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
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...
An unfair labor practices strike at Chicago-based SK Hand Tools has highlighted the widespread attack on health care benefits and wages as employers try to take advantage of the recession.
About 75 workers at SK walked out August 25, about three months after t...
One of the best sections of the New York City public transit system is that stretch of the “A” train that passes between 125th street in Harlem and 59th street. When the A Train is running express it means 64 blocks of uninterrupted movement. Sure, the ri...
It seems almost trivial to accuse someone who launched an illegal war that has killed over a million people of torture. But if we are going to prosecute the lowest ranked Torturers, it makes sense to look up the chain of command.
There is no doubt that George ...
Almost a year after the Great Giddy Swarming of the Obamians last November, some of the revelers are waking up with one booger of a hangover. And they are asking themselves, “What were we thinking when we had that 10th drink of Democratic Party Kool-Aid?”...
A group of scientists, military officials and government bureaucrats signed an informal pact with the devil. The contract became public in August 1945, when U.S. bombers nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since then, no other nation has used a nuclear weapon, but t...
The Iraqi political leadership is moving to the right and those identified as unacceptable are paying the harshest price. As U.S. occupation forces attempt to vacate Iraq’s bloody battlefield, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is positioning himself as a stalwart n...
Last week Sweden’s largest daily newspaper published an article containing shocking material: testimony and circumstantial evidence indicating that Israelis may have been harvesting internal organs from Palestinian prisoners without consent for many years. ...
President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldier...
If ever there were a grandly-scaled operatic vehicle appropriate to our current predicament it would be Wagner’s Ring. The World’s Board of Directors—the CEO of the Gods, Wotan—has just finished its dream home, Valhalla. The problem is, ...
Once my mind cleared after word reached me that Michael Jackson had died, I wondered how much my 1985 book Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream was going for on Amazon ($14 used; $100 new) and came across a review from ’85 that said, &qu...
The disproportionate prison terms imposed on the Cuban Five – Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo (2 life terms plus 15 years), Ramón Labañino Salazar (1 life term plus 18 years), Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez (1 life term plus 10 years), Fernando Gonz&...
Few would consider the opinions of the world’s central bankers to be unbiased or even accurate. These self-proclaimed wise men of international finance didn’t see the recession coming until it blew up in their faces — a blast that destroyed th...
Do you think the wardens will let George Tenet wear his Presidential Medal of Freedom over the orange coverall?
Perhaps he and Donald Rumsfeld will end up doing time together in one of the prisons also slated to host what Rumsfeld called “the worst of t...
Senator Charles Schumer indicated earlier this week that Democrats were fleshing out plans to pass health legislation, particularly the option of a new government-run insurance program, with a simple majority, instead of the 60 votes that would ordinarily be needed t...
Even though organized labor has a long and storied history of accomplishments, no one is ever going to accuse it of being creative or innovative. In fact, when it comes to inventiveness, originality, or a willingness to break with orthodoxy, the AFL-CIO is abou...
On December 17, 2004, Louisa Willcox of the Natural Resources Defense Council convened a collection of U.S. grizzly bear advocates in Bozeman, Montana, with a call to arms. Under threat of lawsuit from the governor of Wyoming, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plann...
Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments in Radical Social Democracy (Zed Books, 2009) provides a...
The next time you’re driving on California’s Highway 5, and you see a grove of dead trees sporting those "Congress Created Dustbowl" signs, hold off reaching for your hankie. If you’re watching a Fox News feed of farmworkers who were paid ...
The timing of the mini-maelstrom over an opinion piece by Neve Gordon, who teaches politics and government at Be’er Sheva’s Ben-Gurion University, calling for a boycott of Israel, was somewhat grotesque. Hardly have the t...
This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned — the media’s insistent support for the war...
Beersheva
The walls have been freshly plastered and painted white, the sculpted stone window frames are filled with frosted glass and the builders are hanging spotlights from the ceiling.
The municipality of Beersheva, the capital of southern Israel, ...
"My vote against this misbegotten war (Iraq) is the best vote I have cast in the United States Senate since I was elected in 1962."
Senator Ted Kennedy
I would like to extend my sincere condolences to the Kennedy fami...
Two years ago, I interviewed Vaclav Smil, the prolific author and energy thinker. I asked Smil, a distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba, why Americans are so easily swayed by politicians and others when it comes to energy matters. His response: scient...
Cindy Sheehan will be at Martha’s Vineyard beginning August 25 a short way from Obama’s vacation paradise of the celebrity elite but very far from the Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq where the body bags and cemeteries fill up each day as Obama’s w...