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
The business world is up in arms about the Employee Free Choice Act. EFCA would make it easier for workers to unionize, by obliging companies to recognize a union once a majority of workers sign verified union cards. This would replace the more common practice of vot...
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years
An old maxim has it that newspaper editors separate the wheat from the chaff, then print the chaff. By this standard, the editors of the Wall Street Journal showed special deftness in their handling of the Madoff affair.
They used the occasion of whistleblowe...
For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the ei...
“As we roll out new products we will continue to price businesses for appropriate margins. We will not sacrifice profitability for membership.”
– Angela Braly, Wellpoint CEO
At the Health Care for America No...
Today I awoke to read that a number of human rights type groups have called on President Obama to create a commission of accountability to investigate and report publicly on torture and the cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees. There is not a w...
With all that happened at the Summit of the Americas, it was easy to miss a significant about-face by the Obama administration. No, it wasn’t the administration’s supposedly softer stance toward Cuba. Nor was it Venezuela’s well-received offer...
A catastrophe like Chernobyl could happen here. It’s the radioactive core of the second biggest lie in US industrial history.
The atomic pushers say such a disaster is “impossible” at a US reactor. But Chernobyl’s explosion spewed radi...
Owing to pending legal issues, as well as continuing intimidation from school administration towards student organizers, all the New School students are quoted anonymously in this article, at their request. CB.
"We occupied a university building, wo...
President Barack Obama and other top officials in his administration have made it clear that there can be no military solution in Afghanistan, and that the non-military efforts to win over the Afghan population will be central to its chances of success.
The re...
The Obama administration’s release last week of four Bush-era memos on the abusive interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody has raised a host of questions. The memos, written by Justice Department attorneys, purport to authorize CIA interrogators to use a ra...
"Usted quien es … Gánese el baloto para que se cambie el color."
"Who do you think you are?…Go win the lottery and change your color," a metro policeman whispered to Afro-Colombian leader Carlos Rosero, founding member of...
It is often said that the there are few forces as destructive as the power of bad economics. Rarely has this been more clearly demonstrated than in the current crisis.
While the bankers’ greed fed the housing bubble, the incompetence and/or corruption o...
With the release of the U.S. Senate’s report on the Bush Administration torture program, it is now incontrovertibly clear &ndash...
When the Ripon Society Forum contacted me to write an essay that identified five Defense Department programs to eliminate, I s...
It seems an article of faith that the first signs of recovery will emerge in the housing market. March data for existing and new homes sales, due out Thursday and Friday, will be trumpeted crocuses of spring if those beat expectations.
Banks report new mortgag...
President Barack Obama inherited two seemingly intractable wars, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, alongside a financial crisis that continues to escalate. Obama positioned himself against the unpopular Iraq war, but he did not place himself in the anti-war camp. It had be...
Flags flying, soldiers dying all the politicians lying–business as usual
It’s official –under Barack Obama, the Department of Justice will not restrain federal prosecutors targeting medical marijuana prov...
If the day comes that Congress finally does its duty and begins an impeachment effort against 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Jay Bybee, the former Bush assistant attorney general who in 2002 authored ...
The weekend that the hemisphere’s Presidents met in Trinidad at the Summit of the Americas marked the same weekend that Cuba defeated the US in the Bay of Pigs invasion 48 years ago. At the Summit, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega recalled the invasion in a s...
RANDY ROWLAND was one of 27 GIs imprisoned at the Presidio of San Francisco stockade who staged a non-violent protest in October, 1968. They were charged with mutiny by Army brass trying to suppress dissent. The first three “mutineers” to be ...
Ah, the common folk. How we do pile up. Come May Day 2009 there will be about 14 million unemployed, twice the seven million who were unemployed in June of 2007.
Speaking about this on the stock market channel—which I have been watchin...
On US tour, Norwegian Dr. Mads Fredrik Gilbert talked about his recent work saving peoples’ lives in Al-Shifa Hospital, located in Gaza City, Gaza, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. The bombardment began December 27, 2008 and continued throughout most ...
On Friday, April 17, after nearly a year of negotiating, a humbled and restructured Screen Actors Guild (SAG) reached tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on a two-year contract. The following Sunday the 71-me...
On April the 17th, like any Fridas afternoon for the last four years, the small village of Bil’in, north of Ramallah, was preparing for the usual demonstration against Israel’s annexation wall (some people call it apartheid wall or separation wall. The Is...
The Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk has been living in a fashioned legal purgatory. Stripped of American citizenship after his alleged role as a death camp guard emerged, the courts have been breathing down his neck. Despite persistent legal interest,...