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 June 2009
As it hammers another nail into the coffin of meaningful health care reform, the Bipartisan Policy Center is laying it on thick. “Join Howard Baker, Tom Daschle and Bob Dole as they unveil their bipartisan plan for comprehensive health reform,” its web si...
In the global debate regarding genetically modified (GM) foods and organisms (GMO’s), the little-known role of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico in testing and propagating GM crops has gone largely unnoticed and unexamined. The agricultural biotechnology acti...
Baghdad.
On June 30 the last US troops will pull out of the Iraqi cities. America’s great adventure in Iraq is ending. Already there are few US military patrols in Baghdad. The American-held area of the Green Zone, for long a forbidden city in the ...
Ican’t get enough news about what’s happening in Iran. The power struggle fascinates me for a number of reasons:
* The demonstrations in Tehran and elsewhere show the huge miscalculations made by the country’s theocratic leadership. For...
Occasionally, an event gushes through media channels, spectacularly belying the notion that news outlets have major ideological differences. The current surge is a Green Wave, emanating from Iran. But there is more going on here than a uniform support for...
Now that the dust has begun to settle on President Obama’s latest broken promise to the LGBT community — his egregious brief FOR the Defense of Marriage Act, comparing equal marriage rights to incest and pederasty — it’s time to examine how we...
Since the June 12 Iranian presidential elections, Iran "experts” have mushroomed like bacteria in a Petri dish. So here is a quiz for all those instant experts. Which major country has elected more presidents than any in the world since 1980? Further, whic...
Thousands of indigenous people from the Amazon jungle of Peru accomplished the unthinkable last week. Their movement to save the Amazon and their communities forced the Peruvian government to roll back implementing legislation for the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement t...
In Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronique des Années de Braise (1975), a film which won the Palme d’Or, a crazy prophet emerges from the city to greet a horde of bedraggled peasants. He extends his arms and says, “You were poor and free. Now you...
In 1978, I was a seven-year-old girl living in Tehran. My memories from that time are child-like and simple, yet I often find that what I experienced then has shed more light on my understanding of today’s Iran than any current political analysis could do. As I...
What do you do when your bosses say they needs to slash your wages by 23%, otherwise the business will go belly up? Worse, what do you say when they tell you there’s no guarantee these cuts will be enough to save it?
If you’re a non-un...
There is, I understand, a popular cable television show featuring a "good" serial killer who has been taught by a kind mentor to channel his murderous psychosis toward socially worthy ends; i.e., killing scumbags who deserve to die but have somehow escaped ...
President Obama called on the Iranian government to allow protesters to control the streets in Tehran. Would Obama or any US president allow protesters to control the streets in Washington, D.C.?
There was more objective evidence that George W. Bush sto...
In reaching across the aisle for Republican support – and no doubt future campaign contributions from the financial sector Pres. Obama is morphing into Joe Lieberman. There also is a touch of Boris Yeltsin in his sponsorship of a financial “reform” ...
The Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of the president’s congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because of the party’s toxic decades-old decision to ...
In looking back on growing up, I always remember 1957 and 1958 at "the two good years," They were the only years my working class redneck family ever caught a real break in their working lives, and that break came because of organized labor. After working a...
At his confirmation hearings two weeks ago, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said reducing civilian deaths from air strikes in Afghanistan was "strategically decisive" and declared his "willingness to operate in ways that minimise casualties or damage, even whe...
In the prologue to The Locust and the Bird, an astonishing account of her mother’s life,...
The Schuylkill County, Pa., justice system managed to do something that insurance actuaries do with mixed results—it has determined not only the penalty for threats to a human life, but also the value of a human life.
? Norman E. Nickle, 54,...
Farmers often depend on off farm jobs to provide health insurance, if that wasn’t an option they could generally afford an individual plan. Farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in America, heavy machinery, large animals, long hours in the sun, chemi...
I’m not really a big fan of overt political documentaries. For the post part, I figure I already know the point of the movie. I usually occupy the same political side of the film, so seeing these movies just confirms things I already know. The content is usuall...
On learning of the supposed suicide of Mohammad Saleh al Haneshi in Guatanamo Bay earlier this month I immediately thought of one of J. S. Bach’s simplest pieces, Komm süsser Tod (Come sweet Death). This is an aria that Bach apparently wrote for a bo...
As the uprisings in Iran illustrate, the new electronic technologies and social networks they have produced have transformed both the landscape of media production and reception, and the ability of state power to define the borders and boundaries of what consti...
Baghdad.
Furious protests are threatening to undermine the Iraqi government’s plan to give international oil companies a stake in its giant oilfields in a desperate effort to increase its declining oil production and oil revenues.
In less than two...
Charles Lynch has been sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge George Wu to spend a year and a day in prison. At a hearing June 11, Wu rejected federal prosecutors’ arguments that Lynch must serve a five-year mandatory minimum, and defense suggestions that he ge...