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Category: CounterPunch+

  • Biden’s Munich: the Origins of the Ukraine War

    If you’re the Russian president, Vladimir Putin—with oligarch billions tucked away in off-shore trusts, a few mistresses, ice time at the local rink, and dachas on the Black Sea—what’s left for your Soviet-era trophy room except the mounted head of the corrupt Ukrainian government, that which believes that Ukraine ought to remain independent from Russia?

    When Putin says “Atakovat” to his military command, Russian tanks, bombers, cyber warriors, fighter jets, and missiles will wash over Ukraine as if it were Saddam’s Baghdad, and in short order a Russian puppet collaborationist government will be installed in Kyiv (the Soviet name was Kiev) to hoist the white flag and declare “an end to hostilities” with Russia—as if somehow Ukraine were to blame for its own invasion.

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  • Fortress Against The Defenceless

    Image by Mike Kenneally.

    “Fortress Europe” has been and still is a nasty term. In the Second World War, Francesco Tava notes, it was used by British and Germans alike but for very different propaganda purposes. For the British, it was an RAF boast (“Fortress Europe has no roof”), referring especially to the bombing of Dortmund on the night of 23-24 May 1943 when 2,000 tons of bombs were dropped, killing about 15,000 people. That fortress was a military target. For the Nazis, Festung Europa was used to reassure the German population after the failed campaign in Russia with a promise that any invasion of Nazi-held Europe would be thwarted by an impenetrable shield of defences, especially the “Atlantic Wall”, a gigantic system of fortifications, barriers, and warning systems. This time, the fortress was protection.

    The insider-outsider idea of Festung is alive and well, hailed by members of Germany’s far-right AfD party and supported by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Austria’s Sebastian Kurz. But the Festung isn’t just a project of ranting extremists. Europe’s liberal states are busy building a fortress to make Hitler’s Atlantic Wall look like a kiddies’ play park and, instead of warding off armed attacks, it’s “protecting” Europe from the world’s most vulnerable people. Last November, the Polish government approved a €350m wall with advanced cameras and motion sensors and, around the continent, migrant- and refugee-deterring technology includes air surveillance, sensors, cameras (radars, thermal cameras, and “heartbeat detectors”), walls, deadly fences, surveillance centres, drones (made by Israeli arms companies and well tested in the Gaza Strip), AI lie detectors, a sound cannon (Greece) blasting 162 decibels at the “barbarians” at the gate. The EU’s border force, Frontex, and member states with EU grants (including from Horizon 2020, which encourages “innovation”) are paying for it all. It’s a bonanza for arms companies, to the tune of some €128 billion.

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  • Hendrix in Our Time

    On a spring night in 1967, the manager of the Savoy Theatre told the young guitar phenom Jimi Hendrix that Paul McCartney and George Harrison would be in the audience for the band’s final show in London. About an hour before going on stage Hendrix, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell hastily rehearsed “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.” They opened their set with a blistering version of the song, which had only been released by The Beatles three days earlier.  By his own account, McCartney was so blown away by the performance that he began incessantly talking up Hendrix to other musicians and producers, including the organizers of the Monterey Pop Festival, who soon invited the new band to perform at the big concert on the California coast three weeks later.  Hendrix closed the Monterey performance, vividly recorded by DA Pennebaker’s cameras, with a vicious cover of Chip Taylor’s rave-up “Wild Thing,” where 90,000 heads were blown, when he lit his crackling Stratocaster on fire and tossed the shrieking guitar into the crowd. Music was never the same.

    Three completed studio albums: Are You Experienced? (1967), Axis: Bold as Love(1968), Electric Ladyland (1969). That’s all we have from Jimi Hendrix. Each distinctive. Each meticulously crafted. Each musically innovative and thematically coherent. There’s nothing else like them in the canon of rock music. And then he was gone. Dead in a London flat at the age of 27 and, as a consequence, forever linked to the ghosts of two infinitely lesser talents: the Texas screecher Janis Joplin and the messianic drug-fiend Jim Morrison.

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  • What Capitalism’s Brought to Tonga

    The eruption of the undersea volcano, off the twin islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai within the Tongan system, drew the world’s attention, if only for a few days, to the island kingdom of Tonga. The death toll so far has been low, and so, for the global viewing audience, more spectacle than tragedy. The satellite images of Nuku’alofa, the capital, covered with grey ash, looked somber and spooky. But such volcanic fall-out is part of Polynesia, isn’t it? Won’t it surely wash away in the tropical rain?

    One heard the little discussion, at least among the talking heads on cable news, of what volcanic ashfall does to a vulnerable ecosystem involving freshwater wells, fishponds, and crops such as coconuts. Coconut palms like volcanic soil, of lava and lava ash, beneath them; they do not, however, like the ash raining down on top of them, defoliating them, breaking their branches. This is especially important as Tonga’s main exports have long been copra and coconut oil. Ash is not good either for the vanilla plants, either, which produce their (sometimes) lucrative beans for the world marketplace.

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  • On the Misuse (and Invention) of Words

    Image by Joseph Chan.

    It is common to hear and read “experts” say that US politics is too “polarized” between “the left,” meaning the Democrats, and the right, meaning the Republicans. According to those who worry and complain about “polarization,” US-Americans need to “come together” and “meet in the middle,” in order to “heal the divisions in the country.”

    This is nonsense. There’s next-to-nothing “left” about the dismal, dollar-drenched Democratic Party of the two Joes (Biden and Manchin), Nancy “We’re Capitalist and Just the Way it Is” Pelosi and Chuck Schumer but there’s quite a bit far right about the Amerikaner Party of Trump (APoT) and January 6 – the Republifascist Party. Helping drive the whole two-party system far to the right, the lying neoliberal warmonger Democrats are in much the same corporate and imperial space that “moderate Republicans” used to occupy. With nowhere left go since the Demublican Citigroup presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the GOP crossed over into radical white nationalist and neofascist territory. It went there in a big way with Trump.

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  • Give Them A Migraine! Fan-boy Ben Burgis Slobbers over Christopher Hitchens

    Christopher Hitchens reading his book Hitch-22 (2010)

    At the outset, I admit that this review of a 160 page book is excessively long. Why exert this much time on a book that doesn’t even contain footnotes and outright admits its major mode of engagement was watching old YouTube video debates featuring the subject?

    Answer: Despite the utter failure of the volume to make a viable argument for Hitchens’ utility in radical politics, what caused his neocon turn, or even shed light on his contributions, the late polemicist remains a useful tool for liberal imperialists and outright reactionaries. On the anniversary of his death, former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter wrote a fawning tribute that in many ways is indistinguishable from the purple prose of this current volume. Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute likewise wrote a reverential tribute. Hitchens remains a useful propaganda tool via his seemingly-endless Hitch-Slap videos on YouTube. Also, obvious from the testimonials page at the front of the book, apparently there are people in DSA who have fondness for him. Why?

    There are many ways to parse this book, just as there are many ways to parse its subject. Adulatory reviews of this title have previously granted Ben Burgis, a philosophy professor and leading advocate of the Jacobin magazine tendency within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the tacit acknowledgement of legitimacy to both his interrogative stance, predicated upon philosophy, and the intellectual validity of the inquiry, that Hitchens had a deep level of thought and political grounding.

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  • Four Good Reasons Not to Go to War Over Ukraine

    The last thing any of us need is a war with Russia over the Ukraine. You don’t need to know much about foreign policy to know that. Let the pundits and talking heads argue about the nuances of NATO and war maneuvers at the border of Russia. For most Americans, there are at least four More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Logging Won’t Do Much to Reduce Large Wildfires

    Recently the Biden administration announced it will spend billions of dollars on logging forests to preclude or slow the spread of large wildfires. One of the arguments alleged by proponents of thinning or logging forests is that it would preclude wildfires and reduce carbon emissions from wildfire. Proponents argue that more trees survive a fire More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How 5G Puts Airplanes at Risk

    New high-speed cellphone services have raised concerns of interference with aircraft operations, particularly as aircraft are landing at airports. The Federal Aviation Administration has assured Americans that most commercial aircraft are safe, and AT&T and Verizon have agreed to hold off on installing their new cellphone antennas near airports for six months. But the problem More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Chile: New Leader, Fresh Optimism, Old Obstacles

    Last week, a few days after I returned to my native Chile from a prolonged, pandemic-induced absence, my face suffered an unfortunate accident. During an early morning walk, I stumbled on an uneven pavement and, staggering to regain my balance, ended up bashing my nose violently against the window of a parked car. Nothing broken, More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Morality Cannot Be Divided: How Netanyahu’s Corruption has Exposed Israel’s ‘Democracy’

    “Hi Mort,” began my calls to Morton Mintz who would invariably answer his phone promptly at the Washington Post. “I’ve got a story,” to which Mintz would respond warily: “Tell me about it.” And so it went for nearly twenty years with me and lots of other citizen advocates, whistleblowers, and congressional committee staff. More than More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Jim Crow Wails in Anguish

    “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” Even if Mitch McConnell’s viral gaffe last week is as innocent as he claims it to be, the stench of something deep — the unexamined racist fear and shame at the core of More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Vaccine Hucksterism: VAERS and the War on Medical Science

    Image by Ivan Diaz.

    If 2020 was the year that broke America’s brain with QAnon, “Big Lie” election propaganda, and Covid-19 misinformation, 2021 to 2022 have shown little signs of a return to sanity. On Covid-19, anti-vaxxer misinformation permeates political discourse. Twenty-seven percent of Americans had yet to be “fully” vaccinated by receiving at least two shots by January 2022, and the vast majority of these holdouts – more than 80 percent – said they didn’t plan on getting vaccinated. The pandemic continues, despite many Americans talking about it as if it’s in the past. Approximately three-in-ten Americans in mid-2021 falsely believed the pandemic was over. Forty-five percent acted as if the pandemic was over, saying in late 2021 that they felt “safe enough to carry out everyday life largely the way it was before the pandemic.” This was up from 36 percent in late August to early September.

    Anti-vaxxer disinformation activists are intensifying their attacks on medical efforts to combat the pandemic, utilizing pseudoscience to manipulate public opinion. One example is the perversion of the VAERS database, which is used to drum up opposition to vaccination against Covid-19. VAERS – the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – is a data tool run by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. It was created in 1990 to provide citizens with one central location to report their experiences with potential side effects of vaccines. This database has become a key piece of “evidence” used by anti-vaxxers to cultivate public distrust of vaccines.

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  • Fromm, Arendt, and Today’s Authoritarian Moment

    Image by Jon Tyson.

    “The crisis of democracy,” wrote German émigré and philosopher Erich Fromm near the height of Nazi atrocities, “is…one confronting every modern state”. Today, one year after the January 6 insurrection, as reports emerge of continuing far-right mobilization in the US, it’s apparent that he was right. Authoritarianism’s global rise – and its creeping advance here at home, underscored by the January 6 attempted putsch – has spawned a slew of “thought” pieces filled with handwringing; ahistorical analyses; and vigorous, ill-considered bandying about of words like “populism.”<

    Articles that judiciously compare the world’s experience of twentieth-century authoritarianism to our contemporary situation to see what lessons we can apply are few and far between (although one appeared recently in CounterPunch+). Given the dangers of allowing festering authoritarianism to go unchecked, this is a void that must be filled. Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) are accessible studies of authoritarianism written by refugees directly affected by the crises they examined. They make the perfect lens to ask ourselves to what extent our current trajectory resembles that of the pre-WWII West, where our current moment differs, and what we should do to stave off calamity and eliminate authoritarianism permanently.

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  • Peter Weiss and His Pièce de Résistance

    “The Raft of the Medusa” by Théodore Géricault.

    Every once in a while a book is published that not only tells a different story about the world we live in, but does so in a manner that is inimitable and unique to the point of being without peer. Peter Weiss’s fiction trilogy The Aesthetics of Resistance may very well be just such a book. Originally published in German during the years 1975 to 1981, the second volume was recently published in an English translation in 2020 by Duke University Press (Volume One was published in English in 2005). It has been worth the wait.

    Weiss, who is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his dramatic masterpiece The Assassination and Persecution of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (Marat/Sade), places his story in The Aesthetics of Resistance in Europe during the years 1937-1945, give or take. The narrator, the sole fictional character, shares some life history with Weiss himself. He is a young man whose leftist politics inform his resistance to fascism in Germany, Spain and elsewhere. Those politics are also what compel his travels from Berlin to Spain where he fights for the Republicans against the fascist Falange until he is exiled to France after the Republican defeat by the fascist forces.

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  • The Cold War Reborn and Resurgent

    In the early 1960s, at the height of America’s original Cold War with the Soviet Union, my old service branch, the Air Force, sought to build 10,000 land-based nuclear missiles. These were intended to augment the hundreds of nuclear bombers it already had, like the B-52s featured so memorably in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Predictably, More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Is Corporate Personhood White?

    The modern concept of “race” seems to rise above the cultural structures by which society organizes itself. Though that privilege was called in question by the suggestion that “race” is a “social construct,” it still remains to articulate the structure of that construct? For instance, the issue of whether “race” is a noun or a More

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Shortage by Design: Trucking in America

    Image by Bernd Dittrich.

    While a pandemic tying global supply chains in knots is a fresh experience for the American political chorus, it hasn’t stopped the chorus from cranking up its familiar refrains. Conservatives have predictively targeted unions and lazy workers, both for their usual alleged goldbricking and for supposedly blocking automation projects that would make American ports more efficient. Since the pandemic, they have added vaccine mandates. For his part, in October, President Biden sought to partner with the country’s largest retailers to fix the crisis as well as calling on the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which handle about 40 percent of the country’s imports, to work around the clock to unload the dozens of ships backed up off the coast. Around this time is was reported that some of the largest retailers were chartering their own, albeit much smaller cargo ships to get around the backlog and dock at smaller ports around the country (the top 5 U.S. importers by volume are Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ashley Furniture).

    On December 23rd, Biden, speaking ahead of a meeting of the task force he put together this past spring to tackle shortages and inflation, announced that Christmas had indeed been saved with store shelves, stocked at 90 percent and the speed of home deliveries increasing, proclaiming ‘Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered, shelves are not empty…The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur.’ Meanwhile, with the emergence of the Omnicron variant, a spokesperson for Maersk, one of the world’s shipping giants, recently said in The Guardian “We do not see major improvement as long as we have a line of sight, which is into 2022…very likely that it continues thereafter and for North America even longer.’ Other experts envision problems lasting well into next year.

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  • Spector Calling

    Phil Spector’s mugshot. California Dept. of Corrections.

    On the night of February 3, 2003, the actress Lana Clarkson was working as a hostess in the VIP room at the House of Blues in West Hollywood, when she encountered music producer Phil Spector. Spector almost immediately fixated on the 6-foot-tall blonde. He dumped his date for the night, drank excessively and continuously summoned Clarkson to his table. After the club closed for the night, a visibly drunken Spector hung around and somehow convinced Clarkson to get into his limo and return to Pyrenees Castle, his sprawling, spooky mansion in Alhambra, where she was found slumped in a chair the next morning, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Her broken teeth were scattered on the floor. Clarkson’s body was discovered by Spector’s Brazilian limo driver, Adriano de Soaza, who told the cops that he saw Spector exit the mansion from the back door with a gun in his hand, mumbling: “I think I just killed somebody.”

    Not long after the murder, I got a call from Spector. He said he’d been a reader of CounterPunch and Rock and Rap Confidential and liked our “style.” We talked and emailed several times over the next few days. Spector’s story was that he and Clarkson were playing sex games when Clarkson started to “perform a blow job” on his gun and it went off. Spector said she died of “what you might call an accidental suicide.”

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  • As Long as Capitalism Exists, the Threat of Fascism Exists

    Image by Moises Gonzalez.

    Six years is an eternity in politics. Consider what was common opinion at the start of 2016: That changing demographics in the United States favored the Democratic Party; it would soon be impossible for Republicans to win a national election unless they sharply changed from their primary strategy of sending dog whistles to their base of conservative white people, a dwindling percentage of the U.S. population.

    Six short years later, there is not only much hand-wringing that Republicans are using bare-knuckle tactics that are poised to give themselves a permanent grip on power despite their minority status but there is open worry of a possible coup by fascistic elements in the Republican Party that would put an end to formal democracy. No longer, it seems, is demographics destiny; the Democratic Party, ever haughtily giving the back of the hand to its base, had believed it merely need show up to win elections.

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  • ​ Onokhov of the North: Coming of Age in Chukotka

    Still from The Whaler Boy.

    As a film historian/critic who specializes in chronicling, critiquing and deconstructing celluloid stereotypes of Indigenous peoples, Russian Philipp Yuryev’s The Whaler Boy made a big impression upon me. On the one hand, the Moscow-born writer/director’s debut full-length feature is a strikingly original movie set among the Native people in Siberia’s Great White North. On the other hand, the Russian auteur’s The Whaler Boy reminded me of several other films plus a classic book.

    This 93-minute movie is largely shot on location in Chukotka, a village inhabited by Inuits in the Russian Far East, bordered by the East Siberian Sea, which is part of the Arctic Ocean. Vladimir Onokhov delivers a poignant performance as the title character in The Whaler Boy, who is named Leshka. The 15-year-old and his best friend, Kolyan (Vladimir Lyubimtsev), live a semi-traditional lifestyle in a Chukotka village near the Bering Strait, with ramshackle, grim-looking low-rise apartments and houses, where the power often fails (just as their motorbikes breakdown motorboats run out of gas, perhaps metaphors of “modernity” failing Indigenous people).

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  • Jacqueline Keeler on Native Struggle and the Need to Rethink Everything about America

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  • Waiting at the Depot

    In my younger years, I probably could’ve been described as an anti-government anarchist. But now, since I’m seventy-five, perhaps wiser and certainly more cognizant of the vulnerabilities of the solitary life and an aging body, I’m (perhaps improbably) on the Lincoln County board: one of twenty-two “supervisors” in a northern Wisconsin county not agricultural like 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.

  • Origin Stories

    Does the United States have a homeland? Is it truly a nation? Or is it still just a colony that exists to exploit the homelands of other peoples? The federal government presently recognizes 537 tribes within its claimed territory. This number is continually growing and doesn’t include state-recognized tribes and Indigenous people lacking any political recognition. Although homelands can be shared, this extreme example of nations within a nation plainly describes an occupation, not a country, and therefore, an ongoing colonial endeavor.

    If the United States is still a colony, it could be described as a colony without portfolio—that is, without a homeland. It broke with its homeland, Great Britain, during the Revolutionary War in 1776, and
    now occupies sans terra firma the homelands of other countries, our nations—Native nations.

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  • Cheney’s Inferno Comes to Capitol Hill

    That’s why the chick was in the way. That’s why so many died needless deaths in a war of lies and looting. Of course, all war crimes on this scale require huge numbers of “willing executioners,” and the snarling man had plenty of help. (Not least from the Senate “statesman” who helped secure bipartisan support for the aggression, Joe Biden.) But the one person on this earth most responsible for the wanton murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq – and a war that destabilized the entire world with its reverberations, killing more multitudes of the innocent – was that snarling, round-faced perverter of democracy, Dick Cheney.

    Now as I write this today, on January 6, I can see video of the Democratic members of Congress gathered to honor the officers who tried to stem the attack on the Capitol last year – an attack fomented by a man who, unlike Cheney and Bush, failed in his effort to subvert an election. I see Dick Cheney there, with his daughter Liz, the only sitting Republican to show up. I see solemn Democratic grandees lining up to shake Dick Cheney’s hand, to welcome him warmly. A glance at media feeds shows me a great gaggle of “liberal” voices praising Cheney for “supporting democracy,” engaging in their usual orgiastic spasms at the sight of any display of bipartisanship.

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  • Mailer and Me

    A couple of years before Norman Mailer died, he came to Portland for a big book event portentously marketed as WordStock. Mailer had been battling his failing body for the last few years. He inched his way across the stage on crutches and lowered his frail bones down in a big chair. Then he launched into a white-hot excoriation of the Bush administration and the complicity of the Democrats. The mind remained as lethally sharp as ever.

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  • ​Red Alert: The Redhead, the Red Scare and Aaron Sorkin’s Big Lie Caught Red-handed

    In Being the Ricardos Aaron Sorkin takes a cerebral look at physical comedy, with a complex, multifaceted plot. The intellectual writer/director dramatizes the marital difficulties of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), the rivalry between Ball and her I Love Lucy co-star Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda), the vicissitudes of television sponsorship and network protocols regarding sex. Ricardos also visualizes Ball’s creative process and deftly, cleverly cuts from color to black and white, with flashbacks that enable Sorkin to revisit classic scenes from the sitcom. Defying celluloid stereotypes, the Cuban-born Desi is portrayed as a shrewd businessman and innovative TV producer who helped introduce the three-camera setup for shooting sitcoms before live studio audiences. Sorkin’s biopic also tackles the heady, heavy topics of TV’s first major interethnic marriage and the Hollywood Blacklist.

    The other feature that Sorkin’s look back at 1950s television most reminded me of was 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck. But with one glaring difference: While George Clooney’s tribute to legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow illumines actual events, Being the Ricardos falsifies history. Sorkin’s two-hour, 11-minute movie is put under the magnifying glass here by a Hollywood Blacklist historian who consulted several other Blacklist scholars and film historians, sought repeatedly (futilely) to interview Sorkin and did extensive research into the subject online and in books, such as Victor Navasky’s Naming Names and Ceplair and Englund’s The Inquisition in Hollywood.

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  • Settler-Colonialism in a Cross-Cultural Perspective

    A picture containing water, outdoor, watercraft, large Description automatically generated

    Painting by William Halsall, 1882.

    Throughout its millennia-long history punctuated by invasion, occupation, and war, the Vietnamese people have accomplished an unparalleled feat: they managed to retain their culture and their sovereignty.

    This is in diametrically opposed and tragic contrast to the Native American tribes of New England the seeds of whose destruction were sown beginning with intermittent contact with murderous, disease-ridden, and slave-trading European explorers and elevated to a foregone conclusion with the arrival of the Mayflower in November 1620 and the Great Puritan Migration that followed.

    This ignominious history is not only academic but also intensely personal, as I am both a permanent resident of Vietnam and a direct and collateral descendant of settler-colonizers, both saints and strangers, who arrived in their New World in 1610 and 1620. If they hadn’t been there at that fleeting moment in history, I wouldn’t be here in this unique genetic form. That said, it is a painful reality that gives me pause.

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    The post Settler-Colonialism in a Cross-Cultural Perspective appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • “It Goes Back to the Days of the Founders”

    Image by Anthony Garand.

    In a recent N“P”R interview on “the possible end of democracy as we know it,” a discussion in which he explained how the neofascist (my description, not his) Republican Party is preparing to constitutionally purloin the 2024 presidential election, the journalist Barton Gellman said something that made me stop and listen:

    “It goes back to the days of the founders. In the first years after the Constitution was written in the first elections, under Article 2 of the Constitution, electors for the presidency were selected, as the Constitution says, in the manner of their own choosing, referring to the legislators. So state legislatures were in charge of choosing electors. Now, for more than 150 years, every state has decided that it would choose electors by asking its voters to vote. So we are accustomed to choosing electors by the popular vote in each state. But that’s not the way the Constitution required. And so what the legal strategy is is for the state legislators to take back their constitutional authority to directly choose electors. And so they can disregard what their voters choose or they can claim that the voters’ choice has been irrevocably tainted by fraud and therefore the legislators can make the choice…. And the reason for this strategy is that there are a number of important swing states in a presidential election that went for Biden in 2020 but have all-Republican legislatures at home. And so the Republican legislatures could theoretically override the choice of the voters. And that’s exactly what Trump asked them to do last time and will be asking them to do next time.”

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  • The “Hellraising Humanitarian” on “Dreaming a New Dream”

    Photo courtesy of Nina Turner.

    The national co-chair for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, Nina Turner, delivered an electrifying speech during her October 30 fundraiser at the Santa Monica home of Jan Goodman and Jerry Manpearl, stalwarts of Los Angeles’ progressive scene. Reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War’s antifascist leader La Pasionaria, the impassioned oration by Turner, a former Ohio State Senator, could be described with colorful cliches as a rabblerousing, fire breathing stemwinder.

    Turner’s dramatic discourse at Santa Monica set the stage for this Q&A almost two months after CounterPunch requested an interview with the extremely busy campaigner, which finally took place by phone. Reached back at Cleveland, Turner revealed herself to be a skilled tightrope walker, a precariously perched performer with one foot in the people’s camp of mass movements and the other in an electoral arena dominated by the capitalist system. The thoughtful Turner clearly chafes under the straitjacket of the two-party duopoly and strategizes how to pursue progressive policies, despite both Republicans and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

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    The post The “Hellraising Humanitarian” on “Dreaming a New Dream” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.