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 August 2008
The recent news that ExxonMobil’s second-quarter profits rang up at $11.7 billion–the largest quarterly profit of any company in history–rightly enraged millions of working people in the U.S. and abroad who are feeling the sting of high...
August 2008 was a banner month for passports. They played a significant role in world events that garnered them rare publicity. Two of the events demonstrated how easy a government can make it to get passports and one demonstrated how difficult it can be...
Mr. Jacques Rogge President, International Olympic Committee Lausanne Switzerland
Dear Mr. Rogge,
You have been derelict in your duty. You have failed to seek out the Jamaican wunderkind, Usain Bolt, kowtow to him,...
Paul O’Neill, Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury, is an unlikely apostle for the crusade to combat global warming. But for the past couple of years the former corporate executive has been preaching the virtues of moving away from fossil f...
Anyone interested in light-hearted, fanciful reading, need look no farther than the ‘John McCain for President’ website. There the reader will find a curious mix of fantasy, unintended humor and the fruits of a mind-boggling imagination. Let ...
This morning McClatchy newspaper reports, "Democrats poised for sharp turn to the...
Old enemies seldom make easy bedfellows. This is what we see in Pakistan today. Now that President Pervez Musharraf, once the military strongman, has been forced out, the shaky alliance of the two most powerful civilian politicians, Asif Ali Zardari and ...
Hey, have you heard? America is worse off than it was four years ago!
Big shocker, eh? I mean, it’s not like the clues are all around us or anything.
So how ‘bout that John McCain, eh? For an old geezer who has...
On August 7, as distracted Americans were immersed in the HiDef torrent of logo-emblazoned jock-ularity and Olympic pageantry, Bush toady Mikhail Saakashvili saw his opportunity. The Georgian strongman (who ascended to power in a US-backed coup) sent his...
If the direr warnings about the US economy and the general state of the world are correct, maybe we should be glad that Obama’s presidential campaign is in failure mode.
Two terms of the Bush/Cheney administration have pretty much destroyed ...
On August 27th, the Brazilian Supreme Court will decide a case that could have far reaching effects on the Amazon and the thousands of indigenous people who live there. The case questions the legality of a process that created an Indigenous Territory in ...
I was recently conversing with a local schoolteacher, a thoughtful woman I admire, when she exclaimed, “I would love to talk to you more when we have time! I mean, I’d love to know what you think about Obama, since he’s black and, oh, w...
Here in New England autumn starts early, and on this late August morning the weather was especially chilly. Nonetheless, approximately 65 union members and supporters found their way to the picket planned here in Harvard Square at the Sheraton Comm...
Federal Reserve officials, academics and central bankers from abroad are gathering for Ben Bernanke’s annual confab in Jackson Hole Wyoming to discuss the management of financial crises. A better topic might be: Is the Fed Still a Central Bank? ...
Yesterday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued its report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) on September 11, 2001. Collapse was caused by the rupturing of the building’s metal framework due to the...
The war between Russia and Georgia is a tragedy on its own terms. But it also has broad implications for U.S. foreign policy. Both President Bush and Sen. John McCain have demonstrated their shared predisposition to involve America’s armed services...
Some people say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
– John Lennon
Although Albert Camus died before baby boomers took charge of the world and placed their redou...
The geopolitics of Russo-American relations is best portrayed by an old Swahili proverb that says ‘when the elephants fight, the grass gets crushed, and when elephants make love the grass gets crushed’.
In that way, post-Cold War rapp...
Fortunately, the Russia-Georgia war was short-lived, but its repercussions will be felt for quite a long time. By defeating Georgia and showing that Washington was unable to defend its own ally, Russia humiliated the United States in front of the whole w...
The great debate on how much—or how little—Barack Obama would change our disastrous U.S. foreign policy usually focuses on the Middle East. That makes sense. Nowhere has the price of the Bush national security strategy been higher, as the vio...
Karl Marx once wrote, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” He wrote these words in his opening ...
"We will continue to bring the world’s most dangerous terrorists to justice," President George Bush said in 2006, explaining why Congress needed to pass a bill to allow detained terrorist suspects to be prosecuted in military commissions....
The artist’s role as social commentator and activist has historically been engrained in our culture. Art and its creation as a response to social and political issues can become powerfully influential in raising public awareness that results in pos...
The crisis in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia eerily recalls a tragedy of the Cold War, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. That year, after revolutionaries challenged Soviet control of this satellite state, Russian tanks and troops rolled into Hunga...
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) officials are pushing various agencies charged with regulating banks, such as the Treasury’s Office of Thrift Supervision to more aggressively give proble...