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Category: CounterPunch+

  • Confusion Over the Yellowstone Grizzly

    It would be hard for anyone reading regional news to miss recent pronouncements by agency scientists that the previously rapid expansion of Yellowstone’s grizzly bear distribution had stalled – and even retracted in parts of Montana. Nor would a reader likely miss speculation by government spokespeople that this recent stasis was attributable to hard limits More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Mattson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Homeownership Rate for Moderate-Income Households Hits Highest Level on Record

    That’s what the Census Bureau data for the first quarter of 2023 showed, in a report completely ignored by the media. While NPR was telling us that the homeownership rate reported in the 2020 Census hit its lowest level in half a century (this was the top of the hour news summary, no link), the More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Campaign Trail: Where DeSantis May Go to Die

    “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” — Herman Melville, American author, (1819-1891) Who wants another Republican extremist would-be dictator as president? We had one who tried to overthrow the government and could try that again if reelected. Want to take a chance? It’s a nightmare, these days in the fragile, More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How the Post Office Could Bring People-Centered Public Banking to Every ZIP Code

    The need for a public banking option is urgent. Nearly 10 million households, a disproportionate number of whom are people of color, are unbanked in the United States. Unbanked or underbanked households must pay expensive fees for non-bank financial services to access their own money for paying bills, cashing checks, remittances, rent, and ATM withdrawals More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Annie Norman – Aditi Sen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Great News! Solar Investment Now Surpasses Fossil Fuels Globally

    Despite the ongoing propaganda and legal campaigns by oil, gas, and coal corporations and their puppet politicians, the “smart money” is now going to investments in solar energy. This is great news for the climate and those of us living on our beautiful blue planet. As noted in a recent report: “Investment in clean energy More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Zaporizhzhia Gazette: Notes on an Unfolding Nuclear Crisis

    At the UN Security Council meeting two days ago, Mariano Grossi presented 5 principles to keep Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant- ZNPP- safe during the coming Ukraine counteroffensive.  The Ukrainian army is expected to cross the Dnieper River and head for Mariupol, with ZNPP directly in its path.  Russia controls the area around the plant, and More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Carol Wolman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • What I.F. Stone Said

    I’ve been struggling lately with a sense of political hopelessness. We’re only a couple of years removed from an attempted fascist coup and our geriatric Democratic leadership is already back to pretending it’s the 1990s again. All the grand hopes of reforming the system following Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, by packing the Supreme Court and 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.

  • Wilderness Needs Our Humility and Restraint, Not Our Poison

    Ted Williams’ recent op-ed attacking wilderness advocates like Wilderness Watch for opposing fish poisoning projects in designated Wilderness and incorrectly asserting that we oppose saving mountain yellow-legged frogs contained a number of factual errors, and demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of Wilderness and the 1964 Wilderness Act. Readers deserve some corrections. My friend Ted, who I’ve known More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kevin Proescholdt.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Wilderness Needs Our Humility and Restraint, Not Our Poison

    Ted Williams’ recent op-ed attacking wilderness advocates like Wilderness Watch for opposing fish poisoning projects in designated Wilderness and incorrectly asserting that we oppose saving mountain yellow-legged frogs contained a number of factual errors, and demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of Wilderness and the 1964 Wilderness Act. Readers deserve some corrections. My friend Ted, who I’ve known More

    The post Wilderness Needs Our Humility and Restraint, Not Our Poison appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kevin Proescholdt.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Hudson Collapse

    The post Hudson Collapse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Polluting the Grand Canyon for “Clean Energy”

    The uranium boom that began the early 1950s on the Colorado Plateau left a haunting legacy of government and industry deceit, radiation pollution, and sickened mine workers exploited with low salaries in unventilated mines, who were denied knowledge of the health dangers, particularly kidney damage and cancer, from their work. More

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bill Hatch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Move Toward a Four-Day Workweek Obscures Low Pay

    Dolly Parton’s signature song “9 to 5,” and the 1980s sitcom of the same name reflect a quintessentially American hustle culture of working 40 hours a week in thankless jobs. Even though many people work even more than that—earning the U.S. the title of “the Most Overworked Developed Nation in the World”—our expectations of the ideal work scenario are built on a hard-fought labor victory, one that was still not nearly enough to curb worker exploitation. More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Tale of Cruelty and Criminality: Doug Valentine on the CIA

    Bill Clinton was the US president in 1991.  The government of Vietnam was still considered an enemy of the United States and the vulgarity of the Reagan-Bush regimes were still very present in the venal Clinton White House.  The fascism of the Trumpist movement was a mere seedling; Reagan and his crew had run secret wars, been overtly racist and homophobic, and reinvigorated the CIA, but the majority of Reagan’s followers still seemed to respect the structure of the US ruling mechanism. More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Hat of Abdul Haq

    Forty years ago this month in Peshawar in North-West Pakistan, my taxi pulled up outside the gates of the headquarters of exiled Afghan mujahideen leaders Younis Khallis and Abdul Haq. I didn’t know either men but what I did know was that they both belonged to Hizb-i-Islami, one of seven Afghan resistance groups based in […]

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  • The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Mammon and the Hippie Pope

    To use a word whose Catholic meaning I learned in second grade at St. Mary’s Elementary while studying for my First Communion, let me make a small confession.  It seems relevant to the response I have to Mary Jo McConahy’s new book Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and the Far Right.  That confession is this: […]

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  • How Assassination Became Policy at the CIA

    The CIA’s role in assassination is one of those topics handled gingerly by the press or Congress from time to time and then hastily put aside, with the habitual claim that the CIA may have dreamed of it, thought about it and maybe even dabbled in it, but had never actually gone successfully all the […]

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  • Lawlessness in the Name of Law and Order

    The most remarkable thing about the news related to the historic indictment of Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump by a New York state grand jury in Manhattan last Thursday afternoon so far is the unhinged nature of reaction from the Republi-fascist (Rf) Party. From House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Rf-CA) to House Majority Leader […]

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  • How Many Monsters are You?

    Late in the afternoon of March 20, 2023, Monica Johnson, veteran employee at Manhattan’s Missing and Unidentified Persons Bureau, was busy playing Candy Crush on her iPhone, when she looked up to see a woman dressed in a dark robe and hijab standing by her desk. The woman told her that she wanted to report […]

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  • American Whiplash

    Famously, in response to the Supreme Court’s Worcester v. Georgia decision protecting Native American rights, Andrew Jackson reportedly responded: “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” The quote is apocryphal, but it goes to the heart of one of the most vexing problems in politics. We think of politics as if it’s a question of statutes, laws, and parliamentary procedure, of getting a policy to the finish line à la Schoolhouse Rock’s timeless ditty “I’m Just a Bill”, as if we could breathe easy once bills are signed into law.

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  • The Fight Against Native American Mascoting

    Ben West and Aviva Kempner’s Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting is a brilliant, powerful, provocative and evocative exploration and deconstruction of the depiction of North America’s Indigenous people in popular culture, primarily in the sports world, but also in other arenas as well. Cowboy and Indian movies – or the “Western,” as the genre depicting First Nations people came to be known – has long been among Hollywood’s most popular productions. Shortly after the invention of cinema, filmmakers started shooting Native Americans. By 1894 Thomas Edison Studios shot the seconds’-long Sioux Ghost Dance and Buffalo Dance, featuring Sioux members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show performing the title dances to be viewed via kinetoscopes. 1898 also saw Edison’s Indian War Council.

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  • Ecocide and Ecoside

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

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  • The Last Child of My Lai

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

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  • How Does an Economic System so Hostile to Life Endure for Centuries?

    When we conceptualize the power that maintains capitalism, violence and ideology readily come to mind. Despite the vast inequality, grotesque exploitation, contempt for life and the environment, chronic instability and the rebellions that repeatedly arise and sometimes take power, capitalism seems firmer in the saddle than ever, spreading its suffocating tentacles to virtually every place on Earth.

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  • Comedy Vacui

    One of the most distressing disappearances from multiplexes in the last half decade is the studio comedy. I’m far from the first person to point out their absence, but I don’t think streaming and “prestige television” are entirely to blame. Romantic comedies have also vanished, and last year’s Ticket to Paradise is the exception that […]

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  • When the CIA Came for Al McCoy

    In 1971 a second-year grad student at Yale named Alfred McCoy met the poet Allen Ginsberg at a demonstration for Bobby Seale in New Haven, Connecticut. Ginsberg found out that McCoy had studied up on the drug trade and also knew several Southeast Asian languages, as well as the political history of the region. He […]

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  • The Speech of Robots

    “The algorithm, he said, was YouTube’s speech and distinct from what users had posted.” – New York Times, Feb. 21, 2023 If the algorithm is speech just as money is speech, then it has the protection of the First Amendment and cannot be obstructed. (Citizens United, 2010) However, Constitutionally both the free speech of money […]

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  • “Look, I Got My Life Out of this Cat”

    In the late 1960s, Paul Coates, after a stint in Vietnam, had left the US Army and was back in the States. He settled in Baltimore, found a job, got married, started a family. But life in the army had awakened Paul to Black consciousness, and he found himself hanging out at the local chapter […]

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  • Thatcherism in End Times Drag

    A largely innocuous, if somewhat tedious, traffic reduction scheme in Oxford, England has in recent months become a bizarre cause celebre of the international far right. Since last May, three areas of East Oxford have had the bulk of their residential streets closed to through traffic to create what are called Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). […]

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  • The CIA’s Changing Take on the Climate Emergency

    Factories along the lower Columbia River, January, 2023. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

    One of the earliest climate-related documents in the CIA library is a 1958 Joint Services Publications report on Soviet analyses of so-called global “heat balances.” The report mostly consists of hundreds of footnotes referencing the work of Soviet climatologists who seemed way ahead on the issue. Until the 1990s, most of the CIA research entries for “climate change” and “global warming” are simply translations of Soviet science journals.

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  • Emancipation, Hollywood’s Best Civil War Movie Ever

    Still, from Emancipation.

    Emancipating Film History

    The Civil War is among Hollywood’s favorite, most frequently filmed wars, and since the silent era numerous popular motion pictures have dramatized “the war between the states.” This oeuvre includes notable productions such as: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation; Oscar-winner Victor Fleming’s 1939 Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller; John Huston’s 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage; 1989’s Glory; as well as Ken Burns’ epochal 9-episode nonfiction TV series The Civil War, which won two Emmy Awards. Now add to this list what is arguably Tinseltown’s best Civil War movie ever: Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, starring Will Smith and Ben Foster.

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