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 April 2006
Often small things provide the most disturbing evidence for world-changing events, as when naturalists observe the quiet disappearance of some little known species. The CIA’s firing of senior officer Mary O. McCarthy is a political event of just this nature....
In the 1980s Melanie Dreher and colleagues at UMass Amherst began a longitudinal study to assess the well-being of infants and children whose mothers used cannabis during pregnancy. The researchers lived in rural Jamaican communities among the women they were stud...
Harry: Back before Bruce Springsteen had recorded
an album, Pete Seeger was a domestic god in our New Jersey home.
A stack of well-worn LPs was spun and spun again on an old black
box phonograph, and on them Seeger sang songs tha...
The other day during a brief press opportunity, President Bush expressed his concern about rising gasoline prices, assuring Americans that his administration feels the public’s pain, while laying out three reasons for rocketing prices of the past two months....
With the Bush neocon gang pushing ahead for war in Iraq, and talking about going nuclear, it might seem an odd time to be thinking about frogs, but hey, it’s spring. And by the way, where are the frogs? Here in the burbs just north of Philadelp...
Curtis Salgado: Strong Satisfaction (Shanachie) The best bluesinger o...
In Nicaragua, the US government continues to flex its muscles to achieve an electoral defeat of Daniel Ortega in the November presidential elections. Ortega, president during the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s, is running for president for the fourth time sinc...
It was ironic that last month’s news told of U. S. troops patrolling and planes bombing Iraq in the name of democracy for resistant natives, while someone in Mobile, Alabama was being denied the right to speak to his representatives at a meeting of his city ...
"Inexcusable" is what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently called the lack of federal funds to improve the state’s system of flood control. In late February on a trip to Washington, he had asked for $56 million for emergency repairs on 24 levee site...
Palestinian children are not made for war, any more than Israeli children are made for war. Yet while the politicians jockey for power, our Israeli mothers go on loyally sending their children to join the army and terrorize the neighbors, as if that were a normal ...
This is, as they say, the crunch. This is the political moment all Israeli governments–all of them, Labour, Likud and ‘National Unity’–have been working towards the past four decades of Occupation: the final push for an expanded Israel, the...
A survey question that is becoming increasingly popular asks people if they like their jobs. Depending on which survey you read, somewhere between 40% and 50% of American workers say they don’t like their work (1,2). What is it exactly people donR...
The WALL STREET JOURNAL published a worried analysis about the April 10 day of action for immigrant rights, pointing to widespread absenteeism by workers who participated, which forced many employers to shut down. Workers at an Excel meatpacking plant in Do...
A few years back I was talking with a young socialist organizer about books. He had just asked me why I wasted my time reading fiction when there was so much non-fiction that needed to be read. Culture, I replied, reflects and illuminates a society just as much, i...
There was a time when investing in rural America meant something personal to most Americans. Many of us are only two or three generations away from a nation of farmers and rural communities. It was a time when people drank milk delivered to their doorstep...
The policy of "hitnatkut", or unilateral disengagement, developed by Ariel Sharon needed a swift facelift following the withdrawal of settlers from Gaza last year. And Israel’s prime minister-designate, Ehud Olmert, has found it in the related conc...
While much of the left has been bemoaning the demise of the antiwar movement and fighting to reinvigorate the opposition to American warmongering that was so evident before the war began, millions of immigrants and their allies have poured into the streets to figh...
Millions of people have taken to the streets in immigrant-rights protests mostly focused against vicious legislation passed by the U.S. House that would criminalize undocumented workers and anyone who assists them. But the "compromise" proposal in the Se...
For a decade or so, the media has been talking about new color and flower revolutions with colorful revolutionaries like "orange" ones in Ukraine. But, after so many sponsored, colored and sanitized revolutions, as additions in the market of "a seri...
"He knows that I serve at his pleasure, and that’s that." These are the words of Donald Rumsfeld, revealing his job security. So, let’ see. Is Rummy King George’s court jester? How about torture designe...
Men who rise to the top of the American military are usually men who, in the old fashioned phrase, have faced shot and shell. Their physical courage is not to be questioned. There is, however, another type of courage, moral courage. This, as I understand i...
Once again the tidings of the season and the news from the news reminded one and all that it is better to be rich than to be poor. The week ended with news of the Cheneys’ tax refund and began with stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal re...
For all intent and purposes, the special prosecutor’s duty in the CIA leak case is straightforward. How the investigation ever got so complicated is beyond me. Mr Fitzgerald needs to keep it simple. Valerie Plame was a CIA agent in July 2003, and the ...
Millions of people have taken to the streets in immigrant-rights protests mostly focused against vicious legislation passed by the U.S. House that would criminalize undocumented workers and anyone who assists them. But the "compromise" proposal in the Se...
Across the country opposition to the war in Iraq is fast setting in. The latest Bush job approval ratings are dismal, hovering around 35%, in large part due to peoples’ wariness about the disorder and uncertainty engulfing Iraq. Two weeks ago 24 town...