Washington is in no mood to countenance neutrality, and no effort is spared to persuade or bully other nations into imposing sanctions on Russia. While the US has met with limited success in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Europe is a different matter, where only one nation maintains a neutral stance – Serbia. More The post Serbia Resists US-led Bullying appeared

In last week’s Democratic primary for Oregon’s 6th congressional district, crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried invested just under $11 million from his $12-billion personal fortune in the candidacy of first-time candidate Carrick Flynn, a fellow aficionado of the cultish “effective altruism” movement. Bankman-Fried lives in the Bahamas. He considered his

In case you have lingering doubts about the reality of human-caused global warming, hop on an airplane to parts of India or Pakistan and spend a few days. And, as long as you’re there, maybe be a good citizen and pick up a few of the dehydrated birds that drop out of the sky. Then, More The post India – Birds Drop Out of the Sky, People Die appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In 1991 I had a doctor friend in a hospital in London who was put in charge of a special medical team which was trained to treat British soldiers in Iraq and the Gulf who became victims of an Iraqi poison gas attack. Wards were cleared of all but emergency cases in her hospital to make room for these More The post The Lingering Mystery of Gulf War Syndrome appeared

The election in the North of Ireland has drawn a lot of attention in recent days. For the first time in history, in apparent contradiction to the very purpose of the state, people in the North elected Sinn Féin as the largest party in the assembly. As a result, Sinn Féin’s leader, Michelle O’Neill, is More The post The Stormont Election and Ireland appeared

Much of the western U.S. has been in the grip of an unrelenting drought since early 2020. The dryness has coincided with record-breaking wildfires, intense and long-lasting heat waves, low stream flows and dwindling water supplies in reservoirs that millions of people across the region rely on. Heading into summer, the outlook is pretty grim. More The post

With the Democrats blocked from codifying the protections provided to women by the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision, they must now turn their attention to organizing state-level elections this coming November. But not in all states — only in those with reasonably winnable seats. The Democrats’ strategy of relying on national polls, even accurate

Karen Middleton’s 2016 biography of Anthony Albanese concludes with a speech he made that year, on the 20th anniversary of his election to parliament. “I’m patient”, he told his clapping audience, “I’m patient — I’m a Souths fan”. The South Sydney Rabbitohs are the Rugby League club Albanese supports, which for the greater part of More The post Who is Anthony 

Out of the goodness of his heart, President Biden has just lengthened our leashes when it comes to Cuba. Isn’t that just so nice? Isn’t it great to live under a nice, benevolent democratically elected dictator rather than a cruel and brutal one? Biden is issuing executive decrees permitting more U.S. flights into Cuba, removing More The post Biden Lengthens

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) working group report gives us until 2030 to stop global warming at 1.5°C. The report proposes several steps that are vital to achieving that goal. The steps are: * Coal must be effectively phased out. * Methane emissions must be reduced by a third. * More forests More The post It’s “Now or Never” on Climate

Three years ago, the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) filed a $24 million gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation. This week, after a prolonged and public battle, the players association for the US women’s and men’s national teams negotiated a groundbreaking collective bargaining agreement. “The accomplishments

Nothing says disinformation like the arrival of the UK’s ex-Bond-like spy Christopher Steele into the limelight to share his latest propagandistic pontifications. Recently, Steele said of Russian president Vladimir Putin that he was gravely ill and that his possible illness may have played a part in the decision to mobilize and attack Ukraine. In a More

In elementary school, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels were my favorite books. I imagined myself much more sophisticated than my peers, who were obsessed with Harry Potter. Of course, I grew to love J.K. Rowling’s work as well. Today, there’s not much that’s more soothing to me than Jim Dale narrating the adventures of More The post Speciesism and

If supporters of a united Ireland achieve their aim, they may want to erect statues of those who have done most to ensure the success of their cause. A strong contender for this honour will be Boris Johnson for destabilising the statelet created by the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and making the partition of Ireland an international issue. More The post Will

The Marcos-Duterte alliance, or what is now the circle of multiple political dynasties around the Marcos-Duterte axis, is a connivance of convenience among powerful families. Like most alliances of this type, which are built purely on the sharing of spoils, it will prove to be very unstable. More The post Why the Son of a Dictator Won the Philippine Presidential

Rarely in Australian history has a governing party suffered such loss in the face of an opponent unable to claim complete victory.  It said much about the disillusionment, and plain disgust, from that nebulous centre of the country’s politics.  That centre roared on May 21, consuming sitting government members and inflicting a bloody reckoning. That More

I pruned some tomatoes. I reviewed some stuff from a local planning board meeting last night (where nearly 200 manufactured houses were proposed for planting in farm fields across town). I checked the weather forecast. Then, as I sometimes do, I checked the UK Guardian newspaper on-line. I’ve seldom found big US media terribly useful in understanding how

May 9 has come and gone, and as has been the constant for the past two decades, both Mr. Putin’s enemies and friends have repeated in unison that on May 9 of every year, Russia remembers and honors the 20 or 25 plus million of its dead during World War II. It even seems that More The post Why Does Putin Make All the Soviet Dead of the Second World War… “Russians”?

I’m beyond fed up that the gender of the murderers are still largely absent from conversations about America’s mass shootings crisis. In Buffalo, of course, racism and white supremacy cannot be overstated, but we ignore gender at our peril. Let’s tighten restrictions on poisonous hate speech on social media. It’s imperative we conduct threat assessments.

Neutrality was once an attractive option in Europe. Switzerland made non-alignment look almost sexy, with its ski resorts, excellent chocolates, and secure banking system. Then there was Sweden, which refused to join NATO or subordinate its military policy to Moscow, offering instead to broker peaceful compromises between east and west as well as north

In the United States, children are more likely to experience poverty than people over 18. In 2020, about 1 in 6 kids, 16% of all children, were living in families with incomes below the official poverty line – an income threshold the government set that year at about US$26,500 for a family of four. Only More The post The Persistence of Childhood Poverty in the US

This November, the Massachusetts electorate will vote on a ballot initiative that will have profound consequences: the ability for the state to amend its constitution and levy a 4 percent surtax on all individuals that have an annual income of one million dollars or more. The Fair Share Amendment – or “millionaire’s tax” as it More The post Debunking the Myth

The conditions that led to a shortage of baby formula were set in motion long before the February 2022 closure of the Similac factory tipped the U.S. into a crisis. Retailers nationwide reported supplies of baby formula were out of stock at a rate of 43% during the week ended May 8, 2022, compared with More The post Baby Formula Industry was Primed for Disaster Long

It’s that time of year, maybe you’ve already noticed. Animals are back and moving about and trying to reproduce. But in this age of hundreds of millions of motor vehicles going everywhere at high speeds, anybody who’s slow is vulnerable. And one of the most vulnerable to death on our highways are turtles. No matter More The post Give Turtles a Brake ! appeared first

National and global debt levels are unsustainably high. We need a “reset,” but of what sort? The “Great Reset” of the World Economic Forum (WEF) would leave the people as non-owner tenants in a feudalistic technocracy. The reset of the Eurasian Economic Union would allow participating nations to opt out of the Western capitalist system More The post A Reset

This interview with world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky has two goals. The primary goal is to understand America’s role in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century, the Syrian civil war. While there has been a lot of commentary on the Syrian civil war, there is confusion about the exact nature of the American involvement in it.

The remediation of nuclear waste has long been a classified endeavor. Accidents, exposure to radiation, and worker injuries on the job rarely, if ever, make the newspapers where they would receive public scrutiny. This is, of course, intentional. The less oversight, the easier it is to mislead and cover up mistakes. Take the case of the military’s Palomares

What tends to be excluded from almost all presentations of the Ukrainian struggle is the U.S. Government policy agenda of inflicting a humiliating defeat on Russia which is at once related to the defense of Ukraine yet quite separate from it in significant respects. This agenda replicates Cold War confrontations, and in the global setting, seeks to remind

The Buffalo shooting will be used to increase funding for police–the same police who didn't stop the racist shooter, who across the country have aligned themselves with white supremacist movements and who regularly shoot young blacks suspected of committing minor offenses like jaywalking or shoplifting. More The post Roaming Charges: Search, Destroy

I’ve been seeing people come out of the desert borderlands for two decades now, and it is startling every time. I couldn’t get that man’s desperate face and lunging limp out of my mind. The season of death in the borderlands had now arrived, as it does every year. More The post Entering the Season of Death at the Border appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Real resisters and revolutionaries calculate and plan, but they aren’t about the crystal ball. They aren’t about the betting odds. They are about human agency and revolutionary praxis to change the odds for the better. The Ugly Foreseeable: Six Dark Predictions It shouldn’t be so easy to predict future terrible events. A couple months or More The post Beyond

If you cringe in horror at the prospect, two years hence, of a Trump versus Biden presidential race, you are not alone. But it looms as a real possibility: two very aged men who should have the decency to retire from public life, having contributed so much to making it an absolute mess. More The post Third Party Blues appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The third-largest city in South Africa, Durban, has had a hellish month. The climate catastrophe witnessed in the city and surrounding areas left terrible wounds that residents here have not yet recovered from. The 350 mm (14 inches) of rain that pounded many areas of the province in a 24-hour period on April 11-12 more More The post Who Dropped the Rain Bomb on

Allies of Tucker Carlson are working hard to distract the public from the Fox News host’s culpability in spreading racist conspiracy theories, adopting the same tactics they sneer at from liberals. In the wake of the Buffalo massacre, where white supremacist Payton Gendron murdered 10 people in a racist attack, Carlson has come under fire More The post Post

Woody biomass, or burning trees to produce renewable energy, is spreading beyond the shores of Europe, where it’s wildly popular and outpacing solar and wind. It’s headed for Japan and South Korea, where subsidies for woody biomass displace funding for solar and wind. Umm, what’s wrong with this picture? In order to know specifically what’s More The post The

On May 15, 2022, the military junta in Mali announced that it would no longer be part of the G5 Sahel platform. The G5 Sahel was created in Nouakchott, Mauritania, in 2014, and brought together the governments of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger to collaborate over the deteriorating security situation in the Sahel More The post Is This the End of

In Jehane Noujaim’s documentary “Control Room,” a daring indictment of embedded media at Central Command (CENTCOM) during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, military spokesperson Marine Corps Lieutenant Josh Rushing has an epiphany. His moral compass is shaken when he recalls his own reaction to Al Jazeera’s broadcast of “American soldiers strewn about a

Staging a vice-presidential candidates debate in the runup to Colombia’s May 29th national elections was entirely appropriate. Nevertheless, the location of the event in Washington and its promotion by US-state functionaries requires some explanation. Because of its venue and sponsors, the affair had elements of an audition or a vetting process overseen

Judy Gumbo arrived at Berkeley, California from Canada in the mid-60s and engaged herself in the political antics of the Youth International Party, aka, the Yippies, through Stew Albert, her boyfriend and a Yippee leader. Judy was a kind of proto-feminist (in principle) and du jour lesbian; a serious anti-war activist who went to North More The post Tales from

Staging a vice-presidential candidates debate in the runup to Colombia’s May 29th national elections was entirely appropriate. Nevertheless, the location of the event in Washington and its promotion by US-state functionaries requires some explanation. Because of its venue and sponsors, the affair had elements of an audition or a vetting process overseen

Olympeion: temple of the Olympian Zeus near the Acropolis of Athens. Ut took several centuries for the construction of the temple. The Roman Emperor Hadrian finished it in 131-132. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos. Unless one visits Hellas / Greece and sees the ruins of ancient temples, theaters, and stadia, it is difficult to understand the magnificence More

The dark spectre of the Covid pandemic has been with us for over two years now and the virus itself is always likely to be with us. Our systems and institutions are in turmoil, our economy, our schools, our hospitals, are still reeling from what has happened, still struggling to cope as the virus continues More The post In a parallel universe, the pandemic would

It was 4:00 AM and I couldn’t sleep. As news about the devastation of Ukraine from Russia continues, talking heads warn of Europe on the brink of war. My mind was ambushed by racing thoughts about our troubled world, and our divided nation’s place in it. What does America stand for? Are we truly an More The post At Home and Abroad, is America “Fake News?” appeared

Israeli police attacked mourners carrying the coffin of slain Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 13, 2022, beating pallbearers with batons and kicking them when they fell to the ground. Yet those who skimmed the headlines of initial reports from several U.S. media outlets may have been left with a different impression of what More The

All over the US media there are discussions taking place, as one would expect, about the slaughter of 10 people in Buffalo, New York, by a young white supremacist in body armor with a rapid-fire weapon.  I have heard no discussion about the phenomenon of mass shootings in general in the US compared to other More The post When the Shooting Ended appeared first on

Growing up in the Southern California suburbs, government surveillance never worried me. But my Syrian-American parents were more cautious. They would often warn me against talking about politics over the phone — in case Big Brother was snooping. As a teenager, I dismissed their concerns. “Listen, we’re not in the Middle East,” I would counter. More The post

It is one of those strange and heady days when you’re being driven towards New York, but the New York that you‘re being driven towards is not the one you love so much and lived in for five years, but a hamlet with a main road cutting through it like a vicar’s knife — not More The post England and the Lost Princess  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

For 50 years now, people have told desperate, heart-breaking stories about what it was like to search for an abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade. These were invariably narratives of women in crisis. They sometimes involved brief discussions about economic inequality, police-state intrigue, and unwanted children, but for the most part men were More The

Most Americans don’t think much about the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC. But if you watch TV, use the internet, or own a phone, it plays a major role in your life. The FCC regulates the airwaves, including the corporations that own your local TV and radio stations. And it plays an important role in More The post We Need a Functional FCC appeared first

Chris Lombardi’s book,  I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars, couldn’t be more on time. As the US ramps up its proxy war in Ukraine and paves the way for even wider conflict, Lombardi gives us the knowledge we need to help rebuild the peace movement. It’s a monumental task fraught with error More The post I Ain’t

The March 15-16 minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve show that there was agreement, given “elevated inflation and tight labor market conditions,” that the Fed needed to take decisive action to shrink its balance sheet, with FOMC participants reaffirming “that the Federal Reserve’s securities holdings should be reduced

Before a hate-filled 18-year-old murdered 10 and wounded 3 African Americans in Buffalo on May 14, he penned a rambling screed about replacement theory. The most common version of this whiny idea, imported from the more hysterical fringes of the French far right, holds that Jewish capitalists are importing cheap immigrant labor to replace more highly-paid

Amid the ongoing atrocities in Ukraine, rising gas prices, and the existential threat of climate change, policymakers in Washington have a long list of crises to address. But there’s one step that could help mitigate all of them: reducing our dependence on oil — and the giant oil and gas companies who profit from it. More The post It’s Time to Stop Profiteering

Bamboozling the public prepares them for bombing those we demonize On April 25, 2018 Stephen Cohen, unraveller of myths extraordinaire, wrote an article on “Criminalizing Russia” in The Nation (republished in War with Russia: from Putin to Ukraine to Trump an Russiagate [2022]). We are increasingly aware that the bamboozling of the citizenry prepares them

Emphasis must be on protecting homes and communities while recognizing the crucial ecosystem benefits that fire provides The fires burning through northern New Mexico this past month redefine what we consider a normal spring. Pushed by relentless high winds and exacerbated by an ongoing, 20-plus-year megadrought linked to the human-induced climate crisis,

“Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism.” -Nikolai Berdyaev, The End of Our Time It could have been a beautiful nightmare. The most terrifyingly colossal More The post The Eurasian Road to

The nuclear power industry has been pushing the fantasy of yet another “renaissance” of nuclear power, based on the absurd idea that atomic reactors — which operate at 571 degrees Fahrenheit, produce substantial greenhouse gas emissions and, periodically, explosions — can somehow cool the planet. But the fact is that no more big, old-style light water More

A major hazardous byproduct of oil and gas operations, called “brine”, poses a pressing problem because of its long-term radioactivity and the extreme volumes produced each year. Billions of gallons of this waste have been injected into Class II injection wells throughout Ohio and millions of gallons have been spread on Ohio roads as a More The

Three years ago, we helped write a report for RootsAction.org targeting 15 corporate Democrats in Congress who deserved to be “primaried.” We called the report “Bad Blues.” A common reaction back then was that those establishment pols were too strong and entrenched to be defeated. On Tuesday, yet another “Bad Blue” apparently went down to defeat – More The

Same story second verse, a little bit louder, a little bit worse. – Anon.   We thought the worst McCarthy was behind us. Joe became prominent in the early 1950s when he claimed to have found hundreds of Communists who had infiltrated assorted federal agencies, including the State Department.  In 1953 he became chairman of More The post McCarthy Redux appeared

The occasions when an activist, writer or commentator triumph over defamation lawsuits launched by a thin-skinned politician are rare in Australia.  When it comes to matters regarding the law of reputation, Australia remains a placewhere parliamentarians, as a species, thrive in the knowledge they can use favourable provisions to protect their hurt feelings

I am an academic, with publications in peer-reviewed journals and a terminal degree. And today I want to make what many certified smart people would regard as an anti-intellectual argument in one specific area. I abhor the emotional and social corrosive effects of many aspects of “wokeness” and the calling out culture that it produces. More The

What if everyone, everywhere over the age of 16, or perhaps even 12, could vote in truly fair, truly transparent, truly voter suppression-free elections? If everyone was legally treated as a future voter from birth as much as a new citizen, would we have a different and perhaps better more equitable world? What if such More The post Let Everyone Vote, Everywhere:

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) visited Cuba on May 8-9. He began by highlighting regional unity as good for equal promotion of economic development for all states. AMLO addressed themes he had discussed previously when Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel visited Mexico City in 1921. At that time AMLO, by virtue of Mexico serving More

The world continues to watch in horror and dismay as Russian forces have decimated the military architecture and established special “peacekeeping” operations in the Ukraine and beyond. As we predictably look to the American president for answers, it is important to take a moment to explore how we arrived here, the role Joe Biden and More The post Biden’s Empty

Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have pledged to restore a mythical, romantic past that celebrates the white cultural life of the countryside. America’s anti-democracy politicians and pundits peddle such myths today. But it’s all talk. They don’t actually aid or protect rural communities and long-endangered landscapes; they instead assert

Never underestimate the potency, and deceptive malice, of the British political mind.  In responding to the threat posed by Imperial Germany during the First World War, the British propaganda campaign made much of the atrocity tale, the nun raping German and the baby bayoneting Hun.  The effectiveness of the campaign was so impressive it sowed More The post

On May 16, the Biden administration announced new measures to “increase support for the Cuban people.” They included easing travel restrictions and helping Cuban-Americans support and connect with their families. They mark a step forward but a baby step, given that most U.S. sanctions on Cuba remain in place. Also in place is a ridiculous More The post For

I will be honest about something. Since the cold-blooded execution of Palestinian, veteran journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh by an Israeli sniper I have felt rather nonplussed. A rarity for me. But it does happen. It happens when I feel overwhelmed with joy. It happens when I feel like I am overcome with despair. And when More The post The World Should be Forever Grateful

The change in marijuana laws across the US raises issues far beyond, “Hey, dude, we can blow a joint now without getting busted.” The racism that permeated the age of criminalization now lurks throughout the phase of decriminalization. The burgeoning business of growing pot raises the specter of corporate agriculture with its threats to human More The post

I’ve been watching this country at war for many years now and, after 9/11, began spending time with American veterans who came to disdain and actively oppose the very conflicts they were sent to fight. The paths they followed to get there and the courage it took to turn their backs on all they had More The post Ukraine: the Antiwar Dilemma appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In the first half of April 2022, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar made some revealing remarks at a press conference in Washington, D.C. He was standing beside U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. When asked about India’s purchase of Russian oil, Jaishankar said: “If you’re looking at

“Ramadewa looked at the numerous troops of monkeys. They were at ease and happy and showed their liveliness. All their movements, their noisy voices, their way of sleeping on branches made him happy just to look at them.” —Verse 151:V1, Kakawin Ramayana I saw macaques for the first time along the river’s edge on the More The post Experimenting on Monkeys is Cruel…Keeping

Why did Payton Gendron (allegedly, but he live-streamed it, so it’s not like there’s much doubt) murder ten people at a Buffalo, New York grocery store on May 14? The pat, and at least partially correct, answer, is that Gendron subscribes to something called the “Great Replacement” theory.  That’s mostly what we hear about

I deeply lament that I was President of Montana Wilderness Association, recently re-named Wild Montana, when it was transitioning to the much ballyhooed and highly grant-remunerated “compromise and collaboration” model of navigating conservation disputes. That is, I mourn that I helped shepherd this acquiescent approach into its current

Who’s the Father? They suck the virgin light through straws poked into your child’s mind as if it were a school milk carton and when the slurpings done the child’s face shows up on the box, another desaparecido They tiptoe through the night’s broad shadows hysteriques and monotones whispering sweet nothings in your dreams as More The post Who’s the Father?

The post Songs of Slavery and Emancipation Teaser appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The routinely dishonest BoJo claimed categorically that his Brexit deal would not put a border in the Irish Sea. He insisted that businesses in Northern Ireland would have unencumbered access to markets in England, Scotland and Wales, saying with typical bombast that the Irish Sea trade border would exist “over my dead body”. However, BoJo, in his haste to

I expect the war will go on for awhile until the generals and politicians get tired of it. An international antiwar movement with significant numbers could hasten that moment. One doesn’t not demand peace because there’s a war on. Indeed, that’s why one demands peace. The movement against the Vietnam war was organized and expanded More

The disasters of war in Ukraine have not yet found their Francisco Goya, but the reporting of journalists conveys a graphic picture of the death and destruction there. This war, like all its predecessors, is hell. Writing about the putatively good war of 1939-1945, Nicholson Baker in Human Smoke described its beginnings as the advent More The post The American

It has dominated news cycles, debates and policies since 2020, but COVID-19 continues to exercise the interest of number crunchers and talliers.  While the ghoulish daily press announcements about infections and deaths across many a country have diminished and, in some cases, disappeared altogether, publications abound about how many were taken in the

Cohen as prophetic voice Reading Stephen Cohen’s War with Russia: from Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate (2022) is required if we are to going to strip fictional narratives away from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In this third article of diving for pearls from our intrepid scholar, we are zeroing in on his penetrating analysis More The post Taking Aim

Long before a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion revealed that by summer Roe v. Wade will likely be overturned, only pregnant people bore the burden of pregnancy—not just physically, but also financially. “Impregnators” have always had the choice to walk away. Sure, they could be on the hook for child support after birth, but what More The post Making “Impregnators”

News that US nuclear weapons may already be back in Britain, at RAF/USAF Lakenheath in East Anglia, makes Britain once again a forward nuclear base for the US in Europe. 110 US/NATO free-fall B61 nuclear bombs were removed from Lakenheath in 2008, following sustained protest at the base by CND and the Lakenheath Action Group. More The post Are US Nuclear Weapons

Allegations have emerged recently that Ukrainian children are being forcibly removed from their country by Russia. Once there, they are put up for adoption. These tactics are horrific, but far from rare. There is a long history of military aggressors forcibly transferring enemy children from their home countries as a means of sowing chaos and More The post

America “must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” –President Dwight David Eisenhower, televised farewell address, Jan. 17, 1961. Thousands of Ukrainians are dying as they rally to save their freedom from a Russia run by a despot determined to conquer a More The post The Absence

As I have long argued, a system of immigration controls necessarily comes with an immigration police state. Warrantless searches of farms and ranches near the border. Domestic highway checkpoints. Roving Border Patrol checkpoints. Immigration raids on private businesses. Felonies for hiring illegal immigrants. Felonies for transporting illegal immigrants.

Montanans got a good dose of the good, the bad, and the ugly this week in both politics and policy. Some of our politicians’ actions are simply unbelievable in their sheer idiocy while others are just downright vicious. But like a beam of sunlight breaking through storm clouds, there’s also some good news — which More The post The On-Going Failures of Republican

I did not know Kathy Boudin, except for her public persona depicted in the media and through writing. I mourned for her when she died on May 1st, and I think that mourning had as much to do with profound sadness at the death of the echoes of the heady days of protest in the More The post Kathy Boudin: Revolution Versus Direct Action appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

It was with gratitude that I watched grizzly bears playing among the meadows. Gratitude that I got to see wolves at their den sites. Gratitude that I observed moving waves of bison surge across the valleys. Gratitude that I could see bald eagles, coyotes, fox, bighorn sheep, elk, deer, and pronghorn, among other wildlife, including More The post Gratitude for

Asian Americans have the highest median household income of the major racial and ethnic groups in the US. But the story of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the US economy is more complicated than might be apparent at first. This article challenges the model minority myth that hides significant numbers within the AAPI population More The post A Brief

I don’t know about you but so many things seem to be happening all at once in our world right now that it feels impossible, emotionally and intellectually, to keep up. As thousands marched this Saturday, in opposition to the Supreme Court’s threatened overturn of Roe vs. Wade, the news broke that another young, armed, More The post From SCOTUS to Shireen:

MISSOULA, MONTANA Conservation groups sued the U.S. Forest Service today to stop a large timber sale in the Kootenai National Forest that threatens a small and imperiled population of grizzly bears near the Montana-Canada border. The groups notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of their intent to sue it, as well. The Knotty Pine Project authorizes

Putin’s regime is engaged in a smash-and-grab imperial campaign in Ukraine. Easier to condemn that campaign than to question the mounting multi-billion budget that is now guaranteed to boost the global weapons market. Anyone who asks for basic public accounting in this war budget can easily be smeared as an agent of Putin’s regime. This is precisely the ideological

I was walking one day at the height of the Troubles in the 1970s with a friend in South Armagh close to the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. My friend, who was from the area, commented that it had great potential for tourism and was not as dangerous as people imagined “though you have to keep a look out to trip wires.” More The post The Tripwire

The prospect of an expanded war demands greater caution on the part of Russian and American decision makers.  Before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agrees to admit two additional members—Sweden and Finland—perhaps NATO should consider the long-term consequences of such a decision. More The post What Russian Folklore Can Tell Us About Russia appeared

The post Turkey Pushing Russia Out of Syria & Kazakhstan appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

You can never be too rich or too thin, an article in the high-fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar quipped way back in 1963. But can a skyscraper for the rich ever be too thin? New Yorkers these days have good reason to ask that question as they look up and contemplate the latest addition to Manhattan’s More The post The Height of Folly: Safeboxes in the Sky appeared first

Weapons, lacking sentience and moral orientation, are there to be used by all.  Once out, these creations can never be rebottled.  Effective spyware, that most malicious of surveillance tools, is one such creation, available to entities and governments of all stripes.  The targets are standard: dissidents, journalists, legislators, activists, even

Vladimir Putin has been demonized, compared to Hitler, excluded from multilateral meetings and institutions, regularly mentioned as a war criminal, and considered by the West to be an international pariah. All of the above are polite descriptions of how he is being presented. Other narratives are not fit to print. But what if we choose More The post Is Vladimir