The post Throwing Chaos at the Wall: The American Dictator’s Playbook appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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The post What We Lost appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David S. D’Amato.

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

The post Trump’s Dangerous Drone Strike Threat  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stewart Lawrence.

The post Manifestations of Israeli Impunity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daragh Cogley.

The post Palestinian First Responders and the Unbearable Sadness of Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robin Andersen.

The post To Honor Women’s History Month, Let Us Now Praise Famous Female Antiwar Activists appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

The post I Am Bombed, Therefore I Am appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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The post Understanding Israel’s Impunity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daragh Cogley.

The post Double-Tapping Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Trump’s Anti-Imperial Imperialism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Columbia’s Profile in Cowardice is Nothing New appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Yemen in Flames: From Depraved Spectacle to SignalGate appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Troy Nahumko.

The post Bombing the Bombed, Displacing the Displaced, Starving the Starved appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Lisette’s Brother Is in Prison appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Susie Day.

The post In Fox’s Wonderland, the Economy is Just Fine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ari Paul.

The post A Forgotten Casualty of the Iraq Invasion appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post The Ceasefire That Never Was appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Operaçao Jakarta: Sixty Years After the US-backed Indonesian Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Roger Peet.

The post A North-South Divide in England’s Unions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

The post The Rendition of Mahmoud Khalil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Boycotts, Divestment, and People’s Arms Embargoes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stan Cox.

The post Why the Corporate Party Won’t Last Forever appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

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

Facebook data center Los Lunas, New Mexico. Image courtesy of Facebook.

In David Pogue’s book, How to Prepare for Climate Change, he suggests readers consider relocating to what he deems “climate safe-havens,” or fifteen cities that offer protection from the worst of climate disaster. These so-called safe havens spread across the northeastern part of the United States, from Minnesota to New York, and as far south as Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Virginias.  Like the “rust belt,” “bible belt,” or “cornbelt,” these post-industrial cities are being redefined by their legacy infrastructure access to freshwater and moderate weather. 

The designation of climate safe havens offers a little bit of hope alongside the litany of dire studies highlighting the irreversible effects of climate change. Studies like this one from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)tell us that this past May was the hottest May recorded on Earth, marking it the 12th consecutive month of record-breaking heat. The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) reports that last year brought 28 weather and climate disaster that cost over a billion dollars in damages—yet another record broken. 

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Under threat from Israeli tanks, the parents and siblings of Ms. Kamla (a pseudonym) were forced to evacuate al-Bureij camp and relocate to her central Gaza home in al-Maghazi on December 25, 2023. Three days later an Israeli tank fired a shell into her home, though thankfully their family was gathered in a different room of the house so there were no injuries. Since December 28, Kamla and her family have been displaced 7 or 8 times.

When the Israeli tanks finished their operation, Kamla left the tent she had evacuated to in Dier al-Balah. She went to see if her house was still standing. She found it partially destroyed, yet still she tried to clear the rubble to live in it once more. That was not the end however, as Israel returned with more tanks and bombs.

The post Hunted by Israeli Tanks and Drones, an English Teacher Protects Her Family in Central Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by William Silversmith.

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

Image by Planet Volumes.

Although any country that challenges domination by United States corporate or military power will inevitably be the target of a sustained demonization campaign, the lies consistently issued in a torrent against Venezuela are beyond the usual level of invective. Venezuela is the most lied-about country in the corporate press of the Global North, especially in U.S. corporate media outlets.

That Venezuela has sought to align its economy to benefit its own people, instituting an impressive array of social services, health programs and political structures to facilitate grassroots participation, has drawn the consistent ire of U.S. authorities. An unrelenting cascade of lies is necessary to generate public support for the unrelenting campaign targeting the Bolivarian Revolution.

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Image by Alex Shuper.

This quotation usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” is a watchword that investigative reporter Greg Palast lives by. Since the contested 2000 presidential election, Palast’s voting vigil has probed America’s electoral system and abuses of it. The journalistic detective chronicled purported purging of mostly Black citizens from Florida’s voter rolls in his landmark 2002 book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and a 2016 documentary version updated for the Trump era with the same title. Now this steadfast watchdog of voters’ rights is back with a new nonfiction cinematic inquiry wherein the reportorial gumshoe is vigilant about Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, and Georgia is on Palast’s mind.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

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

As students worldwide head back to school this fall, in Gaza, there are no schools left. The U.N. considers the systemic obliteration of the education system by the Israeli military to be a “scholasticide” — all universities, over 80% of schools, the Central Archives of Gaza, and at least 13 libraries have been destroyed, as of April 2024, in Israel’s relentless bombing campaign. Almost 10,000 students are dead and 16,000 wounded, many killed in attacks on schools being used as sites of refuge.

Academics and university administrators in Gaza released an open letter asking for solidarity and resistance from the rest of the world: “We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”

As a graduate student, an aspiring professor, and the child of a Jewish academic, I take this call for solidarity seriously. Where and how do we learn ideologies of resistance, radicalism, and revolution? Once we have inherited a radical idea, what do we do with it? And how do we choose what ideas not to inherit?

The post Revolutionary Inheritance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt.

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These days, I find myself in a strange place. Despite the Democrats’ miraculous replacement of Biden, Trump’s reelection remains distinctly possible. I studied authoritarianism for my master’s degree, and I strongly believe that a second Trump presidency would represent the end of American democracy. Yet even so, I find myself frequently tempted to dismiss commentators’ pleas as hyperbolic handwringing. I think I’m probably not alone in this confusing toggling between panic and blaséness. After some soul-searching, I think one of the reasons for the ever-present allure of complacency, other than the natural human tendency towards denial, is Trump’s humor.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Scott Remer.

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

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

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

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Any rock music fan worthy of being considered as such knows that the Pacific Northwest was a major focal point of the music in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Indeed, a sound the industry called grunge began there. Essentially, grunge is punk rock with a lot more fuzz and a few more hooks in the melody lines. In its artistic heyday, so-called punk bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, the Melvins and TAD played clubs, dorm rooms, basements, bars and art galleries in their quest for the fulfillment playing music brings. Somewhere along the line, the media and industry recognized the phenomenon and labeled it grunge. Some of the bands were able to make a living at it and some became incredibly wealthy—something which wasn’t necessarily the best (or the intended) outcome. Other bands brought in other sounds and styles to the music and the scene it created. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell brought in his version of a soaring and melodic metal guitar; Bikini Kill and Mecca Normal brought in a feminist anger and a legion of female fans. The Gits did a bit of everything and, in doing so, stood alone in the scene; they weren’t grunge, metal, or riot grrl. Their singer Mia Zapata had a voice that sometimes sounded a little like Pat Benatar, sometimes a little like Patti Smith, and sometimes like that folksinger you heard one afternoon in the park. Comparisons barely help describe her singing because it remained distinctly her own. The guitar of Joe Spleen, the bass of Matt Dresdner, and the percussion section that included Bob Lee, Bruce Docheneaux and Steven Moriarty completed the sound.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

The post The Transfer Agreement: Nazi Support for a Jewish State in Palestine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Arvind Dilawar.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

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

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

Image by Heather Mount.

Between armed violence and fascism within the United States and the US government’s support for genocide abroad, manufacturers of weapons are profiting wildly. Within the US, arms producers are responsible for fueling war crimes in Gaza and mass shootings across the United States. The profit models of these companies are the same: more violence means more customers. Stoke the fear, fury, and legitimacy of conflict to sell more of your product. Generate a public culture receptive to the idea of weapons as the answer to insecurity, including through the construction and entrenchment of gender and racial power dynamics.

Profitmaking requires marketing. Enter the so-called militainment industry—the marketing of guns and militarism through films, television, video games, and now social media influencers. Gun manufacturers and military agencies, especially in the United States, have long had an outsized influence on the entertainment industry, and they use gendered and racialized tropes to promote gun sales along with a wider culture of militarism, war, and armed violence. But over the last two decades, the methods by which gun manufacturers and other military contractors have been able to influence people across many geographies—in particular young, white, cisgendered, heteronormative men—have become increasingly insidious. And the ramifications for violence are profound.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Timothy Messer-Kruse.

The post Talk, Talk; Bomb, Bomb appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Gerald Sussman.

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

Image by Koushik Chowdavarapu.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE — Picture if you will the citizens of a small town in Northeast Ohio, facing a daunting toxic threat yet trapped in a maze of regulatory capture at the so-called Environmental Protection Agency. Not the citizens of East Palestine, though they too face a challenging quest for the truth about the environmental health threats they may face. But the citizens in and around Uniontown, Ohio have been trapped in such a quagmire for decades, subjected to a dystopian level of gaslighting from the powers that be in an effort to bury the truth regarding the ultra-hazardous poisons reportedly dumped at the town landfill.

The Industrial Excess Landfill (IEL) in Uniontown closed in 1980 and was designated as an EPA Superfund site in 1984, listed as one of the most contaminated sites in the country. Akron area rubber companies were the biggest known polluters at the IEL, dumping millions of gallons of industrial waste and chemicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But local citizen eyewitnesses have long testified that the U.S. military was another covert client in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. This includes the IEL’s former owner Charles Kittinger, who came forward in 2001 to speak of clandestine dumping of three metal eggs of nuclear weapons waste he was eerily warned not to speak of.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Greg M. Schwartz.

Image by Hennie Stander.

We are endlessly and repetitively treated to sermons on the wonders of capitalism. Everybody will be taken care of, with the proviso that you are willing to work. As I have had frequent cause to note, that a line has to be furiously propagated across every channel speaks to a lack of concrete reality. And as more people, especially young people, see that they have declining possibilities, more questioning inevitably arises.

The only thing worse in capitalism to having a job, however unpleasant, is not having a job. Unemployment benefits are barely at starvation rates and end all too soon. Naturally, that is worse in the United States than most other advanced capitalist countries of the Global North. Six months is the limit set at a rate well less than half of what your wages were in the job you just lost. And given that six months is the average time necessary to secure new employment, that means around half of those collecting unemployment insurance will likely have a spell of no income at all.

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

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

As someone who works against weapons and militarism, and war, it’s hard not to see everything through that lens—including the relentless and increasing attacks on women, pregnant people, queer folks, and sexual assault survivors. And it’s hard not to see these attacks as connected—to each other and the broader spectrum of violence, including war and genocide. Perhaps understanding these connections can help us stand together in solidarity for all our freedom.

The post Misogyny and the Attacks on Bodily Autonomy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Julie Wark.

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

Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

Defenders of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” had their hands full last month, particularly when it came to freedom of the press, a cornerstone of genuine democracies. On May 5, Al Jazeera reported that its offices in East Jerusalem — internationally recognized Palestinian territory occupied by Israel — were raided and shut down by Israeli police following the banning of the news network by the Israeli government. Al Jazeera continues to operate in the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but is still barred from reporting or broadcasting in Israel proper. Then, on May 21, the Associated Press reported that Israeli authorities had confiscated AP’s equipment in Southern Israel, despite the news agency submitting to Israeli military censorship. AP’s equipment was eventually returned, but only after the United States’ government intervened on behalf of the US company. Across the border, in the Gaza Strip, the situation for journalists was much more dire. Among the more than 37,266 Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israeli genocide, as reported by Al Jazeera, were at least 103 journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

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

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lance Olsen.

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

Jonathan Cott has written about the meaning of those stories and rhymes we consider to be for children. He has also written about the childlike nature of certain rock and pop songs, especially certain songs by The Beatles and Donovan. He has interviewed artists, musicians, writers and others from Chinua Achebe to John Lennon and many more. His works refer to everyone from Carl Jung to Tony Bennett; Rollo May to the Old Testament; Greg Bateson to Gaston Bachelard. At times, his ability to connect seemingly disparate phenomena is mind-blowing. Other time, one nods their head knowingly at a reference that they might have often considered just to see it verified via Cott’s quotation and argument tying the two things together. Some might consider his considerations too fanciful while others might see them as so simply obvious they wonder why he bothered to even write them down.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

Image by Dan Cristian Pădureț.

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That should be a commonplace idea. And that inevitably means facing up to the necessity of putting an end to capitalism in favor of an economic system of rationality, sustainability and equity for all the world’s peoples.

It can’t be said too many times that the concept of “green capitalism” is a chimera. Unfortunately, belief in that chimera is not limited to the world’s center-left political parties; it extends to the world’s Green parties. Various “Green New Deal” programs have been floated in recent years, generally revolving around a massive buildout of renewable-energy infrastructure and strengthening the social safety net. On their own, there is no rational argument that such programs, should they materialize, would not provide some benefits. But how transformative are such programs?

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

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

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As we enter the eighth month of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, the flow of weapons to Israel continues from the United States, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and other Western countries. Even as some governments claim to have halted transfers or to not be sending weapons at all, they continue to provide licences or parts and components that are instrumental to the continuing onslaught. As people are now being pulled from the rubble in Rafah, in a strip of land already known as the world’s “largest open-air prison,” in a country and people bordered and confined by a violent settler colonial state, the relationships between the profiteers of the military-industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the border industrial complex come starkly into focus. And in the demands of the student encampments, the connections of these structures of state violence to universities becomes clear as well.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Beaumont.

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

Image by Marcel Strauß.

As always when a representative of the right wing tells you he or she is campaigning to bring “freedom,” be afraid. Very afraid. For “freedom” in these cases means freedom for the richest financiers and industrialists to do whatever they want.

For them, “Freedom” is for capital, not for human beings without capital to invest. Today’s exhibit is the offensive against working people that is taking place in Argentina, where the new extreme right president, Javier Milei, is determined to see how far capitalist ideology can be pushed. So far, Argentines have pushed back but Milei, cheered on by domestic and international big business leaders, is nothing if not determined to ram through his austerity packages. And he has shown no inclination to allow mere democracy to stand in his way.

Nonetheless, there is no surprise here. President Milei ran on a program of extreme austerity, brandishing a chainsaw at his election rallies. Unfortunately, enough Argentines bought his siren songs, or were desperate enough to try anything given the country’s punishing inflation, to elect him, ending a one-term period in executive office by the ordinarily dominant Peronists. Alas, doing something new for the sake of doing something new, when it is aimed at you, rarely works. And here there is actually nothing new. President Milei simply promoted standard hard right ideology, albeit promoting it with unusual vigor. Snake oil is snake oil, as Argentine working people are already finding out.

The post Capitalism Attacks Argentine Workers and You May be Next appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Image by Ed Rampell.

From The New York Post to The Wall Street Journal, right-wing pundits have lined up to malign students across the United States who have rightfully criticized their schools for supporting the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. As the genocide continues to unfold — claiming the lives of 35,562 Palestinians, including 15,000 children, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing — students, faculty and staff have brought overdue scrutiny to the complicity of their universities, whose endowments are altogether valued at more than $839 billion per the National Association of College and University Business Officers and invested extensively in the Israeli economy, including weapons manufacturers profiting directly from Palestinian death. Rather than accept that students oppose their tuition dollars being spent to kill Palestinians, right-wing pundits have instead accused them of being “paid protesters” in the employ of philanthropist George Soros.

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I am beyond tired of writing and reading about Trump, his minions Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, and the evils they plan to inflict upon the world. Reading or watching the news is a daily exercise in dread, self-torment, and exhaustion. The return of spring notwithstanding, things are grim these days. The Trumpist menace seems of a piece with a far-right axis on the march in India, Russia, Israel, China, and Hungary. Of course, it’s futile to wring one’s hands and lament Trumpian aspirations to authoritarianism without taking concrete action to prevent them. Yet despite nearly eight years of experience confronting the Trumpian specter, the answer to the traditional, eminently practical leftist question “What is to be done?” remains elusive, and the sense of burnout and political defeat—with the concomitant, complicated welter of emotions —is a specter difficult to vanquish.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Scott Remer.

Image by Jon Tyson.

I am beyond tired of writing and reading about Trump, his minions Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, and the evils they plan to inflict upon the world. Reading or watching the news is a daily exercise in dread, self-torment, and exhaustion. The return of spring notwithstanding, things are grim these days. The Trumpist menace seems of a piece with a far-right axis on the march in India, Russia, Israel, China, and Hungary. Of course, it’s futile to wring one’s hands and lament Trumpian aspirations to authoritarianism without taking concrete action to prevent them. Yet despite nearly eight years of experience confronting the Trumpian specter, the answer to the traditional, eminently practical leftist question “What is to be done?” remains elusive, and the sense of burnout and political defeat—with the concomitant, complicated welter of emotions —is a specter difficult to vanquish.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Scott Remer.

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

USC Pro-Palestine encampment, YouTube screengrab.

The encampments have gone. Tall metal riot fences ring USC. Underpaid security hovers nervously at metal detectors. They paw through your bag when you enter, past the receipts, gum, phone, AirPods, and the overdue library book you never even opened. They’re searching for something. A tent? A Palestinian flag? A keffiyeh? A signed declaration of your commitment against genocide? What they are searching for is unclear, and it’s apparent they themselves don’t even know. The result is not the point; the display is. Like most college campuses, USC is invested in the performative, the circus act in all its summer and acrobatics and glory, something to distract us, for the moment, from the mundanity of reality. The mundanity that college campuses are really just another business: meaningless, archaic, and invested only in its commodification and profit.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ruth Fowler.

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

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

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One of the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States has allowed an decades-long ethnic cleansing to morph into a genocide, a horror that could be stopped with one phone call; has escalated the drilling of oil and gas despite the existential threat of global warming; forced railroad workers to swallow a bad contract by breaking their strike; and spent his Senate career as an errand boy for banks. And that’s the lesser evil!

Joe Biden really is the lesser evil in this dismal race for the White House, and that such an office holder is easily not the worst candidate is surely sufficient to illustrate the decline of the world’s still extraordinarily dangerous superpower. Out of more than 300 million people, this is the best the country can do? Given the quite understandable reluctance (to put it mildly) for the types of folks who are reading these words to contemplate voting either for President Biden or Donald Trump, what do we do when the lesser evil is so evil that he has the sobriquet “Genocide” attached to his name?

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Shai Davidai.

After throwing a foot-stomping tantrum earlier this morning, Shai Davidai, an untenured Columbia University business professor, was denied access to campus.

A self-proclaimed Zionist, Davidai is an Israeli-American who served in the IDF (“proud of it”) and has continually harassed Pro-Palestine protestors at Columbia, labeling them as anti-semitic, pro-Hamas “terrorists.”

On several occasions, Davidai called for the National Guard to be brought in to brutalize pro-Palestine students. He’s even gone so far as to characterize Columbia protestors as “Hitler-youth.”

Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine have started a petition to get him fired.

There is a laundry list of complaints lodged against Davidai, most recently by the 15 Jewish students at Columbia who were arrested and suspended last week during their occupation protest, calling on the school to divest funds from Israel.

In a Jewish Voice for Peace Instagram post, the students called out Davidai directly, writing:

“Futhermore, the disgraceful Shai Davidai publically called us Judenrat Kapost, and told us we would be on ‘the last train to Auschwitz.’ We do not feel safe with this professor still teaching on campus, having access to the Jewish community spaces we cherish, much less portraying himself as a valiant protector and spokesperson of Jews on campus while insulting our ancestors’ memory. Almost every suspended Jewish student los family members in the Holocaust.”

Davidai comes from a long line of assholes. His father, Eli Davidai, is an Israeli business executive who has served as General Manager of ARC, which describes itself as a “leading global advanced manufacturing service provider.”

According to ARC’s 2018 SEC filing:

“Eli Davidai, [ARC’s] General Manager of Operations as of May 2017, has been a Managing Director at QMI [Quadrant Management Inc.] since 1992, where he is responsible for making investments and overseeing companies at the firm.  Additionally, Mr. Davidai was elected to the Company’s Board of Directors on June 5, 2018.”

Among other things, ARC manufactures weapons parts, including “polymer magazine for NATO Compatible weapons,” “triggers and hammers,” “precision guided munitions components,” and more.

In 2016, ARC won an award for an AR-15 component and, in 2010, scored a prize for an “explosive device made for a Department of Defense application.”

ARC also makes parts for MCX and MPX rifles, which are used by the Israeli military.

As you probably guessed, Shai’s parents are extremely wealthy. Eli and his wife, Zohara Davidai, have sponsored the Arrhythmia Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu was fitted for a pacemaker last year.

Interestingly, as @cholent_lover exposed on X, Eli Davidai has had a long business relationship with Alan Quasha, CEO of Quadrant Management, who also serves on the Board of Directors of ARC. Quasha is an interesting character—an international businessman and venture capitalist who is worth billions.

Quasha has been involved in everything from Harken Energy (where George W. Bush was accused of insider trading as he sat on Harken’s Board) to his dealings with the Saudis, US intelligence, and even the Clintons.

Quasha is also the founder of Quadrant Security Strategies, which “makes equity investments in innovative and emerging private companies that support US National Security.”

To top it off, Shai Davidai’s grandfather, Benny Davidai (a founder of El Al Airlines), was a notorious strikebreaker.

The apple doesn’t fall far, as they say.

Meanwhile, as pro-Palestine protests spread across US campuses, Columbia faculty walked out this afternoon in a massive show of solidarity with student protestors.

Image by Columbia University, Associate Professor Hiba Bou Akar.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

Australian Nuclear Free Alliance gathering, March 2024. Image by Ray Acheson.

AUKUS is the awkward-sounding acronym for “Australia-United Kingdom-United States”—a trilateral military alliance that stands poised to waste billions of dollars, proliferate high-level radioactive material and impose its safekeeping on First Nations communities for hundreds of thousands of years, increase global militarism and potentially provoke a nuclear war. If this doesn’t sound like a good investment to you, you’re not wrong. The deeper one digs into the details of this deal, the more one becomes flummoxed by cascading levels of absurdity. It is strikingly disadvantageous for Australia, yet other countries including Canada, Japan, and New Zealand/Aotearoa, have expressed interest in collaborating. Australian activists have been mobilizing to stop AUKUS for several years; it’s past time those living in other AUKUS states or those clamouring to partner with the alliance get informed and active, too.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

Image by Erin Testone.

Though Utah’s state government has failed to pull the Great Salt Lake from the verge of collapse, on March 20, 2024, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a law that prohibits the state and local governments from granting legal personhood to animals, plants, or major ecosystems like the Great Salt Lake. The law is a reaction to a growing rights of nature movement in Utah seeking to secure legal personhood for the Great Salt Lake. By passing this law, Utah joins Ohio and Florida in banning rights of nature as a response to popular, grassroots campaigns seeking to secure rights-based protections for the ecosystems all life depends on. Because rights of nature laws would disrupt corporate exploitation of the natural world, these legislative efforts to squash the rights of nature movement are entirely predictable and similar to historical efforts to squash other rights-based movements like the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. Instead of giving up in the face of setbacks like these, rights of nature advocates must learn how to enforce rights of nature outside of courtrooms and the legislative process along with adapting tactics and strategies for the long game of transforming the legal system into one with a rights of nature framing.

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A still from director Alex Garland’s film “Civil War.” (Courtesy A24)

My derriere still hurts from sitting on the edge of my seat at an IMAX theater while gawking at London-born director Alex Garland’s Civil War, which draws its inspiration from the USA’s contemporary red-state-versus-blue-state zeitgeist. Civil War marks the second time in US history – since Major-General Robert Ross’ British soldiers invaded the White House on August 24, 1814 – that the Executive Mansion has been attacked by Brits. But although this chilling movie’s director is indeed an Englishman, the armed invaders in the provocative Civil War are actually Americans engaged in this insurrectionary, incendiary fable that has the ring of truth.

In Civil War Garland brings the war home with his stark, startling dramatization of the type of fierce combat Americans are used to watching from afar on screens – and from their perches in imperialist cockpits and tank turrets – but are being fought right here in the homeland. As armed rebels march on Washington, D.C. – not on some hapless Third World country du jour – we witness shocking scenes of the Lincoln Memorial and White House, as well as the heartland, under attack in Civil War. (However, a closeup of machine gun nests in the Statue of Liberty’s torch, which is depicted in posters, does not seem to actually appear per se onscreen.)

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Image by Markus Spiske.

Published in 1936, “Shooting an Elephant” remains one of George Orwell’s most celebrated essays. In it, the English writer recounts an incident from his time as a police officer in modern day Myanmar, then known as Burma, part of the British Empire. Responding to calls of a rampaging elephant, Orwell finds the animal docile, but nevertheless feels compelled to kill it, rather than appear weak before the crowd who has gathered to watch. In allowing his conscience to be overwhelmed, he experiences how colonialism dehumanizes not just the colonized, but the colonizers as well.

“I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys,” writes Orwell. “He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy …. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

Although Orwell is writing specifically of the British Empire, he quite clearly intends for his essay to be read more broadly, as applicable to contemporary fascism in Europe as British colonialism in Asia. And so too does his insight extend to today in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine.

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Every day, journalists like myself receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails from publicists pitching their respective clients as sources to consider for this or that story in the current newscycle. It’s not every day, however, that you’re pitched an apologist for genocide.

That is, in essence, the email I received last month from Joshua Steinreich, a publicist with the Steinreich Communications Group, who was pitching Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, as a source on the yet-impending Israeli invasion of Rafah, the potential next phase of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Despite the Israeli military having killed 31,726 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children and 8,400 women, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing, the Israeli military “seeks to minimize civilian casualties,” while Hamas “gains from the loss of life,” in Melamed’s estimation.

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Deadly Connections in the Desert

Image by Ray Acheson.

Last month, organizers and activists from around the United States gathered in Tucson, Arizona for a nationwide summit to Stop Cop City—or, more accurately, Cop Cities. As new research has revealed, there are at least 69 militarized police training facilities in the works across the country. Each was put in motion in or after 2020, clearly a direct response to the Black Lives Matter uprisings that dominated city streets for months to condemn racialised police violence and demand the defunding of police.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

Image by Jon Tyson.

Who decided we should give all our money to landlords? Did you vote for that? I didn’t. You didn’t, either. And if you have thoughts of leaving renting behind to buy, the costs of mortgages are, not surprisingly, rising dramatically as well.

As far as I know, no landlord has been recorded as holding a literal gun to the head of tenants to sign a lease. But then there is no need for them to do so, as “market forces” do the work for them. At bottom, the problem is that housing is a capitalist market commodity. As long as housing remains a commodity, housing costs will continue to become ever more unaffordable. To put this in other words: As long as housing is not a human right, but instead something that has to be competed for and owned by a small number of people, the holders of the good (housing) will take advantage and jack up prices as high as possible.

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Bret Stephens speaking at the 92nd Street Y, Youtube screenshot.

On October 15, 2023, a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel and in the early days of an indiscriminate Israeli response, New York Times editorialist Bret Stephens wrote a column titled “Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War.”

After allowing that “[r]easonable people can criticize Israel for not allowing enough time for civilians to get out of harm’s way,” Stephens, having rhetorically covered himself, endorses the impending ground invasion and arrives at the conclusion inscribed in the column’s title. “The central cause of Gaza’s misery is Hamas,” he writes. “It alone bears the blame for the suffering it has inflicted on Israel and knowingly invited against Palestinians.”

After five months of war, at least 30,000 Palestinians dead (12,000 children, certainly an undercount), innumerable documented atrocities, a partial indictment for genocide, and the prospect of a spiraling Middle East conflagration, you might think his tune would have shifted, even a little. After all, even Tom Friedman has managed to squeeze out some criticism of Israel.

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Still from Israelism.

Without presenting a single shred of evidence, Rep. Nancy Pelosi recently contended on CNN that protesters challenging U.S. and Israeli policies in Gaza are doing the Kremlin’s bidding. “For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see… I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia. And I say that having looked at this for a long time now… I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that,” Pelosi squealed.(Paging Joe McCarthy!)

Nevertheless, undaunted, two thirty-something American Jewish filmmakers have made Israelism, a documentary that is the worst ideological nightmare for the mindless pro-Israel camp. Erin Axelrod and Sam Eilertsen expertly give the lie to the one-sided propaganda about Palestinians that American Jews and others have been indoctrinated with regarding the Israeli occupation, apartheid and other dehumanizing policies, in a skillfully rendered, award-winning 80-minute nonfiction film. Challenging the dominant pro-Israel mythos, American Jewish and Palestinian activists, along with independent presidential candidate/academic Cornel West and intellectual Noam Chomsky, expose the lies that have been perpetrated and perpetuated by the ultra-Zionist militaristic regime and its supporters, threatening their stranglehold over the hearts and minds of Jewish and other Americans.

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Israeli ground operations in Gaza, November 1, 2023. Photo: IDF. CC BY-SA 3.0

There is nothing new under the sun in terms of incitement to war methods or the dehumanization techniques necessary to create compliant and bloodthirsty populations. The only thing that is new are the shifting and doomed populations who find themselves in the way of empire. Students of history, generally without a shred of self-examination, congratulate themselves for being born to a more enlightened time knowing that even if they were transported to those historical events, they would never have participated. They would have been the principled objector. It's a comforting thought with absolutely no skin in the game. But when given present-day examples of such horror, and an opportunity to, if nothing else, be on the right side of history, they fall prey to the techniques that always worked in the past. They believe the current troubles are simply too complicated to unravel; that it's all completely different from historical precedents. Unless a chink in the armor of this thinking takes place, we are doomed to move from genocide to genocide, whenever a population or group is deemed unfavorable or simply in the way. The words may not be exactly the same, but they always bear a striking similarity. That is, they dehumanize the other and make any and all attempts to rid themselves of the so-called savages part of a greater good. You still have to behave in a certain non-murderous ways within your in-group, but all bets are off when combating “the other”. It's like quantum mechanics don't seem to apply to everyday macro interactions. You get to murder and annihilate others, but still tuck your kids in at night like you aren't a monster.

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A newspaper clipping glimpsed in a new documentary is headlined “New Mexico’s Infant Mortality Highest in U.S., Report Says.” Lois Lipman’s film explains why that rate is so high for babies, as well as for others, especially Indigenous and Hispanic inhabitants, in her gripping First We Bombed in New Mexico. Onscreen Tina Cordova, born and raised at Tularosa, only 30 miles from the Trinity Site, declares: “We are the first victims of the atomic bomb.” While the title of Lipman’s gripping 95-minute chronicle may be derived from Joseph Heller’s 1967 satirical antiwar play We Bombed in New Haven, this new production, which won jury and audience awards at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, is in the tradition of anti-nuclear bomb nonfiction classics such as 1982’s The Atomic Café, Judy Irving/Chris Beaver’s 1982 Dark Circle, Jim Heddle’s 1984 Strategic Trust: The Making of Nuclear Free Palau, Dennis O’Rourke’s 1986 Half Life, and Robert Stone’s 1988 Oscar-nominated Radio Bikini.

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Image by Asim Z Kodappana.

What we feel defines who we are and what we believe. Such a statement seems obvious to the point of tautology. Yet we often don’t behave as if we genuinely credit it. Many of us are, despite increasingly savage attacks from neofascist champions of unreason, still children of the Enlightenment. And broadly, the Enlightenment dream was to strengthen people’s reasoning powers to the point where they would persuade one another through logical, rational argumentation and public debates conducted with impeccable calm. Feelings were irrelevant to this project, unnecessary, potential bearers of error. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the fathers of calculus, expressed this rationalist attitude especially clearly in 1679 when he wrote about his pet project to create a universal language, declaring with poignant optimism, “The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.”

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Salvador Allende.

Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman is probably best known to Americano audiences for his play Death and the Maiden, a parable about torture that Roman Polanski adapted for the big screen in 1994, starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley (there were two other versions, a 2016 Iranian reboot plus 2020’s The Secrets We Keep, with Noomi Rapace and Chris Messina). From 1970-1973 the Buenos Aires-born Dorfman served as a cultural and press advisor to Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile. In 1971 Dorfman co-authored How to Read Donald Duck, Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, which has just been re-published by OR Books.

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