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
On the weekend of July 17, over 250 activists from across the country converged on Roosevelt University in Chicago for the largest meeting ever of counter-recruitment and anti-militarism organizers. Retirees from Florida and California, concerned parents from O...
A poll by Worldpublicopinion.org finds that people across the world are eager for more robust responses to the economic crisis than offered them thus far by their governments. Publics in 19 countries that comprise 62 percent of the world’s population were polle...
"It was a trying time for dreamers," Wadad Makdisi Cortas wrote of the year 1935. She was 26 and "yearned to speak my language, to read Arabic books, and to foster Arab independence and solidarity." But she had just become the headmistress of a gi...
A signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, the United States "does not torture." Yet abundant evidence indicates that it does, directly or by proxy—and in fact always has. An old American tradition of state-sponsored torture even has its own le...
The mainstream media has once again dropped the ball on a key aspect of the ongoing story in Honduras: the U.S. airbase at Soto Cano, also known as Palmerola. Prior to the recent military coup d’etat President Manuel Zelaya declared that he would turn the...
The appointment of "Bob and Roberta Smith" (aka Patrick Brill) and Wolfgang Tillmans as two new artist trustees at the Tate gallery has done nothing to redeem the gallery’s somewhat tarnished reputation over the relationship between its supposed gover...
As a grade school kid in Providence RI I was a baseball fanatic. I dreamt the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees and practiced my home run swing in my sleep. I memorized statistics and slept with my baseball glove under my pillow with neats foot oil so it would ...
We may look back at the last few weeks as a historic time in American politics. Free market rhetoric used to denigrate government-sponsored health care is finally being seriously challenged. But is media debate on health care truly open? Commentary ...
Now that the grease in the wheels of the American money machine is working its way, the next phase of the recovery is afoot — proper attention to what Bob Rubin calls “the yields”, the place where creationists and monetarists converge in one simple ...
The foundation-dependent professional enviro eco-blogs are humming with praise for the Obama Administration’s recent desertion of the Bush Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR). Said whopper was an attempt by Big Timber lobbyists/lawyers and captive politicians o...
I arrived in El Salvador half-expecting to see soldiers guarding the corridors of the airport with made-in-the-U.S. machine guns, the way they did during my first, hour-long visit to the country on a lay-over on a flight to Nicaragua in 1982. More than once on my fli...
Last week President Obama spoke boldly about persistent racial discrimination and criticized the "structural inequality" that presents "the steepest barrier" to African American equality in the 21st century.
Speaking before a crowd at the c...
There is a long history of mediums who claim to communicate with the dead. They sell their services to people anxious to talk to relatives or great figures of the past. Such exercises can be dismissed as harmless entertainment – people spend a few dollars to be...
The accolades are still pouring in for departed anchorman Walter Cronkite. Few mention his critical "that’s the way it is" reporting on the atomic melt-down at Three Mile Island. Yet Cronkite and TMI are at the core of today’s de facto moratoriu...
Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the evil spirit of the Gaza War refuses to leave us in peace. This week it came back to disturb the tranquility of the chiefs of the state and the army.
“Breaking the Silence”, a group of courageous former c...
Several of my favorite, most memorable quotations come to mind these days as I sadly observe what seems to me like abject, deferential genuflection before Washington’s Democratic Party majority by major labor and progressive organizations in this country.
...
in Nazareth.
The passionate support for Israel expressed on talkback sections of websites, internet chat forums, blogs, Twitters and Facebook may not be all that it seems.
Israel’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special underc...
Last Thursday, while most U.S. media outlets were focused relentlessly on the marathon endurance test that was ...
Marie Antoinette, contrary to popular opinion, never said a solution for the starving masses of revolutionary France in the late 18th century was, "Let them eat cake." But, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) apparently said something close to it.
At a p...
We often have a tendency to reduce complex social situations to simplistic scenarios, where there is only black or white and no shades of gray, only heroes or villains and nothing in between. Such seems to be the attitude of many Iran analysts, particularly those on ...
Some years ago, a group of union reps were idly discussing what the “worst possible job” in the world might be, and, having once lived in India, I nominated the low-caste Biharis who had the job of hauling the bones and rotted carcasses of dead animals to...
Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for 23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the US soldier in Afghanistan who was captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going...
I found myself in San Diego, CA. when 1979 began. Our traveling group of friends had left the environs of Santa Cruz a few months previous because we had been told that San Diego had lots of work. Once we got there, of course, we decided that the only work we r...
The public disagreement between Israel and the U.S. over continued settlement expansion in the West Bank and Jerusalem has heated up considerably. At a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rejected the Obama administration’s req...
Recent disturbances in Iran and China have drawn attention to not only the fragility of their socio-political systems but also to contradictions in how the United States and other Western powers react to such events. America’s response to demonstrations i...