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 February 2010
Recent exposés revealing that Ethan Bronner, the New York Times’ Israel-Palestine bureau chief, has a son in the Israeli military have caused a storm of controversy that continues to swirl and generate further revelations. (See my piece for CounterPunch,...
Chester Patterson—the eponymous narrator and the central character of Kermit Moyer’s mesmerizing collection of linked stories, ...
When American historian Howard Zinn passed away recently, he left behind a legacy that redefined our relationship to history altogether.
Professor Zinn dared to challenge the way history was told and written. In fact he went as far as to defy the conventional...
On April 17, 2009, with the edifice of the global economy rotting under an architecture of monumental greed, war deficits, and official hubris, the University of California, Berkeley conducted a groundbreaking ceremony for its Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Ec...
For quite awhile now, the political streams have been flooded with the ever increasing wail of the progressive Democrats. The weeping and gnashing of teeth by peace and justice groups, unions, focus groups, Democratic Party blogs and liberal/left journals has become ...
The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and pro...
"Because findings published in peer-reviewed journals affect patient care, public policy and the authors’ academic promotions, journal editors contend that new scientific information should be published in a peer-reviewed journal before it is p...
US politics are in gridlock because elected officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, are fighting to revive an economic model based on construction, development and housing. Instead of breaking with the past– and confessing that trillions of taxpayer handout...
Call him, just for now, Spartacus. He was two years old when the slavers captured him in 1982 and hauled him off to Oak Bay, near the town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the far Canadian west. And there he met his fellow slaves, Nootka and Hai...
Jia Zhang-Ke, who turns 40 this year, is probably best known for his 2004 film, The World, a powerful tragedy that begins as satiric comedy. He has made a number of excellent entertainments, most notably Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures (2003), as well as the st...
You hear a lot of hypothetical “Hitler” questions in Ethics 101 classes. Here’s one: Who would object to a scenario where Hitler failed to receive enough votes to force that 1932 runoff election for president of Germany—even if tha...
You hear a lot of hypothetical “Hitler” questions in Ethics 101 classes. Here’s one: Who would object to a scenario where Hitler failed to receive enough votes to force that 1932 runoff election for president of Germany—even if tha...
Did you catch the video last Tuesday night on NBC of U.S. champion Rachel Flatt as a three year old in what must have been one of her first skating performances? The announcers, including Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton (1984), seemed to think it was very cute. ...
I’ve taken to listening to so-called Christian contemporary music on in my car radio. What fascinates me is the friction between sensuality and its suppression that gives sacred pop its weird energy. A musical style redolent of sex is...
The Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon have been decimated in the last 20 years by an incursion of prospect-miners (garimpeiros) who brought diseases (especially malaria) and other maladies to their hitherto relatively isolated communities. Here we follow the history o...
Six days after Howard Zinn’s death on January 27, I asked my class of forty-seven Introduction to Anthropology students about Christopher Columbus. “Take out a piece of paper and respond to this scenario. You are the Director of Community Theater here in ...
According to Turkish Justice Ministry Statistics as of Jan. 31, 2010, there are a total of 117,547 prisoners in Turkish jails, but only half of this number are actual convicts. The vast majority of the rest are detainees waiting for a court appearance. Ma...
“For someone like myself to be unable to run for president, this is a disaster. How can a constitution bar 99 percent of the people from running?”
– Former IAEA Director-General and Nobel Prize laureat...
Various political demagogues and Wall Street interests have mounted a campaign to convince Americans that despite persistent massive unemployment for the foreseeable future, more than 15 million people underwater on their home mortgages and two unneces...
New York Times columnist Gail Collins’ new history of the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, ...
As I write this article, I’m seated in a hotel room across from the train station in Geneva, Switzerland. There’s a slight, dull pain in my forehead from a two-inch line of stitches that are pulling together a gash that runs diagonally across my brow, tha...
The Iranian government is celebrating the capture of Abdolmalek Rigi, the leader of a violent group called Jundullah (Arabic for Soldiers of God), which Tehran says is a terrorist organization supported by the United States, Great Britain and Israel. ...
Even David Letterman found room to mock it, but Toyota’s recent acceleration debacle is an episode the company would rather forget. The Japanese giant is mired in a controversial recall of vehicles for sudden acceleration defects, numbering...
Sometimes a singular incident can trigger a wave of enormous and lasting proportions. In late 1987, one such wave washed over Sea World, San Diego and sent the entertainment park’s owner, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, tumbling in the wake. The media was investigat...
A little more than a year after her son Casey was murdered in Iraq by the US Military Industrial Complex, Cindy Sheehan took a stand in Crawford to challenge the cowering George Bush who hid behind security at his ranch. The Peace Mom sat in a ditch under the searing...