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Category: CounterPunch+

  • Operaçao Jakarta: Sixty Years After the US-backed Indonesian Genocide

    For the past fifteen years, I have had a poster hanging on the door of the room where I sleep, which shows a stylized representation of the Indonesian island of Bali. The shape of the island is composed of watercolor images of scenes from the paroxysm of violence that swept across the Indonesian archipelago during the years of 1965-1966 as part of a campaign of mass murder against the country’s left. The poster describes and illustrates in horrific detail elements of the progress of the violence, as well as its aftermath: an island where so many people had been killed and where so much land was left untenanted that the perpetrators were able to build an industrial tourism economy in the bleeding void that the genocide had left behind. I look at it every morning before I emerge to face the day. I use it to remind myself of how the world works and what my role as an artist is in confronting it. 

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    The post Operaçao Jakarta: Sixty Years After the US-backed Indonesian Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • A North-South Divide in England’s Unions

    The idea of a North-South divide in Trade Union membership and activity here in the UK has long persisted, often rooted in outdated stereotypes of men in cloth caps, cigarettes dangling from mouths, waiting for shipyard work. But the reality is more complex than that. Yes, while historical factors have shaped Union membership across the […]

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    The post A North-South Divide in England’s Unions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Rendition of Mahmoud Khalil

    On the night of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil and his wife Noor Abdalla were walking back to their apartment on the campus of Columbia University, after eating their Iftar meal, when they were approached by ICE agents, who had followed the couple into their. The lead agent, Elvin Hernandez, asked Mahmoud if he was, “Mahmoud […]

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    The post The Rendition of Mahmoud Khalil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the Struggle Ahead

    Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

    We are in uncharted waters where Trump is criminalizing free speech even as he has ended Israel’s genocidal war, for now.

    1) First and foremost, we need to build as militant, strong, and broad a movement as possible to defend Khalil. I will leave the legal issues to others, but the terrain that “we,” meaning unwavering socialists and communists, fight on is social.

    2) This is a galvanizing moment. Defending free speech and the right to dissent gives us the high ground. It’s a chance to organize. This means bringing in new people, not merely mobilizing those who already agree with us. We need to win people to the left, such as those who are alienated by politics or liberals who are frustrated or disgusted by liberal elite capitulation to Trump.

    A galvanizing moment is when we can unite people with a clear purpose. It is a precursor to a disruptive moment, like Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, the George Floyd movement, and the student encampments for Gaza. In all those cases, the left shifted politics in their direction. Of course, the results have been a mixed bag but that is not the fault of the disruptive moments. They are necessary for the left to achieve meaningful social change.

    3) Speaking of liberals, liberal elites paved the way for Trump with the Democratic Party’s full-metal backing of Israel’s genocide. Harris dehumanized and demeaned Palestinians during her campaign. She promoted Israel’s Jim Crow-style rape hoax that was one of the primary motivators for the genocide, she embraced the genocide, and that is why she lost.

    4) But in the end Harris capitulated and said she would end the war in Gaza. It was too little, too late, two days before the election. But Palestinian- and Muslim-Americans and leftists who held firm are a model we should emulate in how to wield power from below.

    5) Liberal media and liberal universities also paved the way, such as CNN’s Dana Bash who in May 2024 likened peaceful student protesters at UCLA to Nazi Germany AFTER the students were attacked by a mob of violent Ziofascists. And Columbia University will never appease Trump, but it will continue cooperating with him to try to crush and criminalize students, faculty, and staff exercising 1A freedoms.

    6) AOC shows why Democrats are The Enemy. Remember AOC’s shocking primary victory in 2018? She quickly threw Palestinians under the bus. She likened creeping Zionist genocide in the West Bank to gentrification, saying, “settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes.”

    At the 2024 DNC she covered for the genocide, spewing a lie that Harris was working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Notice how AOC did not sign the letter demanding the release of Khalil, and that only 14 out of 214 Democrats in the House did? (Apparently AOC did sign another letter calling for Khalil’s immediate release with 41 other politicians from NY State, but that is the bare minimum.)

    7) Let me talk strategy. Anyone talking about working within the Democratic Party is siding with the enemy. Few leftists realize that Dems don’t need our votes. The left is far too weak, scattered, and disorganized to tilt elections. Dems need our silence. The left has a singular ability to analyze, historicize, and critique why and how Dems betray their base, do the dirty work of the right, and exist only to function as a graveyard for social movements. So Dems need us to shut up, especially right before elections, when we can potentially force Dems to the left by influencing voters with our ideas and critiques. The answer is the more they try to shut us down, the louder we need to become.

    8) We need a complete break from the Democratic Party. This doesn’t mean third party. We need revolutionary parties of the left. Yeah, that is a huge order, but all the strategies of working within the Democratic Party, trying to take it over, or other parliamentary strategies have been a failure. Build power to pressure whoever is in office, but stop worrying about electoral politics and third parties.

    If a third electoral party does form, it will evolve out of powerful working-class and social movements. Then to be viable, a third party needs an existing party to break up. In this case a wing of the Democrats will become a third party which then will supplant the old Dem Party as a new second party. This is extremely unlikely any time soon. I am just explaining the likeliest path to success.

    9) The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil speaks to the failure of the left to unite behind ending the genocide. Many people warned in 2024, myself included, that support for the genocide was going to cost the Dems the election. Leftists who sided with Harris need to learn from this. They got the worst of all possible worlds: genocide and Trump.

    10) If a critical mass of the left had thrown its energy into ending the genocide, damn the election, we would have a more powerful movement now to confront the fascist strategy behind arresting Khalil because we would have had a year of movement building under our belts. Just as important, we would have had the political high ground for taking the correct position that genocide was not a single issue. It was the ONLY issue.

    11) Don’t forget Occupied Palestine, which includes the Ziofascist regime. Trump has his own cynical, self-interested, and avaricious agenda, so he has no love of Israel. It’s clear Trump and Netanyahu have an agreement that Israel can intensify its ethnic cleansing and murder in the West Bank in return for an end to the active genocide in Gaza. (The slow-motion genocide continues, as does Israel’s illegal war in and occupation of Syria and Lebanon.

    At the same time, Trump’s White House is negotiating directly with Hamas, it has sidelined Netanyahu such as by having its operatives speak directly to Israel media, and Trump’s hostage envoy Adam Boehler said out loud that the US was “not an agent of Israel.”

    Trump is doing things that many leftists claimed Biden and Harris could never do.

    12) Even as Trump criminalizes dissent and the Palestine Solidarity Movement at home, he has stopped Israel’s active genocide of Gaza for nearly two month. It is more proof that the excuses by many leftists that Biden and Harris were powerless to end the genocide was simply an unconscionable surrender to a rotten idea that the road to socialism runs through the Democratic Party.

    13) No gods, no masters. No fear, no favor.

    This piece first appeared on Arun News.

    The post The Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the Struggle Ahead appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Continued Propaganda About AI and Nuclear Power

    Image by Johannes Plenio.

    One bright spot amidst all the terrible news last couple of months was the market’s reaction to DeepSeek, with BigTech firms like Nvidia and Microsoft and Google taking major hits in their capitalizations. Billionaires Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Oracle’s Larry Ellison—who had, just a few days back, been part of Donald Trump’s first news conference—lost a combined 48 billion dollars in paper money. As a good friend of mine, who shall go unnamed because of their use of an expletive, said “I hate all AI, but it’s hard to not feel joy that these asshats are losing a lot of money.”

    Another set of companies lost large fractions of their stock valuations: U.S. power, utility and natural gas companies. Electric utilities like Constellation, Vistra and Talen had gained stock value on the basis of the argument that there would be a major increase in demand for energy due to data centers and AI, allowing them to invest in new power plants and expensive nuclear projects (such as small modular reactor), and profit from this process. [The other source of revenue, at least in the case of Constellation, was government largesse.] The much lower energy demand from DeepSeek, at least as reported, renders these plans questionable at best.

    Remembering Past Ranfare

    But we have been here before. Consider, for example, the arguments made for building the V. C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina. That project came out of the hype cycle during the first decade of this century, during one of the many so-called nuclear renaissances that have been regularly announced since the 1980s. [In 1985, for example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Alvin Weinberg predicted such a renaissance and a second nuclear era—that is yet to materialize.] During the hype cycle in the first decade of this century, utility companies proposed constructing more than 30 reactors, of which only four proceeded to construction. Two of these reactors were in South Carolina.

    As with most nuclear projects, public funding was critical. The funding came through the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the main legislative outcome from President George W. Bush’s push for nuclear power, which offered several incentives, including production tax credits that were valued at approximately $2.2 billion for V. C. Summer.

    The justification offered by the CEO of the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to the state’s Public Service Commission was the expectation that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019. In fact, South Carolina Electric & Gas Company’s energy sales declined by 3 percent by the time 2016 rolled in. [Such mistakes are standard in the history of nuclear power. In the 1970s, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and utility companies were projecting that “about one thousand large nuclear power reactors” would be built “by the year 2000 and about two thousand, mostly breeder reactors, by 2010” on the basis of the grossly exaggerated estimates of how rapidly electricity production would grow during the same period. It turned out that “utilities were projecting four to nine times more electric power would be produced in the United States by nuclear power in 2000 than actually happened”.] In the case of South Carolina, the wrong projection about energy sales was the basis of the $9 billion plus spent on the abandoned V. C. Summer project.

    The Racket Continues

    With no sense of shame for that failure, one of the two companies involved in that fiasco recently expressed an interest in selling this project. On January 22, Santee Cooper’s President and CEO wrote, “We are seeing renewed interest in nuclear energy, fueled by advanced manufacturing investments, AI-driven data center demand, and the tech industry’s zero-carbon targets…Considering the long timelines required to bring new nuclear units online, Santee Cooper has a unique opportunity to explore options for Summer Units 2 and 3 and their related assets that could allow someone to generate reliable, carbon emissions-free electricity on a meaningfully shortened timeline”.

    A couple of numbers to put those claims about timelines in perspective: the average nuclear reactor takes about 10 years to go from the beginning of construction—usually marked by when concrete is poured into the ground—to when it starts generating electricity. But one cannot go from deciding to build a reactor to pouring concrete in the ground overnight. It takes about five to ten years needed before the physical activities involved in building a reactor to obtain the environmental permits, and the safety evaluations, carry out public hearings (at least where they are held), and, most importantly, raise the tens of billions of dollars needed. Thus, even the “meaningfully shortened timeline” will mean upwards of a decade.

    Going by the aftermath of the Deepseek, the AI and data center driven energy demand bubble seems to have crashed on a timeline far shorter than even that supposedly “meaningfully shortened timeline”. There is good reason to expect that this AI bubble wasn’t going to last, for there was no real business case to allow for the investment of billions. What DeepSeek did was to also show that the billions weren’t needed. As Emily Bender, a computer scientist who co-authored the famous paper about large language models that coined the term stochastic parrots, put it: “The emperor still has no clothes, but it’s very distressing to the emperor that their non-clothes can be made so much more cheaply.”

    But utility companies are not giving up. At a recent meeting organized by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying organization for the nuclear industry, the Chief Financial Officer of Constellation Energy, the company owning the most nuclear reactors in the United States, admitted that the DeepSeek announcement “wasn’t a fun day” but maintained that it does not “change the demand outlook for power from the data economy. It’s going to come.” Likewise, during an “earnings call” earlier in February, Duke Energy President Harry Sideris maintained that data center hyperscalers are “full speed ahead”.

    Looking Deeper

    Such repetition, even in the face of profound questions about whether such a growth will occur is to be expected, for it is key to the stock price evaluations and market capitalizations of these companies. The constant reiteration of the need for more and more electricity and other resources also adopts other narrative devices shown to be effective in a wide variety of settings, for example, pointing to the possibility that China would take the lead in some technological field or the other, and explicitly or implicitly arguing how utterly unacceptable that state of affairs would be. Never asking whether it even matters who wins this race for AI. These tropes and assertions about running out of power contribute to creating the economic equivalent of what Stuart Hall termed “moral panic”, thus allowing possible opposition to be overruled.

    One effect of this slew of propaganda has been the near silence on the question of whether such growth of data centers or AI is desirable, even though there is ample evidence of the enormous environmental impacts of developing AI and building hyperscale data centers. Or for that matter the desirability of nuclear power.

    As Lewis Mumford once despaired: “our technocrats are so committed to the worship of the sacred cow of technology that they say in effect: Let the machine prevail, though the earth be poisoned, the air be polluted, the food and water be contaminated, and mankind itself be condemned to a dreary and useless life, on a planet no more fit to support life than the sterile surface of the moon”.

    But, of course, we live in a time of monsters. At a time when the levers of power are wielded by a megalomaniac who would like to colonize Mars, and despoil its already sterile environment.

    The post Continued Propaganda About AI and Nuclear Power appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by M.V. Ramana.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How USAID Makes People Homeless In Serbia

    Photograph Source: Embajada de EEUU en Argentina – CC BY 2.0

    The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) played a pivotal role in shaping a legal system in post-socialist Yugoslavia (later Serbia) which exacerbated homelessness and enabled large corporations, banks, state agencies and public institutions to seize people’s only homes and burden the residents of the war-torn Balkan country with overwhelming debt, public sources reveal. While evidence that the US intended to impoverish and displace the people of Serbia is limited, a rare testimony from a former telecommunications minister offers invaluable insight into Washington’s thinking.

    NASCENT NEOLIBERALISM

    Beginning in 1992, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) had privatized its housing fund, enabling most citizens to purchase apartments at low cost that were previously ‘socially’ owned — a distinct form of ownership pioneered by the Yugoslav socialist experiment. This led to high homeownership rates across all the former Yugoslav republics, similar to other post-socialist states like Russia and current socialist countries such as China and Vietnam.

    In 1999, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an American regime change instrument operating under the auspices of the national-security state, financed and critically advised a coalition of 19 Serbian opposition organizations (the Democratic Opposition of Serbia – DOS) on the only viable way they could overthrow the bloc around Slobodan Milošević. The US, along with the European Union, has ever since ’’aided’’ pliable governments in implementing gutting neoliberal reforms, with the purported aim of ’’economic stabilization“ , ’’democratic development’’ and other such fanciful catchwords.

    A decade of war, sanctions and an illegal NATO bombing campaign preceded the ’’revolution’’ in 2000, in which pro-Western, decidedly neoliberal parties won the elections by a very narrow margin. In the first decade of ’’democratic“ rule private monopolies were formed, social safety nets were shredded and democratic institutions inherited from socialism pulverized, with estimates of people who lost their jobs in Serbia alone reaching hundreds of thousands.

    The end goal of this first phase of neoliberalizing the economy (and more broadly, the whole of society) was the wanton destruction of domestic industry through the privatization of socially owned enterprises (SSOEs), which were worker-operated businesses, another staple of Yugoslav socialism. Financially solvent SSOEs were declared bankrupt and sold off for less than the value of their bankruptcy estates, with the bankruptcy process marred by irregularities and corruption. The domestic bourgeoisie would later make billions by consolidating privatized firms into oligopolies and selling them off to foreign capital.

    After this came the next phase of “development”– introducing austerity, expanding the debt-based economy and allowing (foreign) capital to pilfer what wealth was left–natural resources and peoples’ homes. This pivot from privatization and deindustrialization to introducing debt slavery and soaring prices of commodities in Serbia coincided with a passing of the torch from the old political elite (DOS), at this point widely hated for it’s overwhelming corruption and haughtiness, to the ruling manager of neoliberalism in Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić and his “Progressive” party. Unlike his predecessors who failed to meet IMF requirements and thus forfeited the help from their “friends” in Washington, Vučić took in every third-rate huckster from the previous regime and disciplined them, centralized political power and provided a “stable investment climate”.

    HOMES AS FINANCIAL “INFRASTRUCTURE”

    A former Minister of Telecommunications in the short-lived government of 2007-2008, Aleksandra Smiljanić, explainedin an interview with the Party of the Radical Left (PRL) how a representative from a US financial consulting firm foresaw that real estate would act as a means of payment and that frequent evictions would become common judicial practice years before this catastrophe fully materialized.

    The American consultant was to advise the ministry on how to sell off the public telecommunications company and the meeting had been arranged by Mlađan Dinkić, the minister of economy at the time. The “advice” was that, after privatizing it, “Telecom” should increase the cost of its services tenfold, so that it could “attract more foreign investors”. Smiljanić was dumbfounded by the suggestion and asked the consultant if he was aware that a lot of her fellow citizens wouldn’t be able to pay such exorbitant prices, especially the elderly.

    The reply was that the people of Serbia have “infrastructure” that would act as a means of payment, but Smiljanić, still surprised, insisted on a straight answer. The explanation she got was as sincere as it was brazen – “Well, your country has a lot of homeowners”. Years later, legislative changes would make this a grim reality – families frequently losing their only home because of piled-up bills.

    Was this calculation a result of pure professional acumen garnered through years of corporate expertise, or did the consultant know something that the minister didn’t, about the bleak future Serbia was barreling towards?

    JUSTICE IS SERVED…DIGITALLY

    On March 6th 2001, just a couple of months after the “revolution” in 2000, the governments of Yugoslavia and the US signed an Agreement “concerning economic, technical and related assistance”. This paved the way for USAID to get intimately involved with Serbian statecraft  – “helping” with legislative changes, the reconstruction of public institutions, the economy, etc. One of the agency’s first endeavors was “digitalization” – USAID donated a mountain of old computers to Serbian institutions, especially courts and public prosecutors’ offices. Money was also allocated for the renewal of some court buildings and even the website of parliament bears a USAID stamp at the bottom.

    This fits the MO, as has been exhaustively documented in other cases and in different countries, in which the US provides some technical support or funds humanitarian groups, in order to obscure the other nefarious developments they put into play. The good will that this charity temporarily ensured with the general public paved the way for another Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Serbian Ministry of Justice and the US government in 2006 regarding the reformation of the Bankruptcy and Enforcement systems. These processes, which resulted in the new Law on bankruptcy (2009) and Law on Enforcement and Security Interest (2011), were vital. Both legislative changes outsourced public authority and judicial power to private entrepreneurs. The former ensured that what was left of SSOEs was privatized with virtually no transparency, while the latter destroyed basic human rights for poor debtors within the enforcement system.

    The work group that drafted the new law on enforcement was composed of lawyers, economists, but also (and very tellingly) – bankers. But before the establishment of the work group, the ministry formed an “expert group” that set the parameters of the new law, which the work group would adopt. Naturally, this group of experts worked closely with USAID, the forerunner of judicial reform in Serbia.

    The seemingly carefully crafted framing in the years leading up to the law on enforcement being changed in 2011 was that it would protect “the little creditor”, the masses of people who’ve lost their jobs during privatization, and were owed severance pay and/or dozens of monthly wages. People were led to believe that private entrepreneurship will help speed up the still sluggish court system. This was the prevailing narrative, in no small part thanks to liberal media outlets, which led the charge in bolstering the voices of “professionals” and ignoring dissenting voices, which were too few.

    In sharp contrast to what was publicly promised, the new enforcement process heavily favored those who could pay for it, the big, giant and gargantuan creditors. In 2024 alone, thousands of workers from Niš and Prokuplje protested, because they are still owed millions of euros in backpay, despite having positive verdicts from the Constitutional court, the highest judicial body in the country, confirming the validity of their claims (and these are only the people we know about through media reports).

    WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BAILIFF, AN ENFORCER AND A RACKETEER? 

    With parliament officially adopting it in 2011, the new law uprooted the “traditional method” of enforcing court decisions. Whereas enforcers, or bailiffs, were previously directly accountable to the courts which employed them, after 2011 they became self-employed private entrepreneurs working for profit. This policy effectively privatized a part of the judicial system, with bailiffs now being under the vague control of the Ministry of Justice and their own chamber. Bailiffs now get paid for enforcing each legal writ separately, with an untransparent “reward” system for expedient enforcement.

    The changes also brought a cruel penalty for poor people – if you can’t pay your debt, a bailiff will sell your property or seize your earnings, and you have to pay them for doing so. These are known as “enforcement costs” and can vary wildly, with some going up to 10,000 euros for trying to enforce a single eviction attempt. These new astronomical fees bloated every transaction, so that the enforcement industry made at least two for every euro transferred from debtor to creditor. Bailiffs are now known to make a million euros in sheer profit annually, in a country where the median monthly wage is around 500 euros.

    In actuality, what was created was a “mafia”, cartel, a “state within a state” as attested by a significant portion of the Serbian populace. High-profile debacles involving bailiffs abound, with both sides of the polarized major media machine (government sponsored and western-backed opposition oriented) running stories on bailiffs every month or so. Introducing the profit motive in enforcing court documents opened up the broadest avenues for legalized corruption, with money being the ultimate accelerant of the final part of the judicial process. The more money you had, the more “justice” you could afford.

    Forced evictions became commonplace, with homes being sold for meager debts and often auctioned off for 20-30% market value. The opaque “reward” system meant that bailiffs were paid in proportion to the disputed value between debtor and creditor. This meant that enforcing documents pertaining to immovables became a lucrative business model, which in turn meant a surge of forced evictions, often while the evictees were still in a legal battle against the decision which led to their dislodgement.

    IF IT AIN’T BROKE…

    In 2017, USAID produced an analysis of the price list of the enforcement industry. Their own conclusion was that the system they created might be “unsustainable”, if not for an influx of new cases. The American agency also organized workshops for bailiffs, in which they were taught the art of rhetoric and PR competence, a much needed skill in the industry. USAID even did a public opinion poll asking banks how satisfied they are with the new enforcement process. This should more than suffice as evidence of what the US cares about developing in Serbia – an enforcement system that favor, most of all, banks.

    Even with the extensive power and ample autonomy the enforcement industry was entrusted with thanks to the USAID sponsored law, there are plenty of instances in which bailiffs were accused of forgery, embezzlement, bribery and so on. Working hand in glove with banks, huge construction firms, investors and public utility companies, meant that it pays to break the law sometimes. Conveniently, for violations other than criminal offenses, the only place to file a complaint is the chamber of bailiffs and ministry. However, the endless stream of scandals and strong public outrage forced the government to change the law in 2019, again with the help of USAID.

    This legislative change was presented as a crackdown on bailiff corruption by government controlled media, but in reality it only made the state of affairs worse for everyone except them. Despite their sheer unpopularity, impunity and rampant rapacity, the government gave them more authority over the police in eviction processes, for example. Bailiffs couldn’t sell property they seize to their friends and relatives anymore, but they still can trade in devalued dwellings, just through thuggish third parties, as has been reported from the ground by activist and citizen journalists. The new regulations also allowed for homes to be auctioned off online, without the “occupants” having a real choice in the matter. This too was portrayed as “greater transparency”.

    From a broader perspective, it’s worth pointing out that this kind of brutal enforcement system with privatized entrepreneurial “agents” was established and had major consequences in other European countries, particularly Spain, where hundreds of thousands were forcibly evicted and displaced, with banks repossessing a huge swath of real estate after the crash of 2008 drowned a lot of ordinary people in debt. This in turn gave rise to social movements resisting and blocking eviction attempts all across Europe, including in Serbia, where privatizing a part of the judiciary was one of the preconditions to EU accession.

    The post How USAID Makes People Homeless In Serbia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Boycotts, Divestment, and People’s Arms Embargoes

    Three cops arrive at the blockade of Maersk. Photo: @unwisemonkeys on Instagram Three cops arrive at the blockade of Maersk. Photo: @unwisemonkeys on Instagram Three cops arrive at the blockade of Maersk. Photo: @unwisemonkeys on Instagram Three cops arrive at the blockade of Maersk. Photo: @unwisemonkeys on Instagram Three cops arrive at the blockade of […]

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    The post Boycotts, Divestment, and People’s Arms Embargoes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why the Corporate Party Won’t Last Forever

    Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. […]

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    The post Why the Corporate Party Won’t Last Forever appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “A Complete Horrorshow”

    + Netanyahu never wanted a ceasefire in Gaza. It was forced upon him. Not by Biden or Trump, but his own Israeli population, desperate to see the hostages returned, whose lives and health were being threatened by the same brutal policies his regime was inflicting on the people of Gaza. Thus it was not at […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice

    Houses of Parliament (Cape Town, South Africa). Photograph Source: I, PhilippN – CC BY-SA 3.0

    There is no discourse in South Africa more ancient, more unresolved, and more weaponised than that of land. The passage of the Expropriation Act in South Africa has set the air thick with tension, a moment that peels open the past to reveal its jagged edges. A history that never ended, only submerged beneath the language of legality and market transactions, is once again clawing at the present.

    The land is not just dirt and fences—it is memory, survival, identity and belonging, resistance, dispossession of labour, the looting of minerals, and the establishment of racial capital. It is the primordial question—older than the Republic of itself.

    On 23 January 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the controversial Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 into law. Like the screech of rusted gears grinding against time’s stubborn wheel, the Act has sent a raucous clatter through the nation and beyond—its champions hailing it as long-overdue justice for stolen land, its detractors warning of economic ruin, while distant powers, draped in their own self-interest, tighten their grip, their protests echoing not in the name of principle, but of privilege.

    The Act, replacing its apartheid 1975 predecessor, is no mere legislative housekeeping. It is the state’s uneasy reckoning with a history of plunder—a tentative attempt to confront the theft that built South Africa’s economy, the dispossession that cemented its class hierarchies. Yet, as the ink dries, old ghosts stir. Who truly benefits? Who is left behind? And what of the landless, for whom restitution has remained a vanishing horizon, a promise deferred by bureaucracy and broken by politics?

    At its core, the Act seeks to bring the law in step with the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 108 of 1996, aligning the legal framework with the imperatives of land reform. It corrects the lingering contradictions between the outdated Expropriation Act and Section 25 of the democratic constitution, which speaks of expropriation in the public interest, the just terms of compensation, and the broader commitments of a nation still struggling to unshackle itself from its past. The Act echoes previous iterations—2015, 2018—bearing the scars of legislative battles, the residue of failed consultations. It insists: expropriation must not be arbitrary; compensation must be just.

    Yet, as the legal scaffolding is erected, the fundamental question remains—does the law merely refine the mechanics of ownership, or does it reimagine justice itself?

    Since the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck and the Dutch East India Company in 1652 on the shores of Southern Africa, the story of South Africa has been one of land, conquest, and capital. The first wars of dispossession began with the violent subjugation of the Khoi-San, their ancestral land carved up for Dutch settlers who spread inland, waging battles of expansion.

     As they moved eastward, they met fierce resistance from the Xhosa, who for a hundred years fought a series of wars against colonial encroachment. The Xhosa stood as one of the longest-lasting obstacles to settler domination, pushing back against British and Boer forces in a struggle that shaped the landscape of resistance. Yet, even as these wars raged, the British tightened their grip on the Cape, and tensions between white factions deepened—Boers, losing their cheap slave labour, trekked north to claim new territories, leaving a trail of blood and conflict.

    Despite their divisions, settlers were bound by a shared imperative: the extraction of land and labour at the expense of the indigenous majority.

    The discovery of minerals in the late 19th century marked a turning point, shifting South Africa from an agrarian society to an industrial economy fuelled by forced native labour. Capital’s hunger for wealth deepened racial segregation, culminating in the Anglo-Boer Wars, where white capital fought itself before ultimately uniting. In 1910, the Union of South Africa was formed, excluding native South Africans from political and economic power. This exclusion was cemented in 1913 with the passing of the Natives Land Act, which stripped natives of land ownership, confining them to impoverished reserves with the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 and into “tribal” boundaries called homelands by the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951. The foundation for apartheid had been laid—not just through law, but through centuries of war, theft, and the relentless logic of capital.

    The new Expropriation Act of 2024 attempts to pull South Africa’s legal framework closer to the constitutional imperatives of Section 25—the so-called property clause. The legal fiction of “just and equitable compensation” introduced in the Act is an attempt to balance constitutional propriety with the pressure of historical injustice. But whose justice? And what is equitable in a country where land was not bought but taken?

    To date, land reform has largely been cosmetic, measured in hectares redistributed rather than in the dismantling of agricultural monopolies or capital structures. The state has danced cautiously around the issue, unwilling to provoke market unrest or dislodge the deeply entrenched privileges of the white agrarian elite. And so, the Expropriation Act emerges as both a promise and a limitation.

    The Act permits expropriation in the “public interest,” a term rooted in the Constitution but destined to be contested in courts for years, entangling the process in legal bureaucracy. While the Act provides a framework for expropriation with and, in limited cases, without compensation, it does not fundamentally alter the state’s cautious approach to reclaiming large tracts of unused, unproductive, or speculatively held land. Instead, it remains tethered to negotiation, reinforcing a slow and measured redistribution. The Act acknowledges the rights of unregistered land occupiers, yet recognition alone does not guarantee security or restitution—leaving many still at the mercy of protracted legal and administrative processes.

    As argued before, for the nearly 60% of South Africans living off-register in communal areas, informal settlements, or Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses, the Expropriation Act of 2024 offers little more than a symbolic gesture. Without title deeds, their claims to land are not legally secured, yet their histories and lived realities are deeply embedded in it. If expropriation is not accompanied by a robust land administration strategy that formalises tenure rights for the dispossessed, it risks becoming another performance of reform rather than a transformative intervention.

    The Act’s recognition of unregistered land rights is a step forward, but recognition alone does not equate to protection. Unless the expropriation process is integrated with a comprehensive land administration system to document the rights of unregistered occupiers, those most vulnerable to dispossession will remain in legal limbo. The enactment of a Land Records Act, as recommended by the High-Level Panel Report on the Assessment of Key Legislation (2018) and the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform (2019), is essential to ensuring security of tenure.

    Additionally, both panels proposed a National Land Reform Framework Act to establish clear legal principles for redistribution, restitution, and tenure reform. Rather than replacing existing laws, this framework would provide coherence by setting legal criteria for beneficiary selection, land acquisition, and equitable access. It would also introduce mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and alternative dispute resolution, including a Land Rights Protector. The Expropriation Act should not stand in isolation—it must align with these broader legislative efforts to ensure that land reform is not only legally sound but also meaningfully transformative.

    Land, under capitalist relations, is not merely a resource—it is a commodity. Any attempt at expropriation without rupturing this logic is bound to be a compromised one. The Act, while acknowledging that compensation may, in certain instances, be set at nil, does not articulate a decisive framework for when and how this will occur, leaving these decisions to courts and policymakers. The absence of a robust redistributive mechanism means that expropriation may ultimately reinforce rather than disrupt market logic.

    This is not mere conjecture. In countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, land reform initiatives were sabotaged by a combination of domestic elite resistance and international financial retaliation. In South Africa, capital has already signaled its intention to resist large-scale redistribution, with organizations such as AgriSA warning of economic collapse should expropriation be pursued aggressively. This fearmongering is not new. It echoes the same panic-driven narratives that were used to justify land theft in the first place.

    Beyond South Africa’s borders, the passage of the Expropriation Act has triggered predictable reactions from Western powers. U.S. President Donald Trump, following a well-worn script of white minority protectionism, issued an executive order cutting aid to South Africa, claiming the law targets white farmers. The European Union has expressed “concern,” a diplomatic prelude to potential economic pressures. Additionally, the U.S. administration has threatened to revoke South Africa’s benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a trade agreement that facilitates tariff-free exports to the U.S. market. Yet, even as these forces decry land reform under the guise of defending property rights, Trump’s administration has quietly extended refugee status to white Afrikaners, framing them as victims of persecution. This move—granting asylum to the descendants of colonial settlers while barring refugees from war-torn Middle Eastern and African nations—reveals the racialised logic underpinning Western foreign policy. These responses are not about human rights or democracy. They are about the continued assertion of Western interests in the Middle East and Africa’s resources, protecting economic and racial hierarchies that long predate the Expropriation Act.

    International finance capital is already tightening its grip, with investment ratings agencies hinting at further downgrades should expropriation proceed in ways deemed unfavourable to the market. The South African state, historically timid in the face of international economic leverage, may find itself retreating into a defensive crouch, reducing expropriation to an instrument of negotiation rather than transformation.

    The Expropriation Act has reopened historical wounds, but it is not, in itself, a radical break. Its success or failure will depend on political will, legal battles, and grassroots mobilisation. The Landless People’s Movement, shack dwellers’ organisations, and rural activists have long articulated a vision of land reform that centres the dispossessed rather than the property-owning class. Will the state listen? Or will it once again privilege legal technicalities over substantive justice?

    For expropriation to mean something beyond legalese, it must be tied to a broader transformation of land relations in South Africa. This means:

    + Implementing a National Land Reform Framework Act, as proposed by the High-Level Panel and Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform, to set clear criteria for redistribution and beneficiary selection.

    + Recognising and securing tenure rights for the millions who live without formal documentation of their land occupancy.

    +  Creating mechanisms for community-driven expropriation, where citizens can initiate claims rather than relying solely on the state’s discretion.

    + Dismantling the commercial agrarian monopolies that continue to hoard vast tracts of land.

    Expropriation cannot be reduced to a bureaucratic procedure, a sterile legal exercise bound by the logic of the market. It must be a rupture—a deliberate act of redress, dismantling centuries of theft and exclusion. The state stands at a threshold: waver in hesitation, or grasp the weight of history and reimagine South Africa’s land ownership beyond the margins of negotiation. But history is restless. The dispossessed will not wait in endless queues of policy revisions and court battles. The land is calling—not for half-measures, not for another paper revolution, but for a reckoning that answers the injustice written into the soil.

    The post South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • New Report Warns of Increasing Nuclear Dangers

    Image courtesy CODEPINK.

    Once again the ‘Gloomsday’ Machine is reporting the awful news about the growing nuclear threats, the widening nuclear proliferation, and ongoing modernization and development of new weapons most recently in the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor which defines itself as “a research project managed by Norwegian People’s Aid with contributions from a broad range of external experts and institutions, including the Federation of American Scientists and the Norwegian Academy of International Law”.

    There is never any attempt to make people aware of how the nuclear arms race and new forms of proliferation are being driven and the many missed opportunities, over the 80-year course of the nuclear age to reverse the Doomsday machine and move forward to a new world at peace.

    A simple study of history would make it apparent that it is the United States, the only country to actually drop the bomb in the tragic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which has been driving the nuclear arms race from the very beginning of the nuclear age.

    It began when US President Harry Truman turned down USSR Prime Minister Joseph Stalin’s proposal to turn the bomb over to United Nations, which was formed “to end the scourge of war” with its first resolution calling for nuclear disarmament. After the US refusal, Russia then went ahead to get its own nuclear bomb, and the arms race was off and running!

    One need only recall the sorry history of rejected agreements, broken treaties, conditions that would have moved nuclear abolition forward, to know that something’s amiss in how the establishment is talking about nuclear dangers, merely assailing us with reports that the numbers of nuclear weapons available for use is continuously increasing and new countries are considering acquiring these deadly weapons.

    Nor are we reading about how Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s offer to give up Star Wars as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons when the wall came down. Nor are we hearing about the repeated motions from China and Russia in the UN for the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, opposed by the US,  as well as their draft treaty proposals tabled in 2008 and 2014 in the consensus-bound Committee on Disarmament in Geneva for negotiations on a space weapons ban, vetoed by the United States, which refused to permit even discussion on a space weapons ban treaty.

    The Gloomsday bunch never mention how Putin was turned down by Obama when he asked the US to negotiate a Cyberwar Ban Treaty after the US and Israel hacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility with the Stuxnet virus, or that China and Russia support UN resolutions for such a treaty which the US opposes.

    Nor are we hearing about how Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Treaty which required the US and the USSR to have only one anti-ballistic missile base in each nation, and since that time, the US has now put new missile bases in Romania and Poland.

    And while we hear of Putin having recently placed Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, during the Ukraine war, it is never mentioned together with the fact that the US has had nuclear weapons for years in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey as part of its NATO agreement to use our nuclear weapons on their behalf!

    Indeed, at a recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists webinar announcing the world’s closest advance to doomsday, a speaker mentioned that Russia walked out of the CTBT, but he never mentioned that the US never joined the treaty.  Although Clinton signed the treaty, the US, unlike Russia never ratified it.

    If we’re going to ban the bomb and get nuclear weapons states to support the new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, we have to tell the truth about who is the perpetrator in the ever expanding nuclear arms race!  For another way to talk about the bomb, see Code Pink’s Peace Clock. Peace Clock – CODEPINK – Women for Peace.

    The post New Report Warns of Increasing Nuclear Dangers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump Returns Power to Declare War to Congress?

    Image by PS.

    I almost never agree with Mr. Trump. However, having wasted a life as a lawyer trying to resurrect the Constitution of “limited, specifically enumerated powers” and checks and balances to avoid tyranny, I found myself reading his February 19, 2025, executive order proclaiming that, “ending Federal overreach and restoring the constitutional separation of powers is a priority of my Administration,” with hope and amazement.

    The order directs all federal agencies in coordination with the DOGE teams embedded within them to spend the next 60 days combing through their regulations to identify any that may be unconstitutional.

    Sadly, the most critical overreach destroying separation of powers was not mentioned. Let me explain.

    The authors of the Constitution had lived under the government of England where the King was not only commander in chief of the Armies of the Empire, but could declare war as well. History, a favorite subject of the authors of the Constitution, was studied to see where England and other nations went off the rails and degenerated from legitimate government into tyranny and they found a single error repeated over and over again. What was it?

    When one person could declare a war and then become Commander of the Armies to fight the war, in every case that person often declared a war not because the nation was actually threatened, but because taxes and regulations had become so irritating to the people that they were getting restless and demanding reform and possibly revolution. So the Big Head Man, King, Emperor, Chief, whatever, would drum up a boogie man foreign enemy, use fear to inflame the people and divert their attention from the domestic over taxation and government abuse, and use war to manipulate patriotism to stay in power. This trick had been used over and over in history across the world.

    So the Constitution created separation of powers especially in matters of war. The Congress alone can declare war: see: Article I, section 8, clause 11. The authors debated this and concluded history made the people safer if their representatives had to reach a consensus decision that war was necessary and proper. This, it was argued, prevented plunging the nation into an unnecessary war started by some single madman, or a wannabe King, or tyrant seeking to use war to benefit his own power grab as had occurred so many times in history.

    Okay, you don’t trust me on this, I understand, because you have grown up in an America where Congress had long ago abandoned its duty to be the sole entity to declare war and instead delegated it to our Nuclear Dictator. Perhaps then you will listen to Abe Lincoln in 1848, responding to a challenger claiming the President could declare war without Congress, on the matter:

    “The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our president where kings have always stood.” (–Abraham Lincoln, 1848)

    Fear of the USSR (remember them?) overwhelmed Americans and enabled the Congress to give the President the power to declare nuclear war in the 1947 National Security Act. Just one dude, with his “nuclear football,” can launch the entire US nuclear arsenal! Enough bombs to pretty much wipe out humankind, launched in violation of the Constitution. This transformed the President into a Nuclear Dictator.

    Rather than renouncing that unconstitutional delegation of power by Congress destroying separation of powers, every President since Harry S. Truman has accepted that violation of the Constitution, or supreme law, they swore to uphold. Accepting this illegal power seems to violate the Presidential oath of office which requires the President to defend the Constitution. Accepting this power pretty much destroyed the heart and soul of the Constitution, and made every subsequent president an outlaw in any rational view.

    I call on President Trump to renounce this most odious violation of separation of powers. I urge him to issue an Executive Order to restore the heart and soul of the Constitution. Declare to all the world, only the Congress can declare war and as President bound by his oath before god to defend the Constitution, he repudiates the Nuclear Dictatorship and orders all US military branches to refuse to follow an order to launch nuclear weapons unless Congress has declared war.

    And, if the President does not do so, then the Congress, the Courts and the people must strip him of that usurpation. The greatest unconstitutional overreach destroying separation of powers is the Presidential usurpation of the power to declare war. Can we start by reversing that?

    The post Trump Returns Power to Declare War to Congress? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In Handcuffs, Smiling

    You may have heard that, in New York State, there has been an unauthorized strike of prison guards in 40 of the state’s 42 prisons, and that a settlement has been proposed by the governor. Ostensibly, the guards have been protesting understaffing and unsafe conditions; but more importantly, they have used their strike to distract […]

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  • Israel’s Demolition Derby of Palestine

    Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land. Photograph: Antipode Films Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land. Photograph: Antipode Films Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land. Photograph: Antipode Films Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land. Photograph: Antipode Films Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No […]

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  • Surviving a Genocide Zone

    + The Netanyahu government has circulated a plan for Gaza that places the Strip under tighter Israeli control than before the war, shattering any notion that Israel is preparing to end its occupation. Under the plan, which Israel sent to the UN and humanitarian aid groups, aid would be distributed inside “humanitarian bubbles” under the […]

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  • Three Dead Boys

    Ahmed Samra (17), Ahmed Elawdan (16), and Seifalla Elbeltagy (15) weren’t just dead. Between December 27 and 29 they were left to die, made to die in subzero temperatures and bitter winds in a remote, rugged forest of southeastern Bulgaria, murdered by the Bulgarian authorities who knew they were there, and exactly where. The activist […]

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  • Why Thoreau Deserves Your Admiration

    Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina Kuzovkova. Image by Polina […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Giving No Ground

    + Like the Biblical Job (Ayyūb in Arabic, where he is revered as a prophet), every possible misfortune has been visited upon the Palestinians of Gaza. I use the word “visited” in the sense of something being inflicted from outside by outsiders. Something wicked in this case. Unimaginable and unremitting violence has been done to […]

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  • The Tech-Broligarch Nightmare

    Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. […]

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  • What We [DON’T] Talk About When We Talk About USAID

    Photograph Source: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Tyler J. Clements – Public Domain Photograph Source: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Tyler J. Clements – Public Domain Photograph Source: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Tyler J. Clements – Public Domain Photograph Source: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s […]

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  • At the Gates of Hell

    + Sherman burnt Atlanta to the ground, but its residents weren’t evicted to Curaçao. Ypres was obliterated twice in WW I, but its citizens weren’t shipped to Corsica. Dresden was firebombed to ashes, but its residents weren’t rounded up and sent to Antigua. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked, but their irradiated populations weren’t deported to […]

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  • Bourgeois Formal Democracy for Now but Could Fascism be the Future?

    Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and Unsplash+. Getty Images and […]

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  • Ravaging the Soils of Gaza

    When Israeli troops launched their ground invasion of northern Gaza in 2023, one of the first places they rolled into was the Abu Suffiyeh family farm in the Jabalya area (see pdf, page 301). The attackers had targeted the farm, with its thriving olive, pomegranate, and citrus orchards, for total destruction, because it lay in […]

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  • Blow It Up, Clean It Out, Sell It Off

    + Your neighbor burns down the house that your family has lived in since the previous family home, a hundred miles to the north, was demolished 75 years ago by your neighbor’s grandfather. The fire kills your wife, two of your five children, and your mother. The claims adjuster, who is also the principle investor […]

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  • Biden’s Environmental Record

    For those of you scoring at home, you may have noticed the Biden administration’s lackluster performance in the arena of public lands and wildlife conservation. Using baseball as a metaphor, the Biden team had a few brilliant moments in an otherwise forgettable four years that, in its confused approach, reminds us of Abbott and Costello’s famous […]

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  • A Former Danish Diplomat on the Future of Greenland

    On the night of June 21, 1976, summer solstice, I flew from New York to Stockholm. I sat at a north-side window and watched in wonder as the sun went down, down, down, but not under, and rose again. We arrived in Stockholm at 3:30 a.m., and it was broad daylight. It’s an odd thing […]

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  • Pick Up the Pieces

    “Israel has destroyed everything in Gaza. Everything. Except the sacred bond between a people and their land. Their roots run too deep. Their history covers millennia. The wounds of their Nakba have yet to heal.” – Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s ambassador to the UN + How do you compensate for 35 years of being knocked off […]

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  • Canada’s Nazi Problem

    Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube screenshot. Yaroslav Hunka, Youtube […]

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  • The Palestine Exception: Film as a Form of Cultural Work that Facilitates Movement Building

    A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • What Israel and the US Wrought in Gaza

    + After 15 months of unrelenting Israeli bombardment and a week of a still fragile ceasefire, this is what Gaza looks like: + At least 47,161 Palestinians have been listed by the Ministry of Health as being killed by Israeli military actions. Another 12,000 or so are missing under the bomb rubble and presumed dead. […]

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