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 June 2007
Today marks the first oversight hearing on the federal death penalty that the Senate Judiciary Committee has held in six years. Until recently, Congress has asked few questions about how the federal death penalty is being implemented, and we received little inform...
Blackstone. That is the ultimate refutation to the unbelievably brazen campaign being run by Wall Street hucksters and the knee-jerk oppositionists to law and order at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Blackstone is the giant private equity firm that...
So why is the Bush White House advocating for the removal of Everglades National Park from the United Nation’s list of World Heritage Sites in Danger? Orwellian, yes. According to the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, "the UN Educational, Scientific ...
America’s cooperation with other countries in the name of promoting peace has been marked by a push toward democratization. As President Bush said, "democracies don’t go to war with each other." The modern view of this thesis was formalized b...
In 1937, the American Bar Association refused to allow people of color to join its ranks. With the blessing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the National Lawyers Guild was founded as a multi-racial alternative to the ABA. The Guild’s founding members incl...
Over the past several weeks, another state has failed. In this case it was a proto-state, the Palestinian Authority. Following a Hamas coup in Gaza, the PA has been reduced to the West Bank, while a non-state, Fourth Generation entity now rules in Gaza. Here we se...
Nazareth. The boycott by Israel and the international community of the Palestinian Authority finally blew up in their faces with Hamas’ recent bloody takeover of Gaza. Or so argues Gideon Levy, one of the saner voices still to be found in Israel. &quo...
The US economy is walking a tight-rope. The sharp drop-off in growth in the first quarter of 2007, and the expected weak second and third quarters of less than 2% growth, caused the widely watched ...
Once again, we find our political leadership united around a very bad idea, ethanol and other biofuels to help gain "energy independence," to "help farmers" and most importantly, to help citizens avoid the harsh reality of peak oil converging w...
The Bush administration’s successes in appointing its preferred nominees to the Supreme Court appear to have paid off in light of the judicial body’s recent rulings favoring corporate power over free speech rights. Monday’s Supreme Court students...
Public health officials in Indiana are busy doing what Idaho public health officials did two years ago: claiming a cluster of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) victims is a mere coincidence. If the four who died of CJD since January in Allen County in northe...
Michael Moore has made a great movie. Sicko. Everyone should see it. And take the kids. The movie’s message in a nutshell — we need single payer. In the United States. Now. But Senate Democrats are tryin...
In military matters, China has taken America by surprise a number of times recently, and surprises of this nature are not things with which Americans deal well, some portion of America’s political establishment becoming irritable and uncomfortable. It is not...
Recently, it has become popular to sound the death knells for the neoconservative movement. I, myself, am not a ready to dismiss this section of the power elite as other, but, no matter what, in order to address this question it is essential to refresh our minds a...
He sat there dejected and indignant-twenty years ago-in our office. His position as editor of the monthly muckraking magazine, Mother Jones, had broken up. He was looking for a job that would allow him to bring his conscience to work. We gave him a place an...
Ali Hassan al-Majid was the Heinrich Himmler of Iraq. After Saddam Hussein appointed him the all-powerful overlord of northern Iraq in March 1987 he oversaw the murder of more than 180,000 Kurds in just over a year. "The armed forces must kill any human being...
Following months of criticism and sharp internal debate, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) ended its controversial partnership agreement with a group of California nursing homes on May 31. The four-and-a-half-year-old deal was a quid pro quo arrange...
Two San Joaquin Valley Representatives, Dennis Cardoza of Merced and Jim Costa of Fresno, were among 42 Democrats that voted to keep the world’s foremost torture school, the School of the Americas, open during a House vote on June 21. The vote was 203 yes, 2...
Contrary to the many claims that the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip represents the failure of US and Israeli policies in Palestine, the violent civil infighting that has dominated the Gaza Strip over much of the last year and a half and that led directly to the ...
I received a letter from Hillary Clinton the other day noting my "concerns" regarding Iraq. She acknowledges the "seriousness" of the situation which is a "major and constant focus of hers". I’m sure it is. The question is, for ...
"We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." –John Winthrop America is being destroyed. Many Americans are unaware, others are indifferent, and some intend it. ...
New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson has a long way to go before he can call himself a peace candidate as he has been doing in his presidential campaign in the press and out east. He can’t do that back in his home state, not on peace nor on a range of...
District of Columbia Administrative Law Judge Roy Pearson’s attempt to sue the pants off of his local dry cleaners has been a rallying cry for those who champion tort reform. Pearson sued the dry cleaners for $54 million for misplacing his pants and failing ...
The latest efforts by folks in support of two well known university professors to either receive tenure or retain it is a little foreign to me but I’m workin’ with it. I’m from the generation that shut down universities during college strikes in ...
How effective is micro credit as a poverty-fighting tool? In 1976, Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, launched the pioneering institution in the field, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The industry’s growth has been explosive since Grameen ope...