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 January 2004
Man, am I glad I’m not black. Being born black in this country is like waking up smothered in A-1 Sauce in a pit full of starving lions, and then being told to stop acting like a victim. But I’d rather be black than Kurdish. Those Mesopotamian cats are...
Former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’ Neill’s appearance turned out to be significantly more illuminating than anyone could possibly have expected. Notwithstanding, his description of the President as a "disengaged" simpleton with the att...
Many pundits say President Bush is sitting pretty, but this year began with new poll data telling a very different story. A national Harris survey, completed on Jan. 1 for Time magazine and CNN, found that just 51 percent of respondents said they were "likely...
You’d think that President Bush would be facing, to quote Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a long, hard slog in his bid to recapture the White House for a second term what with all the information trickling out of the president’s administration th...
You really can’t rely on these Arabs. Take this fellow, Qaddafi. For decades he played the clown. The whole world laughed at him (except when he downed a French plane in Chad and the Pan-Am jet over Lockerbie.) His Libya was a "rogue state",...
Although Democrats are quick to moan that life is so unfair in a Bush America, they have failed to stop and smell the roses that do appear all around them. One of these roses sprouted up most prominently this week. At a fund-raiser in Missouri, Senator Hill...
For over three months, shoppers and drivers in Southern California have seen them holding their picket signs. They are 70,000 supermarket workers represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) and their picket lines extend hundreds of miles acr...
Although half a world away and 100 years apart, Soha Bechara’s life in Lebanon, at least the first 36 years, has presented some striking similarities to Alexander Berkman’s struggle for economic justice during the age of industrialization in the United...
On September 15, 2001, President Bush declared a "war" on "terror." It will be, he said, "a conflict without battlefields or beachheads." Actually there have been battlefields and beachheads. First in Afghanistan in 2001. Then, in 200...
Forever, people in power have been afraid of fiction. Wild imaginings threaten to undermine the view of the world as unchangeable, the easy idea that history is set in its course like footprints in cement. Novels, poetry, plays, and even pornography have been conf...
An ill-advised edict by the Taleban government early 2001, to obliterate some of the world’s oldest Buddhist masterpieces in the Afghani province of Bamiyan, sent "dark shivers through the international community", as described by ABC news. Shortly...
The most vicious anti-semites in America aren’t the few surviving retro fruitcakes with swastikas in their closets, but rather those self-righteous Jews who attack and try to silence-without conscience, doubt or scruple-any Jew who attempts to discuss seriou...
Folks, I’ve been a boxing fan since I was eight years old. At that time I idolized Cassius Clay, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali. In the mid-70′s, I remember hearing about a young "up and comer" named Greg Page. Page attended the s...
The practice is a bit of a nuisance if you don’t happen to want it to happen to you. Until 1995 it was a secret to all but the cognoscenti. The practice referred to is the practice engaged in by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints of e...
Beyond the shared enthusiasm of the Fuehrer and all US presidents (with the possible exception of Warren Harding) for mass murder as an appropriate expression of national policy, I’ve never seen any particularly close affinity between Adolf Hitler and the cu...
Race is still a major factor in the world, as can be seen in everything from who goes to prison in the U.S. to the economic gap between Europe and Africa. But the question of race isn’t as simple as it was during the 1980s, when a worldwide movement surged a...
Happy New Year! 2004 may become known as the year that the newly created Department of Faith-Based Homeland Anxiety helped George W. Bush slip back into the White House. At the very end of 2003, Tom Ridge, the Minister of Homeland Security raised the nation...
On March 13, 1982, members of the Civil Defense Patrol (PAC) led by the Guatemalan Army entered the town of Rio Negro, Rabinal, in the Departamento of Baja Verapaz. Encircling the village women and children, the PAC, under the orders of the army, began raping and ...
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, my father Francis Anthony Boyle, after whom I am named (being the oldest of my parents’ eight children) applied for admission to Officer Candidate School for the United States Marine Corps. After ...
History is not to be absent but to become absent; to be someone and then go away, leaving traces. A relic, any relic, is a will, we are present at its coronation. The will is where the dead are most alive; a functional autobiography, immortality secured in the gre...
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan goes off to the new world of earth to sabotage Adam and Eve, a guarding angel lets him in because Satan feigns angelic demeanor so well. The narrative voice notes that only God can pierce hypocrisy; angels can’t. I...
Born in 1917, Marvin Miller never played the game, but he may have had more influence on baseball than anyone else in this half of the century. As executive director of the Players Association from 1966-1982, he brought a wealth of experience garnered in the tough...
The desperation move by the Pentagon to try and maintain U.S. troop strength by offering soldiers a re-up bonus of $10,000 give the lie to earlier assertions that were made to me by Pentagon officials last fall when I was writing about contingency planning for a r...
It came at the very end of a long New York Times report of Jan. 2 regarding the havoc caused at Dulles airport in Washington, DC because of heightened concern there about a terrorist attack. "In a footnote, the director of security at Dulles airport wa...
"I think war is a dangerous place, and I think that nobody would kill a journalist intentionally." George W. Bush "The death of José Couso was a premeditated crime, an attack on journalists to prevent...