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 July 2009
“If anyone has been offended, I’m sorry for that.”
—LA Chief of Police Darryl F. Gates
(in response to being criticized for suggesting that more blacks than whites die from police chokeholds is because their carotid ...
Four years after Hurricane Katrina the mass media and most national political leaders have largely dropped the still-devastated and suffering people of New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast from their political radar screen. Yet, the region and its people have not be...
Is there a difference between covert propaganda and secretive campaigns to shape public opinion on controversial issues? The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) apparently thinks that there is.
The GAO recently ruled that the Pentagon pundit program di...
In the latest act of the grim drama surrounding the fate of the five hostages, officials in London have told the families of two of the guards, Alan McMenemy, from Glasgow, and Alec Maclachlan, from South Wales, that the two men are probably dead. The bodies of two o...
In an important development in the American Psychological Association saga, Jeffrey Kaye ...
The day after Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was deposed, President Barack Obama cautioned against repeating Latin America’s "dark past," decades when military coups regularly overrode the results of democratic elections. Obama went on to acknowledg...
They’ve taken all the fun out of cereal boxes. That’s not all. They’ve imposed big fines on the one who tried to make them fun and threatened another. Of course the cereal companies are partly to blame.
Those of advanced years remember with...
Bloomberg is reporting that Honduran coup leader, Roberto Micheletti has accepted the Arias ...
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Sunday said he engineered the central bank’s controversial actions over the past year because "I was not going to be the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over the second Great Depression." Bernanke either ...
The strategy of the major U.S. and British military offensive in Afghanistan’s Helmand province aimed at wresting it from the Taliban is based on bringing back Afghan army and police to maintain permanent control of the population, so the foreign forces can mov...
During mid July, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s qualifications for the Supreme Court. The Solon’s oratory focused on themes of some fictional world, not one threatened by global warming and diving economies. ...
After the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) published its report on the Arab world, with one of its shocking conclusions being that half of the world’s refugees are Arabs, The Economist published in its latest edition July 24-30 a 14-page report a...
"Crisis” is in the eye of the beholder. The Obama administration thinks in terms of years. Others are on a shorter leash. While millions are being marginalized right now, our president, and a supportive press, prepares us for consumer credit re...
Although their politics is polls apart, there is one thing that Musharraf and Imran Khan have in common. Both have more support abroad than within Pakistan . Pakistani expatriates, often disturbed by the poverty, lacking social welfare infrastructure and corruption t...
Beer solves a lot of things. This is not one.
I don’t live that far from Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., just outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are daytime break-ins in homes in my neighborhood from time to time. My wife and I recently encoun...
People have a remarkable ability to believe what they want to believe, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Recent media coverage of political debate on the “public option” for health care reform is a case in point. A review of the nigh...
In an early scene of "My Cousin Vinny," a hilarious 1992 spoof about the clash of cultures, two stereotypical Italian-American New Yorkers, Vinny Gambini and his fiancé Mona Lisa Vito, arrive in the central square of a stereotypical small town in rur...
Last week on NPR a professor in the Sloan School of Management at MIT explained that what is really at stake in the health care bill is the US government’s ability to borrow. In other words, the bill is about cutting health care costs, not about providing hard-...
The farcical arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates for "disorderly conduct" and President Obama’s recent "...
Here in Tegucigalpa I ran into a friend from Venezuela, Angel Palacio, a documentary film maker. He introduced me to Nery, a slightly chubby, dark skinned, gray haired school teacher who’s coming up to a month of protests. He and his wife Suyapa take me to STIB...
The New York Times reported last week that the Bush administration considered sending in the U.S. military to arrest the so-called “Lackawanna 6" in 2002. It is appropriate that was one of the biggest farces of the homefront legal war on terrorism wa...
The headline sounded so detached: "Murder of China steel exec shows privatisation risks." At stake in the killing of the steel exec was fear of a massive job cut. 30,000 workers at the state-owned Tonghua Steel plant calculated that a takeover b...
Nazareth.
A leading Arab educator in Israel has denounced the decision of Gideon Saar, the education minister, to require schools to study the Israeli national anthem.
Officials announced last week that they were sending out special “national ant...
First, an honest disclosure: I loved the Shepherd hotel very much.
In the first years after the Six-Day War, I was a frequent guest there. My work in the Knesset demanded that I stay in Jerusalem at least two nights every week, and after the war I switched fro...
On Wednesday, July 8 more than 60,000 South African construction workers laid down their tools in a sector-wide strike halting construction for six days on stadiums being built in advance of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. While soccer’s signature event is keenly awai...