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 August 2009
EXTRA! Read all about it in the Washington Post: Torture worked; Cheney and torture practitioners vindicated; morale at CIA harmed.
It seems coverage of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” has been put back on track by the editors of th...
It’s not that we’re going to miss the cute little “Dillo” buses very much when the last two lines are finally eliminated from Austin streets in about a month. Inside those quaint green shells the seats were made of wooden slats and the s...
Indigenous Havasupai people held a gathering to stop uranium mining in the Grand Canyon and protect ancestral Havasupai Territory, at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, in July of 2009. Indigenous peoples and activists came from the four directions, from Arizona Hopi...
The long-awaited investigative report by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Inspector General on how the SEC bungled multiple investigations of Bernard Madoff is set for release this week. Unfortunately, according to media reports, the long sufferin...
The investigative report written by Swedish journalist Donald Boström and published in Sweden’s largest newspaper Aftonbladet about Israeli occupation forces killing Palestinians with the objective of stealing their organs has raised a political and media ...
Since movement veteran Cleve Jones announced plans for a national gay rights march on Washington following the passage of California’s Prop. 8 last November, reactions from the LGBT community have been mixed. Supporters of October’s National Equality Marc...
Environmentalist Teddy Goldsmith, elder brother of the financier Sir James Goldsmith, who predeceased him, passed away on August 21.
I met Teddy in 1993 at Jimmy’s vast Mexican estate consisting of tens of thousands of acres, one of the few remaining cl...
I came to Honduras as part of a delegation of concerned activists who went to witness and accompany the daily protests, monitor human rights violations, and report back to the international community on conditions since the June 28 military coup. On that day, Preside...
President Obama finds himself in a precarious position when calling for escalation of the war in Afghanistan. While this conflict is traditionally seen as the “good war,” American and Afghan public support appears mixed at best. There is good ...
The swine flu pandemic can be plenty good for business. In his article, “A Capitalist Pig’s View of Swine Flu,” investor Brian Orelli said that “there is nothing wrong with drug companies and investors making money” from the crisis. &ldq...
I came to Honduras as part of a delegation of concerned activists who went to witness and accompany the daily protests, monitor human rights violations, and report back to the international community on conditions since the June 28 military coup. On that day, Preside...
“The saddest day of your life isn’t when you decide to sell out. It’s when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy.”
—Mickey Spillane
Last week it was announced that Denis Hughes, head...
Unwilling to embrace the obvious and take action on the real underpinning of the country’s enduring economic crisis – an unemployed, underemployed and overall underpaid workforce – President Obama went to his playbook and came up with th...
Two tensions pull at Hala Jaber’s The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles, a riveting story ...
On September 24 and 25, 2009, the Group of 20 (G-20) will meet in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This meeting, billed as the Pittsburgh Summit, will feature some heads of state, finance ministers and central bank presidents from twenty-two of the world’s large...
The first indictment in September 1998 charged the Cuban Five of being unregistered Cuban agents and of other minor violations. The government also charged three of them–Gerardo, Ramón and Antonio–with “conspiracy to commit espionage” (...
Teddy Kennedy’s disasters were vivid. His legislative triumphs, draped in this week’s obituaries with respectful homage, were far less colorful but they were actually devastating for the very constituencies – working people, organized labor &n...
I was raised, like most Irish-Catholics, not to speak ill of the dead—at least while the wake is still underway. Of course, the affliction known as “Irish Alzheimers” exerts a powerful tug in the opposite direction. Forgetting everything except the ...
I should have suspected something was wrong when I took my first step into Terminal 1 at JFK. I was on my way to Riga, and looking for a flight with the shortest connecting times, I naively chose LOT, Poland’s national airline. Big mistake. I’m writing th...
District 9 is not a pretty movie. It doesn’t look pretty. Its message isn’t pretty. It hurts the eyes to watch. In fact, District 9 is an outright ugly movie, but it is an ugly that is perfectly crafted and takes ugly to the heights of a new aesthetic. Th...
A recent poll shows that most economists now believe that the recession, which began in December 2007, will end in the third quarter of 2009. There’s been an uptick in manufacturing and consumer confidence, and the decline in housing prices appears to be flatte...
A federal district court in El Paso, Texas, accepted many of the Government’s arguments, not allowing certain evidence in the case of Luis Posada Carriles to be made public. Posada is scheduled for trial on perjury charges in March of 2010.
The Jud...
That Tre Arrow, a tree-hugging vegan who espouses non-violence and lives by the airy and some nebulous philosophy of Gaia, would top the FBI’s Most Wanted list, only reaffirms the notion that the Bureau’s energy is being exerted in specious directions....
The American unconscious is structured like a watershed.
Mainstream politics regenerates itself with the fluid dynamics not merely of suppression (the overt physical disciplining of the individual into a docile body—soldier, prisoner, or barefoot airpl...
To Gal Uchovsky and Eitan Fuchs,
In two weeks time, your film "The Bubble" will be screened as part of the Homage to Tel Aviv week, at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival (Congratulations!). There is concern among left wing circles in Toronto and ...