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
Here is a copy of the Australian Labor party’s (opposition) budget reply for 2003. Budgets have little humor or sex appeal, but this one’s interesting in that it comes at a time when our universal healthcare system, "Medicare", the one Hillar...
The Canadian Agriculture Minister announced this week that a cow in Canada has tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. The United States immediately imposed a ban on Canadian beef and cattle imports, but the American ...
What is truly astonishing in light of the newest wave of terrorist bombings, the shredding of the Road Map, and the mounting problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the fact that, so far at least, none of this seems to be impacting on the popularity of G.W.Bush. ...
It was an all too familiar scene in Afula on Monday. Screams, sirens and blood stained ground. When Hiba Daraghmeh detonated the explosives strapped around her just outside a shopping mall, she took the lives of three innocent people in a most brutal fashion. Most...
The following remarks were delivered by Carl Camacho Jr., senior class president, on May 17, 2003 at the one hundred and fiftieth commencement ceremony of the University of Wisconsin at Madison on behalf of the graduates of 2003. I...
In April of 1969, an eclectic bunch of people in Berkeley, California reclaimed a piece of land owned by the University of California, dug up the asphalt parking lot there, tilled the soil, planted trees and plants, put in a swing set and benches and turned it int...
By any reasonable calculation, members of the Bush administration should be looking for jobs as desperately as this year’s college graduates. There are two million fewer jobs in the American economy today than on the day George Bush took office, and that fac...
"How best to govern the state? First rectify the language." Confucius. Last week we learned that the Bush Administration lied about the extent of Halliburton Corporation’s involvement in the "reconstruct...
White House flack and fabulist Ari Fleischer quits his post and says he is leaving because he wants to be with family, because he’s been in government service too long and wants to go into the private sector, da-da, da-da–all the usual things people in...
"There shall be a fourth kingdom on earth that shall be different from all the other kingdoms; it shall devour the whole earth,and trample it down, and break it to pieces."–Daniel 23 As I browsed the New York Times ...
Dear Sindy, So as you know I get my dialysis treatments in Pakistan because it’s like so much cheaper and Daddy says there’s no way he’s paying MSRP not even for his little angel, plus Mummy can come with me and go shopping for uncut ...
There should be a shake-up in the manner Washington handles foreign policy. The first thing that should happen is official barring of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz from commenting on matters other than defence in its most confined definition Bush has almost achiev...
There is nothing that infuriates us Americans more than a suggestion that our intensely held feelings of patriotism amount to nationalism. Nationalism, we contend, is a quality found in older nations. And it does not take much for actions by other Americans to be ...
Dubya’s graduating class at Yale is having its 35 anniversary at the White House. New Haven is not a secured city. He might confront Americans. If a C student can’t journey to Yale Yale will come to a C student...
1 It’s hard to wake up in a country run by pissants with war- heads. with dead eyes. with pissy bullies’ mouths. with bad talk badly said. with no pleasure except in that which is power and futile...
In one sense everybody, supporters and opponents of the war in Iraq, got it wrong. Opponents denounced US plans to impose neo-imperial control the country. Supporters spoke of the good things the US planned to bring to the Iraqi people once Saddam Hussein was over...
At the White House today, Ari Fleischer announced that he will resign as press secretary to President Bush effective in July. Ari says he has spent 21 years in government, he never intended to spend the rest of his life in government, he’s recently married a...
University of California at Berkeley Graduation Ceremony, African Studies Department, Commencement Address, May 17, 2003 Congratulations proud young graduates! You have accomplished an important milestone in your lives. Impo...
George W. Bush was appointed into the White House as a proudly born-again "Christian," and his "compassionate" conservative administration entered the White House accordingly, as if it had a mandate from the gods, when it didn’t even have...
The ‘road map’ for peace given recently to the Israelis and the Palestinians is probably a genuine effort by the so-called Quartet — the United States, United Nations, the European Union and Russia– but the plan lacks an essential element o...
An article in Sunday’s Washington Post with this headline caught my eye: "Justice Thomas Tells Law Grads of Being ‘Crushed’ By Rejection." The article went on to describe Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s speech to Saturday&...
More than 50 dead in a week. Thanks for the Iraq war. Thank you, Mr Bush and Mr Blair, for making our world safer by ridding us of the one tyrant–Saddam Hussein–who never had any connection with 11 September 2001, or with the Riyadh bombin...
Say “American conservative commentator” and what do you picture? A middle-aged guy in shirt and necktie, right? Speak of a “hardline Republican pundit” and what else comes to mind? Perhaps a big-mouth butterball like Rush Limbaugh? Or a Bible-bashi...
The Wall Street Journal thing was the last straw. Mammon’s house journal had let the piss-ant drop a rant on a literary lion. God knows, Norman Mailer might have deserved once to be bitch-slapped by Vidal, stiffed by Lowell, a reticent look of dismay fr...
The Honorable Kofi Annan, Secretary General The United Nations (via fax) Dear Mr. Secretary General, We are former intelligence officials who have served many years at senior levels of the US intelligence community. As the role of int...