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Category: CounterPunch+

  • Better Red Than Dead

    A Scene from Jesse Short Bull & Laura Tomaselli’s LAKOTA NATION VS. UNITED STATES. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films release.

    A Scene from Jesse Short Bull & Laura Tomaselli’s LAKOTA NATION VS. UNITED STATES. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films release.

    Whenever I think about the “Manifest Destiny” genocide U.S. rulers wrought against this continent’s original inhabitants – arguably the greatest land theft in human history – the sheer injustice of it all makes me feel like tearing my hair out, gnashing my teeth, slashing my flesh, rending my garments and howling at the moon. At a time when racist reactionaries suppress dissident histories, the new documentary Lakota Nation Vs. United States, co-directed by Oglala Lakota Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, bravely and poetically presents a version of America’s story told from the Indigenous point of view. Indeed, Lakota’s parts I and II – “Extermination” and “Assimilation” – could be titled: “How the West was Lost.”

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Bombshells: Barbie and the Nuclear Age

    Stills from ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’

    Stills from ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ | Photo Credit: Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures

    In 1945, against the dry, sun-drenched backdrop of the American Southwest, two events took place that would alter the course of history. One was Trinity, the world’s first nuclear detonation, and the moment that would prompt Robert Oppenheimer to cite from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The other was the founding of Mattel.

    The coincidence of the Oppenheimer–Barbie release dates incited a frenzy amongst the movie-going public precisely because they seem so at odds. And yet, beneath their grit and camp, the two share more than meets the camera. They are, at heart, both stories of America at war—a war defined by the success of Oppenheimer and his colleagues, and which would in turn define the best-selling doll. The world into which Barbie was born, and of which she would become both symbol and soldier, did not exist before that first successful detonation in the early hours of July 16.

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    The post Bombshells: Barbie and the Nuclear Age appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

  • The World’s Food System Brings us Inflation, Hunger and Waste

    Image of tractor on a farm.

    Image by Scott Goodwil.

    Market fundamentalists would have us believe that if only we left the provisioning of all human needs to the tender mercies of unregulated markets, a cornucopia of fabulous wealth would trickle down to all. A powerful fire hose of propaganda ceaselessly proclaims this, amply funded by those whose interest lie in accumulating unlimited wealth without regard to social or environmental harm.

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    The post The World’s Food System Brings us Inflation, Hunger and Waste appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Other 9/11

    Today the sordid story of our government’s involvement in the effort to prevent Allende from being elected President of Chile and then provoking the coup d’état that led to the murderous dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, is well known.   But though less than a month from when this was written September 11 will mark 50 years since the coup in Chile took place few politicians and journalists will draw attention to that fact.  Rather, as they have been doing since 9/11/20021 they will focus on recalling the terrorist attack on our country that brought down the World Trade Center, destroyed a section of the Pentagon and led to the death of nearly 3000 people (about the same number that died at the hands of the Pinochet regime after the coup d’état).  More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Cantor.

  • American Roulette

    The six white Mississippi cops called themselves “the Goon Squad.” Give them points for accuracy, if not originality. They prided themselves in going the extra mile. For not playing by the rules. For not feeling any level of force was excessive. For not ratting each other out. They had a good run. But it appears […]

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    The post American Roulette appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

  • Cultural Apartheid in Germany 

    Given the continual resurgence of the populist Far-Right under the all encompassing banner of the AFD (Alternative für Deutschland), the Alternative for Germany party, a shocking coalition agreement has just been reached between the Christian Democrat Party (formerly led by Chancellor Angela Merkel) on a local and regional political basis.  It has become imperative for […]

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  • Inside the Mind of Ted Kaczynski

    Image of Unabomber being arrested.

    Image by Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    Kaczynski’s analysis of how the economy works was spot on and was also given short shrift, in part because of the stupid name, “Unabomber,” that he has been tagged with. The word derives from the Unabomb Task Force, the group the FBI assembled to track down Kaczynski. “Unabomb” was short for “University and Airlines Bombings,” which were the first targets of Kaczynski’s mail bombs. Despite tons of physical evidence, the FBI completely failed at locating Kaczynski until they asked the major media to publish his manifesto. Kaczynski’s brother recognized his sibling’s handwork and gave the FBI directions to the cabin in the woods.

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • How NAFTA Ate the West

    In the two years following the enactment of NAFTA, the price of beef dropped by as much as 50 percent. If hamburger eaters exulted at the news, they should have also been aware that with this fall in beef prices has come a crisis for the nation’s small ranchers as grave as that which put […]

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  • Fascism is the Western Answer to Class Struggle

    Setting aside culture war animosities for the moment to consider the direction of politics in the US— to the extent that doing so is psychologically and / or economically possible for dedicated culture warriors, recent revelations that the FBI and CIA were active participants in the 2016 and 2020 national elections run headlong into longer history. While ‘American democracy’ has always been tenuous and abstract (‘representative’), the US has now returned to a pre- and inter-War melding of state with commercial interests. The American political ‘system’ now fits the Marxist-Leninist conception of the capitalist state. More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rob Urie.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Bringing the War Home to the Border to Make Imperialism Great Again

    There is no use arguing that Donald Trump hasn’t existentially altered the conversation on war in this country and sweet Kali knows that I’ve tried. I’ve been crying bullshit in all caps on that swinging bologna salesman’s phony isolationist, Pat Buchanan-with-dick-jokes act since he crashed the GOP primaries on his golden escalator in 2016. The More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

  • Scared to Death!

    I met U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) for the first time recently. I had a short, but revealing conversation with him. I don’t know what he thought coming away from the exchange, but I know what I felt. I felt afraid. I saw someone who was enthusiastic about the current proxy war with Russia and More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Term Limits Wouldn’t Fix the Supreme Court

    “According to respected polls,” Ira Shapiro writes at The Hill, “public approval of the Supreme Court has dropped precipitously to the lowest level in the 50 years that it has been measured.” And not, he cautions, not just to recent revelations concerning the less than ethical (those are my polite words for “bribe-accepting”) behavior on More

    The post Term Limits Wouldn’t Fix the Supreme Court appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • For Russia, With Love

    A still from Compassionate Spy, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

    Two-time Oscar nominee and three-time Emmy Award winner Steve James’ compelling, confessional A Compassionate Spy is the latest in a current cinematic trend of nuke-related documentary and feature films that includes Oliver Stone’s Nuclear Now, Irene Lusztig’s Richland and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Perhaps this vogue is emerging from the collective psyche now because of historic dates regarding the Manhattan Project and the fact that June 19 was the 70th anniversary of the electrocution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953. Or because the war in Ukraine plus tensions between the People’s Republic of China and the USA are heightening.

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  • Setting the Future Free From Inside an Israeli Prison

    In his young adult novel, The Oil’s Secret Tale, Walid Daqqah describes a wall – a vast wall that darkens the sky, divides the Earth, separates animals and plants and people from each other – a wall that stops children from visiting their parents in prison. Daqqah’s story is about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, born […]

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  • Extremism Blends Into the Mainstream

    The ultra rightwing parental rights group, Moms for Liberty, held their second annual convention the last week of June in Philadelphia.  The Moms for Liberty received nationwide attention before and during their gathering as an example of the new normal: welcoming the Moms for Liberty’s right-wing racism, homophobia and book banning into the Republican mainstream. […]

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  • White Supremacy and the Bombing of Hiroshima

    As I was born in Hiroshima, I visited the Peace Park there many times. It was a short walk from my grandfather’s house. I didn’t visit Nagasaki until I was an adult, when in 1999, my friend Gordon Greene and I were in Kyushu as visiting medical education faculty. After our visit to Nagasaki’s Peace […]

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  • Trying to Make a Living and Doing the Best They Could       

    When I was a freshman at Fordham University in 1973, one of the records played most often in the dorms was the newly released Allman Brothers record Brothers and Sisters.  Other top choices in the stack were Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, The Grateful Dead’s Wake of the Flood, Earth, Wind and Fire’s Keep Your Head to More

    The post Trying to Make a Living and Doing the Best They Could        appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Forever Dangers of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

    If you didn’t know better, you’d think Lloyd Marbet was a dairy farmer or maybe a retired shop teacher. His beard is thick, soft, and gray, his hair pulled back in a small ponytail. In his mid-seventies, he still towers over nearly everyone. His handshake is firm, but there’s nothing menacing about him. He lumbers More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Forever Dangers of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

    If you didn’t know better, you’d think Lloyd Marbet was a dairy farmer or maybe a retired shop teacher. His beard is thick, soft, and gray, his hair pulled back in a small ponytail. In his mid-seventies, he still towers over nearly everyone. His handshake is firm, but there’s nothing menacing about him. He lumbers More

    The post The Forever Dangers of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • World Hunger and the War in Ukraine

    On Monday, June 17, Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, announced, “The Black Sea agreements are no longer in effect.” This was a blunt statement to suspend the Black Sea Grain Initiative that emerged out of intense negotiations in the hours after Russian forces entered Ukraine in February 2022. The Initiative went into effect on July 22, 2022, after Russian and Ukrainian officials signed it in Istanbul in the presence of the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. More

    The post World Hunger and the War in Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Elon Musk and the New Era of Extractive Geopolitics

    Image of mine.

    Image by omid roshan.

    In November 2020, leftwing president Evo Morales returned to Bolivia after being expelled by right-wing opponents with the aid of the United States. The Organization of American States (OAS), which has served as an appendage of U.S. imperial aspirations in South America for decades, conducted an audit of the vote tallies and deemed Bolivia’s election of Morales in 2019 illegitimate, forcing him to flee the country. The OAS’s assessment of the election aligned with the U.S. government’s unofficial position that Morales threatened its regional geopolitical interests. There were problems, however. The statistical analysis used in OAS’s 2019 report was “flawed,” according to The New York Times. Even so, U.S. criticisms emboldened Morales’s opposition and led to “a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history.”

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  • On Black Intifada in France

    July 16, 2023 by Sukant Chandan
    Image of French flag.

    Image by Anthony Choren.

    The police racist killing of children is a regular occurance for decades in France, often triggering burgeoning spontaneous working class insurgencies. The moments after French police killed 17yr old ‘Nahel M’ in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre wasn’t any different. 45,000 riot police, including the infamously brutal BRI special forces, contributed to the quelling of another uprising in France conducted mostly by young working classes of African heritage in the ‘banlieues’ or contained council estates often many miles out of the urban centres. Over two nights of the uprising at least 2,000 insurgents have been arrested by French authorities, the average age of arrestees is 17yrs old, pointing to another generation that will see considerable sections of their neighbours experiencing the French criminal justice system and prisons that will only boost their sense of alienation and confrontation with the French colonial state. Black working class communities across colonial centres in the ‘West’ are seeing multiple generations of the same family in prisons at the same time.The average age of the arestees also indicates how young our children are brutalised by the police and schools. The youth who led the uprising are of African heritage, both northern (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) and also other regions like from West Africa and other former colonies of the French state. The uprising saw the insurrectionists use fire bombs, grenades and firearms against the state, indicating a further intensification by means of tactics as compared to previous similar uprisings. There is much to explore as to the significance of the uprising by means of class-struggle against capitalist-colonialism and for socialism in the colonial centre in a context of global victories of white supremacist racism and the far-right.

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    Sukant Chandan is a London-based decolonial anti-imperialist activist and analyst. He advocated justice for Libyans in visiting Libya three times during the Nato onslaught in 2011 and reports frequently on English-language news channels based in Russia, Iran, China and Lebanon on which he discusses issues pertaining to the challenges of the struggle to end neo-colonialism. He can be contacted at sukant.chandan@gmail.com.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sukant Chandan.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Turning the Page on Coal

    For years, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe has fought to protect our reservation and people from the harmful environmental and social impacts of coal mining and energy production. We have pleaded with the Biden administration to take action on the federal coal-leasing program and address individual leases near our reservation, such as the Rosebud strip mine. More

    The post Turning the Page on Coal appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by William Walks Along.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Weird Days at Black Rock

    When you drive into the Owens Valley from the south, on your left to the west is the most magnificent mountain range in the Sierra Nevada. Majestic Mt. Whitney, tallest peak in the continental United States, stands in the middle of a jagged row of peaks, not much shorter. In late spring, great paths of […]

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    The post Weird Days at Black Rock appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Trouble with Palm Oil

    As if the Southeast Asian haze, otherwise known as a “recurrent transboundary air pollution issue”, wasn’t enough, there are many other reminders of how harmful the palm oil industry is to this planet. It’s well known that massiveland-clearing operations of the palm oil agribusiness burn down rainforests and cause the sky-blackening haze but the damage […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Getting It All Wrong About Sequoias and Wildfires

    As my colleagues and I hiked through the Nelder giant sequoia grove south of Yosemite National Park recently, we could barely believe our eyes. In 2017, the Railroad fire swept through nearly all of the Nelder Grove, burning lightly in most areas but very intensely in the portion where we walked, about six years after More

    The post Getting It All Wrong About Sequoias and Wildfires appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chad Hanson.

  • Of College Debts and Real Democrats

    I care less about the pain Joe Biden’s known than the pain he’s gratuitously inflicted. So of all the nothings that would not “fundamentally change” under a Biden administration, the notion that a guy who spent his political lifetime in the service of credit card issuers would actually do something consequential about unindebting students to More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jerry Long.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Echoes of the SS St. Louis Today

    On May 13th, 1939, the SS St. Louis, a luxury cruise ship, departed Hamburg, Germany bound for Cuba, where its 937 passengers, most of them Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany, expected to gain entry into the United States. After weeks at sea, likely filled with a mixture of uncertainty and hope, all but 29 of the More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Derek Royden.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Cruel Arrangements: The UK-Rwanda Refugee Deal Falters

    Since 2022, Rwanda has been very much on the mind of British policy makers, a dark option of retreat from the irritating intrusions of international refugee law. The English Channel has become something of a polemical resource, with those seeking to cross it demonised as undermining Britannia’s sacred sovereignty. Giddy with the dusty advice of More

    The post Cruel Arrangements: The UK-Rwanda Refugee Deal Falters appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • UN Forcefully Hits at US Blockade of Cuba and Prison in Guantanamo

    Nothing on the horizon now threatens the end of the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. Critical voices inside the United States and beyond fall flat; nothing is in the works, it seems. Recently, however, the United Nations put forth a denunciation that carries unusual force, mainly because of the UN’s legal authority and its practical More

    The post UN Forcefully Hits at US Blockade of Cuba and Prison in Guantanamo appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.