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 March 2010
A year ago health care was in crisis. Its cost burdened individuals, businesses, and all levels of government. Americans were dying at a rate of 45,000 per year due to lack of access to health care, health care bankruptcies were rising. Change was urgently needed. Th...
Once again thousands of trapped animals have died from a factory farm fire.
250,000 hens at Ohio Fresh Eggs in Harpster died when firefighters "cut power to the chicken barns and ventilation systems to keep the flames from spreading," say news repor...
As the EU summit meeting convenes, Greece is dominating the agenda much more than Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had wanted. This week she has thrown cold water on the idea that Germany and other EU countries would take responsibility for helping Greece to ...
How pathetic a scene was this: The president of the United States, commander- in-chief of the mightiest war machine the world has ever known, sneaking into one of the poorest countries in the world and meeting with the corrupt leader of that country, where he has com...
As people in Sunni areas of Baghdad heard the full results of the election they ran through the streets firing their rifles into the air in celebration and triumphantly chanting the name of Iyad Allawi, the leader of the political bloc winning most seats in parliamen...
This week former Presidents Clinton and Bush are in Haiti, trying to drum up support for Haiti’s reconstruction and setting the stage for the upcoming donor conference at the U.N. on March 31. There is no shortage of needs, and even plans to address them. Yet t...
“I’m not going to talk about my political party membership, which concerns me only, and is nobody else’s business.”
– Ahmed el-Tayeb, new Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, 20 March 2010 (Al-Dustour)
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One week after CAMP OUT NOW was erected in the cold, pouring rain, the tent was dismantled during a cold, pouring rain. This was the day after a deformed healthcare bill was passed, one that further enriches Big Insurance in its backward slide for many Americans, esp...
The Israeli government has indicated that it will press ahead with a plan to enlarge the Jewish prayer plaza at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, despite warnings that the move risks triggering a third intifada.
Israeli officials rejected this w...
The photo – this one in the New York Times, above the fold – had an uncanny vintage look to it: there on the front page was a black-and-white photograph from 1960—the first black-and-white that I can remember in a long since the Times went to ...
Dredging up tired old myths about America while concocting misleading new ones, the documentary Generation Zero assembles a host of valid gripes currently troubling the nation, but is more than careful to detour around any proposed remedies anchored in reality. In ot...
President Barack Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future will have its first meeting this week. The commission, formed after Obama cancelled the Yucca Mountain spent nuclear fuel repository in January, is tasked with rebooting the count...
Get ready kids. It’s time for more scare stories about Social Security.
The corporate press is weighing in with dire warnings that this year, six years ahead of what had been predicted only a few years ago, the Social Security system...
Last Fall, it was all about the wall: financial bigwigs like former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, former Citigroup co-CEO John Reed, Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, all espoused reestablishing the legal barrier between the derivatives casino that ...
No news is good news, as the saying goes, but when it comes to the legal case of Hugh Farrell and Gina "Tiga" Wertz, no news is ambiguous.
Farrell and Wertz engaged in peaceful protests against the I-69 highway, and the State of Indian...
One of the more devious means by which corporate America has kept labor unions at bay is by narrowing membership eligibility requirements. For example, because the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) restricts “supervisors” from joining a union...
A war of words has broken out between China and the United States and the pundits are predicting that it will end in a full-blown trade war. The Obama administration thinks that China is manipulating its currency to gain an unfair trade advantage and increase i...
In a 219-212 vote this week, the House of Representatives approved, and President Barack Obama signed into law a new round of national health care reform. The bill is the subject of celebration in the liberal corporate press, with the editors at the New York Ti...
At the end of Lorraine Hansberry’s Pulitzer prize-winning drama about a black family in Chicago, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the lone white character appears. He’s Karl Linder and he visits a black family in order to convince them not to move into t...
I’m looking for Walt Whitman Wrapped in freedom-ringing hollow bells And glory hallelujah smells Walt Whitman in his Sunday best All pressed and dressed and double breast The seas should part at his request
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Amidst a cacophony of statements, commentary and analyses about the American-Israeli relationship, and the events since Joe Biden’s visit to Israel, Mark Perry wrote an article in Foreign Policy magazine on March 13, 2010 titled “The Petraeus briefing: Bi...
In American politics, deficits have suddenly become all the rage. Throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, the federal government hemorrhaged red ink, with no one paying much attention. Upon the election of Barack Obama, however, the rules abruptly changed. As if...
Who could ever have imagined that it would take a fatal car accident to express the depth and scale of the anti-corporate mood in Russia? On February 25, on Leninsky Prospekt in Moscow, two women died – Olga Aleksandrina and Vera Sidelnikova. Both of them were ...
Earlier this week, Senator Lindsay Graham reportedly told a packed house at an AIPAC meeting that he urges a military strike against Iran before that country develops a nuclear bomb. As you know, Iran claims its uranium enrichment program is for civil nuclear power p...
I basked in the warm Borneo sun, following a long run somewhere at the edge of a rainforest. The beach was only partly clean, but the water was most inviting. My children ran excitedly, collecting what I assumed to be shells and whatever other treasures the South Chi...