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 May 2003
Last month another major warning flag on the state of our oceans was hoisted when Canadian scientists reported that 90 percent of the world’s big fish have disappeared from the seas. Their study found that the largest and some of the most economically import...
Merely from the whines and howls of his numerous enemies on the right, you can tell that Sid Blumenthal has drawn blood in his book The Clinton Wars, many pages of which are spent detailing what his pal Hillary Clinton famously referred to as "a vast right-wi...
Too little attention has been paid to a remarkable declaration by George W. Bush in his State of the Union address last January. In between great lardbuckets of warmongering lies and vacuous preening, Bush also delivered this ringing passage: "We do not claim...
As my fingers plucked it from the letter box the envelope and I began to sweat bullets– HUAC was inviting me to attend the investigation Cherokee DNA in my cellular magma, Cousin Sam dead in the Alamo, Cousin Woody singin’ in heaven– and n...
The Bush administration has its foreign policy hands full with each nation in its "Axis of Evil." From the ongoing search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to the appearance of negotiations with North Korea, and the push to declare Iran in violati...
Here’s Marion Cunningham, author of the new Fanny Farmer Cookbook, telling a novice how to cut up an onion: "Using a paring knife, slice off the fuzzy brownish root end and the stem top… Peel off the papery outer brownish yellow skin of the...
For fans of the death penalty, June is shaping up to be a banner month. As usual, executions are scheduled in Texas and Oklahoma. However, June is special because Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and Utah have all scheduled executions as well. In fact, Utah, which ...
Forget Michael Powell? It’s almost too easy to do. When he’s not out antitrust busting at corporate cocktail parties where John Q. Public and the paparazzi are shunned, Powell’s been staying out of the public view on his own. The job of FCC Chair...
You look at the way this White House is feeding turds through the fan and you wonder how they can possibly expect to get away with it: pardon my coprolalia, but it seems this administration is hell-bent on spraying dookie over the world like some Brobdinagian chim...
I visited some friends over the Memorial Day weekend whose television is all too often tuned to FoxNews. As you might guess, our views on foreign affairs and the economy are not very similar. Fortunately, we spent most of our time working, drinking beer and watchi...
Editors’ Note: On Thursday, May 29, elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly should have taken place. However, earlier this month Tony Blair decided to postpone the elections because, he said, of the failure of the IRA to come up with a statem...
Here we go again. While postwar Iraq continues to crumble, the Bush administration is now setting its sights on a new target–Iran–in its so-called effort to reshape most of the Middle East and bring democracy to countries ruled by vicious dictators. Bu...
Recently, I was the guest on a radio talk-show hosted by a thoroughly decent far-right Republician. I got verbally battered, but returned fire and, I think, held my own. Toward the end of the hour, I mentioned that the National Security Strategy — promulgat...
My father, a World War II Marine veteran, stood in this past Memorial Day for a reawarding of a Silver Star to my grandfather at a ceremony hosted by the local American Legion in a small town in northeastern Connecticut. My grandfather died half a century ago, and...
About fifty years ago, in July 1953, the U.S. secretary of state held a press conference in which he stated, "The growing activities of the illegal Communist Party in Iran and the toleration of them by the Iranian government has caused our government much con...
Republicans dominate Texas politics, but the national Democrats could learn a simple lesson from the state: Before you can become the party in power, you have to be a real opposition party. When 51 Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives le...
Having destroyed Iraq, the United States now proposes to rebuild it with the money generated from the sale of Iraqi oil, which will be flowing again, we are told, within three weeks. Thus will Iraq’s natural wealth be pumped directly into the coffers of Bech...
While not pursuing, developing, building, manufacturing, deploying or "using" nuclear weapons to make this a safer world Iran has vowed to continue its nuclear program developing reactors said to provide electricity essential to th...
The wonderfully bizarre and philosophically fertile novel Insatiability, written in 1927 by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, describes a society in rancid decay faced with the external threat of a "Sino-Mongolian" army with some very distinct Soviet and Nazi...
Few would argue with the proposition that the replacement of medieval scholasticism 400 years ago with the scientific method unleashed major advances in the human condition. That triumph of facts and reason over interests and faith rests on the invention of...
A new big lie is being told. Al Qaeda has found a happy home in Iran. No solid evidence exists for Rummy’s claim, it doesn’t have to. He’ll repeat it again and again the media will go jumping into embed....
Yes, it’s true, some of the naval force and some pilots have returned home to America and a few of the wounded. But have you noticed, the bulk of our marines and soldiers have not returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. It may be that America has trained a new gr...
The splash page on ESPN.com said it all. "Almost time to sign off" from the Jocks to GIs program, a "support our troops" operation launched back when such were fashionable, shut down even as US soldiers find that an occupying soldier is very mu...
The Israeli cabinet’s highly qualified acceptance on Sunday of the "roadmap" to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is likely to mean the final derailment of this latest in a line of misbegotten peace plans. Just a random sampling of the Sund...
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, National Security Adviser and daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Condoleezza Rice, recently expanded upon her Christian Zionist ideology. "I first visited Israel in 2000. I already then felt that I...