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 December 2008
Around the world, military regimes are arising as if it were the latest fad and every State is vying for Faddist of the Year. In all of these countries, when the military takes over, the populace rebels–and suffers horribly. No one knows exactly what these mili...
“ … no one had been killed by the rocket barrages after the official end of the cease-fire [with Hamas]. This doesn’t mean the situation is possible to live with, but it appears the hysterical reaction by the public as a whole and polit...
It is Christmas Eve down here off the coast of Antarctica and I can absolutely assure you that we are all having a very white Christmas. And it is a happy Christmas because there is no place else we would choose to be.
Not only is it a white Chris...
Conspiracism is raising its Medusa’s head again, her lethal visage wreathed with hissing absurdities, immobilizing judgement, melting intellect to pumice.
Journalist Russ Baker suggests in a new book, ...
RED STATE REBELS: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland
...
Over thirty years ago, a book came out titled How the Government Breaks the Law by Jethro K. L...
Between the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the creation of the United Jewish Agency in 1929, the evolution of political vocabulary in relation to ethnic groups in Palestine accompanied the emergence of an increasingly difficult geopolitical problem.
At the t...
Christians believe that Jesus is the “Prince of Peace” and that a central message of Christmas is “on earth peace, good will toward men.” (Luke 2:14). In fact, belief in “Peace” permeates the Christian’s New...
We are forces of chaos and anarchy Everything they say we are, we are And we are very Proud of ourselves.
–Jefferson Airplane, We Can Be Together
This is the inside story of how my late husband Stew A...
"As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire atinnocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term‘pogrom’ to describe what I have seen." This quote from Israeli PrimeMinister Ehud Olmert came ju...
‘s Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal Click Here to Order!...
2008 will be remembered as a turning point in Russia’s relations with the West. It was a tumultuous year, with Kosovo, missiles in Europe and NATO’s seemingly relentless march eastward like thunderclouds gathering on Russia’s horizon, which finally ...
“I inhaled frequently, that was the point.”
–Barack Obama, November 2006
He picked for Vice President one of the major architects of the Drug War.
He picked for Chief of St...
In September an Afghan journalist, Jawed Ahmad, was released from a US military prison in Afghanistan where his jailers " broke two of my ribs during the beatings." He worked for Canadian TV and the BBC, among other media outlets, and he had done nothing wr...
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Giving a gift is an act sacrificial; enhancement of the self attained in the recognition of ‘other’ seen; way of ...
The U.S. has committed nearly three trillion dollars to the financial bailout so far. The Federal Reserve has made more than $2 trillion in emergency loans and another $700 million has been pledged through Congressional action. Much more money is coming. ...
I was in the living room as the TV in the kitchen was playing a reprise of the campaign. I couldn’t hear the words too well, but as I listened to the cadence and tone of Barack Obama on the trail, it suddenly dawned on me why he and Rick Warren hit it off so we...
"Que Huevos!" ("What Balls!") grinned Don Juanito the tailor, sipping his tea across the counter and extolling the bravery of Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who gained instant hero status for hurling his shoes at U.S. president George Bush...
On Friday, December 19, President-Elect Obama made his fifteenth and final appointment to the cabinet. In a move that was cheered by the AFL-CIO and greeted, predictably, with groans and whining from the business community, he chose Congresswoman Hilda Soils (D...
Last week the Good Lord evidently realized that not enough people had been reading Hyman Minsky’s explanation of how financial cycles end in Ponzi schemes – the stage in which banks keep the boom going by lending their customers the money to pay interest ...
What western lands management has suffered from over the last 20 plus years has been, in my view, a disastrous move toward consensus decision making. There is no known way – and this explains an awful lot of why western land management has moved in this directi...
On Thursday, November 27, in the middle of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Imran Babar, one of the terrorists, called India TV from Nariman House. He used a cellphone that belonged to Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the co-director of the Chabad-Lubavitch Center. The followin...
When the government of Ecuador failed to make a scheduled interest payment on private bonds this month, it was hardly the first time a country had defaulted in the middle of a financial crisis. In fact, it wasn’t even the first time for Ecuador. The small South...
My father took me to one movie, in 1957, when I was eleven years old. Our small town had two movie theaters then, the Roxy and the Ford, but we went to the State, in the larger town three miles north. This might seem not worth noting, but back then a trip to Kittanni...
Sometime in the future…
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll just follow me over in this direction, I’d like to show you one of our rarest and most reviled species here at The Human Zoo – it’s the proverbial ‘Reag...