In this Issue: One Climate: John Davis on this summer’s mega-storms; Taking Women’s Lives Seriously: Laura Carlsen on sexual violence; Land of the Forbidden Fan: Ned Sublette reports from Cuba; The Russian Revolutions Revisited by John Wight; Can We Finally Unite? by Lee Ballinger. Donna Brazile and the Machine by Yvette Carnell; Trump’s Nuclear Nihilism by Jeffrey St. Clair. Plus: Chris Floyd on the opioid crisis; Julie Work and Daniel Raventos on Catalonia; Ruth Fowler on sexual commodification; Mike Whitney on widening inequality; Wesley Wright on Ceramics and Social Consciousness.
Exclusively in the New Print Issue of CounterPunch
It’s Time to Call Economic Sanctions What They Are: War Crimes
The first pathetic pieces of wreckage from North Korean fishing boats known as “ghost ships” to be found this year are washing up on the coast of northern Japan. These are the storm-battered remains of fragile wooden boats with unreliable engines in which North Korean fishermen go far out to sea in the middle of winter in a desperate search for fish. More
Behind the Money Curtain: A Left Take on Taxes, Spending and Modern Monetary Theory
Taxes do not fund government spending.
That’s a core insight of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) whose radical implications have not been understood very well by the left. Indeed, it’s not well understood at all, and most people who have heard or read it somewhere breeze right past it, and fall back to the taxes-for-spending paradigm that is the sticky common wisdom of the left and right. More
Trump Versus the World
According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, somewhere President Donald Trump, instead of saying, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries…. We should have more people from Norway.,” said, “Why don’t we allow more people from shithole countries to come here? They need a decent place to live and work and succeed. Their rulers hold them back. The Norwegians don’t need America as badly. After all, Norway ranks 25th in the Index of Economic Freedom. Let’s be compassionate toward the world’s poorest and most subjugated people. Besides, we’d also benefit from their coming to America.” More