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 February 2007
We all believe that a growing economy is a good thing. Corporate successes make America strong, and international monetary policies have been designed to promote economic growth around the world. But something is wrong. The income gap is growing faster in t...
(Note to Reader: Over the last decade, Jason Whitlock has been one of the most prominent African American sports columnists in the United States. He writes for the Kansas City Star and AOL Sports. For reasons unclear, he often refers to himself as "Big Sexy&q...
Most people know and, in any given week, probably utter one of the many thousands of "Murphy’s Laws" that exist. But Murphy is not the only perceptive spirit: We have Howe’s Law, Sod’s Law (British), O’Toole’s Comment...
Last week, members of the Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace organized an office occupation of Representative Ed Markey’s office in Massachusetts. Their demand was simple: refuse to continue funding the Iraq war and vote against the $93 billion sup...
Gold traders love Dick Cheney. Every time he opens his twisted lip and barks out another threat to Iran, the dollar takes a powder and gold futures shoot to the moon. Maybe that’s the way Cheney likes it. After all, he dumped about $25 million in euro-bonds ...
The 2006 election showed the Republican Party that opposition to the Iraq War was the dominant political issue of the year–trumping all others. Their failure to understand voter anger over the war cost them the majority in the House and Senate. Candidates ar...
Usama bin Laden, according to a top level "independent" task force of political hacks and self-appointed experts in "clandestine finance" set up by the Council on Foreign Relations, worked his monetary magic with the usual tools of clandestine ...
According to British media, the US and UK governments are on track to achieve a March victory in Iraq. This victory will not be publicized nor will it mean an end to the occupation. Written by Bush and Blair’s big oil business partners who serve as th...
If the state of Washington ends up passing a joint legislative resolution next month calling on the US House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney, it will because 900 people who crammed into this c...
Every few years the question of selling out comes up again, most recently it has been in the circles of the environmental movements. First it was Shellenberger and Nordhaus in their Grist Magazine article, the "Death of Environmentalism." This cogent arg...
Chuck Cushman was on a roll. His ruddy face enflamed to imperial purple as he unleashed a horror story about the dastardly practices of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s "endangered species strike force." Seems back in February of 1994 a black helico...
John Bowman is a former Panther who was arrested in New Orleans in 1973 and was tortured by a task force of law enforcement officers from several jurisdictions. In 2003, some of those same agents came to his home in Oklahoma City and confronted him about an unsolv...
Huh? According to Condi Rice, the US attempt to put missile shields in Poland and the Czech Republic is to counter some future Iranian missile threat? What would that be? Does Tehran want to conquer Poland? For its strategic position, perhaps? Or maybe to set up a...
It appeared that all but a handful of the 300 seats were filled in Room 250 of University of San Francisco’s McClaren Conference Center on a rainy Thursday night for what was probably the first debate on the power and influence of the Israel Lobby held betwe...
This past week, we’ve been bombarded by the media with Anna Nicole Smith’s death, the courtroom antics surrounding her burial and custody of her daughter, and Britney-always Britney-who has shaved her head and entered rehab. Plus, there’s the all...
in Kabul. A crazy woman stalks the streets near Afghanistan’s parliament. When a warlord’s rocket killed her family during the early 1990s she lost her mind. Now she moves between the cars and people looking for it, another of the living dead tr...
Not long ago, I met Eyal Naveh, an Israeli historian, who explains that the United States has been the "model" for the Israeli state and society. He claims that the US was first a model for the Zionist pioneers, then for the founders of the state of Isra...
Amid ramped-up federal raids on undocumented workers and a raft of new anti-immigrant legislation at the state level, the immigrant rights movement is building grassroots emergency response networks–while debating what to demand from expected immigration leg...
In March 2006 the conservative administration of Egypt’s prime Islamic high-learning institution, Al-Azhar University, learned that one of their students was an online blogger, and they didn’t like what he was blogging. Complaining about its &q...
Ramesshwar Kuchankar decided that the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee was where he would take his own life. He did, on November 28 in Panderkauda, Yavatmal. Ten days later, Dinesh Ghughul was shot dead by the police at the Wani cotton market in the same d...
Under the pretext that French citizens are equal before the law, there are no official statistics concerning their national or ethnic origins, nor their religious beliefs. These are considered private matters which should not be quantified. However, extrapolations...
Let’s not allow the N-word issue to be over-intellectualized into a debate that focuses on the style of language. The focus must be on the style of racist subjugation and hatred, including the pathologies of black inferiority and self-hatred. We need ...
Former CIA counterterrorism specialist Philip Giraldi, comparing the propaganda campaign against Iran to that which preceded the war on Iraq, has recently declared, "It is absolutely parallel. They’re using the same dance steps-demonize the bad guys, th...
There may have been a period when all roads led to Rome, but for the Palestinian people, all roads lead to checkpoints. The latest checkpoint Palestinians find themselves at is not manned by Israel but rather the ostensible mediator of the Israeli-Palestinian peac...
A grassroots revolt is underway in Jewish communities throughout the world, a revolt that has panicked the elite organizations that have long functioned as official mouthpieces for the community. The latest sign of this panic is the recent publication by the Ameri...