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 April 2007
Everybody has been talking about crisis management and damage control and will the Palestinian realities hold up or not and who’s doing what and so on without really getting back into the real issue of whether there is an opportunity for peace or not. Yes, w...
In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then, as now, the doomsters identified huma...
War profiteer. It used to be one of the dirtiest slurs in American politics, potent enough to sully the reputations of the rich and powerful. Now it’s a calling card, something you might find highlighted in a defense contractor’s corporate prospectus a...
and MICHAEL MANDEL Four years ago the U.S. and Britain unleashed war on Iraq, a nearly defenseless Third World country barely half the size of Saskatchewan. For twelve years prior to the invasion and occupation Iraq had endured almost weekly U.S. and Br...
Virginia Tech suspended or expelled 32 students last year for illicit drug use, according to Kris Reinertson, a junior who heads the Students for a Sensible Drug Policy chapter. Reinertson doesn’t know how many of the cases involved marijuana. Virgin...
"Politics is not like the nursery," wrote Hannah Arendt. As we sit around waiting for the next shooting rampage we must admit that neither is the United States. It has always been brutal and violent. Taking away fire arms would not remove its inherent ch...
The case against Jose Padilla would be funny if a man’s life hadn’t been ruined in the process—but it has. The government’s charges are so weak and riddled with inconsistencies it’s a wonder the case wasn’t thrown out years ago....
"You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off." - Cho Seung-Hui "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" ...
In late January the State Department delivered a potentially explosive report to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The classified report asserts that Israel may have violated the Arms Export Control ...
In his April 21 radio address to the nation (inspired by the violence at Virginia Tech earlier in the week) George Bush announced that he has directed federal officials to conduct a national inquiry into how to prevent violence by dangerously unstable people. It i...
In recent years, the Moroccan government has championed the idea of autonomy as a solution to its territorial dispute with pro-independence advocates over Western Sahara. Rabat has said it is willing to consider an autonomous, locally elected government in Western...
Post-Katrina, New Orleans received the headlines. The government response was a glaring example of the heartlessness and incompetence of the Bush administration, and the neglect and devastation of the city remains a powerful symbol of US racism. In struggles aroun...
As Congress sends its bill requiring partial troop withdrawals from Iraq to the White House for a certain veto, it has never been clearer that mobilizing against this war is necessary, but not enough. Congressional Democrats may be willing to stop there, bu...
There will be an outpouring of tributes to David Halberstam, the renowned American writer who died at 73 Monday in an automobile accident near San Francisco. But no eulogy can match the sheer memorial of his work. Halberstam was, in every sense, a compleat journal...
Recently, NIKOLAS KOZLOFF, author of Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S...
"Hope is a little child." Charles Péguy (1873-1914) Charles Péguy, French poet and essayist, once said: "It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looki...
Let’s have Christ our President Let us have him for our king With a job and pension for young and old We will make hallelujah ring –Woody Guthrie, Arch-progressive "Let’s have Christ our Pr...
As defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was driven from public life thanks to the catastrophe of Iraq, and for the moment at least lurks in obscurity. Wolfowitz, his deputy until 2005, contributed in almost equal measure to the debacle, yet managed to slide from th...
A group linked to al-Qa’ida has claimed responsibility for two suicide truck bombs that killed nine US soldiers and wounded 20 in Diyala province in one of the deadliest attacks on American forces in the past year. "Two knights from the Islamic Stat...
You read and hear the same news we do. Yesterday, on a day the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 13,000 for the first time, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll disclosed that only 22 percent believe the nation is headed in the right direction. H...
Since the Imus controversy erupted there has been a lot of finger-pointing and blame-placing as to what the root of the problem really is. Of course, we all know that racism and sexism existed before hip-hop — that’s a given. But it’s completely ...
The Arab League meeting in Cairo yesterday was unprecedented in its overture to Israel, offering to meet Israeli representatives to clarify the peace initiative that the League re-endorsed at its meeting in Riyadh on March 28. The two events underscore the complet...
Beirut. Maybe Rudy Giuliani could be forgiven for trying out various stump speeches on his Republican audiences now that his campaign for President is up and running. But the message he is delivering as he tours New Hampshire needs to be rejected, indeed re...
The Pentagon has officially retired the phrase "The Long War" as the designated moniker for the Bush Administration’s global wars. Apparently the head of Central Command, Admiral William J. Fallon, phased out the phrase because of the message it se...
United States agriculture policy is outdated, harmful to small farmers and devastating to third world countries trying to make a profit by growing crops. The basic situation is as follows: in the wake of the Great Depression, subsidy programs were put into place i...