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 November 2005
On November 11, 2005 CounterPunch contributer BARBARA LaMORTICELLA was presented with the prestigious Holbrook Prize at the Oregon Book Awards. We reprint her acceptance remarks.–AC/JSC I want to thank my old friend Robert D...
David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a scholar of critical whiteness studies, delivered a talk titled "The Dilemmas of Popular Front Antiracism: Looking at The House I Live In" on November 17 at the ...
1. Herbie Hancock / Michael
Brecker / Roy Hargrove — New
Directions in Music Live at Massey Hall (Universal)
...
FIRST THE good news. Well, good news for someone, anyway. The collective net worth of 311 Indian billionaires is now Rs.3.64 trillion. This is up 71 per cent from last year, when it was a paltry Rs.2.13 trillion. The tribe has also grown. It now includes 133 new e...
A Bigger Bang, the twenty-fourth American studio release by the Rolling Stones, is stacked ...
Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism. Hubert Humphrey Again we have been treated to the workings of a truly compassionate administration. In one case it took two tries, in ...
Skull and Bones is a worrisome and strange Yale secret society. On August 17, 2000 there was an interview with President George W. Bush that bestirred controversy regarding his initiation into Skull and Bones. Time Magazine asked if it troubled him that he had bee...
What an absolute load of manure the WSJ puts out. Straight from the sewers of Foggy Bottom. The funny thing is that for all their millions of column inches, the pig press can’t bring itself to report the truth, which is that it was Vincente Fox that s...
"Freedom isn’t free!"–so we are reminded by the ubiquitous yellow ribbon stickers on gas-guzzling SUVs. An online poll asks if the war in Iraq has been worth the loss of American lives, and the only options for response are: 1) A future of fr...
THE STATE of California is racing to execute Stan Tookie Williams, its most famous death row prisoner. And in response, people from all walks of life–Hollywood stars, anti-death penalty activists, former gang members, educators and more–are now racing ...
A 3 million dollar, ten-year trial of genetic modification (GM) on field peas at The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia’s national science research organization, was scrapped last week (November 18, 2005) when the...
Philip Denney, MD, seemed to be winning some hearts and minds as he testified before a committee of the Arkansas legislature Nov. 17 in support of "An Act to Permit the Medical Use of Marijuana." The bill had been introduced by Rep. Lindsley Smith and co...
The average movie going experience these days goes something like this. Plop down ten dollars for a ticket, another ten for popcorn and a drink, then sit through two hours of things blowing up, juvenile humor, or cheap sentimentality. You escape your job, family, ...
The debate between progressives and corporatists over the state of the mass media goes like this-the former say fewer and fewer giant media conglomerates control more of the print and electronic outlets while the latter respond by saying there has never been more ...
Here we have one of the most widely derided presidents in the history of the United States and a war abhorred by a majority of all Americans and the Democrats have near zero traction as a credible party of opposition. The sequence of events after Representative Ja...
George W. Bush returned from a brief but difficult November learning foray in Latin America: "Wow, Brazil is big." Meanwhile, U.S. citizens grew impatient with his performance. CBS polls rated him at 35% approval in early November. Even his supporters ac...
Whether white phosphorus bombs–what American troops call "Willie Pete"–is a chemical weapon or an incendiary weapon, may not seem like a very important distinction to a casual observer. After all, what it does–burn flesh on contact and ...
"Cuando muere una lengua, las cosas divinas, estrellas, sol y luna, las cosas humanas, pensar y sentir, no se reflejan en eso espejo." "When a language dies, the divine things, stars, sun and moon, the human th...
The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has in the last week signed a pact with the alliance of seven parliamentary parties that have united in opposition to King Gyanendra and his dictatorial regime. They will, in the words of former Prime Minister Girija Prasad Ko...
Former CIA analyst The surprising degree of consensus reached by the main Iraqi factions at the Arab-League orchestrated Reconciliation Conference in Cairo last weekend sharply undercuts the unilateral, guns-and-puppets approach of the Bush administration to t...
Until November 10, my prognosis of the progress of apartheid in Israel/Palestine was right on track. Sharon was on a tight time-table. With a stable government that would last until the elections in November 2006, he would move quickly to nail down the last elemen...
In the three months since we fought the heat and crowds, watching a bit of history being made by the presence of Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Texas, a lot has changed. We drove into town late this morning, noting the landmarks of last summer, Rattlesnak...
During the Second World War, over two dozen anthropologists worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the institutional predecessor to the CIA, performing a variety of tasks ranging from covert-ops to desk-bound propaganda analysis. For the first time, I ...
It has become abundantly clear that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal is doomed. It has dug itself into a spider-hole of treachery and deceit it will never get out of. They have set the stage for their historical legacy alongside the most despicable tyrants ever to d...
On May 12, 2005 the Department of Homeland Security staged a spectacular joint terrorist preparedness exercise in Romulus, Michigan and the Detroit Metropolitan Airport called "Operation Vigilant State, a Surface to Air Threat Exercise." Citizens were in...