Starbucks workers are unionizing at a breakneck pace. We ran the numbers and found that more than 2,000 Starbucks workers are now unionized — and that number will likely triple in the coming months.
Projecting based on current NLRB filings alone, the Starbucks union is likely to have 6,047 workers at 227 locations in the next few months. (Elliot Stoler / Wikimedia
Kategori: Engelske
Workers at World of Warcraft–maker Activision Blizzard have voted to unionize. Fourteen-hour workdays and alleged rampant sexual harassment were among the issues that prompted them to organize the first recognized labor union at a publicly traded video game producer.
Several hundred Activision Blizzard employees staged a walkout at company headquarters
Good news: if you’re gay or bisexual and under-18, conversion therapy is going to be made illegal. But it’s bad news for everyone else in the LGBTQ+ community, as the government’s proposed ban has more holes in it than a distractingly tasty slice of Swiss cheese.
Announced in this year’s Queen’s Speech, the ban will make conversion therapy illegal when it targets
In 1927, the Irish republican Michael Flannery emigrated from the quiet backroads of Tipperary to the crowded streets of New York City, swapping a life of rebellion for a humdrum career in life insurance. But the Irish American community hadn’t forgotten about the old country, and as the Troubles began in Northern Ireland, Flannery found himself at the heart
Joe Manchin stalled and killed the Build Back Better bill under pressure from big business. He could now support a compromise budget with drug pricing reforms, but the pharmaceutical industry is doing everything it can to make sure he doesn’t.
An ad from the Alliance for Patient Access warning that drug pricing reforms would “hurt innovation” and prevent companies
When six suitcases full of guns are discovered on an Irish dock in 1971, suspicion falls on a newly founded organisation of Irish Americans known as Noraid. For nearly 30 years, the US, British and Irish governments accused the group of being a front for the Provisional IRA and of funnelling weapons and cash from the pockets of Irish America to the coffers of the
Olympic Games host cities experience increased gentrification, police surveillance, and environmental destruction. Anti-Olympics activists hosted their second transnational summit in Paris last weekend to put an end to the games’ destruction.
Activists at the second-ever global anti-Olympics summit in Paris, France, which took place on May 21–22,
A single call from an anonymous tipster is all it takes for the government to take children from their families
Chileans have long known about Colonia Dignidad, a German colony in Chile depicted in the Netflix series A Sinister Sect whose settlers committed countless acts of pedophilia, murder, and torture. Less discussed: the Chilean right’s complicity in those crimes.
Historical footage from A Sinister Sect (Netflix).
The Netflix miniseries A Sinister Sect is
A billionaire-backed network of free-market fundamentalists is ginning up controversy over “wokeness” in American schools with an ulterior motive: to demolish public education.
Texas governor Greg Abbott has announced his intention to challenge a Supreme Court ruling that guarantees free public education for all kids. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
The shockwaves from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have reached across the world – all the way beyond the Urals to the globe’s northernmost point. The Arctic Council, established in 1996 as a forum for the eight countries that sit within the Arctic Circle – Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, the US, Sweden and Russia- was in early March suspended
According to Gallup polls, the number of Americans who self-identify as below middle-class, including those who identify as working-class, is on the rise — a rise especially pronounced among those age 18–34.
More Republicans are likely to identify as working-class than Democrats. (Alberto Casetta / Unsplash)
The United States is the country where everyone
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
“Nor can we expect to see Labor take serious action to deal with climate change. Labor is committed to the fossil fuel industries and its carbon emissions targets are a joke.”
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After the police cleared Boris Johnson of all but one rule breach, photos have emerged of the PM drinking booze at a separate gathering during lockdown. How have the Met let him get away with it?
Plus: Australia has a new PM and the Tories are still all over the place on an energy company windfall tax.
With Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani.
The Australian election saw historic defeats for the Right and its backers in the Murdoch media. But the Labor Party can't change the country without fighting for a robust, progressive economic agenda.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese during the Labor Party election night event on May 21, 2022 in Sydney, Australia. (James D. Morgan / Getty Images)
If the 2019
The climate movement is stepping up pressure on banks to stop the flow of cash to the oil and gas industry.
On Saturday 21 May in the seaside spot of Trapani, Sicily, four of us – crew members from the search-and-rescue ship Iuventa – will face an Italian prosecutor. We’re all German nationals working for Jugend Rettet, a Berlin-based NGO. Our offence? Running rescue missions that saved over 14,000 people from drowning in the central Mediterranean
“The May Day demonstrations illustrated the political and social tensions that are building up. On the one hand, a rally in support of the government around the CUT and the coalition parties, on the other, a left-wing opposition with a dissident class struggle trade union pole and social movements.”
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Left-wing presidential candidate Gustavo Petro has been fighting Colombia’s far-right paramilitaries for decades. The revelation of a recent plot to murder Petro is unsurprising, but his campaign still appears strong ahead of Sunday’s election.
Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro speaks during a campaign rally on May 11, 2022, in Fusagasugá,
Market ideologues paint Amazon as a model of a flexible, networked platform capitalism. Yet Amazon’s growth has revitalized parts of the Fordism that Silicon Valley claimed to have overcome — including the rise of an organized blue-collar workforce.
Workers sort out parcels in the outbound dock at the Amazon fulfillment center in Eastvale, California,
When he was alive, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconic art leveled a powerful opposition to inequality and racism. Since his death, his work has been co-opted, emptied of all political content, and commodified to be sold as an image of New York’s vanishing cool.
Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Rainbow Roof on September 19, 1985. (Patrick McMullan / Getty Images)
In
Against all odds, Amazon workers in New York organized a successful union against one of the biggest companies in the world. Here's how.
The world’s second-richest man is using social media to push back against any hint that corporate greed is stoking inflation — and to send a message about his news preferences in the Washington Post, the paper he owns.
Jeff Bezos attends the Baby2Baby 10-Year Gala presented by Paul Mitchell at Pacific Design Center on November 13, 2021, in West Hollywood, California.
Ric Prado fled Cuba after the 1959 revolution when he was ten years old. He went on to work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for twenty-four years — an experience he recounts in his recent memoir, Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior — and then to work in private military operations, […]
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
The United States is excluding Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from the forthcoming Summit of the Americas. Washington probably wasn’t expecting that much of Latin America, led by Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, would publicly push back in response.
US president Joe Biden listens as Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador speaks during the
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
Lea Ypi’s life is awash with instances which makes one question what it means to be free. From Hoxha’s Albania to The London School of Economics, Ypi’s life – as evoked in her book, is an incredible way to explore the connection between the personal and political.
Thanks to its stubborn inaction on climate change, the conservative coalition was trounced in this weekend’s election in Australia. With Greens and independents set to hold the balance of power, it’s time for the climate movement to step up its demands.
Climate activists march through Sydney during the "Strike 4 Climate" actions of May 6, 2022. (Lisa Maree
Hot dog fingers, a talking raccoon, butt plug karate, Michelle Yeoh in dominatrix gear: Everything Everywhere All at Once has something for everyone. Past the absurdity is a deeply (and sometimes overly) sentimental tale about a family struggling to make it.
It’s a waste of time to write about Everything Everywhere All at Once’s plot, because you just need
For a brief period after World War II, Third World nations played an active role in shaping the world economic order and fostering development. For all its promises and a few success stories, neoliberalism hasn’t done the same.
British economist John Maynard Keynes addresses the Bretton Woods conference, where the International Monetary Fund and precursor
Reading and cruising, Jeffrey Escoffier once wrote, “are not such dissimilar techniques.” Both require sustained and dialectical interpretive practices, and he enjoyed them both greatly. He forged this connection while doing both in the mid-1960s: devouring the entire corpus of sexual sociology while pursuing the pleasures of the flesh in New York City’s
The Squad and other progressives voted this week to ramp up the “war on terror” here at home. Right now, they might find it politically convenient to prop up draconian national security measures — but at some point, they're going to have to take a stand.
Federal officers attempt to disperse racial justice protesters in Portland, Oregon, July 30, 2020. (Nathan
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 defines each era? Often, historians lean on terms that point to technology: bronze, steam, carbon, silicon. So is technology a fundamental aspect of being human? On this wide-ranging Trip, the gang take on one of their biggest topics yet.
Starting from the basis that technology is an application of knowledge for a practical purpose, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia
“Despite their unfulfilled promise, the Gary convention — its debates and written program — and the later formation of NBIPP remain important events to study and learn from.”
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United States (USA),
Anti-racism and Islamophobia
Die Linke’s Stefan Liebich recently met with members of Québec solidaire to talk politics. Bringing together vantage points from both sides of the Atlantic, the discussion covered political strategy, regional differences, and tactics for future left victories.
Three hundred thousand march in the streets of Quebec, 2012. (Brian Lapuz / Flickr)
In the middle
Despite setbacks, from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, socialist candidates eked out victories in this week’s primaries. Centrist challengers, backed by super PAC and corporate money, massively underperformed. Democratic socialists aren't going away anytime soon.
DSA member Summer Lee, who won her congressional primary in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, will
Alex Garland’s Men is a horror movie about how awful it is to be a woman. But he’s so intent on driving this point home that all the terror drains out of the film by the end, and only annoyance at the didactic exercise remains.
Jessie Buckley stars in Alex Garland's new horror flick. (A24)
The new A24 folk-horror film Men, currently playing in theaters, is creepy as
If George W. Bush is not going to stand trial for war crimes, he should at the very least stop appearing in public to weigh in on unjustified wars, as he did this week when he accidentally referred to the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
George W. Bush accidentally invoked his own war crimes this week. (TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images)
On January
Before Roe v. Wade, women set up referral networks to help each other access abortions. One referral coordinator was Carol Giardina, who connected her college classmates to safe abortion providers even though it was illegal. The time for such bravery has come again.
Protesters raise their fists during a mass demonstration against New York State abortion
Why the conflict in Ukraine is a disaster for the poor of this planet.
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With recent legislation, the Tories have restricted immigration, disenfranchised voters, and enhanced police powers. The Labour Party leadership needs to do something to stop this turn in British politics.
British prime minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street to attend the weekly Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, May 18, 2022.
With a police investigation into PartyGate ending with no additional fines for the Prime Minister, has a Met stitch up saved Boris Johnson’s skin?
Plus: Rishi Sunak is the first politician to appear in the Sunday Times Rich List; George W Bush jokes about the Iraq War; and Palestine Action get arrested.
With Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani.
Canada’s pretense of being a champion of peace and mediation conceals the aim of its foreign military training operations. These operations are not instances of bighearted largesse — they are strategic, geopolitical power projections.
Training taking place at Canadian Manoeuvre Training Center on Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Denwood, Alberta.
Private equity firms have conspired to flood the emergency health care market with ER doctors in an effort to cut labor costs — in the midst of what patients will still experience as an acute physician shortage with declining standards of care.
While their wages are falling, doctors say private equity-imposed compensation schemes and staffing cuts are leading
Lula is free and polling ahead for this year’s presidential election in Brazil. Is the far right losing its stronghold in Brazilian politics?
Lula da Silva speaking to his supporters in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, 2018. (Victor Moriyama / Getty Images)
Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is finally free from prison, and he is beating President
Amazon has released a laughable statement denying what’s been obvious since the company’s founding: that it, like many other US companies, actively and systematically violates international labor standards prohibiting anti-union interference in workers’ business.
A worker sorts out packages in the outbound dock at Amazon fulfillment center in Eastvale,
One hundred years ago, Sinclair Lewis’s satirical novel Babbitt skewered 20th-century America’s booming midsize city and the complacency and conformity of its middle-class inhabitants.
The American writer and playwright Sinclair Lewis, 1930. (Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images)
One hundred years ago this September, the American suburban
Abortion rights are economic rights.
The miniseries stars Rosario Dawson in a depoliticized dystopia
Tony Blair and New Labour consolidated the economic policies of Thatcherism and fostered a deep cynicism about politics through their lies about Iraq. The crisis of the last decade and its potentially ruinous consequences are their legacy to modern Britain.
Former British Labour prime minister Tony Blair, photographed in 2012. (Chatham House / Flickr)
Tempest contributors Justin Feldman and Sam Friedman discuss the shortcomings of the Left in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and try to trace a path forward.
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United States (USA),
Covid-19 Pandemic
Under Fidel Castro, Cuba backed independence movements across the Third World. This support was decisive in battling South African apartheid, thwarting US covert operations, and securing self-rule across southern Africa.
Cuban soldiers display a poster of Fidel Castro on January 9, 1989, during a ceremony held at the Cuban training camp of Punda, near
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