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 September 2007
It’s been a busy year for pharma, creating new diseases to make healthy people take pills, reformulating existing drugs to win "new! improved!" patents, hiring high heel wearing reps to intercept the doc before ailing patients–and fear monger...
It may seem as if I have been unduly harsh to the Green Party in recent columns. However, my criticism is not with the majority of Green Party members but with their leaders who are preventing the party from developing into a truly progressive alternative to the c...
Cynthia McKinney is doing it. It’s time for you to do it too. Have you, like many Americans, found yourself wondering why President Bush, over and over again, would hand the Democrats in Congress the weapon needed to bring him down? Just look a...
Former CIA Analyst It is an exceedingly dangerous time. Vice President Dick Cheney and his hard-core "neo-conservative" protégés in the administration and Congress are pushing harder and harder for President George W. Bush, isolated fro...
If anyone still believes that Iraq is a free and sovereign state, a couple recent moves in Washington should put a rest to that thought forever. The first is the response to the most recent slaughter by the Blackwater mercenaries. The second is the vote on Septemb...
I listened to ABC NEWS tonight waiting for the story about the new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines with mercury and autism. I watched commercials for prescription pharmaceutical products like Advair and wondered what influence...
One thing you learn when studying Guantánamo is that nothing can ever be taken for granted, and the events of the last week have demonstrated, yet again, that this is the case. In Washington, last week District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed 16 lawsui...
Why did the bank thief in Homestead, Florida think he could get away with using a stolen backhoe "to lift and haul away a drive-through ATM from a Bank of America early Tuesday"? Because that’s pretty much how it works in Homestead, where po...
"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same." - Stendhal The propaganda machine of the Evangelical Christian Right will soo...
Nazareth Israel’s air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon. From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli...
Odessa Lewis is 62 years old. When I saw her last week, she was crying because she is being evicted. A long-time resident of the Lafitte public housing apartments, since Katrina she has been locked out of her apartment and forced to live in a 240 square foot FEMA ...
Fifty years ago this month, the world watched as nine Black students braved a jeering white mob as they walked into the segregated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in the pursuit of an equal education. The images from that September day in 1957 sho...
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s address to the United Nations today about global climate change is one of the most blatant examples of hypocrisy that I’ve ever witnessed. Schwarzenegger challenged the leaders of the world’s nations to "solv...
Those with long memories-that go back, say, three months-will remember the last time the U.S. Treasury Department tried to bend an Axis of Evil member to its will through targeted financial sanctions. Failure was the outcome. Now the United States is...
The 1997 publication of "Whittaker Chambers, a Biography," a ten-year project that became a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, brought its author, Sam Tanenhaus, to immediate public attention, and, something unusual for a b...
More than 500 sub-Saharan migrants from different nationalities and backgrounds quietly left their hideouts in the woods near the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in northern Morocco on 29 September 2005. Some had lived in the woods for more than two years. They confronte...
To Mr. Lee Bollinger, I’m writing you to express my outrage over your vulgar treatment of President Ahmadinejad yesterday when you invited him to speak at your university. Simple human etiquette of the most primitive and elemental sort, was required ...
Before the UAW strike against GM was, literally, ten minutes old, the long knives were already out. Pundits went on record predicting that the union had overplayed its hand, that calling a strike under these market conditions was not only a reckless gamble, but a ...
There are a few ways you can be both a political artist and a rock-star, and Bruce Springsteen has been trying them out for almost four decades now. You can write songs that adopt and/or explore the perspectives of people without power. You can offer moral and fin...
There was a big struggle on Broadway yesterday. It was a collective attempt among U.S. citizens to figure out what exactly is meant by this freedom of speech they had heard so much about. I was curious, too. So I asked people protesting a speech by IranR...
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the United States has prompted an outcry, including protests and tabloid headlines calling him "evil" and a "madman." As Juan Cole says, "The real reason his visit is controversial is ...
CARACAS, Venezuela Adelegation of Indigenous Peoples from the United States and Canada met with leaders in Venezuela to unite in the global struggle for Indigenous rights. Robert Free Galvan, Native activist from Seattle, was among those in the deleg...
Today is Yom Kippur, and almost automatically my thoughts, like those of everybody else who was around at the time, go back 34 years, to that Yom Kippur. I was sitting at home, deep in conversation with a friend, when the sirens suddenly started to wail....
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flew into New York City Saturday. He had come to the United States to speak before the UN General Assembly’s opening session this week. Under agreement with the UN, the United States as the host country for the UN headqu...
In these days of warmongering, peace and justice are tossed about like hot potatoes with no end to the suffering in sight. But, where is the compassion for the children, women and men who are being subjected to the excesses of power in all its guises? Righ...