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 June 2004
One of the lessons I learned in Contemporary Power Relations 101 is that when the rulers resort to brute force to impose their will, it means that they are losing their grip. No longer will their bribes, money, and lies suffice in their ongoing project to pacify t...
Zionism as a political movement developed in the late 19th century. Its founder, Theodore Herzl, was influenced by two phenomena: the extent of French anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Trial, and nationalist ideals then popular in Europe. Herzl held that Jews ...
Say what you will about John Kerry, Philadelphia’s commuter tabloid, the Daily News, today handed the Bush campaign some very bad news in the key state of Pennsylvania with a cover page and two-page editorial blasting the president’s policies, endorsin...
On August 18, 2002, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, "Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas". Quoting anonymous US "senior military officers", the NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the administrat...
Editors’ Note: Here’s the latest in the Steve Kurtz case, the Buffalo artist now being harrassed by the FBI. Recall that Kurtz’s wife died, he called 911, they looked at his art and his books and called the FBI, and now the Justice D...
Russian President Vladimir Putin has a point. Democrats have "no moral right" to criticize Bush for invading Iraq. Why? Because they were gung-ho about invading Yugoslavia. Putin made the comment at the G8 neolib feast on Sea Island, Georgia. Demo...
Ronald Reagan touched many peoples’ lives, many he killed…one was Ben Linder. Ben Linder was murdered by Reagan’s contras on April 28, 1987. He was an engineer who had gone to Nicaragua in 1983, as many thousands did during the years of th...
Rodrigo Rato has been appointed as the new managing d\irector of the International Monetary Fund. I have read the biographical notes and references to his career that have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other major p...
June 16 is the hundredth anniversary of the day Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom wandered through ‘dear dirty Dublin,’ the day and adventure James Joyce immortalized in Ulysses (1922). The city of Dublin is celebrating that fictive event with a festiv...
Come on, let’s celebrate ever...
The catch-cry of early 2004 was "anyone but Bush." Anyone turned out to be John Forbes Kerry & a question arises. Frankly, I don’t have the answer. Maybe his supporters can help me out: Who is more decadent? Kerry, his party or his chur...
Well, today is June 11th and I’m watching all these TV stations play Ray Charles rendition of ‘America’ [Brother Ray just passed away yesterday] while showing the funeral of former President Reagan. Some stations are even showing pictures of the ...
Baghdad. Iraq’s main oil e...
Last week, filmmaker Michael Moore admitted that he withheld footage documenting the abuse of Iraqi detainees by US troops. He explained his bizarre decision this way: "I wanted to come out with it sooner, but I thought I’d be accused of just putting th...
"The glorification of war and conquest and the absolute power of the authoritarian state; the belief in the Aryans, or Germans, as the master race(these) are not original to HitlerThey emanate from that odd assortment of erudite but unbalanced ph...
So now we have Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage wading into local Australian politics with the latest Bush administration attack on the ALP’s Iraq withdrawal plan (see Howard’s 2004 Tampa: director George Bush). Armitage doesn’t waste t...
Baghdad. A suicide car bomb killed 13 people, including five foreigners, in central Baghdad yesterday as insurgents stepped up attacks aimed at driving foreign contractors out of the country. The explosion, in Tahrir Square in the centre of Baghdad, ...
Dublin. Elections to the European parliament are a matter of extraordinary indifference to most voters in Europe, and the addition of 10 new countries this time around doesn’t seem to have changed matters. The elections aren’t actually ...
A recent call by respected environmental leader, Professor James Lovelock, to combat global climate change by building nuclear plants may seem logical on the surface. Afterall, we don’t hear much about nukes these days-just the occasional story of a ...
If I were a fundamentalist Christian, I’d be cruelly disappointed to see the Lord win such a crucial fight with just a TKO. I mean, we’re talking about the Pledge of Allegiance of God’s Country here, and he couldn’t win it with a kno...
Jerusalem. The bulldozers have been working around the clock building the separation barrier, and it is now clear that the end is at hand. The residents’ expulsion is imminent; they will soon be forced to move from their homes and ancestral land. This...
In an extraordinary legal maneuver, a New York state prosecutor announced that he will not re-try four peace activists in Ithaca, but instead handed the matter off to the local U.S. Attorney to take over the prosecution. Four peace activists in Ithaca, New ...
Given its strutting brownshirt quality, here is a slogan that might well have been coined by America’s most articulate political thug, Pat Buchanan. But the slogan, with little waving-flag pictures, is being used for bumper stickers selling John Kerry...
BEDFORD, Ind. Striking workers and their supporters at a Visteon Corp. auto parts plant refused to be intimidated after security guards attacked their picket line May 30. So the 1,000 strikers–members of International Union of Electrical Workers-Commu...
On the last car of a late night N train I asked Death how it managed to move so quickly during wars. "I’m not sure why," Death answered, "but ever since Hiroshima my skates glide faster over the cool Earth."...