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Category: CounterPunch+

  • Religious Freedom isn’t About Employment “Accommodations”

    In 2019, Gerald Groff quit his job, then sued his employer for causing him “much anxiety and distress” by expecting him to show up for work and, after various attempts to accommodate his absenteeism (more than 24 missed shifts in two years), disciplining him when he didn’t. If he’d sued because working on Sundays interfered More

    The post Religious Freedom isn’t About Employment “Accommodations” 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.

  • The Prighozin Rebellion & the 3rd Offensive

    Much has been made in the US propaganda heavy public media about the recently aborted ‘rebellion’ by Russia’s mercenary ‘Wagner’ division led by former fast food restauranteur Russian oligarch, Prighozin. The US media and neocons in US government are trying to paint a picture the whole affair means there’s a deep crisis in the Russian More

    The post The Prighozin Rebellion & the 3rd Offensive appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jack Rasmus.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • We Don’t Know How It Ends

    Image by Khara Woods.

    Fintan O’Toole’s latest book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, starts in 1958 when Ireland “was just about beginning to change,” and moves, one year at a time, into the transformation of Ireland from a developing country to a Celtic Tiger that wowed the European Union with its dramatic growth in GDP.

    The one-year-per-chapter pace thankfully breaks down. Chapter 7 covers 1962-1999. Then back to one-year-per-chapter until 1975-1983, then 1971-1983, then two-years-per-chapter. The trouble with this form of organisation is it doesn’t hold up. The Troubles never end. The conflict between Protestant Northern Ireland and Catholic Ireland just keeps surfacing, a story that gets told over and over again, bodies of innocents blown to bits and men starving themselves to gain symbolic concessions.

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    The post We Don’t Know How It Ends appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • A Choice of Evils

    Co-directors Jan Haaken and Samantha Praus’ documentary Necessity chronicles the frontline struggles by Indigenous and other climate activists, including Stop Line 3 Resistance, Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement, Fire Drill Fridays, etc., against pipelines and fracking. In almost two hours, this sprawling two-part nonfiction film also zooms in on an evolving, new, novel legal defense that courtroom gladiators are developing to defend eco-warriors in the judicial arena in order to defeat the fossil fuel industry in the courts, and from which this production derives its title.

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    The post A Choice of Evils appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • We Should Have Listened to Jim Hansen, Instead We’re Heading Toward Global Chaos

    Hansen’s warning Today, June 23, is a significant date in history, when climate scientist James Hansen went up on Capitol Hill to warn us human-caused climate disruption had arrived. That was 1988. Fossil fuel executives, who knew it was true because their own scientists had told them so, instead swung into a full-scale disinformation campaign More

    The post We Should Have Listened to Jim Hansen, Instead We’re Heading Toward Global Chaos appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Mazza.

  • Has the Putin-Prigozhin Confrontation Opened a Door for Negotiation?

    The war between Russia and Ukraine has become more complex in the wake of the past weekend, which found Yevgeny Prigozhin marching his troops toward Moscow, and President Vladimir Putin finding a safe haven for Prigozhin in Belarus. The conventional wisdom among politicians and pundits is that this is an opportunity for Ukraine and its Western allies to increase the pressure on Russia.  Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, for example, favors “better and more weapons and better and more sanctions as fast as possible,” believing that Putin is more likely to “negotiate an end to this war if he is losing on the battlefield.”  The problem, however, is that the war remains unwinnable; neither side has the ability to achieve a decisive victory. More

    The post Has the Putin-Prigozhin Confrontation Opened a Door for Negotiation? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • 24 Hours of Chaos Ends with Belarus-Sponsored Deal to Settle Abortive Wagner Group Insurrection

    The reasons for Prigozhin’s apparent mutiny are not yet clear. But Prigozhin’s statements have explicitly been aimed against Russia’s military leadership and the ministry of defence. According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Wagner Group boss claimed that the Wagner Commanders’ Council made the decision to stop “the evil brought by the military leadership” who neglected and destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers. This appears to be a direct reference to his claims during the Bakhmut campaign that his units were being deliberately starved of ammunition. More

    The post 24 Hours of Chaos Ends with Belarus-Sponsored Deal to Settle Abortive Wagner Group Insurrection appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tracey German.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Love of Comrades

    Image by Anastasiia Chepinska.

    After an apparent, all-too-brief détente in the battle over LGBTQ rights, gay and trans rights have again become a flashpoint in the American culture wars. Ron DeSantis, a notorious homophobe, transphobe, and antifeminist, is one of the main 2024 presidential candidates. Although marriage equality and its attendant economic and social benefits for the LGBTQ community seem to be relatively well ensconced and are now reinforced by the Respect for Marriage Act, Orwellian “religious liberty” laws threaten to corrode its effect by undermining equality in public spaces and institutions. Trans rights, drag queens, and LGBTQ books in libraries are all under assault, metaphorically and literally.

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    The post The Love of Comrades appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Where is the Outrage?

    “How about we’re buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would’ve taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil; it would’ve been right next door. But now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, we’re making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this? Nobody can believe it.” –Donald More

    The post Where is the Outrage? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Maria Paez Victor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Two Minute Hate

    I saw a poor fellow making the terrible mistake of suggesting on a Facebook post the other day, (I spend an inordinate amount of time there), that love was the answer. He put it this way; “I try to think of ways too find some love for all those people that I’m supposed to hate. More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Scott Owen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Daniel Ellsberg’s Last Message

    When Daniel Ellsberg died on Friday, the world lost a transcendent whistleblower with a powerful ethos of compassion and resolve.

    Ellsberg’s renown for openly challenging the mentalities of militarism began on June 23, 1971, when he appeared on CBS Evening News ten days after news broke about the Pentagon Papers that he’d provided to journalists. Ellsberg pointedly said that in the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents, “I don’t think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There’s neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever.” More

    The post Daniel Ellsberg’s Last Message appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Partial Freedom: What Juneteenth Looks Like for Prisoners

    Juneteenth has long been a special day in Black communities, but I didn’t learn about it until I went to prison. In the early 2000s, prisoners at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla decided to hold a Juneteenth celebration. Because the Department of Corrections didn’t treat the day as special, Black prisoners used the category of “African American Cultural Event” (which had usually been used to celebrate Black History Month) as a platform to celebrate Juneteenth. The spirit of liberation moved through the incarcerated population, motivating other prison facilities across the state to follow suit.  More

    The post Partial Freedom: What Juneteenth Looks Like for Prisoners appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Antoine Davis – Darrell Jackson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Top Ten China Hawks Most Likely to Start a War with Beijing

    War between China and the U.S. would spell doom for humanity. That’s because once the Chinese sink those sitting ducks called U.S. aircraft carriers, hotheads in the pentagon will want to bomb Chinese cities. No one will stop them. And then things turn nuclear. To those geniuses who say, well, we’ve basically been fighting Russia […]

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  • Megamen for Donuts

    “My favorite things, my favorite things… / Blue jeans, see a red-haired girl / Sweet peanut butter, slow-burning candle / Cup of a tea and a good book and the dance of the reindeer, and also… / Pachinko, yeah / Pachinko / Pachinko / Wah, Sankyo…” This beautiful, probably improvised minor key piano ballad by […]

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  • Peace for Ukraine Courtesy of China?

    For more than 200 years, peace conferences have not only resolved conflicts but regularly signaled the arrival at stage center of a new world power. In 1815, amid the whirling waltzes in Vienna’s palaces that accompanied negotiations ending the Napoleonic wars, Britain emerged for its century-long reign as the globe’s greatest power. Similarly, the 1885 Berlin Conference that carved up the continent of Africa for colonial rule heralded Germany’s rise as Britain’s first serious rival. The somber deliberations in Versailles’s grand Hall of Mirrors that officially ended World War I in 1919 marked America’s debut on the world stage. Similarly, the 1945 peace conference at San Francisco that established the U.N. (just as World War II was about to end) affirmed the ascent of U.S. global hegemony. More

    The post Peace for Ukraine Courtesy of China? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alfred W. McCoy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • When Corporate Media Fail, Independent Media Rise Up

    Right-wing media outlets such as Fox News have long pushed racist narratives to further their goals. And, outlets like the New York Times—the so-called “liberal media”—do too little, too late, to push back; it falls to the ranks of independent media outlets to create and promote counternarratives based on racial justice. This is not a More

    The post When Corporate Media Fail, Independent Media Rise Up appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.

  • Birds of a Feather: Trump and Airman Jack Teixeira

    There could not be more dissimilarities between any two people than those between former president Donald Trump and Airman First Class Jack Teixeira.  Simple demographics would record the differences in wealth, education, experience, background, and family.  Trump is a millionaire many times over thanks to an inheritance from his wealthy dad; he lives in golden residences in New York, New Jersey, and Florida.  Teixeira comes from a very modest background; he lives with his parents in a small town near Cape Cod. More

    The post Birds of a Feather: Trump and Airman Jack Teixeira appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why Were Trump’s stolen Documents a Secret from the American People in the First Place?

    Sure, it’s an outrage that Trump would have lied that he had stolen top-secret government files on such things as vulnerability of the US nuclear program, but whether or not that slimy eel manages to slither out of this latest criminal case, it should make Americans of whatever political stripe start demanding an end to all the government secrecy.  No one can with a straight face call the US a democracy when all the important information about what this country’s national government is doing is being hidden away under classified, secret, top-secret and other even more restrictive stamps that make it impossible for us to see them, sometimes as in my case, even for decades or generations.  More

    The post Why Were Trump’s stolen Documents a Secret from the American People in the First Place? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • When “Quaint Dalliance Among Friends” Goes Radical

    Last month, Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley Williams (aka Marina Hyde) wrote a silly puff piece for the Guardian, making what George Seldes, journalist, once called “the most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism”, when she chirpily announced that, “My absolute favourite thing about writing for the Guardian is not being told what to write”. Maybe she never heard about, or failed to understand, or ignored Chomsky’s 1996 warning to British journalist Andrew Marr: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” She seems not to get it: she and nearly all her mainstream colleagues, as imbibers and profiteers of the do-not-write or only-write media culture, don’t need to be told what to write or not to write. And there’s so much they keep mum about, there’s plenty of space for them to write as much bollocks as they want. More

    The post When “Quaint Dalliance Among Friends” Goes Radical appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Julie Wark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • When Does a Formal Democracy Degenerate into Fascism?

    Poster saying Smash Fascism.

    Image by Jon Tyson.

    It can happen here. “Here” being any country in which capitalism rules. When does a bourgeois formal democracy tip over into fascism? That is a question that needs an answer in many places, certainly not excepting the United States, which has already experienced a self-coup attempt with unmistakable fascist overtones.

    We’re referencing Donald Trump’s attempt at a self-coup, to use the Latin American phrase, in January 2021. Many people, even on the Left, laugh at that day’s events, pointing out that the would-be putsch had no chance of success. It did have no chance of success. That does not mean it should be cavalierly dismissed; on the contrary, it should be taken with utmost seriousness. Hitler’s beer hall putsch of 1923 had no chance of success, either, and his violent movement remained on the lunatic fringe for several more years. But we know how German history would turn out.

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    The post When Does a Formal Democracy Degenerate into Fascism? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Richland: Smalltown Americana – With an Atomic Twist

    Image of students by Richland High School.

    Image by Helki Frantzen.

    At a decidedly leisurely pace, director Irene Lusztig painstakingly paints a portrait of an outpost of Americana in eastern Washington State, Richland where virtually all of the townsfolk, except for homemakers, worked since the 1940s at neighboring Hanford. By most economic indicators, those employed by Hanford’s industrial plant earned a decent if not opulent standard of living. The workers and their families enjoyed prosperity and a river in a lovely rural Northwestern setting, where these members of the proletariat could afford to buy consumer products, take their families on vacations and send their children to good universities.

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • James Watt and the Origins of the Corporate Counterattack on the Environment

    On October 9, 1983, I was at the old Weir Cook airport in Indianapolis awaiting the arrival of David Brower, the great environmentalist. Brower emerged from the plane, his face aglow with impish triumph. We hustled down the terminal to the airport bar where he imparted the momentous news that his nemesis James  G for […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Abandonment and the Gerrymandering of Resentment

    Anyone who’s paid attention knows that Wisconsin is a tightly gerrymandered state. The geopolitical scrabble of electoral districts enables the Republican Party to hold large majorities in both the Assembly and the Senate. Those majorities come from districts far more rural than urban. They’re also rather working class in cultural disposition. There is a racial More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Love of Freedom Defines the Political Left, Not the Right

    Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and confusions. One of the greatest of lies and confusions, which I hope to help dispel in this article, is the common delimitation of the very concepts “left” and “right”: it is claimed that to be on the right is to value freedom above all—this More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chris Wright.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ten Years Later, Snowden’s Heroism Shines Ever Brighter

    Snowden did heroic service in awakening Americans to Washington ravishing their privacy. Snowden’s “reward” is to be banished in Russia without a snowball’s chance in hell of a fair trial if he returns to America. But as he courageously declared, “I would rather be without a state than without a voice.” He explained why he leaked classified information: “I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by James Bovard.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Diluted Sovereignty: a Very Australian Example

    Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified.  First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of penal experiments and brutality.  The native populations are treated as nothing more than spares, opportunistic chances, More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • War of the Worlds as Species Reversal

    I first saw Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds at a movie theater in Lima, Peru. My dad and I had been mountaineering in the country for two weeks, and, if memory serves, we were waiting for our flight home when we decided to catch the adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel. My most recent viewing More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jon Hochschartner.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Surplus and the Bystander

    Arun Kundnani. Photo: Freya Billington.

    Arun Kundnani is an author, professor, and activist who began his new book

    If you read about broken-windows policing, it’s pretty clear that neoliberals’ main concern is precisely to make people, who don’t have a wage, pay for their enjoyment of our streets. People who earn wages are disciplined by their need to compete; someone else can always replace you on the job, right? But if you’re unwaged and get a welfare check, irrespective of what you do in life, you’re breaking the neoliberal rules. The fear is that you can go down a street and have the fun of breaking a window cost-free, no price mechanism to restrain your behavior. So the police need to make that low-Level crime cost.

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  • Trump, the Final Undoing?

    Republican leadership time and time again has proven itself to be people who care about nothing more than power. They don’t have principles. They don’t have morals. All they want to do is hold onto power by any means necessary. And living in a red state, I see many people who claim to love America, claim to be Christians, but have no problem aligning themselves with a man who is clearly antithetical to everything they say they believe.

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  • Nuclear Fracking

    Schematic for the Project Gasbuggy nuclear test. Image: Department of Energy.

    In all there were three big nuclear explosions in the Colorado Basin: Project Gas Buggy, Project Rio Blanco and Project Rulison. Rulison was the last major episode in the Atoms for Peace program. The peace in question wasn’t a cooling of the tensions between the US and the Soviet Union, but between two even more entrenched rivals: the nuclear industry and the oil companies, then locked in fierce combat over which sector would control America’s energy future. The AEC wanted to prove that a few well-placed nuclear bombs could strategically rearrange the geology of the Earth’s the crust in such a way as to release deeply buried and once untappable reservoirs of oil and gas.

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