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 2005
On June 29, 1967, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan commuted the death sentence of Calvin Thomas to life in prison, when medical tests conducted after Thomas’s trial revealed significant brain damage. Last week, Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to s...
Lockheed-Martin is headquartered in the Bethesda, Maryland. No, the defense titan doesn’t have a bomb-making factory in this toney Beltway suburb. But as the nation’s top weapons contractor, it migrated to DC from southern California because that’...
My daughter Lori has been wrongfully incarcerated in Peru since the night of Nov. 30, 1995, when she was arrested on a public bus in Lima. She has been a victim of injustice on three occasions: First, by a draconian Peruvian justice system that had received...
One way to look into marginal politics is to illuminate the problematic tension between demands for equality and the maintenance of clannish supremacist world views. I am referring here to the difficult duality involved in requesting to be seen like everyone else ...
Sandra Bullock and Leonardo DiCaprio each donated about $1 million for disaster relief following the recent tsunami in Southeast Asia. The Steven Spielberg family donated $1.5 million. Jet Li donated more than $125,000; Jackie Chan added at least $64,000. Among se...
A retired high-level government source was called yesterday to respond to a nuclear incident in Montana. Apparently the silo doors of numerous ICBM missiles were opened.
Two such incidents during the Cold War era nearly started World War III. When silo doors ...
My next door neighbor is a fascinating man. He woke up one morning a few years ago, shortly after he had moved into his home, and discovered that rats had wreaked havoc on his living and family rooms. They had chewed up the carpet in one room and gnawed away a cou...
1. Was Laura Bush squinting because of the dazzling white of her cashmere suit that she appeared to be poured into, like a sausage? 2. Speaking of sausages, what,s up with Jeb Bush? If Bill Parcels is Tuna, Jebbie is the Whale. 3. How macabre was it ...
"Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go." Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1 All during the Bush administration’s fear-mongering propaganda effort to convince Americans that Saddam and his WMDs were a threat...
OK, so I wake up early on Sunday morning, like 6:30 am, so that I can watch the Chris Matthews show on WPSD, the NBC affiliate TV station out of Paducah, Kentucky. Hey, when you’re on network you have to get what you can when you can. Chris is followed by th...
Back in Raleigh now, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve spent the last two days in a dream. Arrive in DC on the morning of the 19th, and we are hit with horizontal snow and a Siberian wind chill, worse because we are standing in LBJ park ...
Only the most callous would refuse to sympathize with the United States government. That’s because few of my readers have not at one time or another found themselves totally frustrated by the computer and dismayed that the machine on which they squandered hu...
Patrick Resta, Specialist/E4, served as an Army medic in Iraq with the 30th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division. He was stationed in Iraq for eight months in 2004, returning home just about two months ago. He has recently begun speaking out against the war ...
On January 15th, at Kane Hall, on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, former L.A. cop and self-described 9/11 investigator Mike Ruppert told a standing-room only crowd the obvious: "[Ruppert] believes that no sanctions,...
In the Galapagos on New Year’s Eve, a few minutes past midnight, Ecuadorians pile the streets with carefully crafted life-sized papier-mache figurines representing the year’s aggravations elaborately staged on stoops and storefronts after Christmas and...
As I flew into DC’s National Airport Wednesday night, I could see celebratory fireworks over near the Washington Monument. It was the beginning of the Bush version of a party-something akin to Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Of course, I couldn’t help...
As President Bush has gone around Congress and behind the public’s back in the past four years to spread his faith-based initiative throughout the government, serious issues begin to arise. When Congress refused to pass his proposals to lower the long...
On a sunny July day in 1887, Cap Anson of the Chicago White Stockings refused to play a team from Newark unless they removed their starting pitcher, an African American named George Stovey. Thus began the 60 year reign of apartheid baseball in America. The ...
American journalism lost one of its finest practitioners, The New York Times lost its conscience, and I lost a good friend and mentor last night with the death of John L. Hess, who died in his sleep at the age of 87. John, who only recently finished a devas...
The Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation is growing, as is its support among ordinary Iraqis. Iraq’s interim government recently admitted that the insurgency involves at least 40,000 "hardcore fighters" and up to 200,000 active sympathizers–a ...
As we enter this New Year, we are, like Tantalus, trapped between extremes: unable to reach the fruit that hangs just beyond our reach and unable to quench our thirst by drinking from the water that laps at our chin. Hope hung before us during the election season,...
"HE WASN’T Andy anymore." That’s how Araceli Valdez described watching a surveillance video showing her cousin Andres Raya–known to his friends and family as Andy–take an assault rifle and gun down two police officers outside a li...
Whenever you feel bad and want to howl, Remember someone in our government Who used to stand for reason, Colin Powell. He used to care about an argument In which two nations babbled, cheek to jowl, Instead of squaring off like fighters bent...
Four years ago at the counter-inaugural event on the steps of the state Capitol in Austin, TX, I administered a Citizen’s Oath of Office to a crowd that was eager to fight the incoming Bush administration’s reactionary agenda: "...
The Republican senators were already content in confinement. And the Democrats shuffled grumbling into their cage and handed Alberto Gonzales the key even before the judiciary committee began his confirmation hearings. No, their remarks had signaled, they would no...