The football has been brilliant, because football is brilliant. But the 2026 World Cup—hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico—mainly in America—is the most corrupt, polluted tournament in the tournament’s 96-year history. More
THIS WEEK IN
If Your Financial Advisor Recommends Putting Money Into Trump Accounts, Fire Them!
The tax-sheltered account route favors higher-income people. Over a quarter of households owe no income tax, meaning they would get no benefit whatsoever from putting money in a tax-sheltered account. Another 20 percent are in the 10 percent bracket, meaning the account would just save them just 10 cents on every dollar invested. By contrast, the highest income households save 37 cents on every dollar invested in a tax-sheltered account. More
The Dictator’s Dilemma
As I travelled on the London Tube to meet CounterPunch writer and esteemed art historian Stephen Eisenham, I read journalist Owen Matthews suggesting Putin “lives in a parallel reality, a sealed bubble of disinformation where all the data he receives confirms the wisdom of his choices.” It got me wondering what else on leaders and protected bubbles was out there. Did it include Donald Trump? It’s called echo chambers, information cocooning, courtier syndrome. Some political scientists call it the ‘dictator’s dilemma’: rulers depending on information from below, while their own power discourages uncomfortable truths. More
The Plot to Ruin America
Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change. More
Dispatch From Horse Nation
Vampire Planet: Data Centers, Far Bigger Disasters Than You Even Thought
Israel’s Barbaric Ecocide in Lebanon and Gaza
Return of the Yellow Monster of the Diné: Uranium Mining on the Big Rez
“Their Chaos is Our Peace”: Fighting Zionist Repression in Texas and Beyond
Gaza Sunbirds w/ Karim Ali
On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Tori Tsui talks with Karim Ali, co-founder of the Gaza Sunbirds. Karim Ali is a Palestinian award-winning community organiser and co-founder of the Gaza Sunbirds – a para-cycling team of Palestinian amputee athletes.
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The Origins of the Private Intelligence Complex w/ Barrett Brown
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-
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UFC White House and the Billionaire Alliance w/ Nate Wilcox
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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