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 April 2010
Anyone who believes that Goldman Sachs is made up of coldhearted calculating machines, with scant room for any human emotion apart from avarice, should have been monitoring the firm’s most recent global videoconference. This is a quarterly even...
Write “war games.” Hit Google search. In a millisecond untold possibilities appear. I endure a Charmin toilet paper commercial where a cartoon bear wipes his butt with the tissues. Then I enter the real game: “You’re a young cadet, taking part...
“Unlike the Eastern States, we have large areas threaded by a single stream of water… If the local laws should permit these arteries of wealth and health to be monopolized by the few who chance to control their banks, to the entire exclusion ...
Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practice to deceive.
Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, 1808
In the course of three hours [in My Lai in 1968] more than 500 Vietnamese civilians were killed in cold blood at the hands of US troops...
The massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico formed as now an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil (210,000 gallons daily) gush to the surface following an explosion at an oil rig is what other areas of the United States will face under President Barack Obama’s plan t...
I’m destroying freedom. Jim DeMint says so–in his appropriately titled book Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism.
I’m not destroying freedom alone. I have help. For example, from a majority of the U....
The new anti-immigrant law in Arizona (SB 1070) is more than a racist law. It is a device designed to divide and conquer. It’s not designed to just divide white-hued folks from brown hued ones; nor is it designed to merely divide citizens from non-c...
British Petroleum had a fail-safe system for it’s Deepwater Horizon floating deep-water drilling rig.
You know, the one that blew up and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, leaving a tangled spaghetti pile of 22-inch steel pipe one mile long all...
J.B. Handley concluded long ago that mercury is but one component in childhood vaccines that could be contributing to the epidemics of autism and developmental disabilities in American children. And after following two decades of ferocious debate and misdirected, ina...
Before Detroiters voted last fall on a half-billion-dollar bond measure to renovate and build new schools, the state-appointed financial manager Robert Bobb launched an “I’m In” campaign to keep kids in the public schools, which are hemorrhaging stu...
The deficit hawks are going into high gear with their drive to cut Social Security and Medicare. President Obama’s deficit commission is having a big public event on Tuesday in which many of the country’s most prominent deficit hawks will tout the need to...
In 1987, prior to Prozac hitting the market and the current ubiquitous use of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, the U.S. mental illness disability rate was 1 in every 184 Americans, but by 2007 the mental illness disability rate had more than doubled to 1 ...
When I first returned to Mexico City in the wake of the great 1985 earthquake, the biggest drug pushers in that distant neighbor nation were Sherwin Williams Paint ("tinner" or "activo") and Resistol-Dupont glue ("chemo".) Street k...
Congress is holding hearings this week on the legality of the US government’s drone warfare program. Conducted by the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the hearings will examine the CIA...
Tuesday’s hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations laid the groundwork for future criminal prosecutions of Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and his chief lieutenants whose reckless and self-serving actions helped to precipitate the ...
The largest polluter in the Czech Republic is expected to get approval for expansion despite a report advising against the move, objections by environmental groups and an apparent conflict of interest on the part of the public official making the decision.
App...
There are many ways to become undocumented in the United States. Two of the most common ways are crossing the border undetected and overstaying a temporary visa. These are not criminal actions. The penalty for either of these is deportation – a civil procedure....
What are we to make of Nick Clegg who now holds the banner of the Liberal Democrats in Britain? The historian Max Hastings in The Daily Mail (Apr 28) is dismissive. ‘It would be foolish to expect honesty from Nick Clegg and his party,’ he sugg...
Art Welch, the in-school suspension supervisor at the Columbia-Montour Area Vocational Technical School (Vo-Tech) in Bloomsburg, Pa., earns $8 an hour, only 75 cents above minimum wage. In the six years he has been at Vo-Tech, he has never had a raise.
...
Nothing makes J.B. Handley laugh more quickly than the suggestion that he and other parents who question the safety of the American vaccine schedule are "radicals." The Portland, Oregon, businessman is a managing partner in a leverage buyout fund. And when ...
Those who think that there’s an immigration crisis in Arizona are correct, however, this is but part of the story. The truth is, a civilizational clash is being played out in the same state in which the state legislature questions the birthplace and legitimacy ...
Today’s New York Times finds the grey lady engaged in her usual gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over The Deficit, in this case, that of the State of New York which it describes as "alarming."
The sum occasioning the sta...
"I called Clint,” my friend said, as he fumbled through his address book while we sipping a beer in a cafe in San Francisco. Clint?
“Yeah, you called Clint? Clint who?” I give him another look. “You mean, Clint as in...
With all the current hype about the “threat” from Iran, it is time to review the record—and especially the significant bits and pieces that find neither ink nor air in our Israel-friendly, Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).
First, ...
Most people still don’t know what caused the financial crisis. They know it had something to do with subprime mortgages and Lehman Bros, but beyond that, it gets rather hazy. Unfortunately, Congress appears to be in the dark too, which is why their attempt to r...