“Curtains For Keir:” UK Premier Keir Starmer is Out

After Labour’s disastrous performance in local elections in England and parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland in May, it became highly likely that Keir Starmer’s days as prime minister were numbered. This proposition was confirmed by the result of the Makerfield byelection a few days ago in which the Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham (though he is Liverpudlian), widely tipped to launch a bid to overthrow Starmer as prime minister if he won the byelection and entered parliament, did so with a huge majority, tallying over 50% of the vote. More

The Hidden Cost of the U.S. Military: The Real Budget is Far Larger Than Reported

BY Gisela Cernadas, David Vine, and John Bellamy Foster

The problem with most conventional reporting is that there are hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending outside the Pentagon’s annual budget appropriated by Congress. Even a generally authoritative source of global military spending data such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) underestimates U.S. spending by overlooking significant sums outside what Trump calls the Department of War and related budgets. One major example is nuclear weapons spending, which represented around $33.5 billion in net spending for FY 2025. Although nuclear forces are controlled and deployed by the U.S. military, a significant portion of the budget for maintaining and modernizing the nuclear arsenal is allocated through the Department of Energy rather than the Pentagon. More

What’s Wrong With the American Left: Symbols Instead of Substance

BY David Schultz

Once class recedes and the professional class sets the agenda, politics changes character. It becomes a contest over symbols rather than substance, over the words we use and the images we project rather than the distribution of power and resources. This is the most visible fault to ordinary people, who can sense when a movement is more exercised about terminology than about whether they can pay for insulin. More

Elon Musk and the Politics of Trillionaire Fascism

BY Henry Giroux

Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue, exploitation into spectacle, and mistakes its own deepest failures for its greatest successes. The media frenzy surrounding the prospect of Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is not a celebration of human progress or individual initiative. It is a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis, one that exposes the power of class privilege, the corrupting forces of gangster capitalism, and a culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing wealth from worth or exploitation from human flourishing. More

The Origins of the Private Intelligence Complex w/ Barrett Brown

June 20, 2026

Award-winning journalist and author Barrett Brown returns to CounterPunch Radio to discuss the critical period before 2016 when online activism emerged, fusing with political movements and bringing down regimes. During that time, Brown became the public face of Anonymous and the burgeoning transparency movement, which led to the US Government targeting him and his eventual imprisonment. Learn the inside story of the hacking efforts, which powerful individuals and entities were exposed, how Brown and his colleagues began to unravel the complex web of relationships at the heart of the modern private military-industrial-intelligence complex, and how the State fought back. Listen and learn about the manufactured identities, the formation of the alt-right on 4chan, what was confirmed in the Epstein Files, and more.

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UFC White House and the Billionaire Alliance w/ Nate Wilcox

June 12, 2026

CounterPunch explores the upcoming UFC White House spectacle and the Hollywood, DC, and Gulf power brokers at the nexus of US politics, sports and entertainment. Host Eric Draitser welcomes veteran combat sports journalist Nate Wilcox, Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw, to the show to discuss the White House event, the mythology around Trump’s relationship with the UFC and Dana White, the role of Ari Emanuel and TKO Group in monopolizing combat sports and playing all sides of the power structure, the Gulf monarchies and their projection of soft power, the overlap between entertainment, finance, and geopolitics, and so much more.

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When State Disaster Response Fails w/ Dr. Nadine Ortega

June 5, 2026

In this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt speaks with Dr. Nadine Ortega, co-founder of Tagnawa Hawai’i, about grassroots mutual aid disaster recovery. Dr. Ortega breaks down the socio-economic and historical conditions that have led to the recent Kona Low flooding on O’ahu and the 2023 Lahaina, Maui fires, which have disproportionately affected Native Hawaiian, Filipino, and other immigrant communities. She shares stories about the importance of cross-class and interethnic organizing when state-run disaster response fails.

Visit Tagnawa.org for more information.

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