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Category: CounterPunch+

  • Sayonara Glaciers

    Glaciers are a major source of water for people around the world. Up to 75% of all earth’s fresh water is stored as glacial ice – mostly in Antarctica and Greenland, but also in Alaska, the Himalaya and the Andes. As glaciers disappear from the Himalaya and Andes mountains, the rivers they feed via meltwater will dwindle and even dry up. Once water melts out of a glacier most of it ends up in the ocean where it is useless for drinking or irrigation. Glacial ice is not being replaced. Almost 2 billion people rely for water on glacially fed rivers in in China, India, Nepal, Bangledesh and elsewhere.

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  • How the US Went From a War on Poverty to a War on the Poor

    Clinton signing the Welfare “Reform” bill. Photo: White House.

    Not long after Clinton signed the welfare bill, judgment came from Senator Moynihan, who had begun his service to the state back in the sixties with sermons about the “pathology” of the black family and now, bizarrely, was defending the system he’d denounced for years. Even this man of all seasons and all masters was shocked: “It is a social risk no sane person would take, and I mean that. If you think things can’t get worse, just wait until there are a third of a million people on the streets It’s not welfare reform; it’s welfare repeal.”

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  • Imagining a “Half-Earth” Sustainable Economy

    It seems vastly easier to imagine the future as a dystopian nightmare than as a time when today’s problems are mostly behind humanity. For every work of optimism, such as Star Trek, there are dozens of works imagining a nightmare world of deprivation, environmental destruction and severe repression amidst a world of people scrambling to survive anyway they can in a war of all against all.

    Even if a cultural byproduct rather than an intentional construction, this depressing ratio of future scenarios is the inevitable result of capitalism. From cradle to grave, we are endlessly bombarded with propaganda incessantly telling us that humans are competitive, not cooperative, and that individualism is the highest expression of “freedom.” Cut-throat competition is the natural way of the world, as natural as the tides of the ocean, and that participation in struggles against other human beings is the only possible method of organization in a world in which countries and nations also compete fiercely because the world must be organized into “winners” and “losers” through competition. Greed is not only good, it is the primary characteristic driving human behavior because markets sort who those “winners” and “losers” are.

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  • The Fiery Death of Giant Sequoias

    Photo by Joshua Frank.

    We are now losing sequoias at a rate that was once thought to be impossible, and there is no doubt that as fire continues to destroy the last remaining groves of sequoia in California, the great giants of the Sierras could be gone by the end of the century.

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  • The Gospel According to Darwin

    Dazzlingly deploying cutting edge cinematic equipment and techniques, plus the latest scientific knowledge, the ​five-part nonfiction series The Green Planet presents a rare flora’s-eye-view of life on Earth. This BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit production is hosted by Sir David Attenborough, who spryly traverses from and traipses through rain forests, deserts, mountains and the frozen north to “See our planet as never before… from the plants’ perspective,” the renowned naturalist intones in his smooth, soothing, familiar voice as the documentary opens.

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  • George Carlin: the Triumph of Bullshit

    George Carlin at work. Source: HBO.

    There’s a new two-part series streaming on HBO well worth a watch: George Carlin’s American Dream. I was expecting an extended display of his comedy wares, but it wasn’t that, and I wasn’t disappointed. The series is about his life. His families. His cultural background, economic status. How his comedy developed from the Sixties onward, during the most turbulent time in America, when, as the Bard from Duluth, “revolution was in the air.” Context.

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  • How Boris Johnson Became a Footnote

    Boris Johnson, stuck on a zip line, during the 20212 London Olympics. Source: ITV.com.

    Johnson treated public office like one big joke, and was content to have himself portrayed the same way in the media: as a shambling, scruffy-haired scallywag, a buffoonish bumbler always ready with a jolly jape and a sheepish shrug when he was caught out in a bit of mischief. This carried him far in a system happy to hide its rapacious corruption behind his resounding noise.

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  • When History Called on the General

    You’ll see the General’s image at nearly every gathering of the new right: Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Oath Keepers, anti-vaxx Freedom Convoys. He is their new icon and they’ve taken to adorning themselves and their trucks with his face on shirts, stickers and flags. His craggy image, often behind dictator shades, is usually depicted alongside his favorite instrument of mass death: the helicopter, the hovering abattoir from which he had his enemies–students, teachers, trade unionists, feminists, indigenous activists–pitched into the Pacific Ocean.

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  • The Impact of Criminalizing Abortion on Prisoners and Mass Incarceration

    Women prisoners at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Wilsonville, Oregon. Photo: Oregon Department of Corrections.

    In the aftermath of Roe, women prisoners seeking to terminate pregnancies often had to go to court and seek injunctions forcing jail and prison officials to provide them with access to abortion services. There is a dearth of information about how many pregnant prisoners are in custody at a given time and how many have sought to terminate their pregnancies.

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  • Climate Nemesis

    Starving polar bear on ice melting from climate change. Wikipedia.

    Why is it that the US government and Americans tolerate an increasing danger to their lives and the health of the natural world from the burning of petroleum, natural gas, and coal? The science is straightforward. The burning of fossil fuels is increasing the temperature of the planet. So, the solution is obvious. Stop burning fossil fuels. And yet the entire economy and society are hooked on burning the very substances that are causing local and global harm.

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  • Oyez, Oyez, Oy Vey, The People’s Choice: Roe

    Image by Aiden Frazier.

    The Fountain Theatre’s “hyper-staged” revival of Lisa Loomer’s 2016 award-winning Roe is live theater with an activist agenda at its timeliest and most urgent. Loomer’s two-act play is an updated dramatization of 1973’s Roe v. Wade Supreme Court landmark ruling that the high court just overturned on Friday, June 24 (a date which will live in infamy). The drama also depicts the actual historical figures who played leading roles in the abortion rights struggle – Jane Roe aka Norma McCorvey (Kate Middleton) and the attorney who represented her before the Supreme Court, Sarah Weddington (Christina Hall) – as well as other personalities also associated with the groundbreaking case and personages, ranging from attorney Gloria Allred (Aleisha Force) to producer Fred Friendly (John Achorn) to Operation Rescue’s Rev. Flip Benham (Rob Nagle).

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  • Exploring Reflections of Modern Capitalism within Science Fiction

    The exploration of humanity and technology inherent to Science Fiction allows writers within the genre to create realities that reflect our own. The alternate realities allow readers to experience the horrors of modern capitalism from an alternate perspective. In creating distance between the problem and the reader, Science Fiction becomes a vehicle to enlighten readers about issues pertaining to their reality. The horrors and atrocities that are committed by players of the system are exaggerated to highlight the problems within modern society. Therefore, Science Fiction, across mediums and subgenres, offers strategies to highlight the exploitation of workers and consumers. Snow Crash (1992) and the videogame series Fallout both provide realities that allow readers and players to explore futures affected by capitalism and its horrific practices. In presenting exaggerated versions of our reality, authors are using the various devices and strategies allotted to them by Science Fiction. Also, in showcasing different medium, novel and videogame, one can see how authors across mediums translate said devices of Science Fiction to fit within their narrative.

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  • Financial Manipulation and Inequality Keep Rising

    Many well-meaning people lament that our economic system is “not working.” But that isn’t true if we apply some historical context. What has capitalism wrought since its earliest days?

    Capitalism is a totalizing system built on slavery, colonialism, imperialism, plunder, deeply uneven power relations and exploitation. It remains a system where “might makes right” is the “rule of law.” The “innocence” of early capitalism is a fantastical myth purporting the existence of an earlier, innocent capitalism not yet befouled by anti-social behavior and violence or by greed.

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  • The (Migrant) Season of Death is Upon Us

    Image by Sujeeth Potla.

    Summer Solstice should be a time for celebration. But for many desperate migrants attempting to enter the United States, it is a time of death. Soaring summer temperatures in the desert of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, which grow hotter and hotter due to human-induced climate change, claim many lives of undocumented migrants funneled into remote crossings riddling the rugged and vast region.

    For those who do successfully cross, the network of highways leading into the U.S. interior can prove fatal.

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  • On the Precipice of Global Civil (Class) War?

    Image by Jon Tyson.

    Most of us know there’s something wrong in the world. Some of us know it’s even worse than what we’re used to. A plague stalks the planet despite efforts to control it—efforts rejected by those whose agenda demands an angry god, a Darwinian approach to their fellow humans, or both. The numbers of migrants and refugees is in the tens of millions. They flee wars, poverty, criminal violence and natural disaster only to find persecution, hatred and violence on their journeys and at their destinations. Fewer and fewer people own more and more of the world’s wealth; a statistic that means the rest of the world’s people have to share what remains. The level of inequality is impossible to fathom for those of us who are not among the world’s richest and irrelevant to those who are. Police forces in rich nations and poor continue to brutalize that part of the population the economic system has no need for. In many nations—especially the United States—those forces murder Black people rates vastly disproportionate to their presence in the population and their power in the society. Lurking behind this all is climate change caused by humanity and its economic enterprise.

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  • Free Soloing

    Keith Jarrett concerts often unfold like a running feud: with his piano, with the venue, with the acoustics, with the audience, with his own precarious emotional state. The piano player is notoriously temperamental, thorny, moody. Jarrett is a compulsive artist, if not a perfectionist, and he can be petulant. He has singled out audience members […]

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  • Climate Chaos Arrives in Yellowstone

    Somewhere in Yellowstone’s wild green valleys the wildlife is having a massive party. Bison are cavorting and rolling in the dust, pronghorn and mule deer are having races, coyotes are yipping up a storm, wolves are howling and wrestling and playing, bears are romping about, having tree climbing contests. Even the dour moose are nodding and kicking up their heels and badgers are digging and wriggling about. Cranes call their ancient rattles, ground squirrels run across empty highways, and fish explore remade river channels free of hooks and lines. More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Forced Motherhood as Democratic Electoral Strategy

    Hey, how about those “radical Left” Democrats? Have you heard about one of their big ideas on how to buck historical odds and win the mid-term elections this year? They’re counting on the Christian fascist Supreme Court to end women’s half-century constitutional right to control their own reproductive lives. What a gambit! What audacity!

    Why have the leading liberal, Democratic Party-affiliated pro-choice groups Planned Parenthood and NARAL surrendered in advance to the death of Roe v. Wade, announcing the rise of a “post-Roe era” without mass resistance in the streets and public squares? Why haven’t they followed the lead of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) by joining in rallies, marches, and direct actions under the banner of “Post-Roe? Hell No!”? Why have they refused to undertake giant popular mobilizations and direct actions on the model of successful abortion rights activism in Latin America? Why don’t they join RU4AR in donning the green bandana, the symbol of women’s and abortion rights protest in Argentina, Mexico, and Columbia?

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  • How Veronica Died

    Image by Hasan Almasi.

    The English word “custody” went from a mid-fifteenth century meaning of safe-keeping and protection to its late-sixteenth-century sense of restraint of liberty and confinement (probably not coincidentally in the years of the land enclosure riots), and it comes from the Indo-European root (s)keu-, meaning to cover or conceal. Even the most potted hypothetical history of the word and concept is suggestive about a species that, in the name of property and utilitarianism (with its justice-free notion of the “greater good”), fences off, encloses, locks up, hides away, demarcates, “owns” natural resources and all their human and non-human elements, and also tucks away gigantic concentrations of wealth by a tiny minority. Liberal regimes still try to suggest the protective sense, but you only have to look at who is in custody and who the custodians are, in prisons, refugee camps, institutions (like children’s homes), and also many private homes, to find general abuse by certain groups (usually male, white, heterosexual, well-off, and exercising social and political power) of certain other groups (usually powerless, dark-skinned, women, Indigenous, and socially and culturally marginalised people). In the end, this cruel confinement of all aspects of the lives of certain species, and certain human groups, this plundering of everything, human and non-human, in the name of some insane idea of “progress”, is one of the constructs of humanity that is now threatening the conditions of existence of all species, including our own, on planet Earth. Even in these dire circumstances, there’s not much honest examination of basic political categories and assumptions that have brought us to such a pass. And, when they are actually exposed, in the death-throes wailing of an incarcerated woman, any revelation is quickly covered and concealed ((s)keu-). Veronica, automatically ill-treated and silenced in her short life as a First Nations woman, brought it all out, laid it bare for anyone who wants to know, with her death.

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  • The Roots of the LDS Church’s Opposition to Same Sex Marriage

    The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon church) works to maintain the public image of a loving-Christian religious group while simultaneously acting as an anti-queer international political organization. If you’re at all familiar with the church, you’re probably aware of their pro-nuclear family / anti-LGBTQIA2s+ politics. What you may not be as aware of is how their current anti-queer beliefs, practices, and policies are tied to 1) their past polygamous practices, as both are rooted in settler-colonial eugenic ideologies, and 2) the World Congress of Families, a known hate group founded and funded by Russian oligarchs.

    Polygamy was seen as uncivilized and thus not-white by many in the late 19th century United States. In President Hayes’s 1880 State of the Union, he called out Mormon polygamy proclaiming that “marriage and the family relation are the cornerstone of our American society” and asking Congress to reorganize Utah Territory to allow more “intelligent and virtuous immigrants” in.

    Immigration, marriage, and the family were as central to the rhetoric and politics of this Euro-settler-nation then as they are now. Settler-colonialism “destroys to replace” and “intelligent and virtuous immigrants” who become married and reproductive Euro-settler-couples are essential to the “replace” half of this equation.

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  • Rep. Krishnamoorthi’s Ties to Hindu Nationalists

    Photo: Raja Krishnamoorthi – Congressman, IL-8, Facebook.

    Last week, United States Congressperson Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) was asked by a reporter, “What are your views on RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and the Muslim genocide in India?”

    RSS is an all-male, far-right Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization that boasts more than one million men under arms and draws its ideological inspiration from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Its political wing is Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a lifelong member of RSS.

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  • A New Film Inspired By the Murder of George Floyd

    Image by mana5280.

    The whole world was watching when George Floyd was lynched but writer/director/producer Terrance Tykeem’s When George Got Murdered takes us behind the scenes after George’s assassin is incarcerated. This powerful production about the impact of Floyd’s killing focuses on the guards and inmates at the jail or state prison where Floyd’s liquidator, Derek Chauvin, is incarcerated as the former Minneapolis police officer awaits trial for murder and manslaughter after brutally snuffing the life out of the handcuffed Floyd while lying face down on the street on May 25, 2020.

    The Caucasian Chauvin’s extermination of the unarmed, helpless African American Floyd – who was pinned down for nine and a half minutes beneath the policeman’s knee on his neck as George pleaded to breathe and for his mother, as several policemen appeared to do nothing to stop Chauvin – was caught on candid camera by the heroic Darnella Frazier and others. After Darnella posted it on Facebook the teenager’s visceral, vivid cellphone video went viral, sparking demonstrations across America and around the world.

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  • The Spy in the Torture Chamber

    Did Agent Zula Nine Alpha lurk in the shadows of the blacksite in Thailand she ran as the two torture shrinks strapped a man down and poured water down his throat until he felt as if he was drowning, over and over again? Or did she step into the harsh interrogation light to let the […]

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  • The U.S. Left and U.S. Empire

    Image by Jp Valery.

    In 2019, a U.S. airstrike in Syria killed 70 civilians, including women and children. This May, after conducting an “internal” investigation of what occured, the U.S. military concluded it won’t be necessary for any charges to be brought forward, and for anyone involved to face any consequence for what was essentially, a war crime.

    In due time, the rest of the world shall condemn the U.S., bring up sanctions. Major companies shall flee our borders, of course. The colors of flags of countries like Iraq, countries we’ve nearly helped destroy, will be emblazoned on billboards along New Jersey Turnpike and online as you purchase another box of masks from Amazon.

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  • As Long as Housing is a Commodity, Rents Will Keep Rising

    Capitalism marches on. And thus housing, because it is a capitalist commodity, has resumed its upward cost, putting ever more people at risk of homelessness, hunger, inability to access medical care and medications, or some combination of those.

    There had been a temporary dip in the costs of rentals in 2020 as the pandemic threw a spanner into the economy, but the dynamics of capitalist markets have reasserted themselves. Rent is not only too damn high but getting higher, fast. And almost everywhere, not just in your city.

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  • Common Sense in the Form of Theory

    Image by Max Böhme.

    In the ideological disciplines—the humanities and social sciences—it is rare to come across a theoretical work that doesn’t seem to fetishize verbiage and jargonizing for their own sake. From the relatively lucid analytical Marxism of an Erik Olin Wright[1] to the turgid cultural theory of a Stuart Hall, pretentious prolixity is, apparently, seen as an end in itself. In such an academic context, one of the highest services an intellectual can perform is simply to return to the basics of theoretic common sense, stated clearly and concisely. Society is very complex, but, as Noam Chomsky likes to say, insofar as we understand it at all, our understanding can in principle be expressed rather simply and straightforwardly. Not only is such expression more democratic and accessible, thus permitting a broader diffusion of critical understanding of the world; it also has the merit of showing that, once you shed the paraphernalia of most academic writing, nothing particularly profound is being said. Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix constitutes an exemplary demonstration of this fact, and of these virtues.

    Chibber has been waging a war against postmodern theory for some time now, ably defending Marxian common sense against generations of carping “culturalist” critics. His Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) brilliantly showed that the Marxian “metanarrative” that has come under sustained attack by poststructuralists and postmodernists retains its value as an explanation of the modern world, and that many of the (often highly obscure) alternative conceptualizations of postcolonial theorists are deeply flawed. More recently, in an article published in 2020 in the journal Catalyst (“Orientalism and Its Afterlives”), Chibber has persuasively criticized Edward Said’s classic Orientalism for its idealistic interpretation of modern imperialism as emanating in large part from an age-old European Orientalist discourse, rather than from a capitalist political economy that—as materialists argue—merely used such a discourse to rationalize its global expansion. In more popular venues too, notably Jacobin, Chibber has argued for the centrality of materialism to the projects of both interpreting and changing the world. 

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  • James Cromwell Vs. Starbucks

    Image by Ed Rampell.

    It was sticky business for Starbucks on May 11 when PETA protesters, including Academy Award-nominated actor James Cromwell, co-star of HBO’s Succession, staged a “stick-in” on the counter of a midtown Manhattan café. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ demonstration, aimed at raising awareness about the coffeehouse chain’s practices that purportedly perpetuate animal cruelty and global warming, succeeded in garnering global publicity, in large part due to the bold participation of Cromwell, who played a billionaire in 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

    James was born into Hollywood royalty in 1940, when his father, director John Cromwell, was helming Tinseltown classics such as 1934’s Of Human Bondage with Bette Davis, 1938’s Algiers with Hedy Lamarr, 1946’s Anna and the King of Siam with Rex Harrison, et al, until the Hollywood Blacklist derailed his career. Although TV/Movie stars are often accused of being “stuck-up,” James has been using his star power to “stick it” to the powers-that-be and shine a light on social justice and environmental causes, although he became politically engaged long before he was Oscar-nommed for playing Farmer Arthur H. Hoggett in the 1995 talking pig comedy Babe. By the early 1960s, James had taken part in the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi and was friends with the martyred Mickey Schwerner, one of the three Congress of Racial Equality organizers murdered by the KKK in 1964.

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  • Modern America’s Murderous Apotheosis at Uvalde

    “Time for recess!” At those words, a shiver of joy ran through the tummies of everybody in the great big room. Recess! Yay! No more work, no more responsibility, just time to play and play! With their little hearts singing and their spirits soaring, they ran out the door and toddled as fast as their […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Animal Factory

    Death Pit. Image: Sue Coe.

    I grew up south of Indianapolis on the glacier-smoothed plains of central Indiana. My grandparents owned a small farm, whittled down over the years to about 40 acres of bottomland, in some of the most productive agricultural land in America. Like many of their neighbors they mostly grew field corn (and later soybeans), raised a few cows and bred a few horses.

    Even then farming for them was a hobby, an avocation, a link to a way of life that was slipping away. My grandfather, who was born on that farm in 1906, graduated from Purdue University and became a master electrician, who helped design RCA’s first color TV. My grandmother, the only child of an unwed mother, came to the US at the age of 13 from the industrial city of Sheffield, England. When she married my grandfather she’d never seen a cow, a few days after the honeymoon she was milking one. She ran the local drugstore for nearly 50 years. In their so-called spare time, they farmed.

    My parent’s house was in a sterile and treeless subdivision about five miles away, but I largely grew up on that farm: feeding the cattle and horses, baling hay, bushhogging pastures, weeding the garden, gleaning corn from the harvested field, fishing for catfish in the creek that divided the fields and pastures from the small copse of woods, learning to identify the songs of birds, a lifelong obsession.

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  • America’s Role in the Syrian Civil War

    This interview with world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky has two goals. The primary goal is to understand America’s role in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century, the Syrian civil war. While there has been a lot of commentary on the Syrian civil war, there is confusion about the exact nature of the American involvement in it. First, while the facts suggest that America’s role in the Syrian civil war was relatively marginal compared to that of others like the Assad government and its backers, primarily Iran and Russia, this goes against a belief held by sections of the anti-war left that America’s role was prominent. Second, there was a sharp difference between American involvement in the Syrian civil war and American involvement in the Kurdish regions of north-east Syria. While the former was through a combination of inaction and a CIA-sponsored covert operation with no direct involvement of the military, the latter was based on policies that came out of the Pentagon and involved the US military directly, primarily to fight ISIS. In fact, there is reporting to suggest that the two operations, when they co-existed, caused some confusion on the ground as well. While the CIA was offering support to rebel groups fighting Assad, the Pentagon offered to support groups only on the condition that they would fight ISIS and not Assad. Third, even focusing specifically on the Syrian civil war, the topic of this interview, American policy changed with time, depending on the circumstances of the war. Hence, there was no single policy. As such, even though the American role in the Syrian civil war was relatively marginal as noted above, examining it is of some interest.

    A second and more minor goal of this interview is as follows. There has been some controversy over Noam Chomsky’s views on Syria. Since Chomsky has not had much to say about Syria, the controversy is befuddling. It appears to be based on quoting bits and pieces of interviews out of context, rather than an examination of his core arguments. As such, this interview is an attempt to capture Chomsky’s core views of American involvement in the Syrian civil war. His views are necessarily brief owing to the relatively marginal nature of US involvement. Yet, this interviewer found them to be interesting and original. People who criticize his views can at least examine his views in their entirety and decide for themselves the exact nature of their disagreement. Those who read it with an open mind might even be surprised to discover areas of agreement.

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