of our identity.         – Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick More

The post Is Love Extreme?: A Politics of Honest Indignation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

We enjoy having a feeling that we are in control in our lives, and most of us will do incredible feats of mental gymnastics to retain that (often) illusory belief. We may cede to some amount of circumstantial nudging, but overall we want to believe, especially if from America, that ultimately we are in control More

The post Mice Who Stop Fearing Cats appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Even in the era of identity politics, one category of identity is much ignored: what journalist Joe Glenton calls “veteranhood.” In the U.S., nineteen million people, across several generations, share a strong sense of personal identity based on having served in the military. Mainstream media outlets tend to notice veterans only when they’re voting Republican or More

The post Veterans in Labor: How Unions Benefit From Ex-Soldiers in Their Ranks  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Matt Taibbi was surprised to get a confrontational interview from Briahna Joy Gray, who like him, is linked with the horseshoe theory of politics (left and right are the same). The occasion for the interview was that Taibbi has been revealing the Twitter files, the leaked documents from the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter. Gray More

The post Briahna Joy Gray Asks Matt Taibbi The Right Questions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

All the hullabaloo about how much or little SB458 will cost the State of Montana, if the bill is enacted, completely misses the most important flaw in this proposed piece of legislation.  In attempting to define sex and sexuality to include only sperm and egg producers, SB 458 is nothing other than a disingenuous attempt More

The post Montana’s Anti-Trans Bill: an Attempt to Legalize Discrimination appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Vast quantities of lies from top U.S. government officials led up to the Iraq invasion. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, the same media outlets that eagerly boosted those lies are offering retrospectives. Don’t expect them to shed light on the most difficult truths, including their own complicity in pushing for war. What propelled the United More

The post The Urbanity of Evil: 20 Years After the Invasion of Iraq appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

I became a professional philosopher, like every academic nowadays, by taking graduate classes, learning to write and critique philosophical essays and reading the relevant literature. And then writing a doctoral dissertation. Entering the philosophy world is a well-organized activity, but entering the art world is generally a less formal process. I entered thanks to the More

The post How I Entered the Art World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

March 19th marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South More

The post The Not-So-Winding Road from Iraq to Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no More

The post The True Costs of Renting a Home appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Matter did not arise from nothingness. It will not return to nothingness. – Blanqui Aside from his Symbolist autobiography Aurelia, Gerard de Nerval was also famous for walking his pet lobster around town on a leash. Memorably, the leash was a pink ribbon (Satie paid homage to Nerval by binding his late-period musical scores in More

The post The Lobster Crawl to Revolution appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

There have been three professional baseball players I’m aware of from my Gravesend/Bensonhurst (Brooklyn) neighborhood: The one-of-a-kind Dodgers’ pitcher Sandy Koufax (who’d refused to play on the Jewish holidays, and made us all proud although we didn’t really know why!), John Franco, and Joe Pepitone, who was the NY Yankees’ first baseman in the mid-1960s. More

The post Bye-Bye, Joe Pepitone appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

March the 5th last saw the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s death. The circumstances of his passing remain a mystery; some, like his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, supported the theory that her father was poisoned by Lavrentiy Beria, the Minister of the Interior; others claim he died from a stroke. Stalin’s daughter recalls those moments in her More

The post The Unbearable Persistence of Stalin appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This is from one of the people I’m least likely to bother quoting: “We need a national divorce. . .  From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats’ traitorous America Last policies, we are done.” The words are those of our fellow American, Marjorie Taylor Greene, sputtering unhinged right-wing More

The post Staying Woke: Revering Life appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The people fighting to save Holland Lake have done an amazing job showing how corrupt the Forest Service has been in its backroom deals to give POWDR Corporation a permit to expand Holland Lake Lodge.  Unfortunately the “Holland Lake Lodge Syndrome” — which is doing industry’s bidding instead of acting in the public interest — is not limited More

The post “Holland Lake Lodge Syndrome:” a Pervasive Mindset Throughout the Forest Service appeared first on CounterPunch.org.