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 March 2008
Muqtada al-Sadr called on his Mehdi Army militia to stop fighting Iraqi government forces in a surprise move after six days of clashes. The Shia cleric also demanded that the government cease arresting his followers and release those detained. "Because...
A while ago there was a big enough opening in the wall for a car to pass through. Now it is closed. The place is almost empty of people. A young man walks towards me, passes me and disappears into a ditch. And he is gone. I follow him down into the wide di...
In August 2007, Congressman Peter DeFazio, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told the House that he and the rest of his Committee had been barred from reviewing parts of National Security Presidential Directive 51, the White House supersecret plan...
The US Congress, the US media, the American people, and the United Nations, are looking the other way as Cheney prepares his attack on Iran. If only America had an independent media and an opposition party. If there were a shred of integrity left in Am...
The National Sierra Club Board of Directors voted on March 25, 2008 to dismantle the entire democratically -elected structure of the Florida Chapter of the Sierra Club, the fourth largest Chapter in the nation. The Florida Chapter, comprising 35,000 individ...
The Rolling Stones and director Martin Scorsese deliver an impressive visual and auditory masterpiece with the upcoming documentary film, Shine A Light. Stocked with an arsenal of 2006 performance footage from New York City’s Beacon Theater, the two hour fil...
Job security is the foremost domestic issue for working people in Pennsylvania, where Senator Hillary Clinton is expected to win the Democratic Party primary. For many months, as a candidate for president, Senator Clinton has cultivated a pro-labor image. She clai...
Ed Sanders’ language advances in a direction of production which probably isn’t even guessed at That is, it takes the earth to make a feather fall. – Charles Olson, 1964 They’d privatize...
It is being billed as a "massive shakeup of US financial market regulation", but don’t be deceived. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s proposals for broad market reform are neither "timely" nor "thoughtful" (Reuters) In fa...
Translated by Forrest Hylton. The word’s origins are polemical: it comes from the Arabic mahya–bullying, arrogance; and maffia, in Tuscan dialect, a synonym for ostentation. The etymology fits like a ring on a finger. The mafia as we know it tod...
This is the 32nd anniversary of the first "Day of the Land" – one of the defining events in the history of Israel. I remember the day well. I was at Ben Gurion airport, on the way to a secret meeting in London with Said Hamami, Yasser Arafat...
The regulatory framework proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will not address fundamental problems in the banking sector that contributed significantly to the recession and that must be fixed to rescue the U.S. economy from recession and avoid future cris...
The Federal Reserve is presently considering an emergency operation that is so risky it could send the dollar slip-sliding over the cliff. The story appeared in the Financial Times earlier this week and claimed that the Fed was examining the feasibility of buying ...
As John McCain and his presumptive vice-presidential running mate, Joe Lieberman, toured the middle East together (Joe to remind John of who is on first in Iraq so as to correct gaffs born of John’s ignorance or old age, and John to demonstrate that notwiths...
Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada by John Muir Laws The gold s...
In a place just a few miles from sandy beaches and soaring sky-scrapers, white stone villas and sky-blue swimming pools, it seems the epitome of irony and injustice that over 1.5 million people would be subjected to drinking sewage-contaminated water. When th...
As Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the leftist firebrand who millions of Mexicans consider their legitimate president, made his way to the podium in the packed Zocalo plaza here March 18th, the 70th anniversary of the expropriation and nationalization of ...
US and British forces are increasingly playing a supporting role in the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s stalled offensive against the Mehdi Army militia. American aircraft launched air strikes in Basra yesterday and fought militiamen on the streets in...
Awash in the blood of 4,000 U.S. soldiers and at least 1,000,000 Iraqi men, women and children, Arizona Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain returned from a trip to Iraq and declared "we are succeeding." This is the same man w...
For going on 2 decades now the great right wing/business class project of repealing the 20th century has been steadily advanced. It’s now become a bipartisan undertaking, barely missing a beat regardless of which party dominates Washington. Between 19...
"Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk must be ours." – José Martí, Our America Tom Miller recently published in the Washington Post (02/17/08) an opinion pi...
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales was one of the most under-appreciated and underscreened movies of the past year. For the most part, critics found it confusing and didn’t understand that it is not just a movie but a critique of media in general that uses the me...
On Thursday, CNN’s Kyra Phillips, broadcasting from Iraq, gave viewers a tour of Saddam Hussein’s last residence before he was hanged-a prison cell in Baghdad where he was held under US guard in a structure built during his reign. As Phillips obse...
The subprime crisis gives young homeowners a harsh education in predatory lending. When I heard about the subprime mortgage crisis, it sounded eerily similar to the shady credit cardlending practices found on most college campuses. I imagined yet another financial...
Ask not what you can do for the peace process, but what the peace process can do for you. Thus the approach of US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Some may say that Hillary distorting beyond recognition any role she played in the North may not be a big...