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 July 2002
A little background. Last week Jeb! Bush ran at the mouth along the lines of: "For "the families of these victims, justice has been denied," Bush said Thursday. "It is very troubling that we do not have a death penalty process that puts them fr...
Part Two Mayberry through Dark, Dark Glasses But, I digress. The few things I can remember about the first forced year back in Augusta are: I had an anal retentive probation officer named Vern (an old pal of my Dad’s) who cited scripture, and a...
When did the great executive stock option hog wallow really start? You can go back to the deregulatory push under Carter in the late Seventies, then move into the Reagan Eighties when corporate purchases of shares really took off. This was the era of the leveraged...
London. Of the three serious wars that the U.S. has fought since 1945–Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War, one ended in defeat and two in draws–not exactly a glorious record. An Iraq war likewise could end in stalemate. Saddam Hussein is not the Tal...
Part Four Palm Trees and Pink Stucco Flamingos I took up residence with my Mom and step-dad, by then in the Ft. Lauderdale area, on a beautiful golf course called The Inverrary. It was the home of Jackie Gleason’s Inverrary Open. As we drove th...
(or, coming of age in the Deep South in the early 1970s with the likes of Gov. Jimmy Carter, James Brown, Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, the specter of Dick Nixon’s pal Bebe Rebozo, the ghost of General Mad Anthony Wayne, a Kervorkian electro-shock pioneer, ...
Part Three At the Sunrise Inn All of our friends and more would converge at the Sunrise Inn on Saturday nights for Revolution 101 classes that we held for the Augusta College (AC) students. Which consisted of reading materials on the requisite scaven...
Noticing that some eminent and informed writers have likened USA with the old East Germany because of the Patriot Act and the new Terrorist Information & Prevention System, TIPS, where an awful lot of people are encouraged to inform on their fellow citizens, I...
The predominant view in Washington right now is that the corporate reformers are in control. President Bush’s Wall Street speech last week was a bomb, immediately discarded in Washington circles as containing proposals that were too weak to constitute...
A tiny island, “Perejil” for the Spaniards, and Leila for the Moroccans, have come to the forefront of news for the last few days. For many, this is an alarm bell since it resembles very much like England and Argentina’s scuffle on Falkland Island years ...
It would be hard for someone who comes to European historiography from another perspective–Greek, Roman or Islamic–not to notice an obsession, especially pronounced since the eighteenth century, with European superiority. One runs into this obse...
The relentless expansion of corporate control over our political economy has proven nearly immune to daily reporting by the mainstream media. Corporate crime, fraud and abuse have become like the weather; everyone is talking about the storm but no one seems able t...
I hate the feeling of someone reading over my shoulder. Not only is it superficially distracting, but it often affects how I respond to the text. Being conscious of being watched inhibits my thinking because I find myself reading through my watcher’s eyes. I...
The right is whining. Carl Limbacher and his crew complain on the popular NewsMax site that in the two weeks since the Harken story went critical, "the prestige press" (Limbacher’s odd phrase, which presumably means he’s excluding The Nationa...
"So what is our mistake? We are also human beings. Treat us like human beings," says Gulalae, a 37 year-old Afghan mother living in the dust, hunger and fear of the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Pakistan. She calls Osama bin Laden an "outsider" an...
"The man who would be President", during his campaign, picked the "Man from Nazareth" as his role model, causing this writer to almost fall out of my chair. On election eve, I sadly realized how almost 50% of the voters bought into this obvious...
The anti-immigration crusade in the West reached new levels in recent weeks. On July 12, the liberal government of Britain finally got its wish when it reached an agreement with the conservative-dominated government of France to close down the Sangatte Red Cross c...
From the very beginning of the Afghan crisis, which began with the Saur coup in April 1978, U.S. policy-makers have capitalized on misogyny. Women and girls today constitute some 60% of the Afghan population, the male population vitiated by invasion and fra...
Five years ago Bill Clinton announced that he was ending welfare as we knew it. Last week George W. Bush could have commemorated the occasion in his Wall Street speech by proposing to end capitalism as we know it the brand of capitalism that’s wrecking more ...
"I’ll confiscate your camera," the Customs officer growled. I was walking down the pavement on the US side of the border a stone’s throw from Ciudad Puerto Palomas, Mexico. I was rewinding film back into the canister. "Excu...
As we await the conclusion of the FBI’s investigation into the July 4 shooting at Los Angeles International Airport, we are witnessing a sudden attack on law enforcement’s definition of terrorism. If the investigators conclude that the shooting ...
How better to distract Pakistan’s army from supporting America’s “war on terror” than by promoting, yet again, a war in Kashmir? Whether or not the mysterious “Hindu” holy men who turned into mass murderers in the slums of Jammu ...
More than one person who’s worked with Michael Jackson has predicted to me that, if he realizes he’ll never again be the world’s most popular entertainer, he’ll commit suicide. Nobody predicted that the suicide would be so public, though....
All the headlines about corporate disclosures and the need for transparency are sending shivers through the banking industry and its regulators who have always lived in a protected and largely secret world. Hundreds of millions of dollars are expended on ex...
Recently, Americans have been focused on corporate crimes that cheated stockholders and taxpayers out of money to benefit executives and politicians. This week we must focus on a crime that cost thousands their lives, as executives and politicians try to cu...