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 2008
Nicholas Kristof was baffled. A year after the New York Times columnist rescued teenaged Cambodian prostitute Srey Mom from a Poipet brothel by purchasing her freedom for $203, she was back in the brothel. Voluntarily.
In fact, she wou...
In 1971, Ron Rosenbaum’s Esquire article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box”, introduced America to phone phreaks, a subterranean network of geek explorers who probed the global phone system as the world’s largest pre-I...
Having just spent time south of the border in a poor country whose major export is people, I’ve seen firsthand what’s driving people north – and why conventional political solutions aren’t going to deter desperate Sal...
Despite a dip in labor’s national membership rolls and a significant decline in overall influence, make no mistake about it: The AFL-CIO is going to play an important part in the outcome of the 2008 election. That $300 million which the ...
For the U.S. intelligence establishment, the Cold War was a time of certainties: Communism had to be stopped; no cost was too great, no technological obstacle was insurmountable. And, in the case of gaining information on China’s missile program, n...
Riga
The otherwise cool tempered Balts erupted into street protests this Sunday in Riga. The reason was a cynical move by Latvia’s ruling coalition in parliament to convene an early morning weekend vote on the fate of Latvia’s chi...
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about ...
Dave Comroe stepped to the firing line, raised his 12-gauge Browning over and under shotgun, aimed and fired. Before him, a pigeon fell, moments after being released from a box less than 20 yards away. About 25 times that day Comroe fired, hitting about three-fourths...
Last week, an article in the Washington Post explained how decisions of the Bush administration with regard to detention policies have been overturned by the Supreme Court. The tone of the article is interesting. It’s title is "White House Dismissed Legal ...
In the movie, “It Started in Naples” (1960) starring Sophia Loren and Clark Gable, Gable portrays Michael Hamilton, a stuffy lawyer from Philadelphia, steeped in American exceptionalism and arrogance, and finds himself seeking out the custody of his broth...
This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIR’s new environmental history, ...
Last summer the Musical Patriot decided to travel light. Rather than load up his saddlebags with fat volumes on music he stocked his iPod Nano with dozens of audio books, ranging from the lofty to the lurid. The first sunny day, I fell asleep on a West Sussex B...
Somini Sengupta’s front-page article, "India’s Growth Outstrips Crops" (New York Times, June 22, 2008) points out various reasons for the current shortage of staple foods in India– including rapidly sinking water tables, inadequate governm...
Ralph Nader, whose independent bid for the White House has received scant media attention, just got noticed. Speaking to the Denver-based ...
Back in January, at one of the Democratic presidential candidates’ debates, Barack Obama took one of his few open shots at Hillary Clinton’s past as a shill for shady corporations. "While I was working [as a community organizer in Chicago]…watc...
In "Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights," a 1994 essay in the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon takes sides in the Bosnian war on squarely gender-based grounds: Serbia is a man, and Bosnia and Croat...
Many capitalist roaders say the Left is out of touch with popular culture. Well, I say NYET to that! Here, for instance, is an episode of "Sex and the City" that I translated for my Marxist-Leninist study group, so that we may better throw off our Tiffany c...
"Change we can believe in."
"Yes we can!"
"Change the world."
For hundreds of millions of people, the slogans of the Obama campaign are not the focus-group tested products of marketing gurus and professional...
Regarding the abortion debate, I tend to think that life starts when a child develops irony.
The hope of the human race is that we will learn to disagree without believing in anything.
Only brothers could hate each other the way Arabs and Jews do.
...
In his most recent editorial, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times discusses the great progress he sees in Iraq, and attributes it to President George Bush’s troop ‘surge’ of eighteen months ago. A look at just a few of Mr. Friedman’s bizarre...
Everybody knows it, but it took a tacky Republican operator to come right out and say it. Charlie Black, John McCain’s campaign adviser, recently let drop to Fortune magazine that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a "big advantage" for th...
Congressman Barney Frank 2252 Rayburn H.O.B. Washington, DC 20515
Dear Barney Frank,
While you were espousing the freedom of speech and democratic principles of Israel to the House of Representatives on June 18, 2006, were you thinking of ...
She had begun her life of captivity known as Chocolate. But unlike the dessert, which denotes images of sweetness and experiences of delight, this elephant could be anything but. She did, in fact, resemble the food’s more controversial side – its stimulan...
It’s time to knock the cobwebs off the television and fish the remote from the trashcan. Believe it or not, there’s finally something worth watching on TV. GRIT TV with Laura Flanders is a fast-paced political talk show that leaves its mainstream competit...
in Nazareth.
The following is taken from a talk delivered at the Conference for the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on June 21.
In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s chief prophet, confided in ...