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 2007
Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. Where both parties are known to loathe each other, only...
The Bhutto assassination might force Pakistani rulers to reconsider supporting the war on terror that has been forced upon the entire Muslim world. Just as Spain withdrew from the war in Iraq after the Madrid terrorist bombings, Pakistan too might use Bhutto’...
It was the No! 2007 was never the best of times. It was a whiny, fretful twelve months, and what should have been a time of keen enjoyment, poking at the graying ashes of the Bush era, saw the left and progressive sectors grasping at phantoms and with less of a si...
A tremendous myth had been generated over the past months regarding the imminent restoration of ‘democracy’ in Pakistan–with Benazir Bhutto projected as the great liberal hope. This was arrant nonsense. Bhutto was a discredited, demonstrably inep...
MEPHISTO, the demon who bought the soul of Faust in Goethe’s monumental drama, describes himself as "a part of that force which always wants the bad and always creates the good." Yossi Beilin, who resigned this week as chairman of the Meretz...
National and economic security have been the twin agendas of US presidential elections for more than half a century. The Democrats have attempted to demonstrate why they are the best party to manage the economy, while the Republicans are underlining their s...
The story of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan’s recent death from liver failure was tragic. But it was a uniquely American brand of tragedy. Only in the United States would the medical fate of a sick child be left to some private company’s idea of what c...
Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi–attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf live...
The widespread censorship of crucial issues for American Indians increased in 2007, according to Censored Blog readers. The most censored issue was the "Silencing of traditional and grassroots’ voices by those in power." The elected councils...
In the wake of Bhutto’s tragic assassination, renewed international attention focuses itself on Pakistan’s political instability and nuclear capabilities. The United States and President Musharraf adamantly state that the Pakistani military represents ...
With the assassination of Ms. Bhutto, we are given to understand, by many newspaper stories and broadcasts, that anti-democratic religious zealots killed Pakistan’s last hope for democracy. Ms. Bhutto was in many ways an admirable and accomplished lea...
Lahore, Pakistan. I was a twenty-two year old graduate student in Boston when in 1980, a year after her father, the charismatic populist former prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had been hung by military dictator Zia ul Haque, Ms Bhutto arrive...
One of President Bush’s much-vaunted ‘accomplishments’ since the start of his reign of terror is the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. This cabinet post was created following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., and bro...
Over at the Internet Movie Database, redneck trolls are saddling up their cyber posse to go night riding on the message boards against Denzel Washington and "The Great Debaters." All of which is a good thing if you like to see relevance in contemporary a...
This interview is excerpted from Bomb After Bomb: a Violent Cartography, a col...
The second week of December, an ice storm hit the Plains states, and thousands of families lost power, some for a week or more. My family was among them, and the experience gave me an epiphany I call the Light Bulb Theory of Materialism. Never mind the ot...
Immediately after 9-11 the U.S. government began barking orders to the world, especially to the Muslim world. Perhaps echoing unconsciously the Christian scripture passages Matthew 12:30 and Luke 11:23, it proclaimed, "Either you are with us, or with the terr...
Brian De Palma’s Redacted is hard to watch. When I first left the movie, the one word that held fast in my mind was “hard.” The message of the movie is hard. The truth of the movie is hard. The way the movie challenges us is hard. Based on the real life ...
1. Call them small investors, savers or shareholders – corporate crimes, frauds and abuses have battered them in the past decade. Think Enron, Worldcom, Wall Street’s brokerage and investment giants and now the big shaky banks. Trillions of dollars hav...
Arguably, the most unexpected download of this year’s holiday season is the long overdue re-issue of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards’ version of the Christmas classic "Run Rudolph Run." Although Richards recorded the track in 1976, it...
Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto’s behaviour and policies – both while she was in office and more recently – are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again. An odd coexistence of ...
Ms. Bhutto and her father and political mentor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, were democratic, but imperfect political leaders – imperious, indifferent to human rights and, in her case, tainted by serious charges of corruption. (New York Times Editorial,...
Beyond the immediate shock of Benazir Bhutto’s death by violence in Rawalpindi, the greater tragedy for Pakistan is that the opportunity for a peaceful transfer of power-one that did not involve assassination, judicial murder, or legal vendetta — has b...
Time made Vladimir Putin its Man of the Year. Chalk it up as nostalgia for the cold war, when America was great, and a working man in a state like Michigan had two cars, a nice house, a country cabin, a health plan, a pension and a wife who stayed at home, canning...
I’ve got a better idea: the U.S. government should butt out of Pakistani affairs — as well as the affairs of Iraq, Iran, Korea, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and all the rest. My gosh, what does it take for interventionists to finally realize that t...