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
The world’s central bankers met in Jackson Hole last weekend for their annual gathering. Undoubtedly one of the main topics of discussion was the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Board chairman. His reappointment would almost certainly win the s...
This is the conclusion ofa three part series on Charter schools and Obama’s education policy. Click here for part one and here for part two.
Amy Wells, perhaps the most notable writer ...
Crawling through a hole in a fence and walking through an open doorway, Shamus Rohn and Mike Miller lead the way into an abandoned Midcity hospital. They are outreach workers for the New Orleans organization UNITY for the Homeless, and they do this all day long; sear...
America is a strange place. Liberals get emotionally distraught that the Founding Fathers stuck Second Amendment rights in the Constitution. For American citizens to possess firearms is considered to be dangerous. Yet, it is quite alright for Americ...
Until the summer of 2008, Orlande Noel supported his family of eight by operating a trucking business in Gonaives, Haiti, a town of around two hundred thousand people.
Then four huge tropical storms and hurricanes slammed into Haiti in 30 days. &nb...
When you hear about the sick, twisted things that America’s torturers have been doing, courtesy of President George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when it came to ...
On the morning of June 28, women’s organizations throughout Honduras were preparing to promote a yes vote on the national survey to hold a Constitutional Assembly. Then the phone lines started buzzing.
In this poor Central American nation, feminists have...
Western officials are leaking stories to the Associated Press and Reuters aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on n...
At an internet café in Tegucigalpa the other day, I came across Thomas Friedman’s mid-August column in the New York Times “The Land of ‘No Service,’” which I assumed would be about a poorly functioning McDonald&rs...
This is part two of a three part series on Charter schools and Obama’s education policy. Click here for part one.
As I worked on an investigation of charter schools my ...
This is the third part in Ricardo Alarcón’s series on the Cuban Five. Click here to read part one and here to read par...
In late 1949 I worked on a boat taking Jews from Marseilles to Haifa, Israel. Jews from Arab nations were in the front of the boat, Europeans in the rear. I was regarded by many of the Europeans as some sort of freak because I had a United States passport...
My journey to China’s westernmost province began this May in the backroom of an ordinary brasserie in one of Paris’s eastern suburbs. The Uyghur man I had come to see was accompanied by a plainclothes policeman, but even so, his hands trembled...
Over the past several months, the mainstream media and right wing demagogues such as Sean Hannity have reported "heart rending" stories about the Westlands Water District having to fallow fields, putting farmworkers out of work and farms in...
Israeli newspapers this summer are filled with angry articles about the push for an international boycott of Israel. Films have been withdrawn from Israeli film festivals, Leonard Cohen is under fire around the world for his decision to perform in Tel Aviv, and Oxfam...
August 21, 2009
Kenneth Roth
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch
Dear Mr. Roth,
We are deeply concerned by the absence of statements and reports from your organization over the serious and systematic human rights abuses that have be...
In his first major speech on education since his election and swearing in as President, a speech made to an unscheduled meeting of the Council of Chief State School officers, held on March 10, 2009 in Washington D.C., Barrack Obama repeated the claim...
Mexico City With immense sorrow etched into his weather-beaten face, the Tzotzil Indian farmer slowly mounted the imposing granite steps of Mexico’s Supreme Court. Sebastian Perez Vazquez’s job was a thankless one. As pr...
Hats off to Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times for ferreting out what it was that sent CIA Director Leon Panetta scurrying over to Congress in late June. According to Mazzetti, Panetta’s top lieutenants, many of them holdovers from the l...
I died in April, 1979, a Saturday morning that I seem, now, to remember as being sunny and animated, as most sunny spring days on the Mendocino coast are, with that naive optimism unique to unspoiled or only partially spoiled places located near natu...
The "Prince of Darkness" — aka Robert Novak — who died this week of a brain tumor was the Hunter Thompson of the right, albeit with predictable differences. Thompson, like Rimbaud, espoused a total disorderi...
“The ultimate goal…is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years…The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), ...
War clouds refuse to disperse a year after Georgia waged war against Russia. On the anniversary of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s ill-fated invasion of South Ossetia 8 August, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev warned: "Georgia do...
"But, for myself, the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization." Edgar Allan Poe, The Colloquy Of Monos And Una (1850)
Twenty years before a powerful syndicate of military-industrial crimi...
In Iraq and Afghanistan American and British forces became participants in civil wars which their own presence has exacerbated and prolonged. The US and UK governments persistently ignore the extent to which foreign military occupation has destabiliz...