Counterpunch

Things are getting rather bizarre at the US Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).  Its increasingly prominent commanding chief, one General Glen VanHerck, has abandoned any initial sense of frankness in discussing the destruction...

Over the past 25 years, the pharmaceutical industry has spent $8.5 billion on lobbying and over $745 million on campaign contributions to get Congress to do its bidding. Incredibly, last year, drug companies hired over 1,700 lobbyists including the former...

With a few weeks to go in Chicago’s municipal election, union endorsements of candidates for Mayor and the City Council continue to roll in. It is expected, however, that there will be many run-off elections in April because candidates will not achieve the fifty...

The quickest way to offset weak demand is to have the government spend more money. Ideally, this spending should be in areas that provide both current and lasting benefits, like child care and education, but any spending can generate demand in the economy. But in any...

One of the biggest obstacles to reform is that so many lawmakers have vested interests in a hands-off approach to the Pentagon budget. As a start, striking numbers of them have instant conflicts of interest with respect to the defense industry, since they own stock in...

NASA’s going nuclear. It was decreed before most of us were born. Back in 1955, the Air Force set out to design a nuclear-propelled stage for an intercontinental ballistic missile at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. In 1958, a few months after the Soviets...

Historians studying the Philippine-American War estimate that at as many as 15 Buffalo Soldiers decided that their place, rather than helping to suppress the Filipinos’ struggle for independence, was in joining them in revolution. The supposed ‘deserters’ of the 24th...

Predatory lending is an easily overlooked business that has damaged communities of color and poorer people for decades. It traps borrowers in never-ending cycles of debt with high-interest loans on coercive terms. But when Wall Street private equity gets in on the...

War is a language of lies. Cold and callous, it emanates from dull, technocratic minds, draining life of color. It is an institutional offense to the human spirit. The Pentagon speaks the language of war. The President and the Congress speak the language of war....

Part 1: The context of extreme financial devaluations The World Economic Forum is meeting in Davos this week. The gathering of many of the wealthiest corporate elites and state leaders compels consideration of directions global capitalist chaos may take us in 2023....

A year to the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King publicly and decisively denounced not only the US war in Vietnam but the militarism that enabled the war and undermined American society. King’s Beyond Vietnam sermon, delivered on April 4, 1967, at New...

Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. While millions of Ukrainian refugees have since returned home, almost 2.9 million moved to Russia, according to October 2022 figures, and roughly 7.9...