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 2003
The image of a bedraggled, prodded, defeated Saddam has been endlessly paraded on TV since his capture for all to see and cheer. It’s wonderful for many of the Iraqi people that such a ruthless tyrant might finally be held accountable for his years of brutal...
OK, now it’s official. The United States is taking lessons from Israel on appropriate ways to deal with the Arab and Islamic world. This is clear in Seymour Hersh’s story on Israeli-trained American death squads in the latest New Yorker, and Ch...
The last time I saw pictures of a man in need of a haircut being displayed as a trophy of the American Empire it was Che Guevara, stretched out dead on a table in a morgue in Valle Grande in the eastern Bolivian mountains. In those edgier days, in late 1967, the B...
Being an artist and writer, I end up hanging around with some fairly bohemian types. Recently I was drinking wine late into the night with a couple of petite lesbian schoolteachers, a Parisian dominatrix, and the Japanese actress who owns the Hokkaido nightclub &#...
American troops found a guy who looked a lot like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn hiding in a spider hole in Iraq. The word "grotesque" means "out of a cave." "Good riddance," said an oddly prescient G. W. Bush, employing the sam...
Immediately after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, United States officials began large-scale detentions of foreign Arabic nationals and Muslims. Many, if not most, of the detentions were on the flimsiest of...
Shoot first and inquire afterwards and if you make mistakes, I will protect you. Hermann Goering, Instructions to Prussian police Rhyming last names is not all the two men have in common. Each man, though innocent of the ini...
I have before me one of those thumbnail accounts of the birth of rock–the most recent among many dozens, it doesn’t matter which. It says what they always say: that rock was born when white kids ripped off–and sanitized–the raw sexual energ...
A Review of Gender, Ethnicity and the State: Latina and Latino Prison Politics, by Juanita Diaz-Cotto, Albany; SUNY Press; 1996 Gender, Ethnicity and the State opens with a summary of the months of prisoner rebellions in Long Island prisons in 1970. These r...
It seems like the end of the world. It all stops here, up against the wall. When Jenin camp was destroyed there was, for what it was worth, and international outcry. True, Israel blocked the official U.N inquiry, the mined layers of rubble remained for 5 mo...
When Robert Dreyfuss of the American Prospect asked an unspecified Bush neocon "strategist" how best to deal with the resistance in Iraq, the response he received was chilling, "It’s time for ‘no more Mr. Nice Guy.’ All those peopl...
Ernest Crichlow was born June 19, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York. He has been associated with many other artist, during his long, distinguished career including Charles Alston, Romare Beardon, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White. He has taught and ex...
As the New York Times told it, the new train to the plane looks like a two billion-dollar fiasco. A door bumped the Mayor on a trial run; once in business, the train broke down, the few travelers got in late, and found they had to change trains anyway, shlepping l...
The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty. Simon Bolivar "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce." Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire o...
1. What are the new features of current imperialism, as opposed to the one described by Hilferding, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxembourg? Is it a policentric phenomenon, a new "allotment of the world," a "government of monopolies," a "last and highe...
"I’m questioning my own equation is my own equation relevant somehow? The flags are waving, the news is breaking see the man who can’t pick out his own tie If I’d been taught from the beginning would my fears now be winning?...
For two generations the world has witnessed a mounting confrontation between so-called Western modernism and what in recent years has been termed the "Arab street." The latter refers to the state of disgruntlement and social malaise that allegedly afflic...
(1) The Capture of Saddam, in Perspective So the big news Sunday morning was that they got Saddam. This is not terribly surprising. They’ve been searching for eight months and they do, of course, occupy the country. I’m neither happy nor sa...
Every major newspaper in the country reported this week in glowing terms on the completion of the road between Kabul to Kandahar. It is being lauded by the media as Afghanistan’s "Highway to the Future". It should be called the Highway to Re-electi...
Julius Caesar knew how to announce the capture an enemy leader. In 52 BC, his Roman soldiers defeated the tribes of Gaul, and captured the Gallic leader Vercingetorix. The "barbarian" chief was paraded through Rome in chains, and executed after six years...
Schoolboy Issam Naim Hamid is the latest of America’s famous "insurgents". In Samarra–for which read Fantasyville–he was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself with his parents in his home in the Al-Jeheriya district of the anc...
Thursday, December 18, brought some good news for those among us who thought the judicial branch of government was asleep. An independent judiciary is alive and well in two federal circuits–the Second Circuit (New York) and the Ninth Circuit (California). Bo...
Within one week of contracting the devastating virus known as Ebola-Zaire, the relentless attack of the disease liquefies all the victim’s organs and tissue except bone and skeletal muscle. It’s also known as African hemorrhagic fever because at the en...
Medical marijuana patients won a landmark legal victory December 16th when the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government has no constitutional authority to prosecute two California women for possessing and growing marijuana for their pe...
I’m haunted by an interview Molly Ivins had with a young woman in Mississippi. She’d been skinning catfish, 12 a minute, all day long. And behind her stood a man with a stopwatch, checking to see if she was keeping up, and whether he might speed up the...