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 January 2009
Click here to read Part One.
Click here to read Part Two.
The SEC’s failure to investigate and put an end to Madoff’s crime, its announcing in 1992 that there ...
At the risk of raining on the parade, I suggest that the inaugural festivities were not what they appeared. Barack Obama says the pomp and circumstance were not about him but were a celebration of democracy. “For the forty-third time, we will execute the peacef...
Barack Obama said during this campaign — speaking of a notional US president — that he should be able to do more than one thing at a time, which is sound advice for any person.
As Americans today justly celebrate their sweet win over the country...
is a Muslim American of Pakistani descent. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist and Attorney at Law, whose work, “Th...
Click here to read Part One of Investing with Madoff.
Over the years since 1995, Madoff, as often said in the media these days, made steady annual returns — on which one paid ordinary income taxes, not capital gains tax...
Canadians are always so surprised when someone doesn’t like them. “Kandahar blast kills decorated soldier,” says the Star headline truculently. Like, because his handbag matches his Uggs, he should have been okay.
Well, we live in interesti...
Mexico City.
On the third day of the Israeli genocide in Gaza my lower back began to knot up and throb. The pain grew sharper as the bombings continued. By the end of the first week, I was so hunched over that each step was a via cruces. I did not have to ho...
Toffah, Gaza.
Yesterday morning I visited Toffah, a small farming area about one mile from the Israeli border. Because it sits atop a hill, it so was prime land for Israeli surveillance during the invasion. Mohammed, a university student, agreed t...
Oh America, you celebrate better than most. But why must you always celebrate with your blinders on? Why must you celebrate the end to the “race wars” with a nasty kick at the queers? Why must you speak of toil while keeping the toilers at bay?
I&r...
Utopias have a habit of tumbling down in the long run, falling foul of brutal realities and nasty predicaments. In the short-run, they resonate with a pop-like glow, mesmerizing crowds narcotized on slogans and promises. Regarding the inauguration of the ...
How will history describe the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza? Another Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the descendants of the victims? An election ploy by ambitious Israeli politicians to win votes in the February 10 elections? A test range for new A...
It wasn’t a very good speech. Even his brother-in-law yawned.
The oration’s first problem was accidental: how he must have regretted opening with a reference to all the men who have said the Oath of Office, given that (ouch) his own oath had just ...
While American labor unions are having their usual rough time of it (not to mention the additional burden of having weathered eight brutal years of Elaine Chao as Secretary of Labor), the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) is facing not only potential defeat in the form of ge...
Gaza City.
Dr. Atallah Tarazi, a General Surgeon at Gaza City’s Shifaa Hospital, invited us to meet him in his home, in Gaza City, just a few blocks away from the Shifaa Hospital. Early this morning, he and his family returned to the...
Nazareth.
In the last days before Israel imposed a unilateral ceasefire in Gaza to avoid embarrassing the incoming Obama administration, it upped its assault, driving troops deeper into Gaza City, intensifying its artillery bombardment and creating thousands m...
The last time the US restrained Israel in its never-ending wars of aggression was when President Eisenhower pulled the plug on the Anglo-French-Israeli effort to grab the Suez Canal in 1956.
Since then, we have not even chastised Israel when its actions hurt ...
Eight long years ago at a counter-inaugural event in Austin, TX, I administered a “Citizen’s Oath of Office” to the people who had come together on the steps of the state Capitol to challenge the legitimacy of the incoming Bush administration and it...
Lots of people have asked me why I chose to leave my children and travel to Gaza in the middle of a war. If you knew three year old Omar it might be easier to understand. Omar is the youngest child in the family of Abu Yusif, one of our host...
The increasingly forceful tone of statements critical of Israel issuing from certain European Union governments during the current Gaza crisis, plus the news that Israel has decided to send ministers on a tour of six insufficiently docile European countries as a kind...
The American presidency in its outward show and innermost tendency has since World War II increasingly shown all the markings of monarchy. The president is hovered over and catered to by hundreds of aids and sycophants, his every whim answered at notice. He enjoys a ...
In the long sixty-year tortured history of the Palestinian expulsion from their lands, Congress has maintained that it is always the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority, and now Hamas who are to blame for all hostilities and their consequences with the Israeli go...
Amidst the ecstasy of the Obama Inauguration, there lurks great danger.
Merely with his swearing in, our nation has broken an epic racial barrier. We are losing our worst president and getting one who was actually elected.
But the promise of change is...
Maybe symbolism is just symbolism, but the optimist in me says that Barack Obama’s invitation to former Communist and life-long political activist Pete Seeger (along with Bruce Springstein and 89-year-old Pete’s full-throated grandson Tao) to sing Woody G...
Barack Obama’s inauguration coming as we celebrate of Martin Luther King Day predictably draws linkages between the two. Many use Obama’s election to claim a realization of the “dream.” Others mumble something about a post-racial America. I su...
Barack Obama and Co. are planning to launch their own version of economic "shock and awe" in the opening weeks of the new administration. Aside from the $825 billion stimulus package, which will be used to create 3 million new jobs and make up for flagging ...