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 October 2007
Over the past several weeks, the United States has gone out of its way to offend, irk and otherwise provoke a select group of leaders and nations. Through a series of deliberate and calculated actions intended to purposefully estrange those most likely to succeed ...
Though eastern talk show hosts might view Berkeley, California, as a hotbed of diversity, census reports show it be the whitest city in Alameda County. According to Berkeley’s Health Officer, Dr.Linda Rudolph, it is also a city where life expectancy a...
She’s back. Hurrah! She’s a woman. She’s brave. She’s a moderate. She speaks good English. She’s Oxford-educated, no less. And she’s not bad looking either. I admit I’m biased. I don’t like Benazir Bhutto. She...
The first week of the election campaign 2007 in Australia has made fascinating viewing. Watching politics in Australia is much like watching combatants suffering from delirium tremens. Bin Laden faced his enemies with CIA funding, a Kalashnikov and bag of sal...
Act I I am having dinner on a Thursday night in a restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village with two friends I’m working with on a documentary on pornography. We’ve had a long day and are happy to unwind. Near the end of our meal, I...
Perhaps, in the case of Armstrong Williams, the third time will be the charm. The first two official investigations failed to hold anyone accountable for what can only be described as a textbook case of government propaganda. The results of the third invest...
The September and October United Auto Workers (UAW) GM and Chrysler agreements are just the latest examples of union leadership surrender and betrayal. It’s an ominous sign of labor’s plight and clear indication of what’s ahead – more ...
David Horowitz has a long and scurrilous track record of blatant racism, politically driven witch-hunts in academia, and constantly spewing out bald-faced lies. All of this is being ratcheted up to new levels in his upcoming "Islamo-Fascism Awareness" (I...
The horribly mis-named "No Child Left Behind" Act comes up for reauthorization sometime between the end of the year and early 2008. Thumbing their nose at the massive backlash that has developed among teachers, administrators, and the general public...
The Michael Mukasey Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing has demonstrated that Mukasey cannot be relied upon to function independently as U.S. Attorney General. Nevertheless, Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee seem so thrilled that Mukasey is no...
Below Hell’s Half-Mile, the Green River relaxes into a series of undulating bends. The red rocks of Lodore slip away, replaced by the calming brown tones of the Weber sandstone. You might be in Glen Canyon. But, of course, you’re not. On river left...
On September 19, 2005, Yvette Cade went before Judge Richard A. Palumbo seeking an extension of a domestic violence restraining order against her husband, Roger Hargrave. Palumbo, whether from confusion, clerical error, or a genuine belief that the extension was u...
Ten years after the historic strike by the Teamsters at UPS that electrified workers in the U.S. and put fear into the hearts of America’s CEO’s, Teamster leader James P. Hoffa has tentatively negotiated a new national contract with UPS that can an onl...
Is it really fair to blame one man for destroying the US economy? Probably not. But Alan Greenspan is still tops on our list. After all, Greenspan "presided over the greatest expansion of speculative finance in history, including a trillion-dollar hedg...
The massacre in Karachi had been widely predicted. Benazir Bhutto herself has stated that she was aware of the dangers. The government pleaded with her to delay her return. Jihadi leaders, angered by her slavish support of US foreign policy, had publicly threatene...
You know how, when you first put on new music, you don’t really pay attention to the words, or even the shape of the songs? You just listen to what it sounds like: get the general feel. When I first put on Patti Scialfa’s new one, ...
For the last twenty-four years, gay and straight sexual deviants have met in San Francisco during Leather Pride Week to celebrate the Folsom Street Fair. This year, on Sunday, September 30th, between three-hundred-and-fifty and four hundred thousand fetishists, th...
One of the more sordid and long-running stories in Anglo-American colonial history — that of Diego Garcia, the chief island of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean — reared its ugly head again on Friday when the UK’s all-party foreign affai...
Unfolding as nearly a raw, gritty, highly stylized rough cut of itself, Robert Redford’s Lions For Lambs is a breathlessly urgent and stinging reality-based dramatic indictment of recent US foreign policy and its endless war on terror. As a kind of antidote ...
If one can be judged by the company one keeps, then GOP presidential candidate wannabe Mitt Romney is in big trouble. The former Massachusetts governor has just been endorsed by Bob Jones III of the Bob Jones University in South Carolina. This is the chancellor of...
"In the Valley of Elah" has Hollywood relying on cell phone images from Iraq that Mike Deerfield sent to his father via email. Despite the amateur sound and picture quality, we discern armed soldiers riding in a vehicle, the sounds of cursing, a man scre...
The history of relations between the Black liberation movement and law enforcement has always been adversarial, at its best. At its worst, it is a history of murder, beatings, lies and frame-ups. There are few groups in this history that experienced the latter mor...
The pollster and immensely influential tactical adviser at Hillary Clinton’s elbow is Mark Penn. Penn’s polling played a crucial role in Bill Clinton’s recovery from the nadir of 1994, when he joined Team Clinton as part of the rescue party summo...
Young children tell secrets, many of which turn out to be fabulously untrue. But what passes as child’s play can turn deadly when adults agree to keep matters of life and death under wraps. Few have ever heard of Reveilletown, Louisiana. In 1987 30 fa...
The recent public outrage over the conduct of Blackwater Security mercenaries in Iraq, after an unprovoked massacre of at least 17 Iraqi civilians in western Baghdad has been heartening; unfortunately, there has been virtually no attention a far more important con...