Across most of the arid West, snowpack is low, rainfall is scarce, and residents are staring down the barrel of another year of major drought. Water levels are dropping, native fishes have become endangered, and a battle royale is heating up between western states to decide whose water uses will go unfulfilled. More
Just over a month has passed since the first missiles of Operation Epic Fury killed, on the very first day, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 150 schoolgirls and school staff, and most of Iran’s military (40) and political leadership and days since a precarious ceasefire went into effect. The attacks have not only destroyed vital infrastructure in the Middle East, particularly in Iran, but have also completely shattered hopes for coordination and the common defense of sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean. More
I was born in the American South in 1942 “in the land of the free and the home of the brave” (as the final stanza of the national anthem puts it). Francis Scott Key wrote those words in 1814. However, they were not true then, or in 1942, or today in Donald Trump’s all too reactionary America. My Blackness consigned obstacles to me (as it would have in 1814 and 1942) that White people simply don’t have. More
The suppression of intelligent irreverence and the silencing of questions have come in recent years to be a common practice in far too many schools that I’ve been visiting. In a segregated elementary school that I visited in Boston’s Black community, if children asked importunate questions that threatened to disrupt the standardized rout-and-drill curriculum, and could not be silenced by the teacher’s admonitions, they were placed in a lockdown room—a storage closet in the hallway—that was called the “Calm-down Room.” The children often wet themselves and ended up sitting in a pool of urine on the floor and crying for their mothers. In other cities, as I learned, the lockdown rooms are sometimes called “Relaxation Rooms,” or “Reflection Rooms,” or “Quiet Rooms,” although the children who are crying for their mothers are obviously neither quiet nor relaxing. More
In this episode of CounterPunch Radio, MV Ramana speaks with Joshua Frank about the lies and misconceptions surrounding a nuclear power revival, atomic energy’s ties to weapons proliferation, and much more. The conversation took place in January at Page Against the Machine bookstore in Long Beach, California.
M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, and the author of Nuclear is Not the Solution with Verso Books.
Joshua Frank is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books.
Sponsored by Pilsen Community Books.
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Industrial robotics company, FANUC, was the only Japanese company named in the Albanese report on Israel’s “economy of genocide.” This week on CounterPunch Radio, we speak with members of BDS Japan Bulletin and Detroit-based Engineers Against Apartheid to understand the role that FANUC robots play in the production of 155mm shells, one of the primary weapons used in the genocide in Gaza, and the complicated nature of robots as “dual-use” products — with both civilian and military application. BDS Japan discusses automation and how AI fits into Japan’s current right-wing political climate, while EAA addresses the militarization of Michigan’s manufacturing sector and how workers in the automotive industry are organizing against it.
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On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Eric Draitser talks with Yassamine Mather about the Israel/US war on Iran, its geopolitical ramifications, Iranian resistance, and what it means for the future of the region.
Yassamine Mather is an Iranian scholar and political activist. She is the acting editor of Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory. Her research on Iran is within the framework of the Middle East Centre, University of Oxford, where she works. She is the chair of Hands Off the People of Iran.
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