Powerful is the Aroused Voice of Citizens: a Glyph
October 28, 2025| CounterPunch.org
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
Ten thousand soldiers on board 10 US warships, including a nuclear submarine, several destroyers and a missile cruiser, patrol the southern Caribbean in what is the largest US military build-up in the region in decades. At least seven boats allegedly transporting drugs have been bombed, resulting in the extrajudicial killing of more than 32 people. More The post The US Warships Off Venezuela Aren’t There to Fight Drugs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
The wish to be credulous is central to the fraudulent scheme. The one playing the fraud can always rely on some connivance and collaboration from the tricked and the gulled. Many an art curator is bound to turn scarlet at the prospect that their expertise was utterly subverted by a counterfeiter of Picasso and Matisse. More The post Fake Boats and Bogus Admirals appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
On October 4th, 2025, in an interview with Axios, President Trump stressed that one of the main goals behind his Gaza plan was to restore Israel’s international standing. “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world,” Trump said. “Now I am gonna get all that support back.” Under More The post The World Confronts the Genocide Washington is Trying to Bury appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
The problem of centralized power The United States is broken, and it’s time to think about what comes next. Images of the White House East Wing demolition that have filled our eyes in recent days are a visual expression of a broader reality. The constitutional order of the U.S. is shattered. A lawless president backed More The post The U.S. is Broken. Time to Think About What Comes Next appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
The October 24 decision by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to end the ‘grey list’ stigmatization against the banking systems of South Africa, Mozambique, Nigeria and Burkina Faso raises tough questions about these societies’ self-interest, in contrast to the real winners from the move: free-wheeling financiers of capital flight, of drugs and of (alleged) More The post A Western Financial Whip Was Lifted From South Africa’s Back – But Now We Need Another appeared ...| CounterPunch.org
Are Donald Trump and his associates planning a coup if they lose control of Congress following a possible Democratic victory in the 2026 elections? And, if not in ’26, what about 2030 election? In anticipation of losing the ’26 Congressional election, Republican governors in an increasing number of states – including Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, More The post The Failed Coup d’État of 2026? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
Yes, in the ever more ominously unsettled (dis-)United States of Donald J. Trump, I recently went to the “hate America” rally in New York City. Or at least that’s what Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson insisted it was. Who knew that so unbelievably many Americans, millions of us across the United States, would “hate” More The post No Kings, the Second Time Around appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
With 2.1 million cattle in Montana, one might expect Governor Gianforte and our congressional delegation to know where cattle actually get brucellosis. But unfortunately, the governor and delegation appear locked into outdated, unscientific, and unsupported false assumptions that wild Yellowstone bison have transmitted brucellosis to cattle. They have not. The grim result of these false More The post Elk, Not Wild Bison, Have Transmitted Brucellosis to Montana Cattle in Every Case appeare...| CounterPunch.org
This past March, I wrote an article (You Are Here) comparing the moves the Trump administration made to the rise of Nazism in Germany. My only mistake was underestimating the speed by which the transformation would occur. Here we are, seven months later, and the takeover by the authoritarian Trump regime is essentially complete. Literally More The post Dystopia Now appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
The burying ground looks like an abandoned lot. Holding the remains of upward of 22,000 enslaved and free people of color, the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground in Richmond, Virginia, established in 1816, sits amid highways and surface roads. Above the expanse of unmarked graves loom a deserted auto shop, a power substation, a massive More The post The Disgraceful History of Erasing Black Cemeteries in the United States appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
Prologue The Roosevelt poster on freedom is timeless. I thought about its message while on the Parthenon. In early October 2025, I was on the Acropolis admiring the Parthenon, its beauty and architectural perfection. The Athenians built the Parthenon to celebrate their victories over the Persians in 490 and 480 and 479 BCE, decisive victories More The post Untouched by Time: The Beauty and Vision of Freedom appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| 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
“Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know,” the 18th-century British writer Lord Chesterfield advised his son. But common sense doesn’t stay that way. While it appears to most people to be something solid and steady, it changes from age to age, defined and redefined by the push and pull between More The post Toward a New Common Sense of Abundance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
Recently, a friend was asked, “What church do you go to?” to which he replied he was an atheist. I heard his response and was left contemplating what that means today and in this historical moment. What did his declaration have to do with what we were doing on Saturday mornings on a street in More The post We Need More Political Atheists appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
Since August, U.S. warships, fighter planes, and troops have deployed in Caribbean waters off Venezuela and in Puerto Rico. Venezuela’s neighboring countries in Latin America and the Caribbean area are reacting variously. Many oppose U.S. aggression, but at a distance. Others are either non-committal or accepting. Colombia and Brazil are backing Venezuela – or soon More The post Brazilian Workers Lead in Offering Solidarity to Venezuelans under US Attack appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
In the wild, a mouse or rat leads a precarious life. In the city, they dodge traps, poisons, and broom-wielding humans. In the countryside, they face owls, shotguns, and more poison. As Australia’s deputy prime minister once declared during a nationwide mouse plague, “The only good mouse is a dead mouse.” Yet even that grim existence More The post The Lab Mouse Paradox: Why Science Still Depends on Animals Who Don’t Represent Us appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
This week’s news brings us another story that’s starting to get very old — especially for Montana’s existing residents. Namely, the City of East Helena finds itself unable to “meet the demand” for water for the 6,250 new homes plus new businesses that theoretically will be built on former ASARCO lands the city annexed when More The post Montana Can’t ‘Meet the Demand’ to Supply More Water to New Developments appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
In the past few weeks, the US military has killed around thirty people in cold blood. The murders occurred on boats traveling in waters on both sides of Latin America and were undertaken without any warning to the crews on the boats. The rulers in Washington DC claim that those in the boats were involved More The post True Crime: Murder on the High Seas appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
Trump hasn’t taken $2 trillion from taxpayers yet, but we should be prepared for that possibility. The story, which cannot possibly be given too much attention, is Trump’s demand that his Justice Department hand him $230 million because he doesn’t like the way he was treated over alleged crimes. This is straight-out theft from the More The post Treasury’s $2 Trillion Payment to Trump? It’s Very MAGA appeared first on CounterPunch.org.| CounterPunch.org
It is no secret that Donald J. Trump, head of the American Empire, desperately wanted the Nobel Peace Prize. For months, he had been lobbying for it, presenting himself as a peacemaker. A “humanitarian who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will”. His lust for the prize, driven at least in part by the fact that Barack Obama won it in 2009, led Pakistan’s government to publicly nominate him in June as a means of gratifying his ego. And the recent Gaza ceasefire deal he broker...| CounterPunch.org
A staggering racial disparity occurs when cases get to the sentencing phase. If you are Black in this country, you have a higher chance of being sentenced to death. To put a fine point on it, Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population, but there are over 41% of them on death row. So that’s one reason anyone who loves justice and fairness should be against the death penalty, but there is another. One that Angela Davis pointed out in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?| 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
—Göteborg, Sweden. The Christianization of Scandinavia took place over a few hundred years and was completed by the early 12th century thanks to Sigurd| 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
It’s the largest living structure on Earth, 3,000 individual reefs, 900 islands, 1,430 miles, and it may be collapsing. Alas, The Great Barrier Reef Annual Summary Report of Coral Reef Conditions, 2024-2025 presents a dire picture, the poorest condition ever, the worst report in recorded history. Moreover, mass bleaching of coral has been confirmed in 83 countries. Something is seriously wrong with the oceans; this is too anomalous, too massive to ignore as a passing one-off event. More The...| CounterPunch.org
Christianity is back and it's more violent than ever. I speak, of course, of the late capitalist tent house revival of Christian Nationalism amongst the| CounterPunch.org
Before Trump ever landed in the White House in 2016, the United States represented less than 5% of the world’s population. The U.S. has over 750 military| CounterPunch.org
Can a play influence public perception of our shared atomic history enough to shift the conversation away from a presumed nuclear “renaissance” and into a| CounterPunch.org
Andy Mahler, the valiant defender of America’s backwoods, lived in and learned from the forests he spent much of his life fighting to protect from senseless destruction and corporate exploitation. When much of the mainstream environmental movement wrote off rural people, Mahler built a powerful movement among them: decentralized, democratic and rooted in place. Mahler was a visionary, whose capacity for empathy, for both humans and the natural world, was matched only by his steely refusal t...| CounterPunch.org
I had come from the State Library on my bike, a long-term rental courtesy of an excellent and cheap Dutch company called Swapfiets with outlets in many| CounterPunch.org
“Adjunct,” a feature length movie, realistically covers much of what happens in the life of a higher education teacher who could be labeled an adjunct, a| CounterPunch.org
Some of those who pay attention to electoral politics in the United States think the system those politics define and delineate can still be| CounterPunch.org
An American friend visiting London last week asked me to recommend some “movies” to him. Only later did I realise how loaded a question it was. Cinema has| CounterPunch.org
“We can have a world that runs on a resource that’s available to everyone everywhere.” - Bill McKibben There’s a renaissance of nature powering the world,| CounterPunch.org
Global political history is punctuated by state entities that, after vanishing from the international stage, have reemerged in new forms—sometimes| CounterPunch.org
China has transitioned from one of the poorest nations in the world to the second-largest economy with nuclear-armed forces growing at a record pace. Over the past 40 years, China has had the world’s fastest-growing economy with annual growth rates that often exceeded 10% a year. China’s economy grew over five percent in the first half of this year; the U.S. economy expanded by one percent. Meanwhile, U.S. tariff policy is losing friends around the world.| CounterPunch.org
the civilian operation of nuclear power plants also places future generations at military risk. I have written that, historically, nuclear reactors were “born violent.” That is to say, they were invented by the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s to manufacture plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, and were instrumental in killing almost 100,000 people in 1945. The “first” American commercial atomic plant in Shippingport, PA that went critical in 1958, was actually the 14th industria...| CounterPunch.org
