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
Here’s a snippet from William Safire’s latest op-oratorio, "Hence, Loathed Melancholy", in The Upper Right Coast Times: "[T]he capitalist system is not in crisis. In recent months, it has been doing what it is s...
HAVANA — Former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader stated that he is opposed to the concentration of power within corporations that is impeding the development of democracy in his country, and criticized his government’s foreign policy on the isla...
A few years ago, I had the temerity to write to David McCullough, the biographer of Harry Truman, to tell him I thought he was wrong about an aspect of Truman’s character. I had seen McCullough on a C-SPAN rebroadcast of a talk on Truman. Speaking about the...
Usually, Lloyd Allen, the dynamic singer and guitar slinger for the Cannonballs, CounterPunch’s favorite Northwest blues band, is, among his many other talents, a walking fashion statement. But on this Independence Day evening at the Waterfront Blues ...
Bush and handlers think the DOD is out of date And needs big bucks, global evil to dominate. So let’s name it anew, Then we’ll understand it too. Departme...
Folks who believe the official line that the support for the current US policies in the war on terrorism and the new domestic measures at home is nearly unanimous need to know what happened in Greensboro, North Carolina on the 4th of July. The Greensboro Pe...
[Editors' Note: Over the coming months CounterPunch is proud to present installments from David Vest's memoir Rebel Angel, the chronicle of how an Alabama boy became a poet, a rocker, and a political radical, with stops in Romania, academia and the i...
Part Two: Brutalities of Colonial Occupation Following the 1967 war Israel seized East Jerusalem, forced out all of the 6,500 residing Palestinians, and bulldozed their religious centers. The UN reported that by 1971, 48 Palestinian villages were destro...
Part Two: Concerning Violence We return now to a subject touched upon briefly, if only by necessity, which has been distorted and manipulated to no end: the subject of violence. Fanon noted that "the settler paints the native as a sort of quintesse...
As Karl Rove twiddles the dials on the White House Moonshine Machine, prepare yourself for the coming bloodbath. In-between now and then (November 2002) expect to be lectured on individual liberty, personal hygiene, civic duty, discretion, prudence, staying the cours...
"You can forgive the man who robs you, but you can’t forgive the man you rob-in his haggard features you read your indictment and this makes his face so repulsive that you must keep it under your heels where you cannot see it." ...
With the mounting of accounting scandals among major US corporate giants, Appointed President Bush gave a speech to Wall Street on July 9th arguing that "America’s greatest economic need is higher ethical standards." (Never mind rampant poverty in ...
Financial irregularities at Harken Energy during President Bush’s tenure at the Texas oil company have dominated headlines in recent days. But the press has ignored a much bigger scandal: how Harken Energy has benefited from war and terror in Colombia....
"Pssst." I walked straight ahead, looking neither right nor left in a darkened alley illuminated by a quarter-moon. "Pssst." I quickened my pace, but there was no avoiding the shadowy figure. "Ain’t gonna h...
An important marker of civilization has always been the ascendancy of law over the unbridled use of force. At the outset of the 21st century, we are faced with a pervasive dilemma. Reliance on force given the power of our destructive technologies could destroy civ...
It is finally clear what is going on. Everything in the whole goddamn world is turning into a replay of the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida. Think about it. First there was Florida (Louisiana without the music), where the Smirk came out of the Smoke ...
About a year ago I took a train to Tel Aviv. As this is the place that the Zionists created, where Jews can be safe, I took a taxi from the train station to where I was going. You don’t get on a bus in Israel if you don’t have to. The radio was on and ...
The Funniest President traveled to Wall Street recently, on a mission to kick shins and take names. Since entering public life W has scattered behind him a string of linguistic pearls the likes of which many older Americans recall fondly from the TV show Kids Say ...
I live in the country, 10 miles from Estacada, Oregon, and 25 miles from the city of Portland. Since September of 2001, I have been gathering signatures on a state wide initiative petition proposing to amend Oregon’s Constitution in order to enact Campaign F...
Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, the Californian audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish host of KPFA Radio’s Flashpoint current affairs programme, was reading some recent e-mails that he had received from Israel̵...
This week, California State Senator Martha Escutia called a hearing on record label accounting practices. Sen. Escutia represents Whittier, which was Richard Nixon’s hometown. Perfect. Watergate unraveled as a White House conspiracy of dirty tricks, ...
The Supreme Court’s ruling giving public school authorities the green light to conduct random, suspicionless, drug testing of all junior and senior high school students wishing to participate in extra-curricular activities, teaches by example. The lesson, un...
The South Carolina United Citizens decided in a democratic process to put Kevin Alexander Gray on their ballot as their candidate for Governor in this fall’s election. Mr. Gray accepted the nomination. But according to the State Election Commission, South Ca...
Rather than rant at length about the daily Bush&Co. outrage or scandal — they come so fast, it’s hard to keep up — let’s take a step back for some longer-range perspective. The Dance of the Tarantulas Why do we use the ter...
Mr. Bush finally spoke. And the Palestinian people, in spite of their experience with US foreign policy during the past fifty years, listened carefully, hoping that they would hear something new, something hopeful. In their naïve optimism, they though...