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Category: CounterPunch+

  • Democrats Burn it All Down

    The Democrats are burning it all down.

    They are going to lose the midterms because of the Ukraine War.

    A Red Wave of extremists will sweep into office because of the Ukraine War.

    Insurrectionists will have an inside path to a coup in 2024 because of the Ukraine War.

    Biden is doubling down on fossil fuels ensuring climate catastrophe because of the Ukraine War.

    The far right is gaining power across Europe because of the Ukraine War.

    A food crisis has put tens of millions on the brink of starvation because of the Ukraine War.

    It didn’t have to be this way.

    Let me explain.

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  • Out of Prison, Meat in the Game

    One day over fifty years ago, in the boys’ restroom of a Long Island elementary school, a second-grader named Anthony Dixon got punched in the face by a teenaged boy. Anthony, knowing he was too small to punch back, bit: “I bit him real hard; blood was coming down.” The incident might have ended with […]

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  • Understanding Britain’s Political Crisis

    Does anyone still care about Britain, the failed Empire? The British elites, both right-wing and “liberal,” are trained to believe that the UK is a special country, so they would certainly love to believe that global audiences care enough about Britain to wonder what is happening. Putting aside the attention-seeking jingoism, we should at least […]

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  • Philly Judge Blows Off Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Latest Appeal

    A Philadelphia lower state court jurist, Court of Common Pleas Judge Lucretia J. Clemons, has summarily rejected completely the latest and perhaps most dramatic legal challenge by Pennsylvania’s most well-known prison captive, Mumia Abu-Jamal of his 1982 conviction on a charge of murdering a white police officer. Abu-Jamal, charged as Wesley Cook for the Dec. […]

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  • It’s a Clean Sweep! Not One Country Guarantees Workers’ Rights

    Image by Markus Spiske.

    There is no respite from class warfare. Past annual Global Rights Index reports issued by the International Trade Union Confederation have invariably shown that there is no country on Earth that fully protects workers’ rights and the 2022 edition is not only not an exception but finds that repression of labor organizing is increasing.

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  • Ken Burns and the Holocaust

    Image by David Holifield.

    What was the US response to the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews? Too little too late, says this latest Ken Burns documentary. While it is hard to disagree with this estimation, the production simultaneously fails to clearly enunciate important lessons for our contemporary political landscape, something no amount of somber klezmer music can overpower.

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  • What My Grandmother Talked About When She Talked About Whiteness

    I first learned of my cousin’s lynching when I was 10 years old. My family never talked about his murder in my presence, and, to this day, I have not heard them discuss it since. It is almost as if it never happened. I wonder if our failure to discuss this is a coping mechanism; […]

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  • See If You Are Really Real

    Every streaming service is clogged with true crime series about serial killers, child molesters, and white collar criminals. Everyone is on offer: from MVP sickos like Jeffrey Dahmer and Jeffrey Epstein, to the dimwits of The Tiger King and FYRE, to the unethical and indifferent financial criminals and gangsters that kill people from a distance, whether that means inadequately preparing for a festival like Woodstock or poisoning groundwater with “forever chemicals.

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  • Extremism, the BBC, and Why the Center Cannot Hold

    What is violence? Daily, millions of people flee global environmental destruction; fossil fuel companies work tirelessly to extinguish ever-widening varieties of life; Pakistan is still under water… Yet almost twenty years ago, the Earth Liberation Front [ELF], a clandestine environmental organization in the Pacific Northwest – which took care, in its guerrilla actions destroying corporate […]

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  • Masters of Perfidy

    The first clue that something was terribly amiss with the insurance giant AIG should have been made manifest when the conglomerate began offering products–and financial products at that. What exactly does an insurance company produce? The short and nasty answer is that AIG manufactured precisely what it was meant to guard against. Namely, risk. Extreme […]

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  • Liberals and the Magical Thinking

    Image by Kelly Sikkema.

    As we turn towards the 2024 presidential election (much as many of us might like to forget its existence), calls for Joe Biden to step aside have grown in number and volume. I think these pleas are well-founded, and I hope Biden follows through on his campaign-trail indications that he would only serve one term. But liberals and centrists will now likely begin hunting for a glamorous personality candidate like Tom Hanks or Oprah. This isn’t idle speculation: prominent liberal Michael Moore asked Tom Hanks to run for president twice in the wake of the 2016 election. As Moore elaborated, “I’ve said for years Oprah should run. I’ve asked Tom Hanks twice to run. Who doesn’t like Tom Hanks? Nobody, right? Tom Hanks would win.” Although there is a certain logic to Moore’s suggestion—people do value likability—such a move would be both strategically misguided (the right-wing attack machine would undoubtedly uncover things not to like about Tom Hanks or any other celebrity) and an ideological mistake.

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  • Going to Prison as an Act of Resistance to Empire

    The United States is notorious around the world for having a huge prison population. Many of the incarcerated have committed relatively minor offenses; many of which stem from substance abuse issues and institutional racism. Prison is a place most of us wish to avoid. But what if certain individuals purposefully get themselves arrested and risk […]

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  • Long Time Coming: The Second Sino-American War

    Image by Kawasaki Shizuku.

    The United States and China have long been on a collision course in the Asia Pacific, centered around the strategic island nation of Taiwan. Taiwan is currently protected by the U.S., but China considers Taiwan to be a rebellious province, and is determined to reclaim it in the next decade or two. For more than ten years, China and the U.S. have been taking steps in the economic, tech, political and military spheres to prepare for a contest of strength, as each side engages in what are called “salami slicing” tactics [1] that slightly improve its position (ie: one thin slice at a time, at the expense of its rival) without triggering a war.

    This month, in response to the provocative visit to Taiwan by U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi, China took the wraps off its bold new tactic: a series of regular military exercises (which also function as partial and temporary blockades) surrounding the island nation on 6 sides–that can act like a noose. So far, the noose is relatively loose. However, these exercises will be repeated from time to time–and with each provocation by the U.S. and the Taiwan authorities–the noose will tighten.

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  • The Usefulness of the “POC” Identity and its Limits

    Image by Jon Tyson.

    Edison, part of the ever-expanding suburban sprawl in the heart of central New Jersey, is now predominantly non-white, with a plurality of South and East Asian Americans. Alongside the strip malls and gas stations that illuminate the night, one can find H-marts and Patel Cash & Carry supermarkets, next to karaoke bars and saree shops. I grew up a few towns over, in East Brunswick, among fellow Desis who also claim ownership over lush green lawns and homes with long driveways where you can park your car for everyone to take notice of, eventually.

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  • Five Years On, What About #Metoo?

    #MeToo tends to be presented untrammelled by social and political context as a phenomenon where powerful individual men commit sexual violence against vulnerable individual women. Five years after it all began, on 15 October 2017 with Alyssa Milano’s famous tweet, with a pandemic and many other scandals in between, #MeToo may seem a bit passé […]

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  • Britain in the Bardo

    Photograph Source: Library and Archives Canada – CC BY 2.0

    The relentless display of public mourning we’re seeing during Britain’s week in the bardo is not merely a matter of “paying respects” to the departed queen. It goes far beyond that. It’s clear that the government, the “loyal opposition” and the media are together constructing a quasi-religious cult around Elizabeth Windsor to try to shore up a failed, corrupt, egregiously unjust power system that has lost all legitimacy.

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  • The Financial Industry is a Lot Bigger than a Giant Vampire Squid

    Image by Alexander Grey.

    The size of the financial industry bears no relation to the economy. Self-mythological panegyrics aside, the finance industry confiscates money; it doesn’t create it. How much? Get out your calculators, and maybe you’ll have to find a way to add a couple of digits to what your screen can hold.

    Perhaps the total amount of money extracted by financiers (or, more to the point, speculators) is not quite as large as Douglas Adams’ description of space in the, yes, increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers’ Trilogy, as “Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.” But it’s close.

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  • Gerald Horne on the Counterrevolution of 1836

    Dr. Gerald Horne, who hold the the Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, maintains his high-velocity writing pace with a new volume about the founding of the Lone Star State, The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U. S. Fascism from International […]

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  • It’s All Gonna Break

    Every time I see a Gen X critic declare pop culture dead, I remember all of the columns and cover stories that asked “Is Irony Dead?” after 9/11. To be sure, a survey of American media right now wouldn’t exactly be encouraging, or particularly exciting: the highest grossing movie of the year, Top Gun: Maverick, […]

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  • The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

    Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. A few years ago, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were […]

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  • Phillips’ Formula: The Art of Politicizing Noir on Page and Screen

    Image courtesy of Soho.

    Scripts, comics, TV episodes and fiction flow from the prolific, protean pen and brain of Gary Phillips, who is now adding two more books to his already impressive oeuvre of 20-plus volumes. The Los Angeles-based auteur’s latest novel, One-Shot Harry (Soho Crime), is set against the backdrop of Dr. Martin Luther King’s imperiled visit to L.A. as he prepares for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. And hard on the heels of this hardboiled page turner, the tireless Phillips has edited the crime anthology South Central Noir (Akashic Books), which drops September 6.

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  • Love, Sex, and Politics

    Image by Gayatri Malhotra.

    As the recent Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade so poignantly illustrates, the clash over love and sex is one of the most fundamental cleavages in modern American politics. Although it was written back in 1956, Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving offers observations that are strikingly relevant today. Fromm’s insights shed new light on old problems. They help us understand how insecurities related to love, sex, and gender underpin our most vexing societal conflicts, specifically malaise under neoliberalism, incel culture and gun violence, and authoritarian movements. Thinking about the psychology of sexuality and gender better equips us on the Left to formulate programs that tackle the roots of these explosive social problems.

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  • Blowing Up is Hard to Do

    Illustration by Susie Day.

    You see, real violence comes from corporations and governments that create droughts and floods and storms that starve and displace millions. Then there’s the ongoing killings of environmental activists, called ecoterrorists by the state. Above all, Ma, we got to see that there’s a difference between violence done to sentient beings and the property damage of protests that disrupts business-as-usual.

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  • Afghanistan Beyond the Narratives of Insiders

    Army paratroopers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division prepare to board an Air Force C-17 at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 30, 2021. Photo: US Army, Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett.

    The hot sun beat against the building’s modernist glass windows. Inside, in a spacious conference room that smelt like burnt coffee in plastic cups, a man angrily yelled that there was no alternative to a centralized Afghan presidential system and that Afghan would never get anywhere with a reliance on foreign aid. He was a leading voice behind giving Afghanistan foreign aid for twenty years.

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  • The Border’s Wheels of Fortune Spin

    In the annals of border history, U.S.-Mexico relations and global commerce, Ciudad Juárez has often played a pivotal role. Nudged against El Paso, Texas, and Doña Ana County, New Mexico, the northern Mexican city has been a place of revolutions and political upheavals with international repercussions, the passageway of migrants to the promised land of […]

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  • The Spoils of War

    Image by Kevin Schmid.

    Mainstream media coverage of Washington and US foreign policy can sometimes provide useful information on our military-industrial complex/ Few journalists, however, dig as deeply, comb through as many documents, or spend as many months cultivating sources to uncover the inner works of that labyrinthine, sprawling sector of our economy as Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper’s. Cockburn’s new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine, collects a decade’s worth of essays from Harper’s and The London Review of Books. The assembled pieces, each framed with introductory and closing comments from 2021, lay bear the mendacity and greed of the defense bureaucrats and war profiteers who drive U.S. foreign policy.

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  • We Have No Cheering Interests When Two Oligarchic Right-Wing Governments Fight

    Image by Lerone Pieters.

    It is bewildering to see the Russia/Ukraine war be reduced to a cheering contest, as if a football game were being watched. For those along much of the political spectrum, this cheering for “our side” is not a surprise given the well-oiled propaganda apparatus that constitutes most of the corporate media. But many on the Left have substituted cheerleading for analysis, on both sides.

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  • The CIA’s First War on China

    You won’t find a star of remembrance for him on the wall of fallen heroes at CIA HQ in Langley, but one of the Agency’s first casualties in its covert war against Mao’s China was a man named Jack Killam. He was a pilot for the CIA’s proprietary airline, Civil Air Transport, forerunner to the […]

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  • Melilla and the Monster the EU Made

    Like many border cities, Melilla is a contentious place. When Morocco achieved independence in 1956, after more than 40 years as a French protectorate with Spain controlling the northern third of the country as well as Western Sahara, Spain retained Melilla (12 km2, population about 83,000) and Ceuta (20 km2, population about 84,000), its sister […]

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  • The Big Case: On the Trail of the Mole on the CIA’s 7th Floor

    Image by Isai Ramos.

    Bob Baer served 21 years in the Central Intelligence Agency at the Middle East and beyond, and was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal. After leaving the CIA Baer became one of the Company’s most stinging, trenchant critics. His book See No Evil was adapted by writer/director Steven Gaghan for the 2005 movie Syriana, wherein George Clooney depicted a character based on Baer, winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and Golden Globe.

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