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Category: CounterPunch+

  • US State Department Travel Warning on Venezuela

    Following his earlier threat that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s days are numbered, US President Donald Trump announced on social media he was closing Venezuelan airspace. He then immodestly proclaimed the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, commending his nineteenth century predecessor for presciently envisioning “a superpower unlike anything the world had ever known.” On December […]

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  • COP30: Self-Congratulations and Promises to Talk More are No Substitute for Action

    Another climate summit has mercifully ended. As with past summits, nothing of substance happened. The United States did not participate, meaning that the Trump administration technically could not thwart any attempt to block meaningful decision-making, but that was no problem for the Trump gang as Saudi Arabia was there to pick up the ball.

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    The post COP30: Self-Congratulations and Promises to Talk More are No Substitute for Action appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • The Return of Elliot Abrams

    Elliot Abrams, U.S. special envoy to Venezuela during Trump’s first term, said in a recent Foreign Affairs article that the president’s advisors should promptly persuade him that the point of no return has already been passed in Venezuela, and that the only possible outcomes are that either Trump or Maduro will win the contest that is now well underway.  Forthrightly titled, “How To Topple Maduro,” Abrams calls for doing more than blowing up “narco-trafficking boats” (i.e. Caribbean fishing vessels), though he does not go so far as to advocate the deployment of U.S. ground troops in the South American nation.

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  • Drugs Aren’t the Problem

    Drugs are used at the same rate by white and Black people, and white people are more likely to sell drugs than Black people; yet, Black men are incarcerated on drug charges at a rate six to 13 times that of white men, and between 36% and 62% of people in state prison for drug charges are Black, despite Black people comprising only 13% of the US population.

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  • COP30 Shows How Corporate Power Is Derailing Climate Justice

    Analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition shows more than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to COP30 in Belém, Brazil. That means one in every 25 participants represents the industry that is accelerating climate chaos. Lobbyists from ExxonMobil, BP, TotalEnergies, and major trade associations roam freely while delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable nations combined are vastly outnumbered. Indigenous peoples and civil society activists are squeezed to the margins, sometimes literally, as protestors blockaded entrances to be heard. Meanwhile, fossil fuel executives are in the rooms where decisions or the lack thereof will shape our collective future.

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  • Divining the Future

    Divining the Future Stephen F. Eisenman The Dowsers Society To get to Norwich Market from our flat opposite Pulls Ferry, you walk north along River Road to Bishop’s Bridge and then go west across the River Wensum. The bridge was built in the middle of the 14th century and is one of the oldest in […]

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  • A Thinking Machine Is Not in the Cards – in a Democratic Society

    A close-up of a coinAI-generated content may be incorrect.

    Talon / Τάλων, left, the flying anthropomorphic robot made by Hephaistos, god of metallurgy and technology. Hephaistos made the winged robot for Zeus who gifted it to his lover, Europa. Zeus had taken the form of a beautiful bull, right, tempting Europa to climb on his back. Zeus then carried Europa to Crete. Talon would fly 3 times a day over Crete to protect the large island and Europa. Medea, expert in magic and daughter of Aeetes, King of Colchis (present-day Georgia) in eastern Euxeinos Pontos (Εύξεινος Πόντος), Black Sea, joined Jason and the argonauts returning the Golden Fleece to Greece. In Crete, the argonauts faced Talon and Medea put Talon out of action. Courtesy Numismatic Museum, Athens, Greece.

    What tech companies peddle as artificial intelligence (AI) is only artificial. It is not intelligence. Only humans are endowed with the virtue of intelligence – intellectual ability to reason, speak, think, reflect, appreciate the beautiful and the good, decide and create a better or worse present and future. Machines, from the pre-Homeric winged metal robot Talon (about mid-second millennium BCE) to the female robots of Hero of the first century to the robots fueled by AI in the 21st century, are in a sea of ambiguity and doubt.

    The AI robots in particular are make-believe computer prophets. They cannot think, imagine or reason. They are mechanical talking boxes that spit out and regurgitate information humans feed them. Their war and bomb origins, however, give them aura and commercial and military value. They maintain, or their owners try to convince the rest of us, that the robots are essential for organizing the present and possibly the future. But the emerging high tech defense contractors go a step further. They envision AI wars: “Software,” they say, “will change how war is waged. The battlefield of the future will teem with artificially intelligent, unmanned systems, which fight, gather reconnaissance data, and communicate at breathtaking speeds.”

    Corporate defense of AI

    One of the greatest defenders of this indefensible AI technology is the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. In a lengthy article on nearly everything (computers, AI, economics, strategies, wars, climate change, polymathy), he wrote eloquently but thoughtlessly about the miracles of computer chips and the talking AI. He has no doubt these machines and their chips are capable of “learning, predicting and decision making.”

    “We are moving from programmable computing,” he says, “ where a computer could only ever reflect the insight and intelligence of the human who programmed it — toward polymathic A.G.I. [Artificial General Intelligence]. That is where you basically describe the outcome you want, and the A.I. melds insight, creativity and broad knowledge to figure out the rest. We are shifting the boundary of cognition, [Craig] Mundie [former Microsoft computer expert] argues, from what humans can imagine and program to what computers can discover, imagine and design on their own. It is the mother of all computing phase changes — and a species-level turning point.”

    Certainly, AI machines are fed a variety of sciences, but that does not make the machines polymaths. Polymaths like Aristotle, Plato or Pythagoras made sense of the different sciences and integrated the threads that tie them together. They had insights that enriched their knowledge. Machines cannot do such brain work. They have zero notions of truth or falsehoods or right and wrong. Thus, suggesting that “computers can discover, imagine and design on their own,” is imaginary at best. Those machines may as well be mechanical humans of genius. But they are not. They are wires and metal that simply react to the programming of engineers. They cannot think, much less imagine. To imagine is to have a brain and be curious and philosophical. A machine cannot possibly have a brain and be curious or philosophical.

    AI represents money and power

    The excitement of Friedman is the excitement of a man married to corporations, people with money and power, the State Department, Department of War and the illusion that technologies wedded to business will solve the deadly anthropogenic problems threatening our world. Or, more likely, he has convinced himself that the alliance of AI computers and capital will maintain the present oligarchy at its privileged position and hegemony. He says nothing about billionaires and their heavy footprint on politics, the near extinction of freedom, corruption and ecocide the world over. After all, billionaires own fossil fuels that are raising the planet’s temperature more than 2 degrees Celsius. Thus guaranteeing more floods, more heat and suffering – everywhere, a dismal conclusion of Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General. But these realities are beyond Friedman who is proud saying that corporate executives are his ”tutors.”

    For example, what is the most appropriate name describing our age? Post Cold War? No, one of his tutors suggests polycene, perhaps to replace Anthropocene, scientists’ choice for the age where humans, but primarily billionaire businessmen, are crushing global ecosystems, science and traditions and civilization – now during the 21st century. Friedman defines polycene as “multiple intelligences, seamlessly networked, co-improving and co-evolving in real time.”

    This assertion is meaningless. What exactly are multiple intelligences? AI companies directing communications, computers and the military?

    Polycene mirrors the ancient Greeks

    A circular object with images of peopleAI-generated content may be incorrect.

    Constructing a bronze statue (upper right) and shining a statue of a warrior (lower bottom). Tools and parts hang on the wall of the workshop. Masks and votive offering hang from horns (upper left). A worker is stoking the furnace, and a boy works the bellows. About 480 BCE. Kylix by the Foundry painter. Antikensammlung, Berlin. Wikipedia

    Friedman’s invention of polycene is no invention at all. Poly is a Greek word meaning many. Polycene defined Greek society for millennia. Why? Because the Greeks who invented science and civilization were polymaths like the giants of science, men like Pythagoras (mathematics, music, cosmology), Democritos (atomic theory), Hippocrates (scientific medicine), Euclid (mathematics), Aristotle (political theory, science and philosophy), Aristarchos (heliocentric theory), Archimedes (mathematics and engineering), Hipparchos (astronomy), Ptolemaios (mathematical physics, geography) and Galen (scientific medicine). Then we have Homer (epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey), Hesiod (epics of Works and Days and Theogony) and the tragic poets of the fifth century BCE; politicians like Solon, Kleisthenes, and Pericles (sixth-fifth centuries BCE) who set the foundations of Democracy.

    The polis / Πολιτεία

    These men actually imagined, invented and created the polis / city-state for the protection of citizens and the natural world. The polis was the fertile ground for the ideas and institutions that gave birth to the virtues of freedom, science, sacredness of the land, agriculture, Earth and civilization.

    Polis in America and Europe?

    Neither America nor Europe have had polymaths who are like the Greeks. Western civilization emerged from the Greek books and infrastructure that survived the Christian and Islamic monotheistic holocaust lasting several centuries – in occupied Greece.

    I would also love to see a repetition of the ancient Greek innovations in America, Europe and the rest of the world – especially in modern Greece, which still remains a Christian country since the fourth century.

    Alexander the Great (fourth century BCE) and Ioannes Kapodistrias, the first president of independent Greece, 1828-1831, had the same dream. Yes, polycene is a great name for an age of science and civilization shaped by polymaths. But it does not represent the imaginary machine society cooked by AI enthusiasts like Friedman.

    America and Europe of 2025 are far from the Greeks. Their universities train students to do little technical tasks fitting the needs of machine corporations. They have abandoned agriculture to ruthless and unethical corporations employing carcinogens and neurotoxins to fight insects and weeds. They no longer have thinkers / philosophers / polymaths but specialists. Their governments themselves have become bureaucratic business.

    They rewrite history to fit the dark visions of corporations and especially billionaires. Their new history thoroughly rejects the contributions Greece made to science, the arts and civilization. Monotheism clouds their minds and superpower America (after the model of England) forces them, including Greece, to embrace a schizophrenic strategy. That is, treat Islamic genocidal Turkey like an ally. But Turkey’s centuries of exterminating millions of Armenians, Greeks, and other non-Muslim minorities excludes the country from civilization. Moreover, Islamic Turkey occupies almost half of Greek Cyprus since 1974. America and England made that possible. Which means that the US and England are equally responsible for the inhumanity and barbarism of Turkey in Northern Cyprus.

    America, NATO and the European Union also find it convenient to ignore the aggressive Turkish policy towards Greece, especially in the Aegean. Turkey has been calling the Greek Aegean its blue homeland. Neither America, nor the EU, nor NATO find that unsettling. This extremely troubling fact weakens more than international law and human rights. It saps any claims of integrity, respect for themselves and their allies that NATO, America and the EU proclaim. In other words, their indifference to the dangers Turkey represents makes mockery of the civilization they proclaim to the world. America and its NATO allies, without virtues, are sinking Western civilization.

    Moral abyss

    Corporate and state AI gadgets simply lock these undemocratic attitudes and policies together. Thus the US and Europe behave not as states that value science and civilization. They speak and act like mechanical entities from another planet. Their power is based on nuclear bombs and AI corporate institutions, compromised universities, giant but poisoned agriculture and militaries. That’s why they support the deadly wars in Ukraine and Israel. That’s why they still drill for petroleum and natural gas. They are rejecting the dire data of climatology. They barely tolerate Antonio Guterres telling them they are risking civilization and the planet, the Greeks’ Mother Earth and Plato’s oldest of the gods.

    Another Renaissance – for America and Greece

    I speak about this coming dark age because I want to prevent it and return to science and civilization. I draw my inspiration from the Greeks who started humanity to science and civilization. Even the ancient ruins in Greece inspire me and millions of tourists. My ancient ancestors read the light of the Sun god Helios, his sister Selene, Moon, and the other stars and the blue sea. They defeated vast invading armies and built the Parthenon to honor Athena, a beautiful female goddess of intelligence and freedom. Athena was the daughter of Zeus, father and commander-in-chief of the gods. Plato opened his school, the Platonic Academy, that became the model of the institutions of higher learning we call universities. One of the students of the Platonic Academy, Aristotle, invented science and set the reasoning for civilization and freedom.

    These extraordinary things happened in Greece because the Greeks invented beautiful male and female gods that inspired them to think for themselves, even to be like them, love and investigate the natural world, and respect each other while controlling their passions with the virtues of logic and moderation. Greek religion had neither holy books, nor clergy, nor dogmas.

    Of course, the Greeks often messed things up, too, even resorting to civil wars. Nevertheless, their artistic, architectural, political, scientific and technological achievements were unsurpassed for centuries. They remain models for flourishing societies as well as for rebirth through a renaissance.

    In a renaissance for science and civilization, let’s say in America, the first priority would be to control or abolish the billionaire class. Billionaires should be given a choice. Investing their immense wealth to healing the wounds they have caused in society and nature: that is, pollution in land and seas, deforestation, mining, genetic engineering, AI, animal farms, and machine agriculture. In other words, billionaires should be required by law to fund the replacement of fossil fuel energy with renewable energy; clean-up plastic and other forms of pollution; reforest the country; and dismantle industrialized farming and replace it with small-scale organic family agriculture. Refusal to alter their ways, would mean heavy taxation and, possibly, ostracize them from the country. The US should also prohibit money in elections.

    Second, the country ought to lead an international effort to ban nuclear weapons – worldwide.

    Third, the Constitution must be brought up to date. The Supreme Court ought to be abolished and replaced by a High Court of elected judges for a maximum period of 4 years of service and no chance for reelection. The title of Justice for judges should be prohibited.

    Fourth, the Electoral College must be abolished. The President should be elected by the people.

    Fifth, universities must strive to educate students to the virtues of science, technology, climatology, ecology, political theory, democracy, preventive medicine, law and human and environmental health, the arts, music, history, Greek philosophy, ancient Greek language, and other humanistic studies.

    Why teach American students ancient Greek? Because Greek gives birth to science and civilization. It is an extremely rich language in vocabulary, insights and philosophy. Greek mirrors an advanced civilization based on millennia of Greek history, science, the good and the beautiful, self-knowledge, moderation, the rule of law, the Olympics and freedom. Greek words like polycene define modern science and medicine. Greek also enriches English, French, German, Russian and other major languages – with thousands of Greek words.

    As for modern Greece, the country must have a renaissance of bringing back ancient Greek and making it entirely her own written and spoken language. Modern Greek is a simple form of ancient Greek, so the transition to ancient Greek should not be a difficult process. Modern Greece must also redesign its education to highlight the virtues of ancient Greece: freedom, history, mythology, theater, moderation, courage, science, self-knowledge and the beautiful and the good and the revival of the naked Olympics – in Olympia, Greece.

    The post A Thinking Machine Is Not in the Cards – in a Democratic Society appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In Light of the Antifa Designation: Rethinking What We Call ‘Terrorism’

    Image by Mika Baumeister.

    With Trump’s designation of the Antifa movement as a terrorist organization, it is an appropriate time for reconsidering what ‘terrorism’ means. While the left often points to instances of state terrorism, the right is increasingly labeling political opponents as terrorists. This is not an argument for redefining the term, but rather a thought experiment: let’s look at whether narrowing the term’s definition might curb its political use.

    In a general sense, terrorism is referred to as an individual, group, or organization that commits violence for political ends. Under this definition, the state excludes itself and other states. From a state survival perspective, the term applies only to those who seek to disrupt policy, for at its core the state strives to perpetuate the status quo. If anything, the state will allow piecemeal change, though even this it often fights tooth and nail.

    Yet if we veer from the traditional and state-centric definitions of terrorism and expand it to a state which terrorizes people within and beyond its borders, it lays the groundwork for defining acts of war as potential terrorism. Under this rubric, the definition of terrorism could also expand to any party commencing war or engaging in war crimes. This may give many political scientists pause, as this would change the definition so fully that it would lose its original meaning and gravity.

    For these purposes, and because of the wide net that Trump has recently cast on terrorism, I shall stick with the narrow definition – the state survival perspective – to analyze some 21st-century cases.

    Before moving on, we should differentiate assassination from terrorism. Assassination is targeted at a specific person, such as RFK, Charlie Kirk, and Democratic House Speaker of Minnesota Melissa Hortman, while terrorism is an act of non-person-specific violence.

    Under the state survival (differing from regime survival, which encompasses hybrid and autocratic regimes) view, the January 6th Insurrection would undoubtedly be considered an act of terrorism. It was relatively low scale in causing few casualties, but high scale in attempting to directly prevent a mechanism inherent in a democratic state: the transition of power. If a transition of power fails to occur in a democracy following an election, it’s raison d’être as a state has shattered.

    ISIS-inspired vehicle-ramming and mass stabbings in Europe during the late 2010s cannot be considered acts of terrorism in the strict sense, because they lacked concrete political ends. ISIS harbored a vehement hatred towards Shi’ites and the West; unlike Al Qaeda, it was less political, but rather a mix of a thirst for power and backward hatred (albeit not unrelated to actual grievances). The ISIS-inspired mass violence against ‘the West’ in Europe was carried out by a small number of radicalized Muslims, whose alienation often grew from social isolation and experiences of discrimination or disrespect within mainstream society. These attacks were not directed at state institutions or policies but reflected a broader, undirected anger toward Western society itself.

    This stands in stark contrast to the 9/11 attacks, the 2004 Madrid train bombings and 2005 London subway and bus bombings. The goal in 9/11 was to change US policy toward Israel and to have US troops leave Saudi Arabia. In the latter two cases, the goal was to dismantle the “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq; to an extent, the train bombings in Spain helped achieve that objective.

    The act of James Alex Field Jr., the neo-Nazi who drove his car into an anti-racist counterprotest in 2017 in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, was not an act of terrorism. The object of the neo-Nazi’s attack was not directly political in nature, but more of a hatred of the idea of social change and that historic figures who fought to defend slavery should be worshipped as heroes. In essence, it was related to the decision of the state to maintain or take down Confederate monuments, yet the proximity is not close enough to concern the state. The action taken against counter protesters did have intent to impact state policy.

    Hamas’s October 7th attack was not terrorism either. Hamas is the elected leadership of a kind of [imprisoned] state existing in occupied territory; in this sense, it is treated similar to a state in actions of war and peace. Thus, though this was a ruthless attack on civilians, killing more than a thousand, it should be considered a war crime rather than an act of terrorism.

    Similarly, Israel’s genocidal response was not terrorism despite its clear effort to eliminate and starve to death a population of 2.2 million. For it is a state after all.

    Perhaps this may be an overly narrow way of defining terrorism. But it hints at the overall framing and re-framings of the term throughout history. The state has always framed terrorism in its own perceived interest. If we stick to the strictest, state-centric view, we don’t lose sight of its original intent; additionally, it helps prevent casting the “terrorism” net too wide, while at the same time being consistent.

    In the context of the US wannabe dictator’s labeling Antifa and plans to label other dissenters as terrorists, reverting—even hypothetically—to a stricter definition may be helpful. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Antifa is not a group but a movement, no members of this movement have orchestrated mass violence to change state policy, nor – of course – have the millions of dissenters to the Trump administration.

    Ironically, Trump seeks to cast the designation of terrorism on dissent. Yet his dissenters are the ones who try to preserve the republic from its slip into fascist authoritarianism.

    The post In Light of the Antifa Designation: Rethinking What We Call ‘Terrorism’ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Crowley.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Disappearance of Public Intellectuals and the Corporate University

    Public intellectuals have declined due to self-censorship, administrative demands, and corporatization of universities.​ Academic freedom is in sharp decline, with nearly two-thirds of faculty curtailing teaching and research activities due to fear of institutional or political reprisal.​ Corporations directly shape research agendas, limit publication, and generally steer academia toward market-favorable outcomes.​ Activism is absorbed by capitalism and pathologized by media, leaving faculty and students risk-averse, disengaged, and more concerned about professional consequences than about social change.​

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  • A Palestinian Anne Frank

    Still from Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk. Still from Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk. Still from Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk. Still from Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk. Still from Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk. Still from Put Your Soul […]

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  • The Dangerous Rise of the Extreme Right in Latin America

    “Capitalist, patriarchal and white supremacist” is not a mere collection of politically correct adjectives—these inseparable forces fuel the far right and the global political economy. And they no longer find it necessary to crouch behind principles of civility, democracy, equality or international law to do it. In today’s capitalism, they’re out for blood.

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  • How the UAE Enables Human Catastrophe in Sudan, with the US in Tow

    The Sudanese people are victims of top-down oppression inflicted by big imperialists, lesser ones, and Sudan’s elite. Image by Randy Fath. The Sudanese people are victims of top-down oppression inflicted by big imperialists, lesser ones, and Sudan’s elite. Image by Randy Fath. The Sudanese people are victims of top-down oppression inflicted by big imperialists, lesser […]

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  • Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty X

    Architect Cesar Pelli: His Design Center three whales: Red, Green, Blue: Los Angeles.

    The Portraits of Seeing and Listening 

    “Hello”, is how more than a few thousand days began: A few of those days became odysseys like the great imaginary kind…but different:

    Every beginning has a moment. I would walk with- – Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Philip Johnson, Arata Isozaki, Jacques Herzog and more: They only, known to me- -would share a way of seeing their ideas their works: Those moments became Indelible words stamped atop my eyes like architectural footprints: Indelible stamps of approval; The evidence of time shared remains as a whistling collective of visions.

    The “Hello” was and is the only word that mattered. It is a place where the light comes from- -once spoken not another word need be shared: In the back story to the above mentioned- -The feeling of a minute translates into innumerable dreams of fantasy’s appearing in real time.

    The memories of those particular days have a lot to say about how my eyes see today: The paths drawn and suggestive journeys threw my mind into affective whiplashes: Flashes of joy and discoveries blended and formulated in each accelerated and decelerated dreamscape: Years of prying open destinations and wishing for ideas:- -My memories dance enjoined like – -jazz on steroids: Stirred and spurred by “Trane”, Miles, Dizzy and a bit of Gato.

    New York: My camera seemed to sketch a few shadows amidst the elegance of the city.

    Today’s days seem almost sedate by comparison: The inanimate architecture that animates my days seems lavished with an unknown serum with provocative properties:  My mind absorbs what little it can- -Ten-thousand words wave in the distance for me to join- -and engage my posturing architectural encounter. The moments ahead and behind are expressions stowed for safe keeping and to be counted on in another time:

    Imagine the inherent value of ideas living in Dublin’s Trinity College Library; The Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading in Rio de Janeiro; My own Library of Congress and other archival treasures of mankind: Think- -my imaginary swapping of ideas and stories within the greatest known depositories: Then blink a few times: Peek at my humble card catalog, Rolodex or imaginary spindle churning, turning ephemeral spaces not on an atmospheric cloud  but space’s computing cloud.

    My world resides in the aftermath of ”Hello”. The supernatural becomes me- -became me, my platform: The magic of dreaming became my reality: “Hello” is not a word- -it is the path:

    Imagine Homer’ Odysseus: He began his trek home with Hello: He espied his wife Penelope with the eyes tearing: Aghast- -he utters to himself, “hello”: Carrie in Horton Footes’ Trip to Bountiful,  said goodbye to her past with the gleeful eye bellowing “Hello”. The Steinbeck Joad Family began their journey atop the overcrowded truck with a silent chorus in mind singing “Hello”. The journeys ahead and the journeys remembered equate with undeniable grit and hope:

    I have ushered in the word hello my entire career: The directions are, as they were, indifferent to what may befall: Hello had to be urged and so I went: Simply an odyssey of sorts was near at hand.

    Architects OMA in the Foreground and KPF standing just behind: New York’s elegant blue shades.

    Simply by dreaming I measured distances in my minds eyes. The dreams are  what elongates my sextant made from one million army of toy Gumby’s: It is what illuminates my guided days between and from destinations A-Z. The alchemists who provided my first encounter>my first sight>were seer’s who carried architecture’s aforementioned words from my walks with voices: The embrace that ensued my days and decades in remembrance startles the heart.

    The bellowing whispered gasp is heard as I cross cities for conquest: Nothing regal in mind, mere fulfilling the enjoyment of discovery: Hello is heard at every corner. New York, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Seville, Dhaka, London and … My eyes are stamped with what follows “Hello”- -the journey across cities just for a single snap.

    In the garden that is photography, from city to city I have so little to accomplish: I only before I die want to make one Ansel Adams Moonrise, Hernandez and one Roger Fenton’ The Queens’ Target.

    They are very simple requests from a photographer who merely wants to waken his world everyday with “Hello”.

    If I could capture one image that might be lost forever before the light vanishes: If I could capture one image that might have been forgotten by history- – I might dance naked again atop the whale’s of our Seven Seas.

    Seville, Spain: Shades and colors minutes before the sun sets.

    The post Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty X appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Schulman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How to Recognize an Astroturf Movement

    By late summer 2025, approval ratings for Trump and the Democrats were both underwater, with Democrats polling at their lowest point in three decades. A September 2025 Gallup poll also found that sixty-six percent of Democrats now prefer socialism to capitalism.

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  • The Political Uses of Fakery

    Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot […]

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    The post The Political Uses of Fakery appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Manufacturing Consent For War With Venezuela

    It is no secret that Donald J. Trump, head of the American Empire, desperately wanted the Nobel Peace Prize. For months, he had been lobbying for it, presenting himself as a peacemaker. A “humanitarian who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will”. His lust for the prize, driven at least in part by the fact that Barack Obama won it in 2009, led Pakistan’s government to publicly nominate him in June as a means of gratifying his ego. And the recent Gaza ceasefire deal he brokered, mere days before the award was to be announced, bolstered speculation that Trump might actually win the award. Perhaps that is why, when the Nobel Committee named María Corina Machado the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, swaths of liberals, the anti-Trump crowd, and even some leftists celebrated. But make no mistake: while this may be a personal failure for its head, it is, unmistakably, a win for the American Empire itself.

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Latest Case for Abolishing the Death Penalty

    Alabama executed a man Thursday night in an inhumane and cruel manner. They used nitrogen gas to kill Anthony Boyd for the 1993 killing of a man who owed him and others money. Though he repeatedly claimed he was innocent, Boyd was convicted. There is no way for us to know if he did or […]

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  • Turning Back from the Brink of Nuclear War

    Image by Laurentiu Morariu.

    Early this year, legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate introduced resolutions that call upon the U.S. government to lead a global effort to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race. Co-sponsored by 36 members of the House and five members of the Senate, H. Res. 317 and S. Res. 323 urge the U.S. government to pursue nuclear disarmament, renounce the first use of nuclear weapons, end sole presidential authority to launch them, cancel plans for new, enhanced nuclear weapons and delivery systems, maintain the current moratorium on nuclear testing explosions, and provide a just economic transition for impacted communities.

    The context for these antinuclear measures is an escalating nuclear arms race that is rapidly spiraling out of control. In recent years, Russia and the United States, which together possess 87 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, have scrapped nearly all their nuclear arms control agreements. The only exception is the New Start Treaty, which is scheduled to expire in February 2026. Meanwhile, all nine nuclear powers (Russia, United States, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) have committed themselves to dramatically upgrading their nuclear arsenals. The U.S. government, for example, at the enormous cost of $1.7 trillion, is currently engaged in revamping its entire nuclear weapons complex and building an array of new, more devastating nuclear weapons.

    This worldwide nuclear weapons buildup has been accompanied by a revival of public threats by the leaders of nuclear-armed nations to initiate nuclear war―threats that have been issued, repeatedly, by Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin. Not surprisingly, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists currently stands at 89 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting in its history.

    The House and Senate resolutions seeking to halt and reverse this race toward catastrophe are primarily the product of the Back from the Brink campaign. Founded in 2017 by the leaders of two U.S. national organizations, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists, Back from the Brink has emerged as an impressive coalition of organizations, individuals, and public officials working together to create a world free of nuclear weapons.

    At this point, the Back from the Brink campaign has secured the endorsement of a significant number of additional national organizations, including peace and disarmament groups like the American Friends Service Committee, the Federation of American Scientists, Pax Christi USA, Peace Action, and Veterans for Peace, religious organizations like the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the United Church of Christ, environmental groups like 350.org, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club, political activist groups like the Hip Hop Caucus and Indivisible, and governmental organizations like the United States Conference of Mayors.

    In addition, the campaign has attracted the support of hundreds of local peace, academic, civic, environmental, health, policy, religious, and other organizations, as well as endorsements from 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 488 municipal and state officials, and 53 members of Congress.

    Despite this array of support, Back from the Brink’s immediate prospects are not good. Its antinuclear resolutions, now awaiting action by the Republican-controlled House and Senate, seem unlikely to pass, as not a single Republican legislator has signed on as a co-sponsor of them thus far. Nor is it likely that President Donald Trump, who seems enamored with U.S. military “strength,” will champion halting, much less reversing, the nuclear arms race.

    Longer term, however, the prospects are brighter. Unlike the Republican Party of recent decades, the Democratic Party has championed a variety of nuclear arms control and disarmament measures. Thus, if the Democrats do well in the 2026 midterm elections and, thereby, retake control of the House and the Senate, there is a reasonable chance that they will pass Back from the Brink’s antinuclear resolutions. Also, if the Democrats hold on to Congress and win the presidency in 2028, it’s quite possible that nuclear arms control and disarmament will appear once again on the U.S. government’s public policy agenda.

    Of course, even if there are public policy advances along these lines, as there have been in the past, it will not end the immense danger of worldwide nuclear annihilation―a danger that emerged with startling clarity in 1945 with the advent and use of nuclear weapons to obliterate two Japanese cities. Ultimately, a secure future for civilization will be attained only when these weapons of mass destruction are abolished.

    Is that feasible?

    It’s certainly a possibility. After all, when directly confronted with the issue of human survival, most people have displayed an appropriate concern for it by demanding an end to the nuclear menace. And that goal could be attained by seeing to it that all nations sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. That landmark treaty, which was hammered out painstakingly at the United Nations in 2017 and which entered into force in 2021, has already been signed by 95 countries (a majority of the world’s nations) and ratified by 74 of them.

    Admittedly, the nine nuclear powers, still clinging doggedly to their nuclear weapons, are not among them. But, if there were a mobilization of substantial public pressure and the development of international security guarantees enforced by a strengthened United Nations, the reluctance of these holdouts could be overcome and a nuclear weapons-free world established.

    Meanwhile, to provide us with the time it will take to get to this state of affairs, we do need to focus on turning back from the brink of nuclear war.

    The post Turning Back from the Brink of Nuclear War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Wittner.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Anti-Imperialist Motherfucker

    Abbie and Anita Hoffman with their son, America in 1972. Leah Kushner, America Hoffman’s personal family photos. Abbie and Anita Hoffman with their son, America in 1972. Leah Kushner, America Hoffman’s personal family photos. Abbie and Anita Hoffman with their son, America in 1972. Leah Kushner, America Hoffman’s personal family photos. Abbie and Anita Hoffman […]

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  • Fascism and Liberal Complicity

    John Ganz, a fairly center-of-left voice found in the pages of The Nation, had correctly condemned Trump as a “tyrant”, citing such evidence as Trump’s decision to send in federal troops into major cities, and how Trump simply ignores basic tenets of the U.S. constitution. Ganz so far as to argue too, however, that Trump should not be seen as a “fascist”, since the regime is so “cheap and tawdry that to give it the name of a grand historical tragedy like ‘fascism’ grants it a dignity it does not deserve”. Yes, Trump is a bumbling, fumbling buffoon as much as he’s a tactician, pressing his thumbs into the wounds of the American system when it counts. But what’s so fascinating here about the critiques levelled by a Ganz, not to mention an Ezra “Charlie Kirk did politics the right way” Klein among others, is that even with their critiques of Trump, they oftentimes still offer a rather incomplete view of A) the Trump administration’s connective tissue to previous administrations that have paved the way for us to get here and B) muddy the waters in terms of what phrases like fascism actually should mean.

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  • The Price of Peace

    “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”—the caption of Goya’s 1799 etching—was a warning against moral blindness, against reason stripped of empathy. It may not apply neatly to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, but his rise has had the same somnambulant quality: less a climb than an inheritance.

    Installed in the White House by marriage rather than merit, he became his father-in-law’s most indulged adviser—a diplomatic novice handed the Middle East peace portfolio because family outranked expertise. Between 2017 and 2021, this young and slightly mysterious man who once said he relaxed by looking at buildings oversaw the administration’s “peace plan,” culminating in the highly transactional Abraham Accords—deals that normalised Israel’s ties with Gulf monarchies while leaving the Palestinians conspicuously outside the frame. Jordan, as I wrote at the time, kept its caution.

    When the first Trump years ended, Kushner did what many former officials only dream of—he turned his address book into a balance sheet. In 2021 he founded Affinity Partners, a private-equity firm based in sun-slapped Miami. Within six months he had secured $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose personal approval overrode internal misgivings. Reuters later reported additional Gulf-state backing, the Senate Finance Committee since noting that Affinity has collected roughly $157 million in management fees—a tasty afterglow of office that would trouble almost anyone but the man himself.

    Since leaving Washington, Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who converted to Judaism in 2009, have kept a calculated distance from Donald Trump—part image management, part tactical retreat. The separation read as both self-preservation and positioning: close enough to profit from future influence, far enough to escape the chaos that once defined it. It is an image carefully sculpted, not slapped on like wet clay.

    By 2024, as Gaza burned, Kushner re-emerged. “Gaza’s very valuable waterfront property,” he said—a phrase that landed like a Freudian slip, reducing catastrophe to real estate. He offered advice on Gaza’s reconstruction even as he pursued mega-deals such as the $55 billion Electronic Arts “take-private”—much to the chagrin of EA gameplayers—with the same Saudi fund that seeded his firm. In October 2025, amid a fragile cease-fire, the Associated Press credited Trump-era envoys—including Kushner—with quiet, back-channel involvement.

    Photos of Affinity’s Miami offices show a family office disguised as a global fund: muted décor, small staff, white walls, and the steady hum of expensive air-conditioning. Tom Wolfe would have had a field day. Visitors describe Kushner pacing barefoot during long calls, gesturing with his phone. Meetings, people suggest, often end in polite vagueness rather than decision. The manner is frictionless—calm, confident, faintly antiseptic. Former colleagues recall the same vibe in Washington: rarely angered, never hurried, convinced that numbers could soothe politics. Even so, Kushner’s struggle to secure a permanent top-level security clearance was widely cited in Washington as a red flag.

    He also surfaced in the Mueller investigation, his meetings with Russian and other foreign figures serving as a case study in the perils of mixing business, diplomacy, and family inheritance.
    To admirers, he is unflappable and visionary; to others, a kind of avatar of polite ambition. In Gulf business circles, he is said to speak the language of return multiples and megaprojects—a dialect, I’m assured, native to sovereign-fund culture.

    It’s easy enough to picture how a man in Kushner’s position might profit from peace. Hypothetically—emphasis on the word—he could collect management fees on MENA funds for postwar reconstruction; take equity in Gaza–Israel infrastructure once the dust settles; invest in “coastal regeneration,” energy, logistics, or tech ventures that depend on a cease-fire to function. None of this is necessarily illicit. It simply shows how private equity transforms diplomacy into deal flow—how peace becomes another line item in a prospectus. As Hannah Arendt warned, “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

    Palestinian officials have long rejected this logic. In 2019 they boycotted Kushner’s Bahrain conference, calling its promises of investment a bribe for silence. More recently, critics have said you cannot build a riviera on the bones of the dead. The discomfort is universal: profit may rebuild what bombs destroyed, but it also risks sanitising the destruction.

    To allies, Kushner remains a believer in capital as cure—a man determined to prove that investment can succeed where diplomacy failed. To critics, that is the delusion of his career: the faith that liquidity can redeem dispossession. The moral deficit, not the financial one, haunts every discussion of Gaza’s reconstruction. Sympathy never appears on a spreadsheet.

    Between Miami (where fellow billionaire Steve Witkoff is a neighbour), Riyadh, and Tel Aviv, Kushner moves easily, fluent in that grammar of patient capital. In Washington, investigators and former colleagues see something plainer: not vision but access monetised—and a family’s privilege refashioned as a global business model.

    “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin once wrote. In the end, Kushner’s story isn’t just about one man’s knack for turning proximity into capital; it’s about a political culture that treats proximity itself as capital. His calm, his polish, his euphemisms for ruin—all belong to an era in which the line between service and self-interest has blurred into consultancy. The mirage in the desert is not really there. What unsettles people is not simply that he might profit from Gaza’s resurrection, but that such a prospect no longer shocks anyone at all.

    He said recently, without irony, “Instead of replicating the barbarism of the enemy, you chose to be exceptional—you chose to stand for the values that you stand for, and I couldn’t be prouder to be a friend of Israel.”

    Not long after, a Palestinian aid worker told the BBC, “We can no longer recognise ourselves as human beings.”

    And now Kushner is hailed by some as the new Kissinger, presumably forgetting that Kissinger was labelled a “war criminal” by so many people due to his involvement in controversial foreign policies that led to significant human suffering, such as the Vietnam War and actions in Latin America.

    The Goya etching is from Los Caprichos, a series of 80 satirical prints exposing the social and political follies of late-18th-century Spain. It depicts a man—often read as Goya himself—slumped asleep at his desk as owls and bats swarm behind him. It was on this desk that the artist engraved the warning: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” In his notes, Goya clarified this: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”

    The post The Price of Peace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Will American Carnage Spread to Venezuela?

    Illustration by Nathaniel St. Clair

    Every autocrat needs an enemy who threatens the country—preferably from both sides of the border. Such an enemy can serve as the reason to suspend the rule of law and boost executive power.

    For Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it’s been the Kurds. For India’s Narendra Modi, it’s been the Muslims. For Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was first the Chechens, then Alexei Navalny and his followers, and now the Ukrainians.

    Donald Trump has built his political career—and, frankly, his entire personality—on the identification of enemies. His presidential run back in 2016 required belittling his rivals in those early Republican primaries (quite literally in the case of Marco Rubio). Later, he widened his scope to include everyone who attempted to thwart his ambitions, like the FBI’s James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. These days, everything that goes wrong in the United States he blames on former president Joe Biden (who had the temerity to beat him in the 2020 presidential election) and the “radical left” (which is basically anyone more liberal than Stephen Miller).

    But such “enemies” are small fry, given Trump’s desire for ever greater power. To justify his attacks on Democratic-controlled cities, which is really an effort to suppress all resistance to his policies and his consolidation of presidential authority, he needs a more fearsome monster. To find such a bogeyman, he has dug deep into the American psyche and the playbooks of the autocratic leaders he admires.

    On the road to finding the right monster and making America “great again”—a hero’s quest if there ever was one—Trump must first depict the United States as a fallen giant. During his first inaugural address, he declared that “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” According to Trump’s self-centered timeline, the carnage stopped during the four years of his first presidency and resumed once again when Biden took over. Carnage, for Trump, is really just a codeword for race—the fall in status of white people who have lost jobs, skin privilege, and pride of place in the history books. “Carnage” is what Black and Brown people have perpetrated by asserting themselves and taking political power, most often in cities.

    It’s no surprise, then, that Trump has characterized American cities as “dangerous” and, in the case of Chicago, a “war zone.” In his recent address to a stony-faced group of U.S. military leaders, he said that cities are “very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.” He proposed that the military use American cities as a “training ground” to root out the “enemy within.”

    Trump often refers to this “enemy within” as “violent radical left terrorism,” as in the White House’s recent statement on the deployment of the National Guard to Portland. But that doesn’t quite cover, for Trump, the clear and present dangers of drugs and gangs, which are central to justifying his tariff and immigration policies. For that, the president needs to pump up the carnage.

    And that’s where Venezuela comes in.

    A State of War

    The United States is an economically powerful country with relatively low levels of crime. It does not resemble a tropical kleptocracy (not yet). Yet, Trump has gone to great lengths to make it seem that Americans face the same kind of violence that plagued the Philippines during the tenure of Rodrigo Duterte and El Salvador under the current reign of Nayib Bukele. Both autocrats undermined the rule of law to fight drug lords and organized crime. Duterte engaged in myriad extrajudicial killings that have now landed him in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity. Bukele has imprisoned more than one percent of the population, many of them innocent of any crimes, and has effectively declared himself president for life.

    For Trump, who thinks of himself as a white savior (el salvador blanco), the key to Salvadorizing America is to depict a country rapidly going to the dogs, which necessitates sending U.S. troops into American cities and ICE agents into every corner of society. Despite Trump’s claims, the U.S. crime rate was close to a 50-year low in 2022, halfway through the Biden administration. In 2024, the rates for murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery all fell, according to the FBI.

    Then Trump discovered Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that he could use to demonize immigrants, blame for U.S. drug abuse, and tie to criminal activity in cities. The gang has served as the perfect pretext to remove the Temporary Protected Status of Venezuelans as well as round them up and deport them.

    And now the administration is playing up the threat of groups like Tren de Aragua to attack boats near Venezuela’s coast and declare a war against drug cartels. Some voices within the administration are even pushing for a U.S. operation to dislodge Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

    Has the United States replaced democracy promotion with a new, Trumpian form of carnage that it is exporting to the rest of the world, beginning with Venezuela?

    The Purported Threat

    Tren de Aragua began in a Venezuela prison about a decade ago. It quickly spread to other parts of Venezuela before branching out to the rest of Latin American and eventually to the United States. It has allegedly carried out hits, kidnapped people, and engaged in extensive drug trafficking. It has been linked to an assault on two New York policemen.

    It sounds like a formidable organization, and Trump has done much to build up its reputation by branding it “terrorist” and putting it at the same level as the Islamic State.

    In fact, Tren de Aragua is a decentralized organization that doesn’t pose a national security threat to any country much less the United States. Its links to the Venezuelan government are tenuous. Few if any of the roughly 250 Venezuelans deported earlier this year to a prison in El Salvador had any connections to the gang. Most were arrested on the basis of “gang” tattoos when Tren de Aragua doesn’t use tattoos as identifying markers.

    The Trump administration’s order terminating Temporary Protected Status for approximately 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States makes multiple mentions of Tren de Aragua. This week the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s move. The vast majority of Venezuelans left the country to escape gangs, economic chaos and corruption, or the government’s campaign to destroy the political opposition (which has included 19 cases of incommunicado detention). And now Trump is sending them back to lives of great uncertainty.

    According to one poll, nearly half of Venezuelan supporters of Donald Trump, who were key in delivering Miami-Dade county to him in the last election, are having buyer’s remorse.

    It’s one thing to break U.S. laws in going after immigrants. Now the Trump administration is breaking international laws and engaging in extrajudicial murder in its imagined pursuit of Tren de Aragua overseas.

    On September 2, U.S. Special Operations forces attacked a boat near the Venezuelan coast that the administration alleges was a drug-running operation. It claimed to have killed 11 Tren de Aragua gang members. But it hasn’t provided any proof…of anything. The administration has released videos of the attacks without identifying the people it killed, offering any evidence that there were any drugs on board, or demonstrating that the boats had any links to Tren de Aragua.

    Meanwhile, despite a war of words with Colombian leader Gustavo Petro over the latter’s pushback against Trump’s aggressive moves in the region, the United States recently teamed up with Colombia (and the UK) to arrest the alleged head of Tren de Aragua’s armed wing in the Colombian city of Valledupar. This police work received considerably less attention in the press—and from the U.S. government itself—than Trump’s clearly illegal attacks on Venezuelan boats.

    Regime Change?

    Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an autocrat in his own right, has predictably denounced U.S. actions and called up reserves to prepare to defend the country against a potential attack. Less predictably, after the sinking of that first boat, he sent a letter to the Trump administration arguing that he wasn’t involved in narco-trafficking and offering to meet with the administration’s envoy Richard Grenell. The administration ignored the letter and continued its attacks, though Grenell maintained contacts with Venezuela in order to swing a deal to avoid war and facilitate U.S. access to Venezuelan oil. This week, Trump instructed Grenellto stop this diplomatic outreach.

    Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been building up the U.S. military presence in the region. It sent advanced F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico. It beefed up its naval flotilla with eight warships, some Navy P-8 surveillance planes, and an attack submarine. There are nearly 7,000 U.S. troops now deployed to the region.

    This is considerably more firepower than a drug interdiction operation requires. But it’s not enough for a full-scale invasion of Venezuela.

    This in-between approach may well reflect the conflict within the Trump administration between gung-ho regime-changers like Rubio and anti-interventionists like Grenell. The regime-changers, which include Stephen Miller and the head of the CIA John Ratcliffe, count on the support of Venezuelan opposition leaders like María Corina Machado, who had failed to pry Maduro from office in what was clearly a rigged presidential election last year. With many opposition figures now in jail or in exile, she views the U.S. military as a Hail Mary pass.

    Other Venezuelans are much more cautious. “You kill Maduro,” one businessman there confided, “you turn Venezuela into Haiti.” After all, the weak opposition would have a hard time holding the country together amid a scramble for power and oil.

    Longtime international affairs expert Leon Hadar points out that such carnage would not just be a problem for Venezuela. “Venezuela has already produced over seven million refugees and migrants,” he writes. “A state collapse scenario could easily double that number. Colombia, Brazil and other neighbors are already overwhelmed. Where do Trump and his advisors think these people will go?”

    Given that Trump doesn’t make plans and instead improvises like a bombastic actor, his administration has probably not yet decided how to pursue regime change in Venezuela. The president likes to pit rival factions within his administration to see what the internal carnage will produce. As The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall concludes, “Today, full-scale military intervention in Venezuela remains unlikely. More probable is an intensified pressure campaign of destabilisation, sanctions, maritime strikes, and air and commando raids.”

    The reality of Venezuela—the government, the gangs, the immigrants—poses no threat to the United States. The country sends a small percent of drugs here—most fentanyl comes from Mexico, most cocaine from Colombia—while the vast majority of Venezuelans in the United States are law-abiding citizens. Maduro’s military couldn’t do much against U.S. forces, and so far Venezuela has not struck back against what has been a clear violation of its sovereignty.

    Trump’s war on drugs and full-court press on deportations, on the other hand, depend on this idea of Venezuela as a full-blown threat. Venezuela presents Trump with carte blanche to deploy the U.S. military in America’s backyard and in America’s own cities.

    Really, it’s no surprise that Trump wants such a white card. He’s been playing such trump cards all his life.

    The post Will American Carnage Spread to Venezuela? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Feffer.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Borders and Scars

    Ambrose Biece, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defines homicide as “the slaying of one human being by another.” Fair enough. But then he elaborates with the following qualification: “There are four kinds of homicide – felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.” The classification makes no difference to the victim, Bierce writes without stating the obvious that he or she […]

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  • The ICE Raids: The Spearhead of a White Christian Nation

    Recent polls suggest that public support for Trump’s immigration policies might be waning; a welcome sign for those of us opposed to the ruthless targeting of immigrant communities. And, while a decline in illegal crossings at the Southern border may have contributed to this shift, recent polling also reveals that attacks on civil liberties are becoming a growing concern among the general population.

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  • Anarchy in the UN

    This year’s high-level debate at the UN General Assembly reflected a world on the cusp of profound geopolitical transformation. While those seeking to rule the world through military force and economic dominance sputtered on about how oppressed they are, delegates from many other countries called them out for talking nonsense and committing crimes. While there is still a long way to go to mounting an effective collective resistance at the state level, it is significant that most governments categorically denounced genocide, war profiteering, and the rule of force being imposed over the rule of law.

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  • Every Day Aspects of Another Genocide

    Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. – Bertolt Brecht Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. – Percival Everett On 16 September […]

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  • ICEBlock Can’t Block ICE. No App Can.

    Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad […]

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  • The Curse of The Blob

    Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. […]

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  • Contemporary Opinion on Benjamin Netanyahu

    On 5 September 1972, the Black September group took 11 Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics, subsequently murdering all of them during a bungled German rescue attempt. On 7 and 8 September, Israel indiscriminately bombed Lebanon and Syria. Lebanon and Syria pressed the UN for a response.  On 10 September the UN Security Council […]

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    The post Contemporary Opinion on Benjamin Netanyahu appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Strange Things

    On September 9, Israel tried to assassinate Hamas’ political leadership in a surprise bombing raid on a compound in Doha where they were gathered in a Qatari government building to assess the latest ceasefire proposal with the imprimatur, for what it’s worth, of the Trump administration. It wasn’t worth very much. In fact, it may […]

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