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 December 2005
Environmentalists hit the roof in 2002 when President Bush announced his Clean Sky Initiative. The initiative would not clean the skies but dirty them further. It would allow corporations to dump tons more toxic pollutants in the air, delay or exempt enforcement o...
When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1970s until the mid-1980s, the week between Christmas and New Year’s was a week of psychedelic bacchanalia. The Grateful Dead were the house band for this festival and the cops kept their distance wh...
Another year over, and we still haven’t seen the widely-predicted U.S. (or U.S.-Israeli) attacks on Syria and Iran. But keep paying attention. The ...
This is the text of a speech given on December 24 at the "In Defense of Humanity" conference. What happened these past days in Bolivia was a great revolt by those who have been oppressed for more than 500 years. The will of the people was imposed ...
The massive warrantless spying campaign against people living inside the U.S. which was authorized and ordered by President Bush and is only now coming to light has angered Americans across the political spectrum. Now it appears that besides massively viola...
In October, 2004, after taking TeenScreen, a 10-minute computer test developed in the psychiatric department of Columbia University, 16-year-old Chelsea Rhoades of Indiana was told she had two mental health problems, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and social ...
Haiti’s Judicial and Executive Branches are both getting what they deserve this holiday season- each other. After 22 months of close collaboration to trample Haiti’s Constitution and democracy, they have now turned their destructive energies on each ot...
What has happened down here is the winds have changed, Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain. Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time, Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. The nation was in the...
I just returned to New York City after spending a week in Kentucky with my family. This was our first Christmas without Chase, my nephew killed in Iraq five months ago. We gathered for brunch at the home of my brother, Chase’s father. Many of us dreaded this...
Journalists should be in the business of providing timely information to the public. But some — notably at the top rungs of the profession — have become players in the power games of the nation’s capital. And more than a few seem glad to imitate ...
The pages of the Palestinian political history book turn very slowly, incredibly slowly. By the time you read these words, Palestinians will have headed to the voting booths to elect municipal and village councils in what has become a saga of multiple waves of loc...
In Bolivia, Evo Morales has swept into the presidency after years of popular mobilization; the long-suffering indigenous and poor majority is demanding an alternative economic and social order. In Venezuela, seven years after Hugo Chavez first won power, th...
Last December I wrote the following: "2004 should be remembered as a year when the hermetically sealed divide between sports and society frayed for the first time in a generation… I cannot wait to see what 2005 has in store. Also in 2005, the Chicago Wh...
You can be certain that there is a Canadian Federal election underway when a sitting Prime Minister of the Federal Liberal Party– considered the party of permanent rule north of the 49th parallel– takes direct shots at the President of the United State...
1. Cindy Sheehan stands up to President Bush in Crawford, TX and reawakens the anti-war movement. When the ‘Peace Mom’ was at the Veterans for Peace conference in Dallas,Texas this summer she decided she was going to Crawford to see the President. She ...
Former CIA analysts The peace movements of the entire world should be in crisis mode right now, working non-stop to prevent the U.S. and Israel from starting a war against Iran. (See the James Petras article in CounterPunch on December 24, 2005 titled Iran in ...
A new report looks into instances in which the Bush Administration leaked classified information to support its case that Iraq was a threat to the United States. While that case was, of course, ridiculous and the information falsified, the leaking of it wa...
Before Bush boarded his helicopter for evacuation into the Maryland hill country for Christmas at Camp David, the president-in-lycra made the inexplicable observation that "it’s been a great year for Americans." He probably wasn’t speaking fo...
Since his retirement by Ronald Reagan, President Carter has given active service to the causes of human rights and peace. He has written a number of books, and now he has delivered a humdinger: ...
Young men and women in a public park in the North Indian city of Meerut were slapped, and punched by the police on the 19th of December on the grounds that they were having ‘illicit affairs’ though it’s not clear how different things would have b...
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $685 million loan for Iraq on December 24. Now the country’s war torn economy will be fully integrated into the global economy-indefinitely. The reconstruction of Iraq will soon be open to even more industrial...
Each detail described here, every shred of reality, is liable to be considered as a whole, which would dim its severity. Detail: Hundreds of people gather each morning at three narrow steel revolving doors, and the gates do not turn because some unseen person has ...
Torture is all the rage these days, getting plenty of ink in the liberal press, as if it’s something new. It’s not. We have been torturing one another for centuries. Our intelligence professionals have perfected the means and the methods and have creat...
Despite all the news accounts and punditry since the New York Times published its Dec. 16 bombshell about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying, the media coverage has made virtually no mention of the fact that the Bush administration used the NSA t...
Something bad is happening to the election campaign of Amir Peretz. It is just shuffling around. The surge that started with his election as leader of Labor has petered out. Events in the country are chasing each other: the "big bang" of the new K...