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 May 2006
AAs a person whose opinion on the value of voting in a capitalist democracy leans toward that expressed by the anarchist graffiti that reads: "If voting made any difference, it would be illegal," I am occasionally asked by people I meet whether or not I ...
When Steven Colbert declared George W. Bush not to be "brainiac" or a "factinista," he likely wasn’t thinking of Dubya’s policies on Iran or national missile "defense." But Colbert would have been on target if he had been....
US A-10 attack planes earlier this week bombed an Afghan village in the dead of night for several hours, killing nearly 100 people, at least 16 of them acknowledged to have been innocent men, women and children. The Pentagon is claiming that 20 of the dead ...
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s address to both houses of Congress was perhaps the most skilled use of Newspeak since George Orwell invented the term in his novel /1984/. (He had help: author and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel reportedly drafted l...
I guess this time it’s really going to happen, says an Israeli expert. "It," meaning the separation fence between the U.S. and Mexico. He has been following the debate surrounding this fence with curiosity, and some amusement. So, he asks, "wh...
Economics, it’s the elephant in the room that can’t be denied. And this elephant in its corporate exploitive mode is stomping on every one of us and destroying everything in its wake. How about a new paradigm, like a "just distribution of wealth a...
Today, the talk of people’s power in Nepal is the order of the day. Even the Mainstream Media, Moriarty, Manmohan and their intellectual goons are full of that. Evidently they are having hysterical fits intensified by the return of the Cold War paranoia. The...
Iraq is full of sad memorials to Britain’s disastrous invasion of the country in the First World War. In military cemeteries along the Tigris and Euphrates are buried some 31,000 British and Indian soldiers who died in battle or of disease in four years figh...
Two and a half years ago, Attorney General John Ashcroft took time away from his busy schedule hanging drapes on statues to charge Greenpeace with a moldy 19th Century law against "sailor mongering." As Kurt Nimmo wrote a...
Former US Senator and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen has passed away. Bentsen was a Texas Democrat and was President Clinton’s first Treasury Secretary. As Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Bentsen played a key role in the replacement o...
The Bush administration and the National Security Agency (NSA) have been secretly monitoring the email messages and phone calls of all Americans. They are doing this, they say, for our own good. To find terrorists. Many people have criticized NSA’s domestic ...
The deaths of 6 women who used RU 486, the non-surgical abortion drug also known as mifespristone, is creating the usual cacophony of voices demanding that the drug be taken off the market, even though the link between the drug and the deaths is not clear. While a...
It’s becoming clear to me that for people on the left, just about everything this president has done is considered impeachable–a sentiment I share. But it’s hard to convince many more conservative people that the president should be tossed...
When it comes to immigration, the pro-labor camp finds itself in an awkward position. How can it choose between workers who are citizens and workers who are not? But Israel, which, like this country, is also a country of immigrants, has shown that immigration does...
On the afternoon of May 18, 22 year-old Oscar Abraham Garcia-Barrios was shot and killed at close range by U.S. Border Patrol and Customs agents. Garcia-Barrios was just 50 feet north of the border crossing from San Diego to Tijuana. He and a teenage passenger wer...
Arbil, Iraq. Blair’s view: ‘We have a government of national unity that crosses all boundaries. Iraqi people are able to write the next chapter of their history themselves.’ Another view: Two car bombs explode in Baghdad, killing ni...
Congressman John Conyers, D-Michigan, began his career in the House of Representatives in 1964, which makes him the second most senior member in the chamber. He has spent much of his tenure trying to maintain the Congressional role of oversight. He was part of the...
Arbil, Iraq. Blair’s view: ‘We have a government of national unity that crosses all boundaries. Iraqi people are able to write the next chapter of their history themselves.’ Another view: Two car bombs explode in Baghdad, killing ni...
"Do you care more about the pigs around you or God?" BattleCry leader Ron Luce asked the crowd of more than 17,000 youth gathered at Wachovia Spectrum Stadium in Philadelphia on Friday, May 12. No, this wasn’t a metaphor. After reading a passage fr...
The recent USA Today revelation that three major phone companies have (allegedly) been providing phone call records to the NSA shouldn’t come as a shock. Our government has been seeking to harness maximum data for many years-for all kinds of purposes, legiti...
Bethlehem. The US-led political and economic blockade continues, yet contrary to popular belief, it is not only affecting Palestinian Authority employees and the merchants they buy from. Palestinian organizations are unable to bring money in through banks f...
Why did the Bush regime create a crisis over Iran? The answer is that the Bush regime is desperate to widen the war in the Middle East. What has Iran done? Unlike Israel, Pakistan and India, countries that developed nuclear weapons on the sly, Iran s...
Tony Christini wondered why there were no antiwar novels published in the US about its war in Iraq. So did his cohorts Mike Palecek and Andre Vltchek After all, doesn’t this war and its implications need a fictional approach to reach readers who avoid...
Berlin. Can there be a more vivid panorama of the arc of the Communist movement than the view from the foundations where once stood the Nazi SS headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8? Before one’s eyes are photographs of men like the German Communis...
A political bombshell was unloaded on Israel and the U.S. on November 15, 1988 by the Palestine National Council (PNC), the PLO’s legislative body. That "bombshell" has now been resurrected by the Hamas Government. It was the famous Palestinian his...