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 April 2009
Recently the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice asked me to write an article for them with my ideas of how grassroots activists could better use the internet for real change. As a member of the group, I was happy to tackle that assignment, and here are my though...
Something isn’t working.
In late 2005 Michael Chertoff, the new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), launched the "Secure Border Initiative" as the umbrella program for border control and immigration enforcement. The announc...
[Author’s note: This story is from my new book, In and Out of the Working Class...
Remember when Barack Obama made that big announcement at Camp Lejeune about how all US combat troops were going to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June 30? Liberals jumped around with joy, praising Obama for ending the war so that they could focus on their “...
As the US attempts to dig out from economic collapse, a little-known nuclear industry liability could seriously derail Obama’s attempt to revive our finances.
It is the federal disaster insurance on 104 rickety atomic reactors. Because the industry can...
At the centre of the Summit of the Americas held in Trinidad and Tobago over April 17-19, was the only country from the hemisphere not present — Cuba.
Speaking at the opening session, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega noted that while a large majority ...
Perhaps Avigdor Lieberman is only a passing episode in the annals of the State of Israel. Perhaps the fire he is trying to ignite will flicker briefly and go out by itself. Or perhaps the police investigations into the grave corruption affair of which he is suspecte...
The history of American liberalism is one of promoting substantively modest if superficially radical reforms in order to refurbish and sustain the status quo. From Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Bill Clinton’s New Covenant, liberals have specialized in ...
The numbers are in and they are decisive. The longstanding, corporate-right forces of the Independence Party, known here as Iceland’s “Republicans”, have received a trouncing at the polls. With 100% of the vote tallied, the Social Democratic Allianc...
"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It w...
I am long used to my hometown Baltimore being the murder capital of the nation. Suddenly this week Maryland is the murder-suicide capital. We have seen two such gruesome crimes this past week, and what makes them especially distressing (if such superlatives are even ...
The International Monetary Fund turns 65 this year. Until the current economic crisis, it had reduced its workload drastically to a near-retirement level. Its total loan portfolio plummeted by 92 percent in four years. But like many senior citizens who have been hit ...
The outbreak of a new swine flu in Mexico, and the potential threat of a new global pandemic, shines a bright light on a major weakness in the United States—an employment system where most workers are not paid or even face getting let go if they get sick and ha...
Beirut
On June 17, 2008, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice set a remarkable American and World Record for the shortest visit to Lebanon ever recorded by a serving US Secretary of State. The objective was to express love, affection, and non-i...
The AFL-CIO recently posted a health care survey on its web site. And ...
One of the most audacious and cynical corporate-backed social experiments in living memory, the Free State Project in New Hampshire, has now shifted into damage control mode. Free State operatives learned this past week of my article that appears in the current...
Over the course of a long and brutal war with Sri Lanka’s armed forces, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE) emerged as one of the world’s most formidable insurgent groups. Besides engaging the Sri Lankan government in a bloody battle for...
Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets!
–Pablo Neruda
About a month before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the...
Why is the press misleading the public about housing? The housing market is crashing. There are no "green shoots" or "glimmers of hope"; the market is worn to a stump, it’s kaput. Still, whenever new housing figures are released, they’...
This conversation took place on April 1, 2009. Our film crew received Justice Department approval to talk with “the prisoner,” with a prison official in the room. Before his 1998 arrest, Gerardo Hernandez directed the operations of the other Cuban State S...
When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirm...
Could it really have ended any other way? As the New York Times reports, Barack Obama and the Democratic Establishment are coming down hard and fast to quell any incipient movement toward accountability for the Bush Regime’s torture system.
These "l...
Once again, the issue of torture by US operatives is in the news. Barack Obama’s administration recently released some classified information from the recent past that details the debates and eventual support for the program of torture undertaken by the C...
A telltale sign of a dictator’s waning influence is increasing paranoia. And this is exactly what Egypt’s U.S.-backed dictator, President Hosni Mubarak, is suffering from.
At a time when criticism over Egypt’s abetment of the Israeli siege a...
Things looked grim for Charles Lynch last week when the Department of Justice instructed the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles to keep seeking a five-year mandatory minimum sentence in his case. Lynch had been convicted in federal court last summer of marijuana-law violat...