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 2005
Tuesday night, as water rose to 20 feet
through most of New Orleans, CNN relayed an advisory that food
in refrigerators would last only four hours, would have to be
thrown out. The next news item from CNN was an indignant bellow
...
"Louisiana, Louisiana They’re trying to wash us away, They’re trying to wash us away." It isn’t my custom to watch the network or cable news channels. CSPAN’s Book TV is fantastic, as is t...
We are riveted to images of the hurricane’s victims hauled by choppers from rooftops because we are as amazed by the ways life carries us away as we are by salvation. Hurricanes are never just about hurricanes. They are also about communities pulling ...
The men and women of the National Guard shouldn’t be killing in Iraq. They should be helping in New Orleans and Biloxi. The catastrophic hurricane was an act of God. But the U.S. war effort in Iraq is a continuing act of the president. And now, that e...
Standard fare in the mainstream media as well as in both Left and Libertarian blogs, web sites and magazines, is that the Democrats are spineless. But this view simply does not fit the facts, and it is dangerous to boot, because it leads us to underestimate one of...
and LAWRENCE MISHEL The inflation-adjusted income of the median household was unchanged in 2004, remaining $1,700, or 3.8%, below its most recent peak in 1999, according to today’s release by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The 2004 level of median income...
Cindy Sheehan has been subjected to an unwarranted backlash by right-wing pundits because of her antiwar protests and some explosive statements she made about President Bush. Perhaps Sheehan, while mourning the death of her son, Casey, a U.S. soldier who died in t...
According to the information supplied by the International Press, on August 9, 2005, the Court of Appeals of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Atlanta declared null and void the decision passed in Miami which had condemned Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, René...
Former NSC Staffer Over the dying summer. I have known No truce with Time nor Time’s accomplice, Death. –Wilfrid Scawen Blunt What a surreal moment-this faded end-of-summer 2005. We are locked in...
There are various ways of dying by mistake. All of them against one’s own will. Not so long ago I believed that we could also die by mistake as a result of our own will. For example, committing suicide when all is not yet lost. Something like killing ourselv...
Like some other CounterPunchers I am not at all shocked by Pat Robertson’s call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. I’m merely intrigued to find that the reverend butthead’s contumely has reached such proportions that he ac...
I’m sitting in my house in Asheville, NC, watching the storm clouds gather. It’s the very beginning of the eastern edge of Hurricane Katrina that I’m looking at. The sky is completely gray, but the rain is still not visible. The forecasters predi...
You most likely haven’t heard of a feisty woman named Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, even though you pay her salary. For over 20 years now, Greenhouse has overseen contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers. And up until last Saturday, Greenhouse was ...
In October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top military official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton when awarding m...
My entire family is being played for fools by the power brokers in Washington; and they don’t even have a clue about how they are being manipulated. I am embarrassed for them. The truth is out there; but no one is bringing it to our door step. You have to lo...
You know U.S. Christian televangelist Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition is tight with God. Such tightness has it privileges. One grabbing headlines now is the privilege to call for the U.S.-led liquidation of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president, redist...
President Bush is out of touch with the American people, the US military, and international political reality. With every poll showing smaller and smaller minorities approving of Bush and his war in Iraq, with top US generals sending signals that they want ...
Over the weekend, a spectrum of liberal responses to Cindy Sheehan came into sharper focus. The message is often anti-Bush… but not necessarily anti-war. Frank Rich spun out his particular style of triangulation in the New York Times. While der...
Phil Leveque, the Oregon doctor who unstintingly authorized cannabis use by patients in the early days following legalization -when almost all his colleagues were afraid to do so- has received a bill from the State Board of Medical Examiners to pay for his own pro...
"Captain Gordon Pim stated in his speech that it was a philanthropic principle to kill natives; there was, he said, "mercy in a massacre." Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate the Brutes (1996) At last Mr. Elie Wiesel ...
More than one CounterPuncher has urged me to thank Pat Robertson, along the lines of Diane Christian’s excellent piece on our site today, from the bottom of our hearts. Why? As David Nebenzahl of Oakland wrote us, Because Robertson’s o...
Izzy Stone was a natural-born blogger. Except that he was born before the age of the pc and the web. But Stone (born Isador Feinstein, 1907-1989) left a pre-historic version of his ‘blogging’ in the form of the I.F. Stone’s Weekly, a model that s...
There was something truly repulsive about the way Bush and his handlers latched onto poor Tammy Pruett, the Idaho mother whose husband and four sons have already served or are still serving in Iraq. I have no doubt but that this woman, despite all the smile...
Major new developments have muddled the right to armed struggle. The global war on terrorism openly denies that any such right exists. The collapse of the Soviet Union has undermined the Marxist-Leninist concept of armed struggle, which overthrew numerous old regi...
Dear Jennifer Loewenstein, I hav...