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Category: Feature Articles

  • In the Heart of the Gorge

    Columbia Gorge from the summit of Cape Horn.

    When the first shockwaves of the cyclonic bomb began to detonate in the Pacific Northwest, I was on the crest of Cape Horn, six hundred feet above the Columbia River as the skies blackened, 200-foot-tall Douglas-firs shivered in the winds and creeks dry for months began to swell from drenching rains.

    Cape Horn stands at the mouth of the Columbia Gorge, the last large cliff on the north side of the 100-mile-long chasm the great river of the Northwest carved through the Cascade Range, as it barreled its way toward Cape Disappointment, the Desdemona Straits, and the Pacific Ocean another 120 river miles to the West. Cape Horn is made of basalt, laid down by successive floods of lava pouring out of volcanic fissures in the earth on the Idaho/Oregon border more than five million years ago.

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  • COP26 Exposes Failure of Neoliberalism

    Image by veeterzy.

    The UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow October 31st thru November 12th may be the most significant climate conference of all time. The fate of the planet is on the line.

    Prior to that august event, hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers evidenced an alarming fact that the climate system is broken, endangering all complex life. This fact is supported by the Alliance of World Scientists with over 15,000 signatories from 160 countries in support of the following declaration: World Scientists Warning of a Climate Emergency.

    As it happens, the UN climate conference extemporaneously puts the neoliberal brand of capitalism on public trial. Alas, the “free market” neoliberal brand of capitalism has miserably failed to address the global warming issue, thus failing to support civilization at large. After all, it’s established, on an anthropomorphic basis, neoliberalism is an economic model that people emulate.

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  • Liberation or Bust

    For several years, when I served on the board of a primate refuge, I sponsored Lee, a Long-tailed macaque. Caged, tattooed, wearing a restraining collar, Lee had served as a model in toxicity labs. The refuge removed the collar and sent it to me, together with the portrait photo in this column.

    We are primates. We should have no difficultly imagining how a macaque must feel, captured, detained, tormented. Why does our law permit it? If a corporation can be a legal person, can’t a macaque?

    Cases have been made for the personhood of nonhuman great apes, but this line of advocacy has yet to achieve broadly meaningful results. Imagine the state of the biosphere by the time we get to the case for gibbons or lemurs or macaques.

    Climate change raises the stakes. Much of the Long-tailed macaques’ native territory is mangrove forest and riverside land that’s highly sensitive to global heating.

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  • When Goldman Sachs Killed the Peace Dividend

    Goldman Sachs HQ, lower Manhattan.

    Goldman Sach’s ties to the Clintons date back at least to 1985, when Goldman executives began pumping money into the newly formed Democratic Leadership Council, a kind of proto-SuperPac for the advancement of neoliberalism. Behind its “third-way” politics smokescreen, the DLC was shaking down corporations and Wall Street financiers to fund the campaigns of business-friendly “New” Democrats such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton.

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  • China’s Winding Road Toward Capitalism

    Image by Ezreal Zhang.

    There is perhaps no bigger controversy among partisans of the Left than the nature of China and its economy. Is it socialist? Capitalist? State capitalist? A hybrid? That so much debate swirls around this issue is its own proof that the question doesn’t have a definitive answer, at least not yet.

    What can be agreed upon is that China has experienced decades of extraordinary economic growth. But the nature of that growth, and the base upon which it has been created, are also subject to intense debate, arguments that necessarily rest on how a debater classifies the Chinese economy. An additional debate is whether China’s growth is replicable or is the product of particular conditions that can’t be duplicated elsewhere. And what should be at the forefront of any debate is how China’s working people, in the cities and in the countryside, fare under a tightly controlled system that promises to bring about a “moderately prosperous society.”

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  • On the Fascist Stench That Hangs Over this Still-Trumped Land

    Image by Colin Lloyd.

    Next December readers will be able to purchase my next book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberalism, and the Trumping of America, 2017-2021. Completed in June of this year, the volume ends on a somber note, quoting the centrist Atlantic editor Jeffrey Golbderg’s June 14th reflection (ominously titled “The Capitol Riot was Prologue”) on how the “dismal dollar Democrats” (that’s my language, not Goldberg’s) will likely cede full national power back to the neofascist Republicans in 2022 and 2024. “And then,” Goldberg writes, “the four horsemen will certainly ride.”

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  • Life and Death on the Fire Planet

    Photo: US Forest Service.

    Fire is everywhere, nowadays. In the Arctic, Siberia, Australia, Canada, the American West, even in some rain forests. Terms like “fire tornado” have entered the vernacular, along with “heat dome,” which often, along with drought, set the stage for uncontrollable fires. Of course, everyone connects these blazes with climate change. We humans heated the planet by fire, namely the burning of fossil fuels. This in turn dried out entire regions, and they burn. How hot have we made it? Well, last summer the little Canadian town of Lytton smashed all records at 122 degrees Fahrenheit, while in Portland, Oregon, it was 116 degrees for a few days. Portland eventually cooled down, but not Lytton. After days of murderous heat, it burned to the ground.

    Humans have a long and intimate relationship with fire; so intimate, it’s there in our genetic code, or rather cookery is. Because of this deep relationship spanning hundreds of thousands of years, one professor of biology and society, who has devoted years to the study of human fire, Stephen Pyne, believes we should rename the entire Holocene the Anthropocene, and its most recent, industrial phase, the Pyrocene.

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  • Checking in With Dave Zirin: Kaepernick, COVID and the MLB Playoffs

    Image by Mattia Faloretti.

    Dave: Hey Ron.

    Ron: Hi Dave. Long time no see.

    Dave: Long time no see. Thanks for doing this. I appreciate it.

    Ron: When Jeffrey (St Clair) suggested I do this interview, I was reminded of CounterPunch’s early days on the web and your columns from that small paper in Maryland were reprinted in CounterPunch. I was hooked. After all,, it had been a few decades since any Leftist had written about sports in the USA.In a few sentences, how would you describe your trajectory since then?Ron:: And that other guy. Mr. Cockburn….So that was my lead-in, I guess. How would you describe your trajectory since then?

    Dave:: If it wasn’t for CounterPunch, first and foremost, my writings wouldn’t have got out to the broader Left and that’s where my readership really started, with the broader Left; with a lot of closeted Lefty sports fans and a lot of Lefties who hated sports but started to see its value in terms of the struggle of athletes, which I tried to write about a lot in those early days. Since then I’ve stayed on the same beat at the intersection of sports and politics and focusing definitely on Left-wing movements and radicalism and resistance politics that have emerged in sports and I think more of the mainstream’s sports media has moved in that direction, certainly over the last ten years as more athletes have been outspoken and, in a lot of respects, that makes me a smaller fish in a bigger pond but I like that there is a lot more writing, a lot more research, a lot more documentaries that deal with this area of work that, you know for a long time was very lonely to write about.

    Ron: Yeah, it’s very rare anymore that I hear or read that politics doesn’t belong in sports.

    Dave: Yeah. Unless you’re watching the absolute dregs of right-wing media. Something that used to be commonsense in mainstream sports writing has been eschewed.

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  • The Climate Movement’s Last Stand?

    Image by Li-An Lim.

    The upcoming UN climate conference (COP 26) will happen amid an escalating climate crisis. After past conferences failed to prevent today’s unfolding disaster, it’s safe to assume that the 26th COP will follow in the ineffectual footsteps of the previous 25 UN climate summits.

    Nevertheless, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attempted to influence COP 26 by releasing its report ahead of schedule. Because of the consensus-based process of the IPCC — and the direct influence that oil-rich governments exert during the process — the UN body is notoriously conservative in its projections and policy solutions (often referred to as “the lowest common denominator” in climate science).

    The hamstrung IPCC, however, did its best to convey urgency by warning of climate catastrophe unless global emissions are cut in half by 2030 and/or net zero emissions are achieved by 2050.

    The Historic Failure of the UN’s COP   

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  • The Political Economy of Timber Theft

    Stealing trees is as old as the King’s timber reserves. The sanctions for such sylvan thievery have always been harsh. In medieval England, it meant public torture and slow death. In the US, the levy was a kind of financial death penalty –triple damages plus serious jail time. A few years ago, two tree poachers […]

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  • The CIA’s View of Left Political Parties in Afghanistan, 1948-79

    Image by Kevin Schmid.

    From 1979 to 1989, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Navy SEALs, and Green Berets, with help from Britain’s Military Intelligence Section Six (MI6) and Special Air Service (SAS), ran Operation Cyclone: the funding, arming, training, and organizing of tens of thousands of mujahideen (“freedom fighters”) from dozens of Muslim-majority countries. This “had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” in the words of one of Cyclone’s architects, Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017)—Afghanistan being the famous “Graveyard of Empires.” The CIA later rebranded the mujahideen “al-Qaeda” and cited their presence in Afghanistan as justification for the US-led occupation, which started shortly after 9/11.

    Cyclone did to Afghanistan what Operation Timber Sycamore has done more recently to Syria: triggered a refugee crisis of millions, reduced developed areas of the country to rubble, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and empowered far-right Islamists. But how strong was a left presence in Afghanistan before Cyclone? Could secular anarchists, communists, and socialists have formed a progressive alliance against hard-line Islamists? This article explores the CIA’s records.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by T.J. Coles.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • What Happens in the Red States

    Nationally focused progressive intellectuals and activists might be more willing to confront the fact the United States is being overtaken by a creeping, homegrown Amerikaner fascism if they paid more attention to state-level politics, the soft underbelly of what’s left of bourgeois democracy in the not-so United States.

    The left tendency to neglect and avoid what’s happening in the states is foolish. For one thing, state-level policy has significant direct impacts on a vast swath of the nation’s population. From highly populated jurisdictions like Texas (home to 30 million) and Florida (22 million) to smaller ones like Iowa (just over 3 million), North Dakota (762,000) and Wyoming (less than 600,000), at least 150 million Americans live in fully or mainly “red states,” where state politics and policy are completely or largely in the hands of the neofascist Republican party. I write from 91% white Iowa, where the Republikaner governor and state legislature power have passed laws suppressing minority voting rights, forbidding honest discussion of white systemic racism in public education (K-Ph.D.), banning local governments and school districts from enforcing minimum wage ordinances, and banning local vaccine and mask mandates. Iowa’s Nazi Lite chief executive “Covid Kim” Reynolds has cut pandemic-related unemployment benefits, rejected federal Medicaid dollars to help the poor receive health care, and made her state’s taxpayers fund the sending of Iowa state troopers to patrol the southern US border in its neo-Confederate partner state of Texas.

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  • The Collapse of Liberal Zionism

    Image by Ahmed Abu Hameeda.

    Summer is over in Israel and so too the holiday season that includes Yom Kippur and Sukkot with their accompanying prayers of remembrance. Memory is integral to most Jewish holidays. The readings at Passover and the lighting of candles at Hanukkah are collective acts of remembrance. The importance of remembering has always been central to Jewish self-identity. As Jonathan Safran Foer would have it: ‘Jews have six senses. Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory.’

    But here there are also holidays specific to the State of Israel, traditions linked to Zionist history. These include Remembrance Day for Fallen Soldiers, Jerusalem Day which celebrates the ‘reunification’ of Jerusalem, and Independence Day. This is not to mention other days marked in the calendar to honour Zionist icons such as Herzl, Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky, and Rabin. And of course, there is Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Israel, collective remembrance linked to a sense of national identity and a dominant narrative of history is ritualised and institutionalised; the days are sacred milestones in the calendar year. Nakba Day, as commemorated by Palestinians, is not one of them.

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  • Andrew Cockburn on Power, Profit, and the American War Machine

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  • If You Work in the U.S., You Don’t Know How Bad You Have It

    It’s no secret that United Statesians are more ignorant of the world beyond their national borders than the peoples of other countries. That ignorance serves a purpose. How can you keep screaming “We’re Number One” and believing you have it better than the rest of the world if you are in possession of accurate information? […]

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  • Counter-Revolution in Arabia

    The first article in this series looked at the ‘domestic’ role of the British monarchy, suggesting that they served as a ‘counter-revolutionary backstop’, a feudal remnant kept artificially alive in order to prop up bourgeois rule through the bypassing of parliament and the establishment of rule by decree in the event of serious popular unrest […]

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  • The 50 Greatest Singles: an Exercise in the Absurd

    A couple of weeks ago, Rolling Stone, desperate for clickbait to lure in new readers, published a list of what its writers considered the 500 Greatest Singles. 500! That’s really narrowing it down. I didn’t wade my way through the entire sonic ocean, the top 50 were enough recognize what a mess it was, list-making […]

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  • Smoke and Ruins: Deep Time in Paquimé

    Entry into underground chamber, Paquimé complex. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

    The town is Nuevo Casa Grande in the Chihuahua province of northern Mexico, 100 miles or so southwest of El Paso. It is an old place with a new name. We are sitting outside a dusty cantina made of mud the color of salmon flesh. The finger traces of its builders streak the walls. The window and door frames are turquoise, the paint peeling off in blue scales.

    The waitress has left us dark bottles of home-brewed beer and basket of chile peppers, poblanos and serranos, little green sticks of dynamite. We eat them until our mouths are enflamed with exquisite pain.

    Some ethnopharmacologists swear that you can hallucinate this way. But being novices, and wanting later to amble in a nearly erect manner across ancient ruins outside town, my friend Fremont and I decide to linger on the bright edges of consciousness, here in this beautiful and tragic place, where macaws in wicker cages hang above us like cackling white blooms. These birds of the jungle were sacred to the Anasazi, Hohokam and other people of the northern desert. I have seen petroglyphs of macaws carved into pink sandstone cliffs high above the San Juan River in Colorado, a thousand miles away from the nearest rainforest.

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  • Nazis in the Heartland

    German POWs working a farm in Minnesota. Image courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation.

    My father, Dean, was raised on a small farm in Eastern Montana. As a small child in the early 1940s, he worked in his family’s sugar beet fields and tended to chickens and cows, no doubt carrying out countless other chores along with his two young brothers. I’m sure he wasn’t much help, but despite his age, was required to chip in.

    From time to time during the latter parts of World War II, my staunchly Protestant grandparents accommodated Nazi POWs, who labored in the fields alongside my father. The soldiers received no pay, but were rewarded with fresh Lucky Strike cigarettes at the end of the rows they harvested. Guards were always nearby, rifles in hand, ensuring there was no drastic escape for the POWs. Years later, my grandmother, Lydia, would tell me these young Germans were always good workers and kept to themselves. She was never afraid of them, she admitted, and when I would often confront her, “but they were real live Nazis!” she would always counter with something like “they were just young kids, and didn’t know any better.”

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  • The Murky Politics of Film Noir

    Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election probed crimes and misdemeanors at the highest levels of the Trump campaign and U.S. government. In what could be called The Other Muller Report, author Eddie Muller takes readers and cinefiles on a deep dive into a Hollywood […]

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  • Michael Roberts on American Imperialism and Marx’s Law of Profitability

    Marxist economist and author Michael Roberts returns to CounterPunch to discuss the state of US imperialism following the end of the Afghanistan War and how it relates to the profitability of capital in the 21st Century.
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  • Tesla and the Anthropocene

    Photo credits: Sung Wang (via Unsplash) and Leijurv, CC by-sa 4.0 int’l.

    Tesla’s going to produce $25K cars. Welcome news for many working folks who have, so far, only admired Tesla cars from a distance. And it should be good news for the global transition to sustainable energy—if we believe Elon Musk, the self-crowned Technoking.

    Anyway, that 25K price tag got me thinking. When I can afford a Tesla, should I get one? First, I’m taking a due diligence drive. May I show you the sights?

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  • The War on Terror: Twenty Years and Counting

    Image by Jordy Meow.

    With the War on Terror in its twentieth year, thrust back into the public discourse with the recent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Linda Sarsour, prominent Palestinian American activist and thinker, one of the national co-founders of the Women’s March (the largest single day protest in U.S. history), expressed what has been the core experience over the last two decades, “Unfortunately, we’ve been sitting around for twenty years, watching people who look like us, who pray like us, die.”

    As Sarsour noted, the past two decades have been devastating for people within the U.S. but especially for those living abroad, especially those in the Central Asian and Middle East region. From the drone strikes of weddings to now, leaving a political vacuum for groups like the Taliban to re-emerge and reconquer, U.S. involvement, justified by the War On Terror, has left countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, utterly “decimated”, Sarsour said.

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  • Hitchcock’s Sabotage: Film as Terrorism

    Oscar Homolka in Alfred Hitchock’s Sabotage.

    As compulsively watchable as it is, Hitchcock’s Sabotage makes a real hash out of Conrad’s The Secret Agent–that prescient novel which so accurately predicted the ways in which radical underground groups could be penetrated and manipulated by intelligence agencies into doing the repressive work of the state.

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  • Tulsi Gabbard Uses 9/11 Anniversary to Spread Islamophobic Message of Hate

    Tulsi Gabbard on Saturday used the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to promote an anti-Muslim message, the latest in a series of moves by the former congresswoman aimed at courting the right-wing. More

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  • Arendt and QAnon

    Image by Wesley Tingey.

    Although she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt had Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, QAnon’s, and most of the Republican Party’s number, down to almost the last decimal point. Nowhere else will one find a more chilling anticipation and explanation of Trumpism’s deranged conspiracy-mongering and startling resilience.

    Since 2016, it’s been obvious that Trump himself is a purveyor of conspiracy theories, notably about a “deep state” conspiracy (which about 40% of Americans now believe) and 2020 election fraud. Republicans’ steadfast, sycophantic support for Trump, coupled with their recent decision to neither censure Taylor Greene nor strip her of her committee posts, their failure to vote to convict Trump in the Senate during the recent impeachment trial, and an ongoing, farcical “election fraud” investigation in Arizona authorized by state Republicans, confirm that they have morphed into a far-right party with a solid authoritarian base, one reminiscent of European extremist parties.

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  • 9/11: The Doctrines of Bush, Obama, Trump & Biden

    Image by UX.

    Daniel Falcone: Can you comment on September 11, 2001 as a historical event and provide how this day continues to shape the way the United States sees itself in the world?

    Richard Falk: The attack itself on 9/11 was a most momentous event from the perspective of international relations, undermining the dominating historic role of hard power under the control of national governments in explaining historical agency.

    Dramatically, 9/11 revealed the vulnerability of the most powerful country, as measured by military capabilities and global security hegemony, in all of world history, to the violent tactics of non-state combatants in coercive interactions labeled by war planners as ‘asymmetric warfare.’

    On the basis of minimal expenditures of lives and resources, al-Qaeda produced a traumatizing and disorienting shock on the United States from which it has yet to recover, responding in ways that are fundamentally dysfunctional with respect to achieving tolerable levels of global stability in a historical period when security threats were moving away from traditional geopolitical rivalries as climate. While not fulfilling its goals, great devastation and human suffering was spread far and wide, especially in the Middle East and Asia.

    Such an efficient use of terrorist tactics by al-Qaeda, not only as an instrument of destruction, but as a mighty symbolic blow directed at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, embodiments of American economic and military hegemony. The effect was further magnified by its status as a spectacular visual moment unforgettably inscribed on the political consciousness of worldwide TV audiences, conveying the vulnerability of the strong to the imaginative rage and dedicated sacrifice of the avenging weak.

    Of course, the ‘success’ of this attack was short-lived, producing an initial wave of global empathy for the innocent victims of such mayhem, heralding widespread support in the spirit of internationalist solidarity on behalf of greatly augmented efforts at criminal enforcement of anti-terrorist policies and norms. Yet this early international reaction sympathetic to the U.S. has been erased in the American memory, as well as overshadowed internationally by the effects of the American over-reaction that claimed during the next twenty years many times the number of innocent victims than were lost on 9/11. This over-reaction has had counterrevolutionary impacts worldwide that are still reverberating.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Falk – Daniel Falcone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Central America’s Forgotten History

    Aviva Chomsky’s new book, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration, provides a much-needed corrective to the skimpy and frequently inaccurate coverage of Central America which dominates U.S. media. But more than that, it makes a compelling case for, in Chomsky’s words, “changing the structures and institutions which have brought so much harm [to the region].”

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  • 9/11 and the American Mind

    Still from When the Towers Fell.

    It is the second plane that haunts the mind, curving on a course that seems to descend right out of a waking nightmare. Even before it struck that ugly steel and glass tower, there was already a dreadful familiarity to it. Somehow we’d seen its shape before. The Hindenburg in flames. JFK’s head blooming open on the Zapruder film. The Challenger space shuttle exploding live before our eyes in the stratosphere on an impossibly sunny Florida day. The Waco fire incinerating women and children in those Texas winds. The events of 9/11 played out like a horrifying novelty show, seared into the brainpan of the nation by thousands of instant replays.

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  • Republicanism For The Anthropocene

    Image by NASA.

    You don’t have to read the almost 4,000 pages of the grim new IPCC Climate Report to know the gravity of Earth’s situation where humans are driving at least a million species, including their own, to extinction. We’ve had warnings for a long time, from Joseph Fourier (1824, greenhouse effect), Svante Arrhenius (1896, CO2 emissions), Guy Stewart Callendar (1938, global warming) and others through to the IPCC report of 2007 (90% sure that CO2 emissions were responsible for most observed climate warming). Scientists had done their thing but where were the political thinkers? The climate disaster is a political problem. You only have to look at who is most affected. It’s no news that low-income individuals and peoples are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, that developing countries suffer about 99% of the casualties caused by it, but the fifty poorest countries account for 1% of greenhouse gas emissions, while 92% are attributable to countries of the so-called Global North (as if this were merely a geographical category) with only 19% of the global population. It’s evident that the problem is neoliberal capitalism, which has been regulating markets in favor of the rich for the last fifty years.

    Naturally, this system isn’t presenting solutions. When necessary, there’s a greenwashing tweak here or there. We’re told we’re all guilty and all doomed. Meanwhile big corporations will keep making a killing, billionaires will look for bolt holes in remote places, and governments will keep lying. Their tax systems tell us where their loyalties lie: they’re billionaire friendly. So, it’s après moi le déluge because, as we say here in Catalonia, they couldn’t give a rabbit’s fart.

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    The post Republicanism For The Anthropocene appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.