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 October 2002
? Was at the video store rapping with my friend Kenny the mgr. Now Kenny the mgr. is such a nice guy, despite his very conservative views. He enjoys reading my columns, yet still will always comment “Your views are really waaaay out there- but on some...
According to a recent (Sept. 21) article by David Blair in the London Telegraph, “The Maoist movement now wields de facto control over most of Nepal. By following the Mao Tse-tung model of guerrilla warfare—-becoming ‘fish swimming in the ocean ...
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is, as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair write, ‘a columnist of awesome vulgarity.’ A forthright mouthpiece for big business, Friedman reveals how parochialism can pretend to be cosmopolitan. N...
In what could be one of the final steps toward the permanent militarization of U.S. society, we all are being recruited as soldiers in the Bush administration’s unlimited war against endless enemies (also known as the “war on terrorism”). ...
There is little controversy about the facts: last Thursday, in an IDF action in Rafah, at least eight Palestinians were killed (the number will probably climb, since some of the wounded were severely hurt). Five of those killed were woman and children. Almost fif...
Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of ...
Last week, your nation’s capital was a bit more surreal than usual. First and foremost, there is the sniper. And just when the sniper arrives in the neighborhood, here comes Michael Moore with his much awaited critique of violence in America &#...
Many parts of Lebanon were bombed heavily by Israeli warplanes on 4 June, 1982. Two days later the Israeli army entered Lebanon through the country’s southern border. Menachem Begin was prime minister, Ariel Sharon his minister of defense. The immediate reas...
My name is Michael O and I am a recovered alcoholic. I am also a progressive political activist. The two are not always compatible. It is a principle of personal recovery from the disease of alcoholism that I will cease fighting anybody or anything in order that I...
SCRIPT AND SUMMATIVE COMMENTS [0:30 COLOR] [Opens with standard procession of sedans, gleaming, tailfinned, gliding over federally-funded blacktop. Then the obligatory shots of people having evenings out; caucasians conversing in bistros with...
More and more of late, as we endure yet another round of controversy about unsafe sex, promiscuity and bathhouses, monogamy and marriage, I find myself thinking about the late ’70s and early ’80s. During that time, I was a lesbian with separatist tende...
? Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you have lost all singularity. Today we no longer fight for sovereignty or for...
Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of ...
I’d become accustomed to George W. Bush’s use of the word evil until he told the nation this last spring, “The evil one is among us.” Anyone with a passing understanding of the evangelical world of Bush’ faith knows he was referring t...
NSA Echelon 33, CentComm: Email monitored 10/22/04. Dispatched DC Yo, Ed! I’m looking out the window of Watchtower 19 in Force Zone Seven. They’re loading up the dead wagon. Three friendlies, two uncardeds, the usual co...
In a strange twist of fate Turkey’s long-term foe Greece has emerged as the most committed European supporter of Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, EU. Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit may be forgiven for thinking: with enemies like this, who...
Whenever warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu, (a/k/a “Bend-the-Truth Yahoo”), lands in Washington, D.C., he heads straight for Capitol Hill. Since 9/11, the former Israel’s Prime Minister has been repeatedly called as a “friendly” witness be...
The legal world generally doesn’t pay much attention to who wins the Nobel Prize for Economics, and this year is proving no exception. But I wonder if ten or fifteen years from now, we will look back at the moment of this year’s prize announcement as t...
Now they’ve given Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace Prize. Looking at the present, wretched incumbent, Democrats feel smug about their paladin of peace. But there’s continuity in Empire. Presidents come and Presidents go. There are differences, but o...
Twelve years ago a populist priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide became President of Haiti, in the country’s first democratic elections. A businessman summed up the attitude of Haiti’s small but stubborn elite: “Everybody who is anybody is against...
Shipping are aggressively using George W. Bush’s intervention in the West Coast dockworkers’ contract dispute to gut the union’s power. Technically, the Taft-Hartley Act invoked by Bush empowered a federal judge to order employers in the P...
The bomb on the “paradise-island” of Bali in Indonesia recently is predictably being blamed on Al Qaeda by US, Australian and Indonesian officials under a lot of pressure. Very conveniently an identity card, pointing in the “expected” direc...
If you live in Falls Church, Virginia, and you see a funny looking aircraft circling over your neighborhood don’t be alarmed. It’s just the Pentagon looking for the sniper. CNN says Rummy wants to help out, so he has approved “military reconnaiss...
Finally, a man who can tell the Iraqi people what they really want, and help the U.S. give it to them. John F. Burns, in his October 15th article in the New York Times, describes, with some contempt, the scene in Baghdad–on the evening before the referendum,...
A bright young man spent a fair part of Saturday evening trying to convince me that file-sharing and “piracy” were the reason that Eminem’s new album has sold “only” four million copies, like his last one did, but only four million....