Recently, Donald Trump shared a video known as the “Flying King”-- an AI-generated spectacle in which he pilots a fighter plane emblazoned with the words “King Trump,” raining brown sludge, representing excrement, onto a group of protesters below. This grotesque display seems to be a direct response to the widespread “No Kings” protests, where citizens reject his self-proclaimed sovereignty. Some of Trump’s supporters hailed the video as “performance art,” a way of “owning...| CounterPunch.org
So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming. More The post Let the Work Speak for Itself appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
President Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the U.S. government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen. Trump has boasted of the killings by the U.S. military but claims all the targets were drug smugglers. Trump has threatened to suspend all U.S. government handouts for the Colombian government. Trump warned that Petro that he "better close up" cocaine production "or the United States will close them up for him, and it won't b...| CounterPunch.org
The nature of the United States’ relationship with Israel defies logic and reason. It is a parasitic one-sided benefit, entangled in the tentacles of organized influence, manipulation, financial power, and media control. Israel contributes next to nothing of tangible benefit to America’s security, strategic value, or economy, yet Washington continues to design its foreign policy and moral compass around Israel. It is so absurd it borders on sorcery. More The post How Israel-First Jewish A...| CounterPunch.org
There are enough problems in the world without getting into an intergenerational American dust-up. But if journalists like Emily Holzknecht and Binyamin Appelbaum and their recorded speakers want to go after their elders, this Baby Boomer from the Bronx is ready to tussle. If the New York Times columnists and interviewees want to pin the world’s problems on Baby Boomers like me in “Thanks a lot, Boomers,” they’d better be ready for some pushback. As Aretha Franklin sang: “R-E-S-P-E-...| CounterPunch.org
We're not afraid, we're not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game....| CounterPunch.org
The story of British abolitionism, its many failures and long overdue success, is a lesson in the limits of reform. Lacking a wider context of change, reform in one sector is likely to fail or be indefinitely delayed. British radicalism in the 1790s was confined to a small number of groups with just a few hundred (or at most a few thousand) supporters in a population of nearly 10 million. It could not marshal anything close to the strength necessary to effect radical goals of general slave em...| CounterPunch.org
The facts show that, in this six-decade-plus crime against humanity, Indonesia has been the tool of other interests, that the role of the United Nations (by which I mean some of its dominant powers and personalities) has been particularly egregious, and this is surely one of the reasons why the West Papua genocide has continued sub rosa, deliberately silenced, for more than sixty years. There are many aspects of the UN betrayal because they belong to big-power politics, and they’re convolut...| CounterPunch.org