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
ON HIS new album, Bruce Springsteen sings some of the most celebrated songs of struggle in U.S. history. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions honors socialist folk singer Pete Seeger, collecting a small part of the music Seeger helped to spread during his...
Now that May is here, perhaps you’re looking out at your lawn and thinking it needs mowing. Instead, you might want to think about whether you need that lawn at all. The problem isn’t grass. Humans first lived on the grasslands of Africa, and ...
During my years of writing and speaking about the harm and injustice inflicted upon the world by unending United States interventions, I’ve often been met with resentment from those who accuse me of chronicling only the negative side of US foreign policy and...
The web lit up last week with stories about how the New York Times, and the Bush Administration, had information in the summer of 2001 that specifically foretold of an impending, spectacular attack by al Qaeda "perhaps to be visited on the continental United ...
O’SHAUGHNESSY Relentlessly Chávez continued, hour after hour on Sunday afternoon, May 14, in the drab auditorium of Camden Town Hall in London, the Spanish words tumbling out like some verbal tsunami or chaotic linguistic volcano. Socialism; Fidel; th...
FAA: "Hi. Boston Center TMU [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we needsomeone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out. NEADS: Is this real-world or ...
I find people that cry ‘fascism’ at the slightest erosion of their fundamental American rights just as irritating as the next guy. The next guy happens to be Heinrich Himmler, but you know what I mean. It takes a lot to get me riled. After all, just be...
The 2006 Social Security Trustees Report, which includes the Medicare program, was recently released. The trustees projected the year 2040 as the depletion date of the Social Security trust fund versus 2041 in the 2005 report. Thanks to the Greenspan Commis...
The facts, as stated by the AP May 12: "New Jersey forward Clifford Robinson was suspended five games without pay by the NBA on Friday after violating terms of the league’s drug policy for the second time in two seasons. Robinson will miss at least the ...
As the violence in Iraq escalates, our leaders continue to assault us with pugnacious and defiant political rhetoric that recalls dialogue from the movie, A Few Good Men. Comments of George Bush are chillingly similar to Colonel Jessup’s arrogant diatribe wh...
In a recent column I wrote about police interrogation tactics that lead a surprising number of people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. It turns out that corporate America has followed suit. Many large corporations tak...
Never forgoing the opportunity to wage war upon the evil empire of secular humanists and spread the "good word," the Christian Fundamentalists have taken their pitch to new heights. Not so ironically it was in a secular setting. The folks responsible for...
Amman, Jordan. Yesterday, I eagerly awaited a visit from a friend who had just arrived from Iraq. We greeted each other warmly and marveled over having managed to stay in touch with each other through ten years, this in spite of distance, siege, warf...
A Short History of Funk Sun Ra: The Magic City (Evidence) Sun Ra...
On the stock-market channel Friday afternoon, just before commercial time, comes news that the Senate of the USA has declared Inglés the "national language" of state. Then comes the commercial, cutting to a Chinese couple standing in a busy airpor...
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Since the slaughter of the communist workers and fighters in 1977, two years after the revolutionary victory, the United States and its imperialist allies have constantly been flexing their muscle in the region. The freshly victorious ...
The recent wave of massive marches by immigrant workers in US cities has the potential to redefine the way the immigration debate proceeds in the US, if for no other reason than it can no longer occur without input from immigrants. No longer can the dialogue occur...
India’s development debate has actually regressed this past decade. For one thing, a single, homogenised view of development is being shoved down from above. Whether it works or does not work is not the issue. Any departure from it is heresy. If you oppose t...
You can tell that the US-led campaign against Hugo Chávez has reached a critical stage when the New York Times starts providing rhetorical cover for Condoleezza Rice’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s increasingly desperate efforts to isolate the Venezuela...
I can still remember my terrified reaction on first encountering Arab women dressed in chadors, covered from head to toe in black sheets with only their eyes visible. It was at Kuwait airport and I was three years old, arriving with my mother and brother to join o...
The Marcos Factor has unexpectedly become a wild card in Mexico’s closely fought July 2nd presidential election. While out of earshot plying the back roads of provincial Mexico with his "Other Campaign", an anti-electoral crusade designed t...
In approving an effective ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians this week, Israel’s Supreme Court has shut tighter the gates of the Jewish fortress the state of Israel is rapidly becoming. The judges’ decision, in the words of the country&...
It makes sense that President Bush would propose a "virtual fence" on the border with Mexico. After all, he is pretty much a virtual president, fronting for the real powers behind the administration: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. For tha...
"Sanctuary is not a building. It is not one man or one woman or 16 of them. It is a response rooted in faith and nurtured by prayer and conscience" Statement from the Religious Leader’s Affirmation of Sanctuary Ministry (January...
Responding to their own well-deserved bad PR following decades of unsustainable logging and road building on national forest lands in the Northern Rockies and elsewhere, the U.S. Forest Service has been attempting to redefine the terms of the debate so the public ...