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 February 2004
A white Jesus during Black History Month? I find it more than a little ironic that during February, Black History Month, we are being bombarded with images of a white Jesus in the trailers for Mel Gibson’s film. Jesus, the Annointed One (Kristos), wa...
Ralph Nader has defined a perfect moral dilemma for thinking Americans. He finds himself in a situation resembling that of Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen’s drama, "An Enemy of the People." Dr. Stockmann discovered the municipal baths were contaminat...
Much of the world sees President George W. Bush as a persona non grata. Unilateral actions, false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and scandals from Halliburton to the president’s National Guard service are giving America and its presiden...
It was a quite a show at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s worldwide threat assessment briefing on Tuesday, Feb. 24. Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., outdid himself as damage control officer for fallout from failed intelligence. Sen. Rob...
The year 2003 was a truly outstanding one for Canadian self-assertion. In a completely unexpected encounter of fates, Prime Minister Jean Chretien proved there to be no contradiction in running a democracy within the confines of a G7 nation. Tyrannical mood swingi...
Music and politics ? They just don’t mix, the critics say. David Segal, the Washington Post pop music critic, summed up the conventional wisdom when he said that the "history of rock and politics could be summarized in an hour or two, because pop...
Well, that’s it then. The show is over. The scales have fallen. The monstrous gears of the dark satanic mills that spewed their poison fog across the land have ground to halt at last. George W. Bush’s performance in his nationally televised inte...
Tony Blair and George W. Bush want the issue of spying at the United Nations to go away. That’s one of the reasons the Blair government ended its prosecution of whistleblower Katharine Gun on Wednesday. But within 24 hours, the scandal of U.N. spying explode...
Some people are greatly gratified that the International Court of Justice has been reviewing the legality of Israel’s "security fence"–known everywhere outside of Israeli rhetoric as "the Wall" (or, in the media, increasingly as &qu...
The US lawyer representing the government of Haiti charged today that the US government is directly involved in a military coup attempt against the country’s democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Ira Kurzban, the Miami-based attorney who ...
Mark Falcoff’s February 23, 2004 American Enterprise Institute post, "Facing up to the Conflict in Colombia" broaches an important topic. But Falcoff does not face up to reality as promised. Falcoff correctly notes that what started as a civil conf...
We’ve got the rebels in Iraq on the run! So says a letter intercepted by U. S. Forces in Iraq in January (Dexter Filkins, New York Times, 02/08/04). It was taken during a raid on a "known" Al Qaeda safe house in Baghdad. U. S. authorities cl...
On the day that Justin Timberlake ripped open Janet Jackson’s blouse during the half-time of the Super Bowl to reveal a bejeweled breast and create a national firestorm of protest, American Soldiers 523 and 524 died in Iraq. Along with the two American soldi...
If the American mainstream media had given Ralph Nader the coverage throughout 2000 that they gave him this past weekend, we would today have a strong, federally funded Green Party and President Gore would be seeking re-election this November. The widesprea...
"As night fall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air, however slight, les...
The cynicism was knee-deep at the White House yesterday as the President extracted another convenient diversion from his political bag of tricks. Gay-bating has always been a familiar theme among conservatives and Bush is no exception. Feigning moral rectitude, he...
George W Bush, a man searching for a winning issue now that his "war president," "I’m a warrior," and "We’ll find those WMD’s" rhetoric has lost its punch, has now seized upon some illegal behavior by some San Franci...
(from a talk at a Burlington, Vermont Town Meeting titled "Can We Vote to End The War?" Feb. 18, 2004) I have never voted in the general election for a presidential candidate from one of the two major parties. The reason for this isn’t becau...
The Times says "President Bush kicked off his general election campaign on Monday night." Kicked off? Where has the Times BEEN, all these months? Anyway, the Bush handlers gave him a good line. He said John Kerry was "for tax cuts and against...
A man searches for truth, works for justice, teaches love and peace. His flesh is cut up, killed on a tree by empire, religious establishment and mob. His message is twisted and tortured to provide pretext for further empire, patriarchy, crusade, slavery an...
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Listening to Democrats screaming about Ralph Nader’s entry into the presidential race we finally understand the mindset of those Communist dictatorships that used to take such trouble to ensure that the final count showed a 99 perce...
We have one national political figure in this country of undoubted integrity and what does he get from this nation of ingrates? Accusations of spoiler and ego-maniac. Naturally the Greens joined the din denouncing Ralph, not mentioning that their pot-addled, dithe...
Stirring a crowd is one thing. Mob politics is another. Today with his announcement that he intends to pass a Constitutional Amendment against gay and lesbian marriage, President Bush reminds us what a mob monger he is. "I’m a uniter, not a divi...
The following is the text of a news conference with RALPH NADER at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., as transcribed by Federal News Service Inc. Today I enter the 2004 elections as an independent candidate for the presidency of the United States...
Halliburton and its former chief executive, Vice President Dick Cheney, could become President Bush’s Achilles heel come the November presidential election. On Monday, the Pentagon said it launched a criminal investigation into allegations that Hallib...