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 2007
This week film-maker TAO RUSPOLI travels to the noirish heart of Los Angeles for a conversation about sexual and political repression (and liberation) in America, with Dr. Susan Block, a sex educator, political columnist and defender of the First Amendment. ...
Shortly after President Bush’s State of the Union address last week Jim Webb, the freshman Senator from Virginia, delivered the Democrats’ televised response to Bush’s annual speech. Many antiwar progressives were pleased to hear a Democrat confr...
July 1, 1916, was the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. On that single day, the British suffered more than 50,000 casualties, of which 20,000 died. The battle went on for four months, leading to about a million casualties on all sides, and the war itself con...
The most recent fighting in the Gaza Strip, which has left many people dead, confirms that the internal strife plaguing the Occupied Territories since the advent of Hamas to power in January 2006 was not entirely the outcome of outside meddling in Palestinian affa...
I was at the gym, walking by a television tuned to one of the many insipid morning chat shows…but that’s not what stopped me dead in my tracks. What got my attention was the guest: Ralph Nader. I watched the host begin the interview with yet another re...
Baghdad. There are growing suspicions in Iraq that the official story of the battle outside Najaf between a messianic Iraqi cult and the Iraqi security forces supported by the US, in which 263 people were killed and 210 wounded, is a fabrication. The heavy ...
The judge in the Zyprexa secret document case has sent a New York Times reporter an invitation to attend a hearing in the on-going Eli Lilly fiasco in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. "This invitation," Judge Jack Weinst...
Hundreds of meatpackers from the Smithfield Foods hog processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina honored Martin Luther King Jr. Day at a January 15 rally in nearby Fayetteville, where they lambasted the company for its refusal to give workers the holiday off....
Once, during previous wars in distant lands, professional photographers were the foolhardy folks who faced danger on battlefields (and in the shadowy world of guerilla warfare), shooting pictures under extremely adverse conditions, adding the vivid reality of phot...
Not so long ago, the prospect of the US and UK taking military action against Iran was inconceivable. In September 2005, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw explicitly said as much in an interview on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme. Prime Minister Tony Blair,...
"The Fed should have tightened earlier to avoid a festering of the housing bubble early on. The Fed is facing a nightmare now: the recession will come and easing will not prevent it." Nouriel Roubini, "Fed Holds Interest Rates Steady as Slowdown Out...
"If Arafat were alive" one hears this phrase increasingly often in conversations with Palestinians, and also with Israelis and foreigners. "If Arafat were alive, what’s happening now in Gaza wouldn’t be happening"–"...
Although the anti-war movement demonstrated on January 27th that it could mobilize hundreds of thousands to demand an end to the war on Iraq, the question remains whether the anti-war forces can begin to dismantle the war machine. In one of their more challenging ...
I just watched a video from BBC Newsnight showing Iraqi forces in a recent dust up near Najaf. Our Iraqi "allies" were moving about in "technicals" or small Jeep type 4x4s, some with machine guns on top. Then along came the embedded US troops i...
"Why are you travelling so often to Canada?" the tough U.S. border guard barked. I was on Amtrak, going from New York to Montreal, as I’d done dozen of times before over several decades. This was my first experience (summer 2006) of the increasingl...
Matthew’s gospel records that when his disciples asked, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?," Jesus put a child in their midst and said, "Whoever becomes humble like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (18:1-4) ...
(This essay is adapted from ANTHONY ARNOVE’s January 29th testimony before Congress’s "Out Now Caucus," chaired by Rep. Lynn Woolsey and Rep. Maxine Waters.) The title of my book is borrowed from Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, writ...
Amman, Jordan. Earlier this week, I received a joyful phone call from Baghdad. Members of a family I’ve known since 1996 announced that one of their younger daughters was engaged. Broken Arabic and broken English crossed the lines: "We love you! ...
Bush’s splurge is already bringing premature claims of success, even though the first troops are just arriving in Iraq. A column in yesterday’s Washington Times by Ollie North quotes an American officer in Iraq as saying, "Do they (Members of Cong...
"You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!" Henry B. Adams These are trying times for the first branch of government. Ignore the evident kn...
It is very difficult to get people to see the long-term, the strategic, and those things that fundamentally could change our world for the better; or for the worse if things are left to the vices of the ruling classes. We are constantly pressured by the media imag...
Last week Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) spoke with strength, clarity and emotion about the need for every senator to take a stand on the Iraq War. There are moments in the Iraq War dialogue that create a paradigm shift in the Congress and the nation, e,g, when Rep. M...
It was relatively early on Saturday the 27th of January when I got to the Mall in Washington DC. The bus ride from Asheville had been bearable–I even got a few hours of sleep. The early morning crowd was small–in fact it wasn’t even a crowd.; jus...
Baghdad. American and Iraqi troops killed about 250 armed men alleged to belong to an apocalyptic Islamic cult who were planning to attack the religious leadership of the Shia in the holy city of Najaf, according to Iraqi political, military and police sour...
I went to the protest on Saturday. At the end of it an old soldier from movements past said, "The problem is the people who organize these marches are too old. They’re risk averse and institutionalized. And that’s really it." I think she̵...