Новости за 20.02.2026

Rev. Jesse Jackson surprised me during a trip to his home state of South Carolina. He asked that I join him in the hospital room of his dying mother, Helen Burns Jackson. I had accompanied him in 2015 to write about his work advocating for then-governor Nikki Haley to accept Medicaid expansion funds from the Obama administration, and for her to remove the Confederate Flag from government property. When his mother became ill, he made his trips to Greenville more frequent, always attaching them to a political purpose. Читать дальше...

Jesse Jackson’s two runs, in 1984 and 1988, were the last Democratic presidential campaigns I had any interest in joining. Those campaigns, which, among other things, warned about the coming neoliberal takeover of the Democratic Party, spawned dozens of great activists, including my late buddy Kevin Alexander Gray. who would later play vital roles in the movements that followed Jackson’s political campaign: anti-World Bank and WTO protests, the Nader campaigns, the Occupy Movement, the Sanders campaign, BLM, and the migrant rights movement. Читать дальше...

Earth’s climate system has suddenly shifted to a new phase of global warming acceleration that few saw coming. This ups the ante for risks of severe climate-related disaster scenarios following a record-shattering year in 2025. This directly impacts American homeownership, whether it is compatible with current U.S. energy/climate policies. More

In January 2026, US President Donald Trump declared Cuba to be an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US security—a designation that allows the United States government to use sweeping economic restrictions traditionally reserved for national security adversaries. The US blockade against Cuba began in the 1960s, right after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but has More

Last year, I was living in the UK when activists from the anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian direct action group Palestine Action hugely. embarrassed the Royal Air Force and the British government by cutting their way through a security fence surrounding  an RAF Airfield in Oxfordshire and spraying red paint on the jet engines of two aircraft known to have assisted Israel’s aerial slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. More

A January 2026 Gallup poll showed that 89 percent of all Americans expect high levels of political conflict this year, as the country heads toward one of its most decisive midterm elections ever. Gallup, however, was stating the obvious. It is a surprise that not all Americans feel this way, judging by the coarse, often More

“I’m not scared, you’re scared!” is the repeated line in a children’s story we recently read to the kids at the Unitarian Universalist version of Sunday school I attend with my children. In that story, a scared bear and a brave rabbit, who (naturally!) are best friends, go on a hike together. Rabbit has to cajole and More

Pam Bondi’s combative exchanges and derisive comments before the House Judiciary Committee revealed a contempt for democratic procedure. This was not mere incivility; it was a warning that the separation of powers is being undermined from the top of the Justice Department. One critic called her testimony “wild entertainment.” Another journalist said she looked like More

In our latest, we talk with legendary filmmaker, screenwriter, actor and novelist John Sayles. We start with a discussion about his new novel “Crucible.” But, also talk about labor, class consciousness, portraying the organizer as a hero, the border and the American empire in his, and other, films and novels. John Sayles is an Oscar More

Read Sam’s full report here, funded by the CounterPunch Investigative Fund.

Human primates seem extremely keen to shock each other these days. Arizona-based Axon Enterprise, Inc. (formerly Taser International) produces electroshock weapons. And its market cap amounts to tens of billions in USD. Axon’s corporate slogan is Protect Life. CEO Rick Smith has gone so far as to suggest that using a Taser 10 is safer More

If you’re too busy or overwhelmed by life or AI to listen to my sixth annual State of the Sexual Union address (2026), delivered live 2/14/2026 on Active Radio hosted by Hartley Pleshaw on WCAP-AM 980 – now available for your aural edification – here’s my single-word 2026 prescription for our very sickened society: Therapy. We need it. I need it, and More

It’s been a tumultuous couple of weeks for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency followed through on its plan to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding and all the rules and decisions based on it. This action means the federal government no longer considers carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — which result from burning More

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it. Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to More

One of the issues that bothered many economists, including me, were the complaints that people were falling behind — even as the data on wages and inflation consistently showed that wages were outpacing prices, especially for those at the bottom end of the wage distribution.  Part of this story was clearly a right-wing effort to More

Forty-seven years ago, after a millennium of monarchical rule, Iran reinvented its political system. The Islamic Republic was birthed by the Revolution of 1979; considered one of the most consequential historical events of modern times. The Iranian Revolution profoundly altered the geopolitical landscape of West Asia. By removing the Shah, Iranians severed one pillar of More

Centrism [in Great Britain]…Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance.  The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the clip, neutralize the headline.  The long-term consequences – erosion of empathy, normalization of cruelty, a growing sense that nobody in charge believes what they say – are outsourced to society to endure.                                                      More

Climate activists are calling out pro sports teams across the U.S. Why? The answer is the teams’ sportswashing partnerships with Big Oil. According to activists, sportswashing uses fans’ fondness for their pro teams to fog the lethal consequences of fossil fuel sponsorships with Big Oil, e.g., BP America, Phillips 66 and Shell. Call it a More

What to do with Don Giovanni? The title character—not to mention the universally recognized operatic masterpiece that bears his name—should, by rights, have been cancelled in the wake of #MeToo and probably long before. [ . . . ]

What to do with Don Giovanni? The title character—not to mention the universally recognized operatic masterpiece that bears his name—should, by rights, have been cancelled in the wake of #MeToo and probably long before. [ . . . ]

Wes Jackson’s career demonstrates that sometimes the race goes not to the swift but to the unconventional, that the battle can be won not only by the strong but by the stubborn. Straight-A students don’t always lead the way. Jackson, one of the last half-century’s most innovative thinkers about regenerative agriculture, has won a MacArthur Fellowship, the More

The Trump administration recently announced significant changes to the 2026 Operational Test for the 2030 Census. If implemented, the changes would undermine the utility of what should be a broad, multi-site rehearsal of census operations, potentially compromising the validity of the 2030 Census results. The changes transform the test from a safeguard into a source More

In 2026, the United States is being ruled by an administration led by a wannabe dictator named Trump. His ego seems to dominate his decisions, while his paranoia encourages him to surround himself with authoritarian individuals eager to prove a strength they have always doubted existed in their persona. Not an intellectual by any measure, More

Australia has always been susceptible to the Zionist siren song. H. V. Evatt was a brilliant lawyer and High Court of Australia judge (at 36, the youngest appointee ever). He was also joint Foreign Affairs Minister and Attorney-General in successive Labor governments, 1941-49. However, Evatt moonlighted as Chair of the UN Special Committee on Palestine More

Tourism has a very bad press. It’s usually analyzed critically. Tourism brings too many over-privileged, historically ignorant people to foreign places. In the case of Venice, which I am writing a book about, tourism is blamed for the extreme gentrification that is making life all but impossible for most of its inhabitants. Many of the More