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 2006
Since the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in March 2005, the U.S. Administration has played an increasingly imperious role in Lebanon, exacerbating divisions in an already fiercely sectarian country. Against a backdrop of bombings and assassinations which ha...
As one of the creative directors of the Yippies, Stew Albert helped to script the 60s. Stew’s life is a joyous rebuttal to the slurs of mean-spirited bigots such as David Horowitz and Newt Gingrich that the 60s counterculture unleashed a moral rot at core of...
Thanks to a minor but persistent ailment, I recently paid a series of visits to my local doctors’ surgery. As always, the waiting room was filled. The patients–mostly working-class, many from the Turkish and Kurdish communities that are prominent in th...
Going through the lists of pork in defense appropriations bills, it is quite easy to pick examples that appear foolish on their own face or that obviously have no proper place in the defense budget: museums, bicentennial Lewis and Clark celebrations, and breast an...
Commentators on Hamas’ victory in the election preach the acceptance of Hamas as a negotiating partner in the Israel/Palestine peace process. The central messages in these commentaries seem to be that, 1. The world in general, and Israelis in particular, sho...
The yippie who the masses knew but never got the fame abbie, jerry, krassner too the women unknown the wanted few a brother who when the times were tough used his street sense and played it rough smuggled weather around ...
The 2006 federal election has set the stage for a possible dismantling of Canada’s distinctive social and economic fabric. The newly evolved Conservative Party, in many respects a chilling echo of the USA’s Republican Party, is poised for a two-stage a...
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." Benjamin Franklin, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence "Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you wer...
WASHINGTON DC. Jimmy Carter presented Iran with 52 hostages. George Bush has done a lot better, sending 130,000 Americans across the ocean as guarantees of his administration’s good behavior toward the Islamic Republic. Last week, Tehran reminded us o...
The pathetic failure of Democrats in the Senate to stick together and block the appointment of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court — a man committed to the idea of a president with unchecked, dictatatorial powers, and who favors corporations and the state over th...
Writer and political activistTariq Alidescribes himself as a "person of the Left." In a recent interview in Kolkata, he talked about his concerns over an Asia which is "politically undetermined and economically over-determined," and of an India...
Is Judge Samuel Alito a member of Opus Dei? If so, does it matter? If it matters, why? A Senate staffer confirmed that the Judiciary Committee received numerous "notes and letters" stating that Judge Samuel Alito is a member of Opus Dei....
After months of pointing out — first the shortsightedness and then the criminality of the Bush Administration — columnist Paul Craig Roberts has now begun to confront a deeper malaise, the idiocy of the populace. If true, this is a glacial problem and ...
In keeping with its established role as purveyor of disinformation, Fox "News" talking head Brit Hume misreported Fox’s own poll. On "Special Report" (January 26) Hume said that 51% of Americans "would now support" air strikes o...
As 2005 holiday celebrations were getting underway last December, the International Monetary Fund pledged a gift to Nicaragua: complete cancellation of the $201 million debt that Nicaragua owed the multilateral financial institution . Many have applauded this move...
The one thing Americans will not tolerate is being lied to. Conscious, clever and cunning lies from a President and his administration are an abomination to America’s concept of a free and open government of and by the people. The tipping point for s...
The good news from the occupied territories is that Hamas won the elections. As opposed to what the chorus of national intimidation–speaking in one voice from Benjamin Netanyahu to Ami Ayalon–is saying, the political change in Palestine could be good n...
Lately, all the Ken and Barbie-like, mainstream media, entertainment/news anchors have weighed in on James Frey’s memoir, ...
With 2,966 examples costing about $11.1 billion, [2] the pork in the 2006 Department of...
Opening Remarks to the closing session of the International Commission of Inquiry On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, Riverside Church, New York, January 20, 2006. When Clark Kissinger called me yesterday and said, "You wil...
We have great news: Political prisoner Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, "Fr. Gerry" is right now on a plane in the air from Port-au-Prince to Miami. A cancer center in Florida has agreed to treat his leukemia, so he will get immediate attention for the cancer, as ...
With great fanfare the other day, Oprah Winfrey asked James Frey a question that mainstream journalists refuse to ask George W. Bush: "Why would you lie?" Many pundits and news outlets have chortled at the televised unmasking of Frey as a liar. Th...
"Most people just don’t understand how pervasive government surveillance is. If you place an international phone call, the odds that the [U.S.] National Security Agency are looking is very good. If it goes by oceanic fiber-optic cable, they...
I’d got so used to Nicholas Kristof’s January visits to prostitutes in Cambodia that it was a something of a shock to find him this January in Calcutta’s red light district instead. As readers of his New York Times columns across the past...
A marijuana-policy-reform activist is walking down a country road at midnight. S/he comes to a crossroads and meets a tall, dark man who lays out the following scenario, which the activist can accept or decline. President George W. Bush will announce his support f...