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 November 2002
President Bush’s announcement last week of his intention to privatize up to half the federal workforce came with the usual confident talk about reducing government costs and improving services.Market ideologues may believe that, but there is no reason citize...
This past month I was invited, for the second time in as many years, to present a book in Germany. Last year Piper published ...
It’s tempting to get totally disheartened by the recent midterm elections. I certainly did. But don’t despair: Things are going to get much worse before they get worse. Then they’ll get even worse, and then things will start to get better. I’...
(This letter was written to Rolling Stone after their "women in "rock" issue was published, but was not printed by their editors.) I tried to find some cleverly worded way to express my disgust with your "Women ...
If you are a political prisoner in one of Colombia’s prisons you have to fight for your life every single day of your detention. A substantial section of the prison guard, working with the police and the army openly supply paramilitary prisoners with the wea...
I bet you anything if you tried hard enough, you could find someone who didn’t like Tom Dowd. It wouldn’t be anybody I ever met, but there must be somebody out there. As a young scientist at Columbia University, Tommy Dowd worked on the Manhatt...
Subprime lenders have been marching up to state legislators around the nation with a stern warning-”enact protections for borrowers and you will trigger a quick and certain reduction of credit for thousands of low, moderate and middle income borrowers.”...
In November 2002, once again, Tehran University became the site of anti-government protest by the students and the youths. The protests that began with less than a few hundred students reached a peak of more than 5000 in three days. Similar acts of defiance were h...
Let’s hear it for the senior Canadian official who mustered the guts to call Dubya a moron. Unfortunately, the Canadian who said this decided to remain anonymous. Of course, these days, speaking the truth and then remaining incognito may be the right thing t...
We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep on saying it: A country whose leader has the power to imprison any citizen whatsoever, on his order alone, and hold them indefinitely, in military custody, without access to the courts, without a lawyer, without any...
“Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Theodore Roosevelt “When you pick up a stick at one end, you pick up the other end too.” Indiana, mid-20th century Theodore ...
In today’s reinvasion of Jenin Refugee Camp, the Israeli Occupation Forces made the bottom section of the camp into a closed military zone in the morning, using about twelve tanks, ten jeeps, and at least two Apache helicopter gunships. I had been trying to get betw...
There he goes again. Chomsky, Cockburn and Vidal. They’re the axis of evil of the Left, so says The Nation columnist and Stanford University PhD candidate in history Eric Alterman. Writing in the current issue of The Nation (Dec. 9, 2002), Alterman sa...
EDITOR’S NOTE: In September of 1991 law professor and CounterPunch contributor FRANCIS BOYLE asked the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East to file an Indictment, Complaint and Petition for Relief from Genocide by President Ge...
The race is on to get capital murder convictions and the death penalty for the two Beltway sniper suspects, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. Indeed, in a blatant case of the cart driving the horse, the jurisdiction for their trials was chosen with the ̶...
In a final burst of shameless opportunism for the legislative year 2002, the President and his party pushed their “homeland security” bill through Congress. The bill was laden with pork and gifts to special interests. Among the most ostentatious was a ...
After more than two weeks detention by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Amer Jubran is out on bond. The INS hasn’t given up, though. In a few months they’ll try to deport him. In the meantime, the feds have again shown a determination to tra...
‘Evil’ has been forefront in current affairs during the last year. Al Queda is ‘evil’. Saddam Hussein is ‘evil’. We fight an ‘evil axis’. This is not new. The so-called fight for ‘justice’ has been vetted...
To be Palestinian in the United States means to have no voice. Representations of the Palestinian cause stem more frequently from TV pundits and other elite media sources than from Palestinians themselves, whether here or there. The form and shape of those represe...
‘Evil’ has been forefront in current affairs during the last year. Al Queda is ‘evil’. Saddam Hussein is ‘evil’. We fight an ‘evil axis’. This is not new. The so-called fight for ‘justice’ has been vetted...
There must be some god somewhere laughing really hard right now. If it weren’t for the deadly consequences of the latest UN security council resolution, i would be having a good laugh as well. So here’s a bit of dark unintended self-satire for y...
As the Bush war machine attempts to plant the flag of imperium wherever its over-sized jackboot takes it, Americans must fight to reclaim that most precious ground, ceded to the forces of the right after long wars of attrition: our minds. No less than the c...
The Fourth Amendment requires probable cause of a crime before a phone can be tapped or a home searched. On Monday, a special federal appellate court, meeting for the first time in its 24-year history, ruled that the government may conduct secret wiretaps and secr...
Dear Ayatollah Shahroudi, It’s been a while that I have planned to write to you. But as we are both aware, the anti-God forces in our countries keep us quite busy! I have been very occupied doing my share to keep these forces in check here. But their ...
A Wal-Mart advertisement caught my eye during the Washington Redskins game against the Jacksonville Jaguars two weekends ago. It was the Sunday before Veterans Day and the company thought it best to honor former military personnel who now work at its stores by buy...