Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives from 1999
Under the clearest of north coast skies, four days before the winter solstice and the brightest moon for the next hundred years, Julia Hill, aka Butter...
Seattle has always struck me as a suspiciously clean city, manifesting a tidiness that verges on the compulsive. It is the Singapore of the United States: spit-polished, glossy, and eerily beautiful. Indeed, there is, perhaps, no more scenic setting for a city set...
Beyond the wildest hopes of the street warriors, five days in Seattle have brought us one victory after another. The protesters initially shunned and de...
From Texas comes another story raising yet more ethical questions about George W. Bush. At the heart of the scandal is the Houston-based Service Corporation International (SCI), which describes itself as “world’s largest death care provider”. As GoreR...
The world’s two largest grain companies are now one. The wave of mergers that has changed the face of the American economy in Clinton time is also engulfing the food industry. On July 9, 1999 Cargill Inc., the nation’s largest privately held company, won appro...
Children in the Banana Trees is a photodocumentary which looks at workers and working-class life in the Philippines. The images were taken over a period of six years, including a period covering a strike of banana workers for the San Francisco Chr...
At the beginning of the Kosovo conflict,CounterPunch delved into the military career of General Wesley Clark and discovered that his meteoric rise through the ranks derived from the successful manipulation of appearances: faking the results of combat exercises, greasing t...
Back in 1996, when the number of Iraqi children killed off by sanctions stood at around half a million, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made her infamous declaration to Lesley Stahl on CBS that “we think the price is worth it”. Given such pride in mass m...
The last time I saw Katha Pollitt was on a Nation cruise in the Caribbean just under a year ago. By the second day Katha was making it clear that all was not well between us. Soon it came out that by quoting some of her off-the-cuff remarks in the New York Press IR...
So, is there serious evidence of a Serbian campaign of Genocide in Kosovo?? It’s an important issue, since the NATO powers, fortified by a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished the charge of genocide as justification for bombing that destroyed much of ...
On June 17, the state of Texas put to death by lethal injection John Stanley Faulder, a Canadian who had been convicted in 1977 of murdering Inez Phillips, an oil heiress. Faulder’s case received more press attention than most executions these days, mainly because t...
“Camp would have moved on to the Happy Hunting Ground of the old art movement. A new art movement would be in. It would be called Shit. Its test would be: is this object, happening, work, event or production more resonant than it was yesterday? Movies about the Stra...
Delegates mustering in Los Angeles for the AFL-CIO convention this week will be set, first and foremost, on having a good time — the sacred duty of all conventioneers with any sense of responsibility and tradition. Then, amid the parties, they’ll consider labo...
"The US Constitution’s great gift to
the cause of international democracy is contained in its first
three words. The rest of it can go…. Checks and balances, separation
of powers, and the rest would have to defend th...
The ashes of the murdered Branch Davidians and their children — all 74 of them — were still glowing as the nation’s major news institutions rousingly endorsed the decision of Janet Reno and her boss, Bill Clinton, to give the FBI (and, as it turned out, ...
A former schoolmate of Edward Said has told CounterPunch that Justus Reed Weiner, author of an attack on the renowned Palestinian intllectual in the September issue of Commentary, deliberately suppressed pertinent information. In Commentary Weiner attempts to show ...
In general, death is something none of us wants, in fact it is something we don’t even like to think about. When death takes place naturally, it is a process beyond our control to stop, but where death is willfully and deliberately brought about, it is very unfo...
Back in February of 1989 a Belfast lawyer called Pat Finucane was murdered by Protestant gunmen. Finucane was well-known for having defended members of the Irish Republican Army, and he’d had plenty of run-ins with police in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, also with ...
There are differences between the two, of course. The late Princess Diana campaigned against land mines, whereas Hillary Rodham Clinton was an enthusiastic advocate for the cluster bombs that now litter the Serbian and Kossovan landscapes, set to kill or cripple for the n...
Anyone wanting a vivid snapshot of the rubble of US policy toward Latin America should glance at Colombia, where the Clinton Administration now has one foot over the brink of a military intervention strongly reminiscent of John Kennedy’s initial deployments in Vietn...
When school kids hose down their classmates with automatic weapons we have to endure weeks of sermonizing about Goths, the baneful influence of Marilyn Manson, computer nerds, the Hitler craze, the need for tougher gun laws, alienation in the suburbs legislators speed ot ...
There were cheers and brave talk almost four years ago, as new leaders took over the AFL-CIO. Yet this spring has marked an awful defeat for the very campaign intended to symbolize labor’s resurgence: the United Farm Workers’ campaign to organize the straw...
BERKELEY — As a broadcaster at radio station KPFA for the last ten years, I often wondered just how many people were tuning in. After all, these are the apathetic 1990s, the passions of the 1960s are supposedly long gone. But when Pacifica Foundation pulled me ...
BERKELEY–Pacifica Foundation’s growing practice of saying one thing in public, while doing the complete opposite behind closed doors, achieved remarkable new heights this week. For months board chair Mary Francis Berry, fired publicity flak Elan Fabbri, an...
Pacifica finally took over on July 13th. I was a reporter for KPFA Evening News that night. In fact, I was waiting in the news control room, ready to go into the studio to read my copy on the Pacifica story when Dennis Bernstein came in, pursued by Lynn Chadwic...