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 May 2005
"The lessons we should learn from all The fighting in the days of old When providence bestowed divine The sanctuary purified Let lightning circle all you hold And don’t uproot the olive grove" -Mirah, &q...
The "nuclear option" may have receded in the U.S. Senate for the time being. Unfortunately, it’s still very much on the table for the two newest aspirants to the nuclear club. Not to mention those who already have their membership cards. ...
If you think President Bush should be impeached, it’s time to get serious. We’re facing huge obstacles — and they have nothing to do with legal standards for impeachment. This is all about media and politics. Five months into 2005, ...
The Pennsylvania Department of Health claims it has a plan to deal with a potential outbreak of H5N1, a lethal strain of the Avian influenza. But it’s a secret plan. So secret that local and county health departments don’t know what it is. Nor do physi...
Caracas. A muddy path leads off the airport motorway into one of the small impoverished villages that perch on the hills above Caracas, a permanent reminder of the immense gulf between rich and poor that characterises oil-rich Venezuela. Only 20 minutes fro...
Every five years the parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meet in a review conference to further the non-proliferation and disarmament goals of the treaty. This year the conference ended in a spectacular failure with no final document and no agreement o...
Paris. The French went ahead and did it. Despite being lectured by government and party leaders, media pundits and foreign leaders flown in from neighboring countries, all telling them that they must vote "yes" to the Treaty establishing a Consti...
Tel Aviv No one knew until now what veteran television journalist Haim Yavin thought about the news he has been announcing for more than three decades, and he is so nonpartisan that one wondered whether he had an opinion of his own at all. Now, at 72, he is...
W. Mark Felt, the assistant director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal, has admitted to being "Deep Throat." He was the source of important information for Washington Post investigative reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Felt’s revelations and...
"It should be presented to the city as a permanent curiosity, as a monument to one of the strangest of millionaires, a reminder of our recent past, a treatise on copper, and a tribute to the state of Montana." THE NEW REPUBLIC, 1...
Sir Ridley Scott’s treatment of the Crusades in Kingdom of Heaven focuses attention on a chapter of history that is barely remembered in our societies, yet provides the prism through which Muslims view their relations with the West. The central storyl...
It is important that you should know I cannot sleep on in airplanes. This is partially because I also cannot sleep under any circumstances, but may have its roots in the neurotic belief that it is only the power of my mind keeping the aircraft suspended 45,000 fee...
What are we to make of the news reports that Baghdad is to be encircled and divided into smaller and smaller sections by 40,000 Iraqi and 10,000 US troops backed by US air power and armor in order to conduct house to house searches throughout the city to destroy c...
Tuesday, May 31, is the next day on which the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Ashcroft v. Raich could come down. The current mood of uncertainty in the medical cannabis industry can be inferred from the following, which was written by an attorney who knows wh...
So now we have the worst of all worlds: the prospect of some rotten new federal judges and the survival of the filibuster, which the Republicans have consented not to abolish and the Democrats pledged almost never to use. As Senator Russ Feingold said, &quo...
THE NATIONALIZATION of a bankrupt and closed-down paper company, Venepal, under workers’ self-management late last year signaled a new turn in Venezuelan politics. Soon afterward, Chávez used the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil to ta...
Imagine you are leader of a nation with a population of 69 million, and one fifth the size of the US. You have massive oil and gas deposits but your country is otherwise appallingly poor, being over 70 per cent desert that cannot be irrigated because there are few...
George Lakoff has been enlisted by the Democratic Party to advise and consult. He been endorsed by Howard Dean, Arianna Huffington and Robert B. Reich. He has become the intellectual taste of the season among the Greens and left-Democrats. He’s frequently so...
The reported desecration of the Quran by US guards at the infamous Guantanamo prison, as originally reported by Newsweek on May 9, 2005, was not–as it should’ve been–an opportunity for a thorough examination of US army practices, and thus human r...
Decades ago we were told how consent is manufactured in these great – United States of America. Yet our government since then has become even more up-front about its motives for employing propaganda. Recently, George W. Bush was in Rochester, N.Y., p...
Bucharest. I was interviewed a f...
Art and Fear By Paul Virilio Trans. Julie Rose, Intro by John Armitage...
I am not in a position to comment upon the details of what took place in England with regards to the outcome of the 26 May special vote within the Association of University Teachers, and its result of rolling back a previous resolution calling for a selective boyc...
Call us all Ishmael. At least those of us who have been unwittingly conscripted on what we thought was a voyage with purpose only to learn out of the sight of land that we were on a monomaniacal expedition of bloodlust revenge. Those who our Captain Ahab s...
This focus by Democrats in Congress on judicial appointments and on the appointment of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador is just a pathetic sideshow. In the end all that sound and fury signifies nothing. The Democratic leadership struts around boasting that it...