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 November 2007
Union bargainers for the striking Writers Guild of America (WGA) are scheduled to meet with representatives of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on Monday, November 26, to resume negotiations. Other than a brief and mutually acrimonio...
In Jerusalem. The "Annapolis establishment," as it might be called — those in Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. who have a vested interest in making the Annapolis summit look like producing something meaningful — engaged in a strangely u...
It was political theater at its finest in Lebanon Friday. After nine years in office, President Emile Lahoud stepped down from his post at the stroke of midnight without the legislature having named a successor. In fact, parliament never convened as the op...
Welcome to the jackboot state, not to mention the jackboot campus, anno domini 2007. A doctor gives verbal advice to protect the life of an unconscious man and she duly gets hit with attempted felonies by vindictive campus cops, with the connivance of the Universi...
Translation by M. Shahid Alam The world changes utterly: the stars spin faster, O Saqi. In every heart I hear the cry of surrender, O Saqi. God’s journeymen have lost their arts, their certainty. Whose artifice deceives them, who has th...
Seniors are engaging in more sexual activity, enjoying it more and sex is extending longer in life than previously estimated. This is the principal finding of a much-heralded survey of the sexual life of American seniors, those 57- to 85-years-of-age, recen...
The Observer’s Dan McDougall described their garment shop as, "smeared with filth, corridors flooded with excrement from a flooded toilet." The workers recounted threats and beatings from management to keep their nimble fingers moving. Hours were l...
Any man admired by both Senators Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch can’t be all good. And, in fact, Stephen Breyer’s elevation to the highest bench illustrates concisely how, across the past twenty years, Kennedyesque liberalism and Hatchian conservatism have...
Reality has finally caught up to the stock market. The American consumer is underwater, the banks are buried in dept, and the housing market is in terminal distress. The Dow is now below its 200-Day Moving Average — the first big "sell" signal. Any...
So where do we go from here? I am talking into blackness because there is no electricity in Beirut. And everyone, of course, is frightened. A president was supposed to be elected today. He was not elected. The corniche outside my home is empty. No one wants to wal...
Rhetoric flowing out of the White House indicates the Bush administration is planning a military attack on Iran. Officials in Saudi Arabia, a close Bush ally, think the handwriting is on the wall. "George Bush’s tone makes us think he has decided what h...
I wish I had a nickel for every time a conservative told a lie in order to sell an ideology that would otherwise be hopelessly unappealing. But, then, what the hell would I do with ten kazillion, trillion, dollars? I wouldn’t know how to spend that mu...
I was half right. In late May I wrote that September was going to be an exciting month in Iraq. I observed that that was the month in which funding for the war would end and the debate about the future of the war would begin. That has happened and the debate has n...
Once again let me urge you to visit the show of classic sculpture from India now at the De Young Museum. This is an experience not likely to be repeated in your lifetime. My colleagues in reviewing the show have mentioned the Greek, or at least Hellenistic,...
As a teenager, I learned to appreciate fiction by reading The Naked and the Dead. High scho...
On Tuesday November 20, Adel Abdul Hakim, a former Guantánamo detainee from Xinjiang province in the People’s Republic of China, took another step towards reconstructing his shattered life by applying for asylum in Sweden. The 33-year old, an ...
"A voice was heard upon the high places, weeping and supplications of the children of Israel; for they have perverted their way, and they have forgotten the Lord their God." Jeremiah 2:21 T his week the forces of good wi...
As head of Congress and the major political operator for President Evo Morales, Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera stands in the eye of a political hurricane. The changes proposed by the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) government have unleashed pr...
The Swat District in Pakistan’s Northwestern Frontier Province, dominated by the Swat Valley, watered by the River Swat, surrounded by snow-capped mountains rising as high as 20,000 feet, has been compared to Switzerland in its breathtaking beauty. Only 684 ...
As the late Senator Paul Wellstone liked to say, "We may be entitled to our own opinions, but we’re not entitled to our own facts." Even with organized labor’s many problems (shrinking membership, internal dissension, gutless Democrats, growi...
I don’t know why I was so shocked listening to Keith Olbermann’s insulting, degrading and uninformed remarks about President Hugo Chavez yesterday. Perhaps because Olbermann is the only man on commercial television who has so far had the guts to make a...
I just got back from investigating an impending massive fish kill at Prospect Island in the northern section of the California Delta between Miner Slough and the Sacramento Deepwater Channel. Bob McDaris, owner of Cliff’s Marina in Freeport, Bob Boffitt, a K...
Sodexho food-service workers at University California Davis and social justice groups such as Students Organizing for Change have been busy mobilizing for improved labor conditions. Their goal is for the company,s 500 contracted-out workers to become university em...
The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare...
Clogging aisles and bloating highways, America snatches foodstuffs and day-chunks of time. On the day before Thanksgiving, a grandchild of nine years old looks proud to help a stooped woman in lime slacks to read labels on an end cap. Gramma, old enough to remembe...