CounterPunch surpassed 2.7 million readers in 2025 — a milestone we could not have reached without the support of our readers. The website has seen a steady uptick in readership since Jeffrey St. Clair, our long-time editor-in-chief, first built it about 25 years ago. That steady growth has come with an equal increase in the cost to maintain the site. More
Where is today’s public discussion on how much the U.S. economy will have to pay to rebuild an even vaster military-industrial complex to restock the missiles that Trump has used up? I’m not sure that there’s much intention of paying the Military Industrial Complex with weapons that have failed in practice. But no doubt there will have to be new research on what kind of weapons will work against the war that is promised against China in a few years. Raw materials and labor for such new weaponry will be much more expensive now. It will all be added to the U.S. GDP, but will not be “real” production for the economy at large. More
2026 is the sixty-second year since Civil Rights Summer, that remarkable upsurge of practical action intended to break the grip of the political oligarchy that had ruled the states of the old Confederacy through terror and violence since the end of Reconstruction. Its objective in 1964 was to empower the African American community in the South by reinvigorating the right to vote. Many people braved brutal reactionary violence in 1964 and 1965 to restore voting as the most basic American right. Their political achievement –the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – placed the full weight of the federal government behind enforcement of universal voting rights for the first time in American history. The systematic violence and the obvious chicanery of the poll taxes, literacy tests, local government gerrymanders and other overtly discriminatory devices were to be ended. The principle of representative democracy that expresses the will of all the people, freely casting their votes to choose their leaders, would be vindicated. Or so we hoped. More
One of the few guarantees in life is loss. The unmerciful realities of temporal existence and entropy make the pain of separation a sole constancy. Over the course of an average life, a person will lose not only one person of emotional importance, but many. A few will take their last breath after an extended and humiliating period of decline, giving the bereaved an opportunity to prepare, which despite what logic would have us assume, doesn’t always make the blow any easier to absorb, while others will exit like captives making a jailbreak or party guests who neglect to say, “goodbye.” The surprise does seem to make the aftermath worse. More
On this episode of Counterpunch Radio, Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt speaks with Dr. Shahd Abusalama, Palestinian academic, writer, and artist, born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp, in northern Gaza. Shahd discusses her book, Between Reality and Documentary: A Historical Representation of Gaza Refugees in Colonial, Humanitarian and Palestinian Documentary Film, published in 2025 by Bloomsbury and SOAS Palestine Studies, and reflects on her recent book and film tour in Japan. Recorded during the opening days of the recent War on Iran, Shahd reflects on the ramifications of the war for Gaza, historical lessons from her time in Hiroshima, and her image of what true liberation could look like for the Palestinian people.
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On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Erik Wallenberg and Joshua Frank welcome back Ramzy Baroud to discuss his new book, Before the Flood, a profound exploration of Palestinian history and resilience through the personal stories of his family—the al-Badrasawis. Beginning with intimate details of village life in Beit Daras prior to the Nakba. They also talk about the ongoing war in Iran and Israel’s larger strategy for the region.
You can catch Ramzy Baroud on the road this spring and summer. He’ll be at Chicago’s Pilsen Community Books on Sunday, May 3, at 5 PM.
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In this episode of CounterPunch Radio, MV Ramana speaks with Joshua Frank about the lies and misconceptions surrounding a nuclear power revival, atomic energy’s ties to weapons proliferation, and much more. The conversation took place in January at Page Against the Machine bookstore in Long Beach, California.
M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, and the author of Nuclear is Not the Solution with Verso Books.
Joshua Frank is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books.
Sponsored by Pilsen Community Books.
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