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 August 2004
"We’re legal, why don’t we act it?" Todd McCormick, explaining his attitude after Prop 215 passed. (He would serve three years in federal prison for cultivation.) Lepptomania, n. 1. Extreme stubbornness in the beli...
Yesterday, Friday, the Washington Post published a letter from the President of Citizens Against Government Waste in response to my commentary in last Sunday’s Outlook section. Tom Schatz, the President of CAGW, focus...
Ceasefires in Iraq are notoriously fragile but the agreement to end the fighting in Najaf may work because it is underwritten by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful religious leader in Iraq. The winners and losers in the crisis in Najaf, wher...
In ancient Sumer, Iraq 5000 years ago, ruling councils sometimes sought a lugal (big man) to lead armed fight in times of crisis and danger. Scholars think eventually these big men became kings, and civil and military power merged. Saddam Hussein consciously copie...
In Iraq and elsewhere, all eyes are currently on Najaf. As I had guessed, the battle ended with a whimper, not with a bang, as the Mahdi Army militiamen exfiltrated, and Moqtada al-Sadr turned over the keys to the mosque to Ayatollah al-Sistani. But the re...
The Republican National Convention that will begin Monday in New York City has stirred up the expected buzz in the various parties gearing up for the event. From the hundreds of thousands who will flow into New York to protest one hears a variety of intentions &qu...
This year’s presidential election has witnessed the almost complete collapse of the U.S. Left into supporting the second party of big business. Using the logic that "Anybody But Bush" should be in the White House, a pro-big business, prowar, conser...
Rev. Jonathan Edwards delivered the hellfire and brimstone "spider" sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741. This topical sermon is a bitter jeremiad against the "New York Negro rebels" w...
Seven thousand political prisoners are held by Israel and nearly 4000 of them are on a hunger strike now demanding humane treatment. Human rights organizations are outraged but the US-tax funded Israeli government shrugs its shoulders. The Israeli minister...
Those close to him mutter, under their breath of course, that Tony Blair’s only moment of doubt over Iraq came in the wake of the exposure of the Abu Ghraib scandal. This is plausible, as our Prime Minister possesses a Gladstonian moral imperative. He...
"These must be strange days to be a neoconservative," writes Martin Sieff in a...
Early this year, CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair and I met with a couple of Green Party activists over lunch in Oregon City. Daniel Bonham is a Union organizer who decided that, with the Democrats continuing to back policies that hurt workers–NAFTA,...
"We pray today that Najaf will recover. The military operations have brought only destruction." Kassem Hameed, 52, oil worker from Basra who went to Najaf to support Ayatollah Sistani The Grand Ayatollah led a hug...
I send each and every one of you my very warmest greeting from 31 years deep inside of the Belly of the Beast. As you know, I’m a former member of the original Black Panther Party, and even though government officials claim that there are no political...
I was there. I read the book. Denied secular conscientious objector status, I fasted for months as I traveled the nation’s highways by thumb. By the time I reported for my induction physical, I weighed less that 85 pounds, which at a height of 5’9"...
Months ago when it looked like JFK-lite was going to get the Democrats’ nomination, some prescient pundit somewhere commented about Kerry’s combat medals, predicting the campaign would consist largely of arguments for and agin’ the veracity of hi...
The political establishment has thrown down the gauntlet. New York State Supreme Court Justice Jacqueline Silberman ruled late Wednesday against an attempt by United for Peace and Justice to open up Central Park’s Great Lawn for a massive rally against the W...
"All’s fair in love and war." -popular saying "All’s fair in love and war" is usually taken to mean that nothing’s fair in love or war, that anything goes, and regular rules don’t app...
A message beaming into our brains, last read on east coast highway’s many computerized signs — Report Suspicious Activity. I tried to hold out and not to snitch on the giant unfolding conspiracy but George W. Bush is the kindest sweetest man I ever ser...
Two days after workers at the 36th and Madison Starbucks in New York City turned in their union cards to the NLRB for a certification election, Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, sent them a little voice message. In this dispatch from the corporate tower, Schul...
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. Edward R. Murrow As the nation eagerly watches to see what techniques are employed at the Republican National Convention to keep protestors out of sight if not out of mind, we are...
"They hate us because we don’t know why they hate us." Bill Maher Instantly, instinctively, and unrelentingly, the American establishment has framed the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the language of a cla...
Who doesn’t watch the Olympics? Well, aside from those who are mad cause their afternoon TV shows are pre-empted. Oh yeah, and those that, although they love our national anthem and all that, just get tired of hearing it incessantly. Once a day is enough, th...
"My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they’re going to stay that way!" – Claud Cockburn, British journalist, interviewed Capone in 1929 (In Time of Trouble, 1956) I smiled when I read in l...
"The judgment of Hist...