Fascism doesn’t start with bombs. It starts with applause. It doesn’t begin with extermination camps. It begins with legitimation of exception, of “necessary” violence, and of the convenient lie.

Editors or staff at The New York Times are still wedded to the quaint notion that the U.S. does not routinely torture, abuse, humiliate or intimidate prisoners in its charge.

Beyond law and precedent lies the most important reality: the cost of this aggression is paid by ordinary people in Venezuela.

The attack on 3 January is not the first against Venezuela. In fact, the pressure campaign began in 2001 when the government of Hugo Chávez enacted a Hydrocarbons Law in accordance with the sovereignty provisions in the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999.

I have a few thoughts in response to what seems like an uptick in interest in Dorothy Day in recent years. When I first read Dorothy Day, the first thing that stood out to me was her continuity with a long tradition of Christian anarchism in America.

A year into Trump’s mass purge of immigrants from the United States, it’s beyond debate that the people orchestrating and conducting the raids, round-ups and deportations have committed more grievous crimes than the vast majority of the people they’ve harassed, arrested, jailed and sent into exile.

2025 will go down as the second or third hottest year on record. The last decade has been the hottest decade in human history.

What has happened to the Mauser strikers — and what could have been different?

Trillionaire Cometh, Democracy Goeth.

Three dominant narratives contend for the future of Gaza and occupied Palestine, yet only one is being translated into consequential action: the Israeli narrative of domination and genocide.

Congo’s devastation is not a local failure, but the logical outcome of a global economic system that profits from extraction, militarization, and silence. The world may be watching Congo more than before, but it still refuses to see itself in the story.

The United States has used military force or engaged in outright warfare 30 times since 2001, with Congress largely on the sidelines. And rarely have those interventions achieved anything like their stated objectives.

"Why we are on hunger strike in UK jails."

The attack against Venezuela’s principal revenue source has nothing to do with drug trafficking–military operations abroad are the least effective method of combating drugs–but rather, reflects an imperial desire acted on by the last five U.S. administrations.

A synecdoche is a figure of speech where an individual event is used to represent the whole story. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more exact synecdoche for the Israeli genocide in Gaza than turning the strip’s largest hospital into an unmarked mass grave.

Tech titans investing millions to create genetically engineered babies.

Obama’s powerpoint death parade led to Trump’s Venezuelan killings.

Israel has violated the Gaza ceasefire almost 600 times, killed and injured over 1350, including murdering 136 Palestinian children, under various pretexts. Yet, the supposed guarantors of the truce remain hushed.

The Caribbean faces two choices: Join the US attempt to intimidate Venezuela or build its own sovereignty.

Millions of Americans who receive health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace are going to see their health insurance premiums double (or worse).

The warning we ignore at our peril: From El Salvador’s dungeons to America’s doorstep.

President Bone Spurs on Prince Bone Saws: “We have an extremely respected man in the Oval Office today. And a friend of mine for a long time. A very good friend of mine. I’m very proud of the job he’s done. What he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights.”

Things happen. Journalists get slain and dismembered. Academics get imprisoned. Activists get tortured. Dissidents disappear. Independent media bows down. Judges kneel. Political violence, the erosion of free speech, the end of democracy… Things happen.

One aircraft carrier or health care coverage for tens of thousands? www.counterpunch.org/2025/11/19/o...

The U.S. military build-up in Latin America and the Caribbean is expanding faster than some may realize. U.S. soldiers and Marines have begun training in the jungles of Panama for the first time in decades.

The crackdown on Encampments and the surveillance and censorship that followed is only part of a broader and more draconian campaign to restrict students and faculty from criticizing and protesting injustice when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

The Democrats weren’t going to “win” the shutdown, but they could’ve drawn blood from Trump and his cadre of cruelty in Congress. In the end, they surrendered and all of the bleeding was on their side, from largely self-inflicted wounds.

Dick Cheney created an imperial vice presidency.

In the high silence of the Andes, where the air thins to a whisper and the earth itself seems to remember older empires, there lies a nation haunted by the sound of waves it can no longer hear.

For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair.

The world is failing to prepare for the climate it has already created.

One of the worst after-effects of Trump’s radioactive personality is that he is so reviled by many Americans that he has softened the reputation of one of the most evil and destructive figures in American history: Dick Cheney.

It is difficult to interpret the Trump administration’s wholesale attacks on governmental programs as anything other than accelerationist efforts to destroy basic features of the American political and economic systems.

Late last month, the Trump administration deleted funding for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. That torpedoed dozens of websites with bevies of reports of federal abuses.

Washington Post Editorial Board Endorses Trump’s Golden Dome:

Halliburton’s looting of Iraq and the US treasury happened in broad daylight, right under the nose of the press, the Democrats and Michael Moore, who made Dick Cheney’s former company the bete noire of his film “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Nothing deterred.

With the government shutdown largely over the future of Obamacare, it is a good time to say a bit about the ridiculous cost of healthcare in the United States.

Not too far from Melissa’s flood zone, another kind of disaster has been unfolding in comparative media quiet. This one is caused not by climate, but by our autocratic president, who gave us two month’s warning.

There’s no more pungent symbol of the corrupt nature of the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq than Halliburton, the Houston, Texas-based oil services conglomerate.

Ramzy Baroud via @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social www.counterpunch.org/2025/11/04/i...

Genocide tends to be recognised “only after a significant portion of the targeted group has already been destroyed and the group as such has suffered irreparable harm.”

An extremely important essay by @wsolol.bsky.social on the NYT's favorite genocide denier. www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/25/b...

This tragedy is different from past atrocities in one disturbing respect: the suffering, the use of starvation as a weapon, the unrelenting bombardment, the mass murder, they are laid bare for all to see. The violence is not concealed, it is flaunted.

Timber mining is Empire’s latest scorched earth policy.

The body of a single child, wasting away from the lack of the basic fluid that runs in my sink or yours, best captures the way war casualties ripple across time and populations.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza has brought two chilling truths into our focus: first, Israel is deliberately and aggressively undermining the security and stability of the entire Middle East and, second, Israel is utterly incapable of surviving on its own.

War kills in so many ways.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza has brought two chilling truths into our focus: first, Israel is deliberately and aggressively undermining the security and stability of the entire Middle East and, second, Israel is utterly incapable of surviving on its own.

The United Kingdom just leapfrogged the US to become the leading country in the so-called “Free World” to abandon its much-touted tradition of freedom of speech, press, and assembly, along with the right to protest.

El Salvador is in a constitutional crisis, so much so that one can get into serious legal trouble even for being a lawyer—at least the kind who upholds the law, rather than kowtowing to Bukele.