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Category: Feature Articles

  • The Tragedy of Allende-era Chile: A Strong Start Countered by Imperialist Assault

    Image of an Allende protest in Chile.

    James N. Wallace – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress

    The 50th anniversary of the first 9/11 — the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government headed by Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende — is this month. Chilean working people made enormous advances during the first year of the Allende government, formally a multiparty coalition known as Popular Unity, before Chilean capitalists, U.S. corporate interests firmly backed by the Nixon administration and right-wing elements in both countries were able to regroup and begin a heavy-handed sabotage campaign waged with increasing vehemence. In this excerpt from What Do We Need Bosses For?: Toward Economic Democracy, some of those first-year successes are recounted but the bourgeois forces are already beginning their efforts to obstruct and ultimately reverse all advancement.

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  • Halmahera: EVs For Uncontacted People

    Image of EV plug in.

    Image by Juice.

    One very dangerous new norm that all humans should be worrying about is who most benefits and accumulates most power in this death-dealing system, or who can be held largely responsible for the plight the world’s in. Let’s start with the richest man, Elon Musk. Asked last year if he has more influence than the American government, he complacently replied, “In some ways”. Ronan Farrow describes how “Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him”. For example, he “seeded so much of the country with … [Tesla’s] proprietary charging stations”, that he pushed the Biden Administration into pushing his electric cars and now, “His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies”.

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Shoplifting as Capital Offense

    On the first day of August, Ta’Kiya Young turned 21. She’d been struggling since her mother’s premature death, but she’d recently found a new place to live and was eager to explore a career as a social worker. To celebrate her birthday, she took her two sons, 3-year-old Ja’Kenli and 6-year-old Ja’Kobie, to the Ohio […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Why UPS Workers Were Ready to Strike

    Image of striking UPS workers.

    Image by Joe Piette.

    Richard Hooker has worked at the United Parcel Service (UPS) for over twenty years and after long, sweltering shifts spent at the warehouse, sweat burning his eyes, his limbs feeling like they’ve been filled with concrete, he would just sit in his car, unable to drive home.

    “You’re physically drained, you’re mentally drained from moving packages all day, non-stop,” he explained, “And you need to take a nap cause you’re too scared you’ll fall asleep when driving home.”

    Hooker, now a union leader for Teamsters Local 623 which represents over 5,000 workers at both facilities in Philadelphia, is part of a broader Teamsters campaign to address many of the lingering issues impacting workers at the company, from conditions inside the warehouses and trucks to pay for part-time employees and drivers.

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  • Writing Palestine

    In Palestine – a country whose existence goes unrecognized by most of the West – Palestinians are arrested, humiliated, beaten, killed by Israeli military or settlers every day, if not every hour. What began in 1948 as the Nakba has taken on force, ramped up control, occupied every aspect of Palestinian life. And, given Israel’s […]

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    The post Writing Palestine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Sins of Butte

    Image courtesy of the US EPA.

    Standing on a ridge overlooking the expansive Berkeley Pit, a pungent smell emanates from the murky waters below, leaving a slight burn in my nostrils. This is Butte, nestled in a valley that straddles the Continental Divide, high up in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana. A little over a hundred years ago, Butte was a boomtown, ruled by copper and raging with prosperity. Industrious miners from Ireland to China ventured to this remote place to strike it rich or at least make a decent living. In its heyday, Butte was a bastion of socialist politics. International Workers of the World (IWW) was active in the early 1900s and, along with other labor factions, fought the monopolies of Butte’s three Copper Kings; Marcus Daly, William A. Clark, and F. Augustus Heinze. It was a tough, violent era, and miners were known to let off steam in local gambling dens, brothels, and bars. A historical plaque in town sums Butte’s past well: “She was a bold, unashamed, rootin’, tootin’, hell roarin’ camp in days gone by, and she still drinks her liquor straight.”

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  • Better Red Than Dead

    A Scene from Jesse Short Bull & Laura Tomaselli’s LAKOTA NATION VS. UNITED STATES. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films release.

    A Scene from Jesse Short Bull & Laura Tomaselli’s LAKOTA NATION VS. UNITED STATES. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films release.

    Whenever I think about the “Manifest Destiny” genocide U.S. rulers wrought against this continent’s original inhabitants – arguably the greatest land theft in human history – the sheer injustice of it all makes me feel like tearing my hair out, gnashing my teeth, slashing my flesh, rending my garments and howling at the moon. At a time when racist reactionaries suppress dissident histories, the new documentary Lakota Nation Vs. United States, co-directed by Oglala Lakota Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, bravely and poetically presents a version of America’s story told from the Indigenous point of view. Indeed, Lakota’s parts I and II – “Extermination” and “Assimilation” – could be titled: “How the West was Lost.”

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  • Bombshells: Barbie and the Nuclear Age

    Stills from ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’

    Stills from ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ | Photo Credit: Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures

    In 1945, against the dry, sun-drenched backdrop of the American Southwest, two events took place that would alter the course of history. One was Trinity, the world’s first nuclear detonation, and the moment that would prompt Robert Oppenheimer to cite from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The other was the founding of Mattel.

    The coincidence of the Oppenheimer–Barbie release dates incited a frenzy amongst the movie-going public precisely because they seem so at odds. And yet, beneath their grit and camp, the two share more than meets the camera. They are, at heart, both stories of America at war—a war defined by the success of Oppenheimer and his colleagues, and which would in turn define the best-selling doll. The world into which Barbie was born, and of which she would become both symbol and soldier, did not exist before that first successful detonation in the early hours of July 16.

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  • The World’s Food System Brings us Inflation, Hunger and Waste

    Image of tractor on a farm.

    Image by Scott Goodwil.

    Market fundamentalists would have us believe that if only we left the provisioning of all human needs to the tender mercies of unregulated markets, a cornucopia of fabulous wealth would trickle down to all. A powerful fire hose of propaganda ceaselessly proclaims this, amply funded by those whose interest lie in accumulating unlimited wealth without regard to social or environmental harm.

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  • American Roulette

    The six white Mississippi cops called themselves “the Goon Squad.” Give them points for accuracy, if not originality. They prided themselves in going the extra mile. For not playing by the rules. For not feeling any level of force was excessive. For not ratting each other out. They had a good run. But it appears […]

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

  • Cultural Apartheid in Germany 

    Given the continual resurgence of the populist Far-Right under the all encompassing banner of the AFD (Alternative für Deutschland), the Alternative for Germany party, a shocking coalition agreement has just been reached between the Christian Democrat Party (formerly led by Chancellor Angela Merkel) on a local and regional political basis.  It has become imperative for […]

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  • How NAFTA Ate the West

    In the two years following the enactment of NAFTA, the price of beef dropped by as much as 50 percent. If hamburger eaters exulted at the news, they should have also been aware that with this fall in beef prices has come a crisis for the nation’s small ranchers as grave as that which put […]

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  • For Russia, With Love

    A still from Compassionate Spy, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

    Two-time Oscar nominee and three-time Emmy Award winner Steve James’ compelling, confessional A Compassionate Spy is the latest in a current cinematic trend of nuke-related documentary and feature films that includes Oliver Stone’s Nuclear Now, Irene Lusztig’s Richland and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Perhaps this vogue is emerging from the collective psyche now because of historic dates regarding the Manhattan Project and the fact that June 19 was the 70th anniversary of the electrocution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953. Or because the war in Ukraine plus tensions between the People’s Republic of China and the USA are heightening.

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  • Setting the Future Free From Inside an Israeli Prison

    In his young adult novel, The Oil’s Secret Tale, Walid Daqqah describes a wall – a vast wall that darkens the sky, divides the Earth, separates animals and plants and people from each other – a wall that stops children from visiting their parents in prison. Daqqah’s story is about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, born […]

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  • Extremism Blends Into the Mainstream

    The ultra rightwing parental rights group, Moms for Liberty, held their second annual convention the last week of June in Philadelphia.  The Moms for Liberty received nationwide attention before and during their gathering as an example of the new normal: welcoming the Moms for Liberty’s right-wing racism, homophobia and book banning into the Republican mainstream. […]

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  • White Supremacy and the Bombing of Hiroshima

    As I was born in Hiroshima, I visited the Peace Park there many times. It was a short walk from my grandfather’s house. I didn’t visit Nagasaki until I was an adult, when in 1999, my friend Gordon Greene and I were in Kyushu as visiting medical education faculty. After our visit to Nagasaki’s Peace […]

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  • Elon Musk and the New Era of Extractive Geopolitics

    Image of mine.

    Image by omid roshan.

    In November 2020, leftwing president Evo Morales returned to Bolivia after being expelled by right-wing opponents with the aid of the United States. The Organization of American States (OAS), which has served as an appendage of U.S. imperial aspirations in South America for decades, conducted an audit of the vote tallies and deemed Bolivia’s election of Morales in 2019 illegitimate, forcing him to flee the country. The OAS’s assessment of the election aligned with the U.S. government’s unofficial position that Morales threatened its regional geopolitical interests. There were problems, however. The statistical analysis used in OAS’s 2019 report was “flawed,” according to The New York Times. Even so, U.S. criticisms emboldened Morales’s opposition and led to “a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history.”

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  • On Black Intifada in France

    July 16, 2023 by Sukant Chandan
    Image of French flag.

    Image by Anthony Choren.

    The police racist killing of children is a regular occurance for decades in France, often triggering burgeoning spontaneous working class insurgencies. The moments after French police killed 17yr old ‘Nahel M’ in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre wasn’t any different. 45,000 riot police, including the infamously brutal BRI special forces, contributed to the quelling of another uprising in France conducted mostly by young working classes of African heritage in the ‘banlieues’ or contained council estates often many miles out of the urban centres. Over two nights of the uprising at least 2,000 insurgents have been arrested by French authorities, the average age of arrestees is 17yrs old, pointing to another generation that will see considerable sections of their neighbours experiencing the French criminal justice system and prisons that will only boost their sense of alienation and confrontation with the French colonial state. Black working class communities across colonial centres in the ‘West’ are seeing multiple generations of the same family in prisons at the same time.The average age of the arestees also indicates how young our children are brutalised by the police and schools. The youth who led the uprising are of African heritage, both northern (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) and also other regions like from West Africa and other former colonies of the French state. The uprising saw the insurrectionists use fire bombs, grenades and firearms against the state, indicating a further intensification by means of tactics as compared to previous similar uprisings. There is much to explore as to the significance of the uprising by means of class-struggle against capitalist-colonialism and for socialism in the colonial centre in a context of global victories of white supremacist racism and the far-right.

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    Sukant Chandan is a London-based decolonial anti-imperialist activist and analyst. He advocated justice for Libyans in visiting Libya three times during the Nato onslaught in 2011 and reports frequently on English-language news channels based in Russia, Iran, China and Lebanon on which he discusses issues pertaining to the challenges of the struggle to end neo-colonialism. He can be contacted at sukant.chandan@gmail.com.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sukant Chandan.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Trouble with Palm Oil

    As if the Southeast Asian haze, otherwise known as a “recurrent transboundary air pollution issue”, wasn’t enough, there are many other reminders of how harmful the palm oil industry is to this planet. It’s well known that massiveland-clearing operations of the palm oil agribusiness burn down rainforests and cause the sky-blackening haze but the damage […]

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  • We Don’t Know How It Ends

    Image by Khara Woods.

    Fintan O’Toole’s latest book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, starts in 1958 when Ireland “was just about beginning to change,” and moves, one year at a time, into the transformation of Ireland from a developing country to a Celtic Tiger that wowed the European Union with its dramatic growth in GDP.

    The one-year-per-chapter pace thankfully breaks down. Chapter 7 covers 1962-1999. Then back to one-year-per-chapter until 1975-1983, then 1971-1983, then two-years-per-chapter. The trouble with this form of organisation is it doesn’t hold up. The Troubles never end. The conflict between Protestant Northern Ireland and Catholic Ireland just keeps surfacing, a story that gets told over and over again, bodies of innocents blown to bits and men starving themselves to gain symbolic concessions.

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  • A Choice of Evils

    Co-directors Jan Haaken and Samantha Praus’ documentary Necessity chronicles the frontline struggles by Indigenous and other climate activists, including Stop Line 3 Resistance, Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement, Fire Drill Fridays, etc., against pipelines and fracking. In almost two hours, this sprawling two-part nonfiction film also zooms in on an evolving, new, novel legal defense that courtroom gladiators are developing to defend eco-warriors in the judicial arena in order to defeat the fossil fuel industry in the courts, and from which this production derives its title.

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  • The Love of Comrades

    Image by Anastasiia Chepinska.

    After an apparent, all-too-brief détente in the battle over LGBTQ rights, gay and trans rights have again become a flashpoint in the American culture wars. Ron DeSantis, a notorious homophobe, transphobe, and antifeminist, is one of the main 2024 presidential candidates. Although marriage equality and its attendant economic and social benefits for the LGBTQ community seem to be relatively well ensconced and are now reinforced by the Respect for Marriage Act, Orwellian “religious liberty” laws threaten to corrode its effect by undermining equality in public spaces and institutions. Trans rights, drag queens, and LGBTQ books in libraries are all under assault, metaphorically and literally.

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  • Top Ten China Hawks Most Likely to Start a War with Beijing

    War between China and the U.S. would spell doom for humanity. That’s because once the Chinese sink those sitting ducks called U.S. aircraft carriers, hotheads in the pentagon will want to bomb Chinese cities. No one will stop them. And then things turn nuclear. To those geniuses who say, well, we’ve basically been fighting Russia […]

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  • Megamen for Donuts

    “My favorite things, my favorite things… / Blue jeans, see a red-haired girl / Sweet peanut butter, slow-burning candle / Cup of a tea and a good book and the dance of the reindeer, and also… / Pachinko, yeah / Pachinko / Pachinko / Wah, Sankyo…” This beautiful, probably improvised minor key piano ballad by […]

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  • When Does a Formal Democracy Degenerate into Fascism?

    Poster saying Smash Fascism.

    Image by Jon Tyson.

    It can happen here. “Here” being any country in which capitalism rules. When does a bourgeois formal democracy tip over into fascism? That is a question that needs an answer in many places, certainly not excepting the United States, which has already experienced a self-coup attempt with unmistakable fascist overtones.

    We’re referencing Donald Trump’s attempt at a self-coup, to use the Latin American phrase, in January 2021. Many people, even on the Left, laugh at that day’s events, pointing out that the would-be putsch had no chance of success. It did have no chance of success. That does not mean it should be cavalierly dismissed; on the contrary, it should be taken with utmost seriousness. Hitler’s beer hall putsch of 1923 had no chance of success, either, and his violent movement remained on the lunatic fringe for several more years. But we know how German history would turn out.

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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Richland: Smalltown Americana – With an Atomic Twist

    Image of students by Richland High School.

    Image by Helki Frantzen.

    At a decidedly leisurely pace, director Irene Lusztig painstakingly paints a portrait of an outpost of Americana in eastern Washington State, Richland where virtually all of the townsfolk, except for homemakers, worked since the 1940s at neighboring Hanford. By most economic indicators, those employed by Hanford’s industrial plant earned a decent if not opulent standard of living. The workers and their families enjoyed prosperity and a river in a lovely rural Northwestern setting, where these members of the proletariat could afford to buy consumer products, take their families on vacations and send their children to good universities.

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  • James Watt and the Origins of the Corporate Counterattack on the Environment

    On October 9, 1983, I was at the old Weir Cook airport in Indianapolis awaiting the arrival of David Brower, the great environmentalist. Brower emerged from the plane, his face aglow with impish triumph. We hustled down the terminal to the airport bar where he imparted the momentous news that his nemesis James  G for […]

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  • The Surplus and the Bystander

    Arun Kundnani. Photo: Freya Billington.

    Arun Kundnani is an author, professor, and activist who began his new book

    If you read about broken-windows policing, it’s pretty clear that neoliberals’ main concern is precisely to make people, who don’t have a wage, pay for their enjoyment of our streets. People who earn wages are disciplined by their need to compete; someone else can always replace you on the job, right? But if you’re unwaged and get a welfare check, irrespective of what you do in life, you’re breaking the neoliberal rules. The fear is that you can go down a street and have the fun of breaking a window cost-free, no price mechanism to restrain your behavior. So the police need to make that low-Level crime cost.

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  • Trump, the Final Undoing?

    Republican leadership time and time again has proven itself to be people who care about nothing more than power. They don’t have principles. They don’t have morals. All they want to do is hold onto power by any means necessary. And living in a red state, I see many people who claim to love America, claim to be Christians, but have no problem aligning themselves with a man who is clearly antithetical to everything they say they believe.

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  • Nuclear Fracking

    Schematic for the Project Gasbuggy nuclear test. Image: Department of Energy.

    In all there were three big nuclear explosions in the Colorado Basin: Project Gas Buggy, Project Rio Blanco and Project Rulison. Rulison was the last major episode in the Atoms for Peace program. The peace in question wasn’t a cooling of the tensions between the US and the Soviet Union, but between two even more entrenched rivals: the nuclear industry and the oil companies, then locked in fierce combat over which sector would control America’s energy future. The AEC wanted to prove that a few well-placed nuclear bombs could strategically rearrange the geology of the Earth’s the crust in such a way as to release deeply buried and once untappable reservoirs of oil and gas.

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