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 March 2007
Shortly before leaving to inspect what was once viewed as the US’s backyard, US President George Bush told a March 5 event organised by the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, "I want to talk about [an] important priority for our country, and that is helpi...
Incredible! In Palestinian schoolbooks, there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence of Israel even in the 1967 borders! They say that the "Zionist gangs" stole the country from the Arabs! That’s how they poison the mind...
Big Shots are found everywhere in American society. So, viewing them from the San Joaquin Valley of California, once a great agricultural area now mindlessly converting itself as fast as violation of environmental law and regulation and common sense permits to ano...
America’s immigrants-most of them Latinos and most of those from Mexico-have been waiting and hoping for a comprehensive immigration reform, one that would legalize those who have been working in the United States and give them a path to citizenship without ...
Upon the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge where the chachalacas gather in small groups to screech for dawn, John Neck takes Jay Johnson-Castro for a winding-down ride. The two friends have returned here nightly during their five-day walk against immigrant prisons, ...
"He who knows the enemy and himself will never in a hundred battles be at risk." SunTzu. Last Friday was potentially a sublime day for the cause of peace in the House of Representatives. Under pressure from the peace...
Saturday March 18: Sulaimaniyah The difficulty in reporting Iraq is that it is impossibly dangerous to know what is happening in most of the country outside central Baghdad. Bush and Blair hint that large parts of Iraq are at peace; untrue of course b...
The American football hero may be gone but details of his mysterious death in Afghanistan just won’t go away. Most recently, as reported by Time Magazine, "Nine officers, including up to four generals, should be held accountable for missteps in the aft...
"House, 218 to 212, Votes to Set Date for Iraq Pullout" reads the New York Times. "Democrats Tout Plan for Troop Pullout," headlines the Washington Post. "Pelosi’s Gamble on Iraq Pays Off," beams the Los Angeles Times. The reade...
On March 20, student free speech joined the panoply of endangered fundamental rights ready to be stripped away from us due to the tragedy of the drug war. Kenneth Starr, former solicitor general, who reached broad fame by highlighting a presidential sex scandal in...
The victims of violence and aggression know the secret: the attackers are never more dangerous, more deadly, than when enthralled by their own juvenile fantasies. David Obey, hoarse and choked with emotion, told his fellows on the floor of the House yesterd...
No one can say that the documentary An Unreasonable Man sugarcoats the case against its subject. The film ...
A few weeks ago many thousands of people marched on Washington D.C. to protest the American escalation in Iraq and the looming attack on Iran. It makes little difference whether it was one-hundred thousand people or five-hundred thousand, in any case we were but a...
Rejoice! Congress may have come to life! The President has drawn his line in the sand and a Senator has crossed it! "We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants," President Bush said in a last ...
A recent article on Iraq Body Count’s web site detailed the struggles of a soldier who came home from the war with devastating injuries. Blind, brain damaged, and missing both hands from an explosion, he is one of the many casualties of the Bush/Cheney debac...
With a particular irony that only the American media can orchestrate, in early February the distraction industry juxtaposed round-the-clock coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith with occasional mentions of the U.N. report of the escalating environmental crisi...
Striding into Kyoto in December of 1997 claiming to be a mighty warrior in the battle against global warming was a familiar beast, the nuclear power industry. Some of the industry’s biggest lobbyists, men such as James Curtis (a former deputy secretary of en...
Not only does American democracy rank a miserable 17th on the list of the world’s modern democracies (according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s index of democracy); it also doesn’t fare well when compared with traditional Native American dem...
Sophocles’ Antigone speaks to modern audiences, most often and most effectively in languages adapted to those audiences. However, translations of fifth-century BC Greek tragedy in English in the twentieth century are often written in archaic English, which w...
The typical American family is buried in debt. According to the Federal Reserve Fund, household debt equals almost 25 percent of net household worth, or 136 percent of disposable income. After wages fell behind inflation for a decade, Americans mortgaged their hom...
The new national pastime of comparing the Iraq war today with America’s Vietnam disaster a generation ago continues. Secrecy, half-truths and outright lies were the guiding principles followed by two presidential administrations during the Vietnam War and, o...
There’s a novel by Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg titled The Life of the Automobile th...
Pick almost any date on the calendar and it’ll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN Ambassador into the Security Council to declare to issue an ultimatum. It’s like driving across the American We...
One ordinary December day, I took a tour of my hospital with Deborah Yokoe, an infectious disease specialist, and Susan Marino, a microbiologist. They work in our hospital’s infection-control unit. Their full-time job, and that of three others in the unit, i...
Regime change elements in the United States have not given up on trying to derail the Six-Party Agreement-and they may succeed. Using the principle Trust-Then Verify, North Korea has refused to participate in meetings and talks until the $25 million of fund...