Nations are judged not only by what they do, but also by what they make us see, and what they force us to feel. Nations are not merely political or economic constructs. They are aesthetic phenomena that leave lasting visual and emotional imprints.

The 2025–26 Iran conflict has forced a reckoning with a basic fact of modern warfare: the side that can absorb costs longest wins, regardless of whose aircraft are more advanced.

Poverty does not merely deprive people of comfort or opportunity—it shapes the conditions of their health.

It may be tempting to blame Trump entirely for the perilous state of journalism in the country, but that steady decline in press freedom over the past decade spans multiple administrations, with both parties holding power in Washington.

Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II.

US Military Fuels Extreme Weather Events.

In the 50 years of resistance against Moroccan occupation forces, the Polisario has never engaged in any acts of terrorism. Not once. Indeed, they have formally ratified the Geneva Conventions and their protocols and they are a party to the African Union’s Convention on Counter-Terrorism.

The power of the most important protest movement of our time, the Palestine Solidarity movement, lies in how it shaped a new political consciousness, especially among younger generations on campuses.

A dark storm cloud of ignorant financial speculation hovers above the Navajo Nation, the largest indigenous reservation in the country, rich in mineral resources, livestock, farms and sacred landmarks.

Insipidness or kitsch: That’s the language of fascism now.

Israel cannot sustain an open-ended fight on multiple fronts indefinitely. Israeli officials boast about fighting on “seven fronts,” but many of these are, in military terms, largely imaginary rather than sustained battlefields. The real wars, however, are entirely of Israel’s making.

Something other than Trumpism bears the responsibility for the imperial presidency under which we now live. This is not to take away from Trump’s unprecedented levels of incompetence and malfeasance. The problem, however, lies in the Constitution itself.

“Their chaos is our peace.”

Donald Trump’s rhetoric and actions against Iran, Venezuela and Cuba over the last year have few parallels in modern history. They have to be seen as marking a new stage. As such they call for a reevaluation of analysis and strategy on the part of the Left.

The Israel Advocacy Machine demands complete allegiance, compliance, and submission. And it will go to extraordinary lengths to silence and discipline those who question or reject its propaganda.

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, and a battle royale is heating up between western states to decide whose water uses will go unfulfilled.

I was born in the American South in 1942 “in the land of the free and the home of the brave”. 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.

What until just over a decade ago was envisioned as a group of nations capable of defining or negotiating minimum parameters to preserve autonomy in their international relations policy is now in shambles.

In line with his “America First” rhetoric, Trump has reverted to an old U.S. tradition― nationalism―and all that entails in terms of militarism, war, and imperialism.

The highly paid press, political officials, and the same people who ignore as a matter of routine the rising costs of housing, health care, and higher education treat a 25-cent-per-gallon jump in fuel as tantamount to the apocalypse. www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/10/w...

It’s important for Americans who haven’t been paying attention to Gaza to understand that when Israel signs a “ceasefire” agreement, only one side is held to its pledge to cease firing.

Every bomb dropped abroad is a bill sent home. Every war waged in the name of “security” is paid for by Americans who go without—without affordable healthcare, without stable housing, without a government that prioritizes their well-being.

According to Israel’s new death penalty law, Palestinian children, like adults, could, in practice, find themselves facing the gallows. This might take some by surprise, or even be dismissed as an exaggeration. Sadly, it is neither.

At some point—and I can’t quite say when—it has become harder, at least from this side of the Atlantic, to separate our image of Donald Trump from the United States itself. The two have begun to blur in ways that feel new, and, frankly, unsettling.

Vessels of Revolution: On Akinsanya Kambon, suppressed history and the fire we’re living through.

The most important question is whether the negotiations over the next two weeks represent an ‘offramp’ for the US from a war it realizes it can’t win, or just another deception and tactic to buy time to restore US and Israel military resources.

At some point—and I can’t quite say when—it has become harder, at least from this side of the Atlantic, to separate our image of Donald Trump from the United States itself. The two have begun to blur in ways that feel new, and, frankly, unsettling.

Overcoming one extreme event, let alone two or more, would always pose a remarkable challenge to even the most competent of governments. Sadly, we face an increasingly hazardous future with a demonstrably incompetent leadership team. www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/07/o...

Although bookshelves groan under the weight of tracts about U.S. racism, no one’s writings on the topic are more unsettling than Jonathan Kozol’s. He is among our greatest and most eloquent dissenters.

We need to brace ourselves for ever more calamitous outcomes from Donald Trump’s extreme leadership incompetence. In fact, his incompetence is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another, culminating perhaps in global political-economic collapse.

Trump chose people for conducting foreign affairs with no training in international relations or diplomacy, only personal loyalty.

If the Empire’s adage is divide and conquer, transnational solidarity is to gather and prevail.

Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.

The war on Ukraine created a grain chokepoint by blocking the export of specific agricultural commodities. A prolonged war in the Gulf, by contrast, could trigger an energy crisis that affects the entire infrastructure of global food production.

The Democratic Socialist of America with 100,000 members nationally and important experience in organizing campaigns, should put itself forward as a leader of the movement against the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

It’s difficult to imagine a greater U.S. strategic mistake than to align itself in any fashion with Israel.

The timid Democrats have criticized Trump for not having a “plan,” as if having a plan would legitimize his criminal war. But they do have a plan and the plan is maximum destruction. The plan is for a spectacle of bomb-blast light shows and mass death.

The Trump Corollary constitutes not only an ideological and imperialist offensive against decolonial currents and multipolar tendencies in Latin America, but also a strategic project whose assault on Venezuela has broader geopolitical implications.

A man who cannot even pronounce the name of the Iranian general he ordered to be assassinated in 2020, or the name of the “supreme leader” of Iran whom he helped murder in 2026, finally did what Netanyahu wanted to be done: attack Iran on behalf of Israel.

Trump's attempt to use American economic dominance as a geopolitical weapon is colliding with the deeper imperatives of global capitalism.

“It’s not meant to be happening here.” Louise Starkey, an Australian influencer in Dubai posted those words to the internet in response to Iranian missiles hitting the United Arab Emirates.

Beyond the well-known dispossession and exploitation, this apartheid manifests in tight surveillance of Palestinians’ speech, facilitated by companies such as Facebook, which collaborate with Israel.

The simplest way to think about the surge in oil and natural gas prices is as a big tax on consumers of these products.

We are watching Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conduct a war that is evil. There is no banality to be observed.

“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir.

We are not actually at war, yet the war is going very well!

The war that began on February 28 can realistically be deemed to be the formal opening of World War III because what is at issue are the terms on which the entire world will be able to buy oil and gas.

On January 23rd, I ignored a factually incorrect State Department warning about chavista motorcycle gangs “kidnapping Americans” and flew into the airport in La Guaira, Venezuela, for a 30-day reporting assignment for TeleSur.

Let’s review the shifting rationales (all fallacious) for Trump/Netanyahu’s criminal attack on Iran that has quickly engulfed much of the Middle East:

We’d live in a much different world today if Harry Truman had been impeached and removed from office over his surprise Korean “police action” instead of receiving a retroactive congressional rubber stamp.