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 2004
US Air, the nation’s seventh largest airline, currently in a bankruptcy designed to allow it to break all its previous union contracts and eliminate its pension program, has come up with a new idea that is sure to sweep Bush USA. The new idea: Working...
The American media has descended on the Asian tsunami with all the fervor of feral animals in a meat locker. The newspapers and TV’s are plastered with bodies drifting out to sea, battered carcasses strewn along the beach and bloated babies lying in rows. Ev...
The terrible earthquake/tsunami disaster, along coastlines of the Indian Ocean, left tens of thousands dead and many times more people homeless and weakened. Front pages news stories swept the US corporate media "12,000 dead, 40,000, 60,000 and 100,000 made p...
With a death toll rising above 120,000, and large affected areas still inaccess...
Massive political plates in the depths of Old Foggy Bottom unexpectedly shifted this past weekend. Megatons of pressure, built up from decades of internal strife, sent gargantuan waves hurtling towards Iraq. The country’s antiquated defenses quickly crumbled...
"We travel in the chariots of the Psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets, and are born again in the language of Gypsies/Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk/Let me see an end to this journey." Mahmoud Darwish, "We Trav...
In an April interview with the New York Times, World Bank President James Wolfensohn suggested that in addition to blowing up people and things: "I would argue that there is also a need for a parallel and equally urgent attention to the question of developmen...
A small group of wealthy farmers receive the vast majority of water and subsidies from the federal Central Valley Project, concludes a groundbreaking report issued on December 15 by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). The study was issued as Indian tribe...
It has been nearly ten years since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China and the U.S. government’s ratification of the Beijing Platform for Action. To commemorate the occasion, analysts and organizations have begun to assess the expected gai...
The Independent Who said this and when? "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of informatio...
What defines conduct unbecoming an officer? Major General Thomas Fiscus, judge advocate general of the Air Force, opposed the harsh interrogation techniques approved and later rescinded by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for use on Guantanamo prisoners. S...
President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina is locked in a standoff with the International Monetary Fund on the third anniversary of a popular uprising. Just before Christmas, 2001 protesters surged through the streets of Buenos Aires demanding that the entire politica...
The horrific aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami has revealed what many in the world have known for a long time: Western nations are eager to exploit the under privileged, but slow to lend a helping hand in times of crisis. In the past 72 hours we have al...
In the aftermath of a cataclysm like the Asian tsunami, speculation can run wild. Reserving judgment until we really know what happened, here is a list of salient questions and answers that I,ve compiled from news reports, government and other reliable sources....
On Sunday, Dec. 26, an earthquake-triggered tsunami with an effect of 1,000 miles from its epicenter in the Indian Ocean near Sumatra devastated 12 countries. Within hours, numerous countries and private social service agencies had begun massive relief operations....
Hyderabad, India. Here, a few hundred kilometers from coastal Andhra Pradesh, the papers and TV are carrying nonstop heartbreak: a military officer clinging to his two small children, keeping their heads above the surface until he finally swallows too much...
Mike Wallace and his producer did their best to ridicule and incite jealousy towards Ricky Williams on "60 Minutes" Sunday night, but could not bring him down. My comments in (parentheses). MW: We’re about to tell you a very strange story ab...
History is made by people who seize the moments that circumstances offer and bend them to their purposes. When the conditions are adverse, they nurse their purposes, their dreams of freedom, dignity and power, so that when their moment arrives, they are ready to s...
During the 1970′s, the apartheid government of South Africa sought to bolster its claims to legitimacy by allowing elections in the Bantustans – the equivalent to today’s walled in Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The thou...
How does one comprehend the magnitude, impact, and context of a disaster that may claim more than 100,000 lives? But enough about the U.S. occupation of Iraq… The recent earthquake/tsunami in Asia raises more questions than answers. Here’...
More than 80,000 people are dead. Bodies wash ashore in a dozen countries. A train, loaded with a thousand passengers and their luggage, is swept away, engine, tracks, and all. Cars, trucks, buses, and boats are pushed more than a mile inland by the rushing water....
Professor of Law, Washburn University Robin Hood and not Osama Bin Laden is the most celebrated outlaw in the English-speaking world. Part reality and part fantasy, Robin Hood has been written into children’s stories and adult poems, portrayed on the sta...
Cost of one F-22 Raptor tactical fighter jet — $225 million Cost of the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq–$228 million/day Amount spent by Kerry and Bush campaigns — $400 million U.S. aid to Yushenko camp in recent Ukrainian confli...
*For Ilsa, Rick…and ...
President, Nebraska Farmers Union As a recent New York Times article on ag subsidies clearly shows, family farm agriculture is now reaping the public perception and political backlash that the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Corn Growers Associat...