Ramokgopa addressing an Open Government Partnership event. Photograph Source: Open Government Partnership – CC BY 2.0 Ever since South African Energy Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa announced that Cabinet had approved the updated Integrated Resource Plan last...
Counterpunch
Any Way You Look at It, You Lose
Image by Element5 Digital. Here it is, February 2024 and it’s as if the US’ two major parties had already held their nominating conventions. Biden vs. Trump. Two corpses of the US political system as the vaunted democracy’s choices. Reactionary neoliberalism or...
Tomorrow Belongs To Palestine
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “How Long? Not Long” speech on 25 March 1965 following the historic voting-rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. He told the thousands who had gathered on the steps of the Alabama...
When Much is Too Much: Elon Musk’s Compensation Package
Photograph Source: Steve Jurvetson – CC BY 2.0 When is the acquisitive nature of open frontier capitalism too much? When Elon Musk is told that US$56 billion as a pay package is unfair. This, at least, was the finding by Delaware Court of Chancery by Judge Kathaleen...
History, Olive Trees and Football: What Keeps Palestinians Strong
Image by David McLenachan. Despite the horrific war in Gaza and the unprecedented number of casualties, millions of Palestinians in the Middle East and around the world took a brief respite from their collective pain to watch their national football team make history...
Is a New Korean War in the Offing?
Photograph Source: Cheongwadae / Blue House – KGOL Type 1 In recent days, U.S. media have been proclaiming that North Korea plans to initiate military action against its neighbor to the south. An article by Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, neither previously...
The Crisis in the Teamsters
Last summer, the Teamsters were riding a wave of goodwill and favorable publicity. The union’s year-long contract campaign at UPS raised expectations for a potential transformative national strike at the country’s largest private-sector employer. Much of the US Left,...
The International Court of Justice Censures Israel for Its Genocidal War
Photo by mohammed al bardawil On January 26, 2024, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) released their 29-page order that found “plausible” (paragraph 54) evidence that Israel was conducting a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. The court...
The California Faculty Association Sellout Meets (Highly Educated) Resistance
Carrying the classic signs, “I don’t want to strike but I will,” California Faculty Association (CFA) members marched in an atmospheric river storm on Monday, January 22. Nobody counted how many marched, but in some instances, uncommon academic militancy appeared as...
The Need for Understanding Never Stops
I inhale the big, do-nothing shrug that always follows the annual posting, by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of its global metaphor for Armageddon. For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock has been set – by scientists analyzing the dangers faced by...
Mattole River Salmon-Welcoming Celebration, 2023
Mouth of the Mattole River. Photo: Bill Hatch. To begin my story near the end … we were on a beach at the northern border of the Lost Coast of Humboldt County in northwest California on a Saturday afternoon in mid-November, standing beside the mouth of the...
Ruling by ICJ Means Canada and the U.S. Could be Complicit in Gaza Genocide
The International Court of Justice has issued a ground-breaking decision in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, ordering Israel to comply with six provisional measures to safeguard the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from genocidal violence. The...