Whether they want to or not, the Arab people today face a wholesale attack on their future by an imperial power, America, that acts in concert with Israel to pacify, subdue, and finally reduce us to a bunch of warring fiefdoms whose first loyalty is not to their people but to the great superpower (and […]
The post Talk, Talk; Bomb, Bomb appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Photograph Source: APIMADERO – CC BY-SA 3.0
In what prosecutors called a “landmark ruling in the fight for human rights,” a U.S. jury in Miami has found banana giant Chiquita Brands International liable for the deaths of Colombian civilians due to its financing of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a brutal paramilitary death squad.
The AUC was responsible for thousands of civilian deaths and hundreds of other human rights violations while it was active between the late 1990s and mid-2000s, some of the most violent years of the Colombian civil war. The ruling holds Chiquita accountable for making hidden payments to the paramilitary organization from 1997 to 2004. Even in the early years, the group’s atrocities were already well documented not just in Colombian media, but also in the United States, where the State Department declared the AUC a terrorist organization in 2001.
After 17 years of legal proceedings, the first set of victims and their families have finally attained a measure of closure. The jury ruled that Chiquita must pay $38.3 million to plaintiffs in eight of the nine “bellwether” murder cases presented in the six-week trial.
The families brought the suit after Chiquita pleaded guilty in a U.S. criminal case in 2007 to making over 100 payments to the AUC totaling more than $1.7 million over more than six years.
“This historic ruling marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country, a milestone for justice,” EarthRights International, the NGO that represented plaintiffs, said in public statements immediately following the ruling.
As part of Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country created an independent transitional justice body to investigate crimes against humanity committed by both armed groups and Colombian security forces. The investigations have included cases like the “false positives” scandal, in which the military, with the aid of AUC forces, killed over 6,400 innocent civilians and recorded them as guerilla fighters to inflate rebel casualty statistics at the height of the civil war.
The Miami ruling in the Chiquita case represents a further step towards what Colombia’s peace court has called restorative justice—attempts to offer remedy and justice to the millions of victims killed, displaced, injured, or assaulted during the conflict.
Jurors in Miami sided with plaintiff’s claims that Chiquita Brands chose to profit from the bloodiest period of Colombia’s more than half-century conflict rather than abandon its operations in the country, and that the decision to fund death squads actively participating in that conflict meant the company was liable for the deaths of family members of victims in the case.
In an internal email sent in December 2003, a Chiquita Brands director wrote: “We appear to be committing a felony.” Yet the company continued financing the paramilitary group until well into the next year, according to court documents from the previous criminal case.
Families of the victims of the AUC in the Colombian regions of Urabá and Magdalena Medio have for years sought the right to sue the U.S. fruit giant in civil courts in both Colombia and the United States — petitions that Chiquita Brands delayed for nearly two decades with legal tactics in both countries.
Now, any final settlement with the families will likely involve further litigation and perhaps negotiations with the company. A second case featuring other victims with claims against Chiquita is set to begin preliminary hearings in July.
Chiquita has already announced it will appeal the decision, and unless the fruit giant offers a general settlement, EarthRights lawyers, who also represent other victims, have said they will continue to pursue further litigation in future cases. Chiquita’s legal troubles—including claims from more than a thousand victims in hundreds of cases, as well as a slow-moving criminal case in Colombia accusing executives of “aggravated conspiracy to commit a crime”—are far from settled.
“The struggle for justice is slow, but victory is possible, even against the wealthy and the powerful,” Tatiana Devia, a lawyer with EarthRights who worked on the case, said in a press conference following the verdict. Devia underlined that the ruling is “important for justice in Colombia as well.”
The case marks the first time a foreign company has been held liable for financing death squads in Colombia, an accusation that has also long been made against Coca-Cola, U.S. coal company Drummond, and Canadian mining giant Aris Mining (formerly Colombia Gold), among others.
Some experts suggest the Chiquita ruling could set a precedent in ongoing investigations into the actions of some of these companies as well.
Although the AUC nominally disarmed as part of an agreement with the government in 2006, many of their fighters simply re-armed and joined new criminal groups, perpetuating a dynamic that still fuels low intensity conflict in the country today.
Exacerbating and Profiting from Conflict
In addition to their arguments regarding the illicit paramilitary payments, attorneys for the plaintiffs also presented witnesses, including former AUC leaders and Chiquita employees, that accused the U.S. corporation of providing AUC forces with direct material assistance, including gasoline, transportation, and the use of shipping docks controlled by Chiquita Brands. The AUC used these resources to import weapons on multiple occasions.
Among the several former paramilitary leaders who testified in the trial was Salvatore Mancuso, one of the AUC’s most infamous commanders and a key witness in several ongoing investigations into paramilitary financing cases before Colombia’s transitional justice court.
Mancurso testified that Chiquita executives met personally with top paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño Gil, spokesman and political chief of the AUC, widely considered “the godfather of paramilitarism” in Colombia. The two parties negotiated payment in return for the AUC’s security services against left-wing rebel groups in the region, which had in previous years attacked Chiquita infrastructure.
Rather than denying the atrocities being committed by paramilitaries in those days, key witnesses for Chiquita’s defense stated that the AUC’s brutal reputation and propensity for human rights violations were well known by executives at the time—part of the company’s legal strategy of justifying executives’ actions by claiming that they agreed to work with the AUC only because they feared them.
Chiquita denies that the company should be held liable for violence perpetrated by paramilitary groups, arguing they were extorted by the AUC and financing was provided under duress and out of fear for their own safety and that of their employees.
However, another former AUC leader, Raúl Hasbún, testified that, contrary to the company’s claims, the paramilitaries never forced Chiquita to pay extortion fees. Nor did AUC forces ever attack Chiquita Brands operations institutionally—a fact that Charles “Buck” Keiser, who directed Chiquita’s operations in Colombia from 1987 to 2000, admitted under questioning during his own courtroom testimony on May 3.
On the contrary, the AUC, almost immediately after its formation as a paramilitary group in the region, provided Chiquita with security teams in multiple departments in the north of the country in exchange for regular financing in a relationship that plaintiffs described as “an equal partnership,” according to court documents.
At no point in this period did Chiquita choose to simply leave the country and extricate itself from Colombia’s spiraling conflict. Instead, EarthRights lawyers argued in court, “they chose to exacerbate and profit from” it.
According to court findings from the 2007 case, the company paid 3 cents on the dollar to AUC forces for each box of bananas exported from the country.
Remedies for a Debt Long Owed
As part of the 2007 investigation, Chiquita admitted to making illegal payments, as well as initially trying to conceal them as legitimate business expenditures. The company was fined $25 million in that case, but victims of the AUC never saw any of that money.
This latest ruling does not mean money is changing hands immediately, explained Marco Simons, lead counsel for EarthRights. This is but one case of many, which are part of “an ongoing process,” he said. “We hope that this win will pave the way for compensation and adequate remedies for all plaintiffs.”
For Ignacio Gómez, the verdict is a long-awaited personal vindication. He was the first journalist in Colombia to make these allegations public 21 years ago, and over the years he endured efforts by Chiquita Brands to suppress his work via lawsuits, as well as threats from paramilitary forces.
“I’ve been waiting years for this decision,” he told us. “And for Colombia, the importance of this decision cannot be understated.”
“Chiquita’s history in Latin America goes beyond this case,” he said, retelling the story of the “Banana Massacre” in Colombia, the slaughter of hundreds of striking plantation workers in the early 20th century, back when Chiquita went by another even more infamous name: the United Fruit Company.
“This debt is finally starting to be paid,” Gómez continued. In a country still suffering the after-effects of 53 years of civil war, fueled at least in part by the actions of private sector companies like Chiquita Brands, “we have hundreds of thousands of reasons to celebrate this ruling.”
This article is syndicated in partnership with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).
The post Victims Win Historic Victory Against Chiquita in Colombia Paramilitary Case appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniela Díaz Rangel and Joshua Collins.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Image by Candice Seplow.
Learn how political nonviolence can rehumanize us to one another and defend democracy in the U.S. and around the world.
After the shooting at former President Trump’s campaign rally, many people rushed to say that “political violence has no place in our democracy.”
Let’s go even further and boldly say: political nonviolence is essential for democracy.
The ties between nonviolence and democracy run deep. We know from the groundbreaking research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan that even if a nonviolent movement fails to achieve its primary goals, it often leaves a more democratic society in its wake. On the other hand, violence swiftly destroys democracies, shoving them toward authoritarianism and “politics at the barrel of a gun.”
Political violence has a terrible track record. It has spent centuries delivering and defending injustice, abuse, discrimination and destruction.
So, what should we do instead? Boldly and with vision, we should be building a culture of active nonviolence, including defining and implementing new standards of political nonviolence.
For 11 years, Campaign Nonviolence has been working to mainstream nonviolence and build a culture that implements nonviolent values, solutions, worldview and approaches. We have persevered in this work even as political violence has heightened — because we already know that more violence and continued inaction will not get us out of this mess. We need a profoundly different approach.
If we want to have a politics where every voice feels safe and respected, where each citizen has a right to participate, and where no one will be harmed for their political beliefs, nonviolence needs to be both a state and an individual policy.
Amidst the George Floyd Protests in 2020, Vox editor Ezra Klein wrote an essay, “Imagining the nonviolent state,” asking the thought-provoking question: “What if nonviolence wasn’t an inhuman standard demanded of the powerless, but an ethic upon which we reimagined the state?” He goes on to explore new standards of policing, restorative justice and responding to protest movements.
In a world of political nonviolence, we’d see these kinds of changes:
Nonviolent protesters are allowed to exercise freedom of speech and assembly without fear of police repression.
The use of nonviolent action as a tool for social, political, cultural, and economic power is fully protected for all people.
Police are not allowed to use violent repression against unarmed protesters.
Political events are weapons-free for all participants.
Polling places are protected by peace teams. Every citizen trains in violence de-escalation and anti-harassment skills.
No one makes threats of violence or intimidation over political views.
Political campaigns are legally required to refrain from hate speech, discrimination and violent rhetoric
Debate, discourse, voting and democratic process is held as sacred by all.
Each community trains to defend democracy with nonviolent action, learning how to thwart coups, attempts to steal elections and unjust policies that undermine fair participation in the political process.
What can you do to make this vision a reality?
Start talking about political nonviolence and the specific ways we uphold it. Reach out to public officials, policy makers, police and activist groups with these ideas.
Work with groups like Meta Peace Teams, DC Peace Team and Joy To the Polls on election safety and keeping the polls safe for all voters.
Engage with your fellow citizens about this by fact-checking, fostering civic discourse and working to build understanding rather than fear and division. Join efforts like Braver Angels that help people rehumanize one another in times of extreme polarization.
Learn how nonviolent action defends democracy. Check out how Choose Democracy and Hold The Line protected the 2020 elections, and consider how these strategies can be adapted to help us now.
The long-term work of building a culture of active nonviolence can start right here in addressing the political violence that is threatening our country. The United States is not alone in dealing with these issues. Around the world, many nations are grappling with authoritarianism, extreme politics, politically motivated violence and increased repression of protests.
We need political nonviolence more than ever. It’s a vision of democracy worth striving for.
The post We Need Political Nonviolence Now More Than Ever appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rivera Sun.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The failure of Israel’s two most important allies, the US and UK, to put an end to the slaughter of the civilian population in Gaza in 2023-2024 and the American and British mainstream media’s refusal to contextualize the 7 October attack raises questions about their status as democratic states. What many independent journalists and academics […]
The post The US-Israeli Regime of Despair appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
The International Court of Justice has made definitive what has been obvious for decades: It’s about the apartheid, stupid. In a sweeping ruling announced on Friday at the Hague, the Court ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories violates international law and should be ended. It determined that the occupation amounts to “annexation” of […]
The post It’s the Apartheid, Stupid! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
The Village Voice, April 13–19, 1980
A Response to Mike Johnson
I read Mike Johnson’s article Choosing Our Opponent: Why I will work to elect Joe Biden in the Stansbury Forum with a mixture of curiosity and concern. Not because I find it surprising that he is going to campaign for Biden’s reelection, but because he reaches back to the Carter presidency to find what he perceives as the U.S. Left’s failure in 1980 then and what needs to be done now. Johnson wrote:
“For me, it helps to go back to 1980, when much of the Left argued against supporting Jimmy Carter’s re-election race against Ronald Reagan, a position which I believe in retrospect was wrong.”
As someone who came of age in post-Vietnam America, the Carter years were a big part of my political life. I was sixteen when Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976. I came from a blue-collar, working class family in Massachusetts, whose hearts really were with the Kennedy’s, despite Chappaquiddick, yet, both of my parents voted for Carter. My Mother, however, had an innate distrust of Southern Democrats (Carter was from Georgia), and my father once cracked, “Don’t trust anybody that smiles that much,” referring to Carter’s trademark smile.
By the time I started college in the fall of 1978, Carter’s presidency had already taken a sharp right turn. It got a lot worse. Soon after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter reinstituted the registration for the draft (military conscription) and I was a member of the first generation of young men that had to register since the end of the Vietnam War. My first national demonstration, in fact, was against the draft in Washington, D.C., while he was still president on a cold, windy day in March 1980.
I write all of this because I know the Carter years really well, so I’m perplexed at why Johnson needs to have a public recantation four decades later of the position that his group the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) took way back then. While he is not naïve about Carter’s record in office — he gives a long list of Carter’s failures but surprisingly omits many others, especially the Iranian hostage crisis — he appears to miss the big point: the Carter presidency was a transitional regime between the many decades of the Democratic Party domination of national politics since the New Deal to the Republican Party since 1980.
All the key political issues that we identify with the Reagan era, especially deregulation of major industries, including trucking, finance, and the airlines and the attacks on the labor movement, had devastating consequences for workers in what had been up-until-then densely unionized industries. When I was writing my book The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS, I was genuinely shocked to discover the boasting of Carter’s inflation “Czar” Alfred Kahn, a self-described “good liberal democrat” and the former chairman of the Department of Economics at Cornell University, about making the lives of unionized workers worse: He wrote:
“I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from competition can increase their wages much more rapidly than the average.”
Mike Johnson recognizes that many leading labor figures hated Carter, including Machinist President William Winpisinger and AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, yet Kirkland endorsed and campaigned for Carter. In one of my favorite interviews with Winpisinger, Village Voice journalists Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway asked:
“Is there any way the President [Jimmy Carter] can redeem himself in your eyes?”
“Yes, there’s one way he can do it.”
“What’s that?”
“Die.”
“So, he’s totally unacceptable as President?’
“I have said so countless times. I don’t intend to relent. He’s unfit to run this goddamn country. He was elected on the crest of the wave of Truth Sayers, and that son of bitch had lied through his fucking teeth every day he’s been there. It’s quite clear he marches to the drum beat of the corporate state.”
Winpisinger went in a different direction than Kirkland and a majority of the leaders of U.S. unions in 1980. He led a walkout of three hundred delegates at the 1980 Democratic Convention to protest Carter’s nomination, and later endorsed radical environmentalist Barry Commoner for President. For the president of a union heavily invested in the U.S. War Machine was pretty gutsy stuff. But, Winpisinger later failed monumentality when he refused to call on his members to honor the picket lines of striking air traffic controllers in 1981, with the devastating consequences that followed.
While I was going through my old Carter file, I found it interesting that so much of what I kept from those years was from the lefty — liberal, iconoclastic Village Voice, secondarily the New York Times, and, lastly a sprinkling of article from the Old Left newspaper the Guardian, which remind how wide and deep the hatred of Carter was. I joined the International Socialist Organization (ISO) soon after I went to college at UMass-Boston and remained a member until 2018. Our newspaper Socialist Worker took the right position then — “No Choice in the 1980 Elections” — and I would defend it now.
I would suggest to Mike Johnson to go back to the 1976 presidential election and recall what Michael Harrington argued then. Harrington was the future leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, and probably still the best known socialist in the United States because of his book The Other America. In an exchange with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara in 2013 on the legacy of Michael Harrington, I wrote:
Whatever doubts might have lingered for me about the question [voting for the “lesser evil”] were cleared up by a debate between Harrington and Peter Camejo during the 1976 presidential election campaign, when Camejo was running as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party.
I read the transcript of the debate when it was published by Pathfinder Press several years after it took place. Harrington and Camejo were both in top form. Harrington was subtle and nuanced. But I thought Camejo, arguing for the importance of socialists remaining independent of the two capitalist parties in the U.S., won the debate.
I wasn’t surprised by Harrington’s pitch for a “lesser evil” vote for Jimmy Carter over the incumbent and unelected Republican President Gerald Ford, but I was struck by one particular point. Harrington said, “The conditions of a Carter victory are the conditions for working class militancy, and the militancy of minority groups, and the militancy of women, and the militancy of the democratic reform movement. We can actually begin to make victories on full employment, national health and issues like that.”
I knew from my own experience of the Carter years that none of this happened — the mass movements didn’t advance because of a Democratic victory. And if we replace Carter with Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry or Obama, can we say any different? This strategic “engagement” urged by Harrington weakened the left terribly during the post-Vietnam war era.
So, when Johnson writes that we should “pick our opponent” and campaign for Biden, I’m reminded that whatever you want to call that strategy, it is a road to nowhere.
The post Jimmy Carter and the U.S. Left: Lessons for Today? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Image by Koushik Chowdavarapu.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE — Picture if you will the citizens of a small town in Northeast Ohio, facing a daunting toxic threat yet trapped in a maze of regulatory capture at the so-called Environmental Protection Agency. Not the citizens of East Palestine, though they too face a challenging quest for the truth about the environmental health threats they may face. But the citizens in and around Uniontown, Ohio have been trapped in such a quagmire for decades, subjected to a dystopian level of gaslighting from the powers that be in an effort to bury the truth regarding the ultra-hazardous poisons reportedly dumped at the town landfill.
The Industrial Excess Landfill (IEL) in Uniontown closed in 1980 and was designated as an EPA Superfund site in 1984, listed as one of the most contaminated sites in the country. Akron area rubber companies were the biggest known polluters at the IEL, dumping millions of gallons of industrial waste and chemicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But local citizen eyewitnesses have long testified that the U.S. military was another covert client in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. This includes the IEL’s former owner Charles Kittinger, who came forward in 2001 to speak of clandestine dumping of three metal eggs of nuclear weapons waste he was eerily warned not to speak of.
The post What is the EPA Hiding at the Landfill in Uniontown, Ohio? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Image by Hennie Stander.
We are endlessly and repetitively treated to sermons on the wonders of capitalism. Everybody will be taken care of, with the proviso that you are willing to work. As I have had frequent cause to note, that a line has to be furiously propagated across every channel speaks to a lack of concrete reality. And as more people, especially young people, see that they have declining possibilities, more questioning inevitably arises.
The only thing worse in capitalism to having a job, however unpleasant, is not having a job. Unemployment benefits are barely at starvation rates and end all too soon. Naturally, that is worse in the United States than most other advanced capitalist countries of the Global North. Six months is the limit set at a rate well less than half of what your wages were in the job you just lost. And given that six months is the average time necessary to secure new employment, that means around half of those collecting unemployment insurance will likely have a spell of no income at all.
The post You Are Not Alone if You Are Out of Work appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
“When did you become so anti-social, Anna?” There was no pregnant pause or awkward stammers on Red Scare after Amber A’Lee Frost chided Anna Khachiyan for saying “man kind of did it to himself with all of these political institutions.” After nearly two hours of polite but curt discussion, Frost breaks, frustrated by Khachiyan and […]
The post The Molting of the Dirtbag Left appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
+ The official Palestinian death count in Gaza by the health ministry now stands at 38,345. Another 10,000 are presumed dead, their bodies buried under rubble. + Two months ago, Ralph Nader said he believed the true death toll in Gaza was likely nearer 200,000. + Last week, Nader’s estimate was vindicated by The Lancet, […]
The post Redefining Ceasefire as Bloodbath appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Image by Matthew TenBruggencate.
The fundamental problem we face today in world affairs is our failure to adjust our international institutions to the imperative needs of a rapidly evolving age.
The UN Secretary-General said as much last September when in a speech before the General Assembly he noted: “We cannot effectively address problems as they are if institutions don’t reflect the world as it is.”
The world has become far more complex than it was in 1945 when the current global governance system, based primarily on the UN Charter, was created.
This system of international cooperation is no longer fit for purpose. It struggles to cope with the multiple unresolved crises we face, often because it lacks the appropriate jurisdiction, adequate resources, and the conceptual framework to effectively diagnose the problems and bring about credible solutions, and because it is deemed fundamentally unfair.
And so, we move on towards a potentially catastrophic future of accelerating climate change, the continued unraveling of our nuclear order, rising and destructive nationalisms, increasing conflict, more frequent pandemics, and an economic paradigm that cannot deliver well being for all.
The UN Charter was adopted 79 years ago, on June 26, 1945. So, here’s a thought experiment: If we were to start from a completely blank page, with no prior mistakes to correct or historical context to maintain, what system of international governance would we design and how might it function?
Adaptation and reinvention are a part of the natural course of things. One can both support the UN for its achievements and acknowledge the need for its transformation. Our call to reform the UN comes from our desire to see it survive and thrive.
The Charter was always meant to be a living document. In adopting it in 1945, then U.S. President Harry Truman made this clear: “This Charter will be expanded and improved as time goes on. No one claims that it is now a final or a perfect instrument. It has not been poured into any fixed mold. Changing world conditions will require readjustments.”
The Charter’s own Articles 108 and 109 were deliberately drafted to institutionalize the possibility of its evolution over time. The main issue to be addressed by these articles from the very inception of the UN was the veto in the Security Council. This should be seriously reexamined, as recommended in a recent report of an expert body convened by the Secretary-General. But so, too, could the Charter place a greater emphasis on climate change, on which it is silent; it could articulate the rules of a World Parliament to make it more representative; it could strengthen the UN’s ability to enforce decisions; provide more predictable financing, and better engage the world’s citizens in international decision-making.
The most common argument against updating the Charter is that with today’s fraught geopolitical landscape, we risk ending up with something worse
First, there will never be a perfect time. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.
Second, Charter reform will take years. The mood will change in time. But we need to start the process, or at the very least, the conversation.
Third, Charter reform would address the very issues that make many nations so mistrustful, including perceived double standards in the application of international law and a global governance system that privileges the interests of a few powerful countries at the expense of others. Creating a fairer playing field would incentivize countries to engage in good faith.
And finally, yes, there are risks involved in UN Charter reform, but there are even greater risks in continuing our current path.
This is why the exercise of imagining a new start, from scratch, could be helpful. Imagination isn’t subject to a veto (Charter reform requires that all five permanent members consent to the change), nor is it bound by the current political loggerheads which can make even marginal change seem extremely difficult.
Imagination can open the door to ideas both great (such as questioning the role of state sovereignty in a world of global interdependence); and small (like requiring that the General Assembly hold a session whenever a veto is used in the Security Council).
What we must avoid, regardless of the fraught political moment and our own trepidation, is to delay conceiving of something new out of a misplaced deference to a system that is not delivering credible solutions to existential threats.
We would do well to imagine what a new Charter might look like (as some have already begun doing); what principles it would be built on, what institutions it would give rise to, and how it could inspire the world to come together in a new shared endeavor. Imagine a new Charter drawn up by a far more representative display of the world’s many cultures and governments (only 51 countries existed when the current Charter was drafted whereas there are now some 200 sovereign nation-states. Once we have dared to imagine, we may be better equipped to bring some of the necessary changes into being.
The stakes could not be higher. A new path is needed. The question is whether we craft it intentionally, as a matter of conscious choice, or whether we suffer the horrific consequences of failure to act.
The UN Charter was always meant to be a living document. Perhaps now is the time to breathe some new life into it.
The post Breathing New Life into the UN Charter appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dan Perell – Heba Aly.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The New York Times has been justifiably criticized, as you probably know, for its anti-Palestine bias in covering Israel’s war on Gaza. But you may not know that the Times building is located near Manhattan’s theater district. This is why a lot of show people tend to walk past the Times, and why my friend, […]
The post Genocide Then and Now appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old from Texas, was recently found dead in a creek near her home. Video footage from a convenience store and interviews with neighborhood residents led police to two men whom they later arrested. Both suspects are undocumented migrants from Venezuela. Her murder immediately became a narrative about the savagery of illegal aliens […]
The post Migration is Not a Crime appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
+ This week’s Israeli seizure of nearly five square miles of land in the Jordan Valley of the occupied West Bank is the largest land grab in the more than three decades since the signing of the Oslo Accords. First, the lands were declared “closed military zones,” then the Netanyahu government reassigned them as “state […]
The post Moving Human Targets appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Revenge of the Swine by Sue Coe.
All illustrations by Sue Coe.
“Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”
– Theodor Adorno
I grew up south of Indianapolis on the glacier-smoothed plains of central Indiana. My grandparents owned a small farm, whittled down over the years to about 40 acres of bottomland, in some of the most productive agricultural land in America. Like many of their neighbors they mostly grew field corn (and later soybeans), raised a few cows and bred a few horses.
Even then farming for them was a hobby, an avocation, a link to a way of life that was slipping away. My grandfather, who was born on that farm in 1906, graduated from Purdue University and became a master electrician, who helped design RCA’s first color TV. My grandmother, the only child of an unwed mother, came to the US at the age of 13 from the industrial city of Sheffield, England. When she married my grandfather she’d never seen a cow, a few days after the honeymoon she was milking one. She ran the local drugstore for nearly 50 years. In their so-called spare time, they farmed.
My parent’s house was in a sterile and treeless subdivision about five miles away, but I largely grew up on that farm: feeding the cattle and horses, baling hay, bushhogging pastures, weeding the garden, gleaning corn from the harvested field, fishing for catfish in the creek that divided the fields and pastures from the small copse of woods, learning to identify the songs of birds, a lifelong obsession.
Even so, the farm, which had been in my mother’s family since 1845, was in an unalterable state of decay by the time I arrived on the scene in 1959. The great red barn, with it’s multiple levels, vast hayloft and secret rooms, was in disrepair, the grain silos were empty and rusting ruins, the great beech trees that stalked the pasture hollowed out and died off, one by one, winter by winter.
In the late-1960s, after a doomed battle, the local power company condemned a swath of land right through the heart of the cornfield for a high-voltage transmission corridor. A fifth of the field was lost to the giant towers and the songs of redwing blackbirds and meadowlarks were drowned out by the bristling electric hum of the powerlines.
After that the neighbors began selling out. The local diary went first, replaced by a retirement complex, an indoor tennis center and a sprawling Baptist temple and school. Then came a gas station, a golf course and a McDonalds. Then two large subdivisions of upscale houses and a manmade lake, where the water was dyed Sunday cartoon blue.
When my grandfather died from pancreatic cancer (most likely inflicted by the pesticides that had been forced upon him by the ag companies) in the early 1970s, he and a hog farmer by the name of Boatenwright were the last holdouts in that patch of blacksoiled land along Buck Creek.
Sewage lagoons by Sue Coe.
Boatenwright’s place was about a mile down the road. You couldn’t miss it. He was a hog farmer and the noxious smell permeated the valley. On hot, humid days, the sweat stench of the hogs was nauseating, even at a distance. In August, I’d work in the fields with a bandana wrapped around my face to ease the stench.
How strange that I’ve come to miss that wretched smell.
That hog farm along Buck Creek was typical for its time. It was a small operation with about 25 pigs. Old man Boatenwright also ran some cows and made money fixing tractors, bush hogs and combines.
Not any more. There are more hogs than ever in Indiana, but fewer hog farmers and farms. The number of hog farms has dropped from 64,500 in 1980 to 10,500 in 2000, though the number of hogs has increased by about 5 million. It’s an unsettling trend on many counts.
Hog production is a factory operation these days, largely controlled by two major conglomerations: Tyson Foods and Smithfield Farms. Hogs are raised in stifling feedlots of concrete, corrugated iron and wire, housing 15,000 to 20,000 animals in a single building. They are the concentration camps of American agriculture, the filthy abattoirs of our hidden system of meat production.
Pig factories are the foulest outposts in American agriculture. A single hog excretes nearly 3 gallons of waste per day, or 2.5 times the average human’s daily total. A 6,000-sow hog factory will generate approximately 50 tons of raw manure a day. An operation the size of Premium Standard Farms in northern Missouri, with more than 2 million pigs and sows in 1995, will generate five times as much sewage as the entire city of Indianapolis. But hog farms aren’t required to treat the waste. Generally, the stream of fecal waste is simply sluiced into giant holding lagoons, where it can spill into creeks or leach into ground water. Increasingly, hog operations are disposing of their manure by spraying it on fields as fertilizer, with vile consequences for the environment and the general ambience of the neighborhood.
Over the past quarter century, Indiana hog farms were responsible for 201 animal waste spills, wiping out more than 750,000 fish. These hog-growing factories contribute more excrement spills than any other industry.
It’s not just creeks and rivers that are getting flooded with pig shit. A recent study by the EPA found that more than 13 percent of the domestic drinking-water wells in the Midwest contain unsafe levels of nitrates, attributable to manure from hog feedlots. Another study found that groundwater beneath fields which have been sprayed with hog manure contained five times as much nitrates as is considered safe for humans. Such nitrate-leaden water has been linked to spontaneous abortions and “blue baby” syndrome.
Pig and wirecutters by Sue Coe.
A typical hog operation these days is Pohlmann Farms in Montgomery County, Indiana. This giant facility once confined 35,000 hogs. The owner, Klaus Pohlmann, is a German, whose father, Anton, ran the biggest egg factory in Europe, until numerous convictions for animal cruelty and environmental violations led to him being banned from ever again operating an animal enterprise in Germany.
Like father, like son. Pohlmann the pig factory owner has racked up an impressive rapsheet in Indiana. Back in 2002, Pohlmann was cited for dumping 50,000 gallons of hog excrement into the creek, killing more than 3,000 fish. He was fined $230,000 for the fish kill. But that was far from the first incident. From 1979 to 2003, Pohlmann has been cited nine times for hog manure spills into Little Sugar Creek. The state Department of Natural Resources estimates that his operation alone has killed more than 70,000 fish.
Pohlmann was arrested for drunk driving a couple of years ago, while he was careening his way to meet with state officials who were investigating yet another spill. It was his sixth arrest for drunk driving. Faced with mounting fines and possible jail time, Pohlmann offered his farm for sale. It was bought by National Pork Producers, Inc., an Iowa-based conglomerate with its own history of environmental crimes. And the beat goes on.
My grandfather’s farm is now a shopping mall. The black soil, milled to such fine fertility by the Wisconsin glaciation, now buried under a black sea of asphalt. The old Boatenwright pig farm is now a quick lube, specializing in servicing SUVs.
America is being ground apart from the inside, by heartless bankers, insatiable conglomerates, and a politics of public theatrics and private complicity. We are a hollow nation, a poisonous shell of our former selves.
An earlier version of this piece originally appeared in CP +.
The post Animal Factories: On the Killing Floor appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
As someone who works against weapons and militarism, and war, it’s hard not to see everything through that lens—including the relentless and increasing attacks on women, pregnant people, queer folks, and sexual assault survivors. And it’s hard not to see these attacks as connected—to each other and the broader spectrum of violence, including war and genocide. Perhaps understanding these connections can help us stand together in solidarity for all our freedom.
The post Misogyny and the Attacks on Bodily Autonomy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
“You do a massacre in an isolated rural village where no one will ever know about it” Prabowo Subianto, President of Indonesia I’m not going to mince words. Prabowo Subianto must be one of the evilest men who ever stained this bumi manusia (earth of humankind), to cite the title of the marvellous, novel by […]
The post Prabowo Subianto, Cuddly Mass Murderer appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
In December 2023, Israeli troops laid siege to the Anan apartment building in Gaza City. For more than a week, the building was routinely shelled by Israeli tanks and quadcopters and strafed by sniper fire. The entrances and exits were blocked by bulldozers. The water was cut off. Then on the morning of December 19, […]
The post Israel’s Willing Executioners appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
In December 2023, Israeli troops laid siege to the Anan apartment building in Gaza City. For more than a week, the building was routinely shelled by Israeli tanks and quadcopters and strafed by sniper fire. The entrances and exits were blocked by bulldozers. The water was cut off. Then on the morning of December 19, […]
The post Israel’s Willing Executioners appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
The post Silky Shah appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Josh Frank.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Photo by Jean-christophe Gougeon
The media have told us endlessly how people can no longer afford things due to higher prices and the fact that wages have risen more doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t want to disagree with the experts, but suppose we just did a little calculation about how much time it takes a typical worker to earn enough money to buy a gallon of gas.
Here’s the picture going back a decade.
This takes the price of a gallon of gas and divides it by the average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory workers. This is a category that covers roughly 80 percent of the workforce, but excludes most high-end earners like managers, professionals, and Wall Street types. This means that it cannot be skewed by the big bucks going to the top.
As can be seen, gas prices did jump a lot relative to wages in the spring of 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the peak, in June of 2022, it took 0.179 hours of work (10.7 minutes) to pay for a gallon of gas.
That was more than twice as high as low hits during the pandemic when the economy was shut down, although it was not that high by historical standards. Gas cost more than 0.20 hours of work (12 minutes) at points in 2011 and it peaked at 0.224 hours of work (13.5 minutes) in July of 2008.
But June 2022 was two years ago, and the oil markets have largely stabilized since then. The most recent figure is 0.12 hours (7.2 minutes). That’s still a lot higher than when the economy was shut down. (Donald Trump seems to think those were glory days – gas was less than $2.00 a gallon, but we couldn’t leave our homes.) But the current 0.12 hours cost of gas doesn’t look bad compared to prior periods.
For example, in 2018, it took as much as 0.128 hours (7.7 minutes) to pay for a gallon of gas. In 2019 gas peaked at 0.122 hours (7.3 minutes) of labor in May. It’s understandable people would want cheaper gas, just like they want higher pay. But the reality is that it is not especially high by historical standards, including what we saw in the recent past.
The spread of electric cars in the U.S. and elsewhere is likely to send gas prices lower in the years ahead. Electric car buyers will of course not especially care about gas prices, but more people buying electric cars will mean cheaper gas prices for those who don’t. (No, that’s not especially fair, just the reality.) Anyhow, the basic story is gas prices are actually pretty low today compared to what people earn, but that doesn’t mean the media should not yell about gas being unaffordable.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
The post The Labor Price of Gas is at Trumpian Levels appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
test publish 2
The post test publish 2 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by AAAdmin CounterPunch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
Defenders of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” had their hands full last month, particularly when it came to freedom of the press, a cornerstone of genuine democracies. On May 5, Al Jazeera reported that its offices in East Jerusalem — internationally recognized Palestinian territory occupied by Israel — were raided and shut down by Israeli police following the banning of the news network by the Israeli government. Al Jazeera continues to operate in the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but is still barred from reporting or broadcasting in Israel proper. Then, on May 21, the Associated Press reported that Israeli authorities had confiscated AP’s equipment in Southern Israel, despite the news agency submitting to Israeli military censorship. AP’s equipment was eventually returned, but only after the United States’ government intervened on behalf of the US company. Across the border, in the Gaza Strip, the situation for journalists was much more dire. Among the more than 37,266 Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israeli genocide, as reported by Al Jazeera, were at least 103 journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The post Israel’s Long War Against the Press in Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
“Why am I finding it difficult to give honest feedback to a poem when I don’t face the same problem with an academic essay?” The question comes from Keshav at the end of a workshop – why this difference, why this hesitation about the articulation of our response to the creative but not the critical? […]
The post Feedback Dope appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Anyone who knows Benjamin Netanyahu, and Joe Biden has for nearly 50 years, could see it coming. Sooner or later he was bound to bite the hand that feeds him. Bite it hard enough to draw blood, confident that not only could he get away with it but that he’d get more food as a […]
The post Lying Down With Netanyahu, Getting Up With… appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
As the story of Juneteenth is told by modern-day historians, enslaved Black people were freed by laws, not combat.
Union Gen. Gordon Granger said as much when he read General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, in front of enslaved people who were among the last to learn of their legal freedom.
According to the order, the law promised the “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”
But the new laws guaranteeing legal protections for equal rights – starting with the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 and followed by the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments after the U.S. Civil War had ended in April 1865 – did not eliminate the influence of slavery on the laws.
The legacy of slavery is still enshrined in thousands of judicial opinions and briefs that are cited today by American judges and lawyers in cases involving everything from property rights to criminal law.
For example, in 2016 a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited Prigg v. Pennsylvania, an 1842 U.S. Supreme Court case that held that a state could not provide legal protections for alleged fugitive slaves. The judge cited that case to explain the limits of congressional power to limit gambling in college sports.
In 2013, a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited Prigg for similar reasons. In that case, involving challenges to an Indian tribe’s acquisition of land, the judge relied on Prigg to explain how to interpret a federal statute.
Neither of these judges acknowledged or addressed the origins of the Prigg v. Pennsylvania case.
That is not unusual.
What I have learned by researching these slave cases is that the vast majority of judges do not acknowledge that the cases they cite involve the enslaved. They also almost never consider how slavery may have shaped legal rules.
The Citing Slavery Project
To place these laws in historical context for modern-day usage and encourage judges and lawyers to address slavery’s influence on the law, I started the Citing Slavery Project in 2020. Since then, my team of students and I have identified more than 12,000 cases involving enslaved people and more than 40,000 cases that cite those cases.
We have found dozens of citations of slave cases in the 2010s. Such citations appear in rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court and in state courts across the country. Citation by lawyers in briefs is even more prevalent.
An ethical obligation?
Addressing slavery’s legal legacy is not just an issue for historians.
It is also an ethical issue for legal professionals. The code of conduct for U.S. judges recognizes that “an independent and honorable judiciary is indispensable to justice in our society.” The code further calls for judges to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity … of the judiciary.”
Lawyers share in this obligation.
The American Bar Association notes the profession’s “special responsibility for the quality of justice.” It also calls for lawyers to further “the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system.”
Such actions are particularly important because of the rising importance of the Supreme Court’s history-and-tradition test, which uses analysis of historical traditions to determine modern constitutional rights. Courts risk undermining their legitimacy by paying attention to some legal legacies while ignoring others.
It is my belief that lawyers and judges must confront slavery’s legacy in order to atone for the legal profession’s past actions and to fulfill their ethical duties to ensure confidence in our legal system.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The post US Laws Created During Slavery are Still on the Books appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Justin Simard.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Hunter Biden, Youtube screengrab.
The chemicals are reducing testosterone levels. The world is plastic and we’re just living (dying) in it. The strong man contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden symbolizes the decline of the man.
Tony Soprano repeatedly laments that there is no more of the strong silent type in The Sopranos, the greatest television show of all time. For Mr. Soprano this crisis is related to the decline of the small business, the family, and the individual freedom.
Tony Soprano represents capitalism at its best, at its most contradictory. He comes from a mythical time in which man ran capital, and capital did not run man. For Soprano, the decline of man is of course linked to the browning, the queering, the feminizing of society. But his misreading only reaffirms his crisis and ours.
Society may have become soft, but it also has become more brutal. The weaponization of victimhood and the ignoring of real victims link together. For example, the cancellation of a new director of Genocide and Holocaust studies at the University of Minnesota, just one day after his hire. This was a Jewish man who labeled the Palestinian crisis a genocide. This is a sign of a society that is far too sensitive and far too brutal at the same time.
Microaggressions trump real aggressions. The political persecutions of Donald Trump and Hunter Biden heighten our alienation from politics and society in general. Few can state the obvious about these trials. Both are political and do nothing for the people. All it affirms is that you will be punished by the people who don’t like you. It won’t be fair.
For Hunter and Donald their criminality used to insulate them from the punishing nature of modern society. Now they are being taken down for cynical political purposes. Their criminality is not the crime. It is a sham. A reminder to ordinary people that the way to make a career is to take other people out.
But Biden and Trump emerge as the only real rallying figures for bourgeois society precisely because they are so far from being men. The more senile Joe Biden becomes, the more he seems strong to his supporters. The same is true for Donald Trump. Biden and Trump become things in and of themselves.
Their speech is associative. They do not really know what they are saying. But a feeling comes in one way, a word comes out the other. Deciphering a coherence isn’t the point. The father’s command is not direct. The father himself is lost.
We relate to the father on this level. He is not leading us. We are leading him. We want to lead Biden and Trump to coherence. We do not want to admit that the real forces that drive these men are so far out of our grasp, comprehension or control.
Biden and Trump know themselves. They know the good old days. Days we do not know. Somewhere in there the good old days rest. When they speak the good old days try to come out. The pieces of the puzzle don’t make sense.
We can go to war. But we can’t fight in them. I hear in passing a story of a young man who went to fight in Ukraine on his tour of Europe, a place even more emasculated than the United States. He remains in Ukrainian prison. What are we doing?
We want a war. We want something to fight for. But the frontlines are not heroic. The police and border control are growing and hiring. But this is not the work of heroes. Brutalizing the poor and desperate minority population does not make us men.
We blame these minorities, women, trans people, but it is hard to believe it. We have more of a sense that our food and water is poisoned. We don’t know where it comes from. The chemicals from too green grass in drought runs off and cuts off our balls.
Tony Soprano looks to his mother as the castrating figure. If only it was that easy. If only it was the family that alienated us, rather than society that alienated us from the family. Tony is not the man his father was. But no one is. No one has rules or standards anymore. Everyone has sold out.
So we can blame our MAGA neighbor, we can blame the immigrant, we can blame whoever we want. But eliminating the other solves none of our problems, it only lays them bare. So we continue with a militancy treadmill. We want to be radical without going anywhere. We want to maintain our opposition, our resistance, for as long as we can, before we realize the totality of our crisis.
Biden and Trump are the leaders for our time. It is easy to say one hates them both. Everyone hates them. Even the justice system. Sure they are pathetic. But they are the modern fathers.
There is not one father in modern society. He cannot be the breadwinner. He cannot take the heat. He is too traumatized and self-absorbed. We need at least two fathers.
Immanuel Kant writes in Critique of Judgement: “There is clearly a big difference between saying that certain things of nature, or even all of nature, could be produced only by a cause that follows intentions in determining itself to action, and saying that the peculiar character of my cognitive powers is such that the only way I can judge how those things are possible and produced is by conceiving, to account for this production, a cause that acts according to intentions, and hence a being that produces things in a way analogous to the causality of an understanding.”
We want to explain Trump and Biden. They cannot explain themselves. What is driving them is alienated from us, completely. The same can be said for ourselves, our fellow workers, our family. We cannot explain each other’s motivations, or our own.
At times it appears a straightforward motivation occurs. Is it ambition, purpose, compassion? But each step out of line is absorbed by the system where individuals do not exist. Each individual cannot be predicted. But a group of people on average? Always, or so it seems. Except never by the machines that claim they are able to do it.
Even the machines that watch us are alienated. They don’t know us, they don’t know themselves, they don’t know their creator.
The modern strong man is weak. He is on the run. He continues to accumulate as many skulls as he can in the hopes he can trade them for his freedom. Even if he can, his freedom is unfree.
When the American Right claims that freedom is not free, they are attempting to guilt the civilian who is still alive and seemingly oblivious of the blood that makes him alive. However freedom is unfree, rather than not free. Freedom in modern society is so mediated that we feel even more alienated when freedom is presented to us.
We know our free actions are not our own. The modern aesthetic seeks solely to express a class position. Art is disastrous. Through its formula, art loses its humanity and can no longer express what is true. Instead art is a data set. We repeat again and again that there is no way out through the predictability of our art.
All heroes are martyrs. No heroes are success stories. Heroes are necessary to keep the violence and destruction going. They will be honored for their sacrifice.
Where is the salvation in this story? Where do we look, besides Trump and Biden? Do we look to the moment of castration? Should we obsess over what could have been? Or do we find freedom with our castration? A little less weight to carry around. A little.
The pesticides and packaging, not the trans story time at the library, is castrating. But this castration is not the end. It may not be our freedom. But it is also not the end. We may primarily be machines. We may be at the mercy of technological development that both makes us expendable in our labor and powerless in our resistance. We may find that simple life isn’t possible or even desirable. We may find that our penis is being sold on the side of the road, for a pre-inflation price.
We may have reached the spiritual end. We have not reached the physical end. We must continue to go on. We must not look to the past. The figure looking for his father may have never had him. The abstraction and alienation may have always existed. The attempt to reclaim a coherent reality might always have been there.
There is still freedom. Even if the only freedom is death, or the choice to die. The father does not know the way. They often do not know they are on stage. But the father can lead us because he knows himself. Or more accurately, he is confident in his misreading. We too don’t know the way. However, that shouldn’t stop us from being confident in our misreading. We should go forward knowing only one thing: we do not know.
Now we are free. Now we can be our own fathers and each other’s fathers. If Joe Biden and Donald Trump can do it, so can we. If these two men can find happiness, success, and a good life in capitalism, anyone can. There is no story more improbable than these two men being at the top of the world. Miracles can happen, miracles will happen, miracles must happen.
One could gain solace from telling themselves: I am not Biden. I am not Trump. That is healing enough. Why stop there? Why not look at their rise as a miracle? Not a miracle for any of us. Not a miracle for this world. Rather a miracle in the sense that the absurd can triumph. Only the absurd can triumph.
So rather than try to relate to a normal that no one relates to, find the absurdity. There is no authority. There may be a giant punitive apparatus but there are no rules, really. There is no right thing. There is no tradition. Just a world of hypocrites looking for self-advantage. Find freedom here. Dad thinks the mirror is a television. So really, no one is home.
The post The Father In 2024 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
After reading a recent update on the consequences of firing up the fossil fuels, a longtime correspondent told me, “I look at my grandchild, age 5, and think about her early death.” The rest of the story is that grandparents have been getting their own lives cut short in heatwaves which have, by the way, […]
The post Closing in on the Kill appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. “I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who […]
The post What’s a Palestinian Life Worth? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Jonathan Cott has written about the meaning of those stories and rhymes we consider to be for children. He has also written about the childlike nature of certain rock and pop songs, especially certain songs by The Beatles and Donovan. He has interviewed artists, musicians, writers and others from Chinua Achebe to John Lennon and many more. His works refer to everyone from Carl Jung to Tony Bennett; Rollo May to the Old Testament; Greg Bateson to Gaston Bachelard. At times, his ability to connect seemingly disparate phenomena is mind-blowing. Other time, one nods their head knowingly at a reference that they might have often considered just to see it verified via Cott’s quotation and argument tying the two things together. Some might consider his considerations too fanciful while others might see them as so simply obvious they wonder why he bothered to even write them down.
The post It Must be High or Low appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.