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 September 2009
Indian officials and figures are not happy. At least when it comes to gestures on the part of Australian politicians to pacify them over claims that Australia is a safe destination for their vast pool of students. Attacks on Indian students, whether racially mo...
September 21 was the season premiere of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, one of the most popular shows on network television.
Its popularity is due to two reasons: the love of "second acts" (popular actors, athletes or media personalities of yeste...
On Monday, walking through the center of Rome, you couldn’t help noticing the Italian flags on display at shops, bars and restaurants. Merchants associations had printed up color copies of the flag to be placed in shop windows with the words "In honor of t...
The saga of the real-life “Norma Rae” came to an end September 18, when Crystal Lee Sutton, the woman on whom the classic 1979 movie was based, died in Burlington, North Carolina, of brain cancer, at the age of 68.
It was Sutton who, in 1973...
Federal regulators are “seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors” (as the New York Times recently informed its readers.)That would enable the ...
The fun has not gone out of banking after all. Following the disastrous fall of 2008, conventional wisdom had it that many of the things that made banking fun, like amazing bonuses and fascinating (if not understood) financial instruments were going to follow the din...
At the end of this year, three provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act will sunset unless Congress acts to reauthorize them. In my view, Congress should take this opportunity to revisit not just those three provisions, but rather a broad range of surveillance laws enacted ...
Don’t count Dr. Aaron Carroll among those who were stunned by a Sept. 13 New England Journal of Medicine survey that said American physicians overwhelmingly support national health insurance. A researcher at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Carroll wa...
Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with one million school children now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recessi...
Today’s weak signals are getting stronger, as the extensive range of perils facing the planet start to bite. Another day, another drama. A chunk of prime waterfront in Byron Bay falls into the Pacific. The shrinking glaciers in Tibet threaten food supplies in I...
With the G-20 summit approaching, cheerful talk of “international cooperation” fills the White House press-room. These comments carry with them the implication that “free trade” is integral to “cooperation,” a fact made explicit in...
NO POINT denying it: in the first round of the match between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama was beaten.
Obama had demanded a freeze of all settlement activity, including East Jerusalem, as a condition for convening a tripartite summit meeting, in t...
The leak of the "initial assessment" of the war in Afghanistan by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in the war, with its blunt warning that "[f]ailure to provide adequate resources" is likely to result in "mission failure", w...
The United States scarcely knew what a complex disaster it was confronting when it went to war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. It will eventually – perhaps years from now – suffer the same fate as Alexander the Great, the British, and the now-defunct S...
During his tenure as the Fort Lauderdale Police Chief, the late Ron Cochran was one day asked how he relieved the stress of his tension-filled job: “Like everyone else” he quipped, “I smoke a joint.”
“Only kidding”, he...
Now that President Zelaya has returned to Honduras, the coup government – after first denying that he was there – has unleashed a wave of repression to prevent people from gathering support for their elected president. This is how U.S. Secretary of State ...
Joe Biden has issued a warning ridiculously peculiar given a system in which Republicans and Democrats are interchangeable. Biden’s concern: if Republicans, during the 2010 election cycle, gain the 35 House seats that are in Republican districts, Barack Obama&r...
It started when she was seen going into the lab, but wasn’t seen going out. Yale graduate student Annie Le (MED ’13) entered Yale’s 10 Amistad Street medical building after leaving her keys, purse and phone in her office at the Sterling Hall o...
With the release of the CIA report detailing torture methods in secret prisons, we are at a critical juncture with an opportunity to regain our nation’s credibility in the world. The acts described in the report are morally reprehensible and a direct affront to...
Manuel Zelaya, the ousted leader of Honduras who was overthrown in a right-wing military coup in June, has made an incredible political gamble: yesterday he returned to the troubled Central American nation in a bid to reclaim the reins of power. In the capitol of Teg...
The centerpiece of the General Stanley McChrystal’s "new" counterinsurgency strategy of "clear, hold, build" is the accelerated training and expansion of the Afghan Army and Police Forces (ANSF), in addition to a major increase in the size o...
This is a rapidly changing situation. GREG GRANDIN will update as situation warrants. AC/JSC
In a bold move, the democratically elected president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya – ousted in a military coup in June – has returned to Tegucigalpa, entering...
Acorn is a poor people’s grassroots organization.
Earlier this month, some of it’s employees were caught on tape giving advice to two young right-wing activists posing as pimp and prostitute.
Pfizer is a wealthy and powerful multinational ...
Mexico City
More virulent than last spring’s Swine Flu panic here and cranked up by Mexico’s two-headed TV demon, a pandemic of paranoia is sweeping this neighbor nation as Felipe Calderon embarks on the back half of his battered presidency. ...
Reports of distress pile up with disarming regularity. The latest one comes from the United States Census Bureau, which reports that the poverty rate is now 13.2 per cent, the highest level since 1997. Almost 40 million Americans live below the poverty line, which th...