Support Our Annual Fund Drive! CounterPunch is entirely supported by our readers. Your donations pay for our small staff, tiny office, writers, designers, techies, bandwidth and servers. We don’t owe anything to advertisers, foundations, one-percenters or political parties. You are our only safety net. Please make a tax-deductible donation today.
The Dreadful Chronology of Gaddafi’s Murder
Jean-Paul Pougala's April 14, 2011 piece in Pambazuka News titled “The Lies Behind the West's War on Libya” describes how Africa first developed its own transcontinental communications system by purchasing a telecommunications satellite on December 26, 2007: the African Development Bank ponied up $50 million toward the nearly $400 million cost of the orbiter and the West African Development Bank added $27 million more. Libya contributed $300 million, which made the purchase possible. Pougala writes that when it was up and running, the new system was “connecting the entire continent by telephone, television, radio broadcasting, and several other technological applications such as telemedicine and distance teaching.”
After 14 years of foot-dragging by the IMF and the World Bank, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s generosity allowed for this one-time purchase that spared the nations of Africa a $500 million annual lease payment for access to a telecom satellite and euchred Western banks out of potential billions in loans and interest. At this time, Gaddafi was also seeking to establish a trans-African banking system based on gold to free the continent from its financial bondage to the IMF and the World Bank—which would gravely harm both predatory entities. More
Enter Sandman: the Pence-Kaine Sleepwalk
Mike Pence and I were born in the same month, of the same year, in the same state. But we inhabit different cultural universes. Pence grew up in Columbus, Indiana, a corporate town run by the notoriously anti-labor, anti-atmosphere Cummins Diesel. I grew up about 35 miles north on I-65 in Southport, an old farming community, recently swallowed up by the metastasizing suburbs of Indianapolis.
In the spring of 1977, Pence and I squared off against each other in a statewide mock legislative event hosted at his high school, Columbus North. I still had an interest in electoral politics then, fresh off of working on Eugene McCarthy's independent campaign for president, and had been sent to Columbus as leader of the tiny Indiana Student Peace Party. More
Duterte’s Death Squads, and Ours
Some people get bent out of shape if you call them a “son of a whore.” On September 5, just before his first meeting with President Barack Obama, President Rodrigo (“Rody”) Duterte was asked by a reporter how he would respond if Obama asked about extrajudicial killings. More
Top Stories
Exclusively in the New Print Issue of CounterPunch
How Hillary Could Provoke a Nuclear War
Alan Nasser digs into Hillary Clinton’s horrifying nuclear weapons policy, where the use of a new generation of nukes is viewed as a legitimate tactic for conventional warfare. Hillary’s Mother Complex: Ruth Fowler dissects Hillary’s strange brand of feminism. Inside Our Camps: Lee Ballinger recounts the appalling history of the US internment camps for Japanese Americans; Up in Smoke: Josh Schlossberg investigates how the corporate environmental movement quietly promotes biomass energy; Beyond Progressivism: Andy Smolski charts how the progressive movement got coopted by Big Capital. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on melting glaciers; Yvette Carnell on the meaning of Colin Kaepernick; Paul Buhle on Margaret Sanger; Mike Whitney on Janet Yellen and Big Money; Ed Leer on the films of John Carpenter; Chris Floyd on ISIS and the new neocons; Daniel Raventos and Julie Wark on Europe’s Rebel Cities; and Alan Wieder on Studs Terkel on Third parties.
