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
This is an excerpt from JEFFREY ST. CLAIR’s environmental history, Bor...
Sheesh, if I receive another email invitation for something like brunching, for a donation, of course, with a Democrat, I’m going to want to kamikaze the address of the gala. I do not feel a need to sup with, commune with, or brush the shoulders ...
Patients Out of Time is a pro-cannabis reform group led by Al Byrne, a retired Naval officer, and MaryLynn Mathre, a Vietnam era nurse. Al survived two catastrophic events in which others died and over the years he’s had to deal with post-traumatic stress...
It was diabolical. It happened back in the original Tea Party days, when the wealthy colonial landowners, with brilliant orators such as Patrick Henry smoothing the way, united all Americans in a frenzied bond against the British. Sure, Great Britain c...
President Barack Obama has become the chief sales officer for market regulation, a theme he has been labouring over for some time. Cooper Union, its location pitched within a few miles of Wall Street, doesn’t seem to be tiring of luminaries...
Market commentators are fond of talking about “free market capitalism,” but according to Wall Street commentator Max Keiser, it is no more. It has morphed into what his TV co-host Stacy Herbert calls “rigged market capitalism&rd...
Did you know GM sells more cars in China than the U.S.?
In March, GM sold 230,048 vehicles in China and 188,011 in the U.S. The U.S. auto giant is on pace to sell more than 2 million vehicles in China this year and 3 million by 2015.
“Overall aut...
Monday is the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. It comes as the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear government officials in the U.S. and other nations try to “revive” nuclear power. It also follows the just-released pub...
I don’t think teddy bears are mentioned anywhere in the Quran. Therefore, is the animated satirical series ‘South Park’ well within its rights to portray Prophet Mohamed dressed in a bear suit? What was the pressing need for such a depiction? The la...
When I watch the public furor over the ruling party’s attempt to “toughen” regulations on the financial industry, I get the same feeling I often have in a theater: Good show but it’s not real.
There’s something eeri...
Immigrant bashing, like baseball, has become a favorite American pastime. The draconian, anti immigrant bill (SB 1070) in Arizona only adds credence to this reality.
This pernicious bill not only targets undocumented immigrants in this desert st...
The explosion that ripped through a West Virginia coal field April 5, killing 29 miners, was a haunting reminder of just how little has changed since a dozen men suffered the same fate four years ago in the Sago mine. On the heels of that tragedy we pa...
Like many parts of the world, Florida’s Atlantis is underpopulated.
Urban and semi-urban underpopulation is a serious problem for the drifter because people are interesting (grand, noteworthy, odd, laughable, sexy, irritating) and t...
To understand the present conflict, one has to realize that until 1895 Jews and Muslims had lived together in peace in Palestine for more than1200 years. After the Romans expelled them in 70 A.D., Jews were not allowed to live in Jerusalem for 600 year...
The last days of April 1970 seemed relatively uneventful. The first Earth Day occurred on April 22nd that year. For the most part it bore little resemblance to the green corporation festival many of today’s Earth Days seem to be. ...
In 1988, the labor union I belonged to, the AWPPW (Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers), hoped Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt would win the Democratic nomination for president. Of all the candidates in the field (Al Gore, Paul Simon...
Subjected to relentlessly repeating sounds, the human mind reflexively imposes a pattern on them. The clock’s tick-tick becomes the infinitely more interesting tick-tock, though even that improvement on absolute uniformity hardly makes for a full evening&...
On February 24, as I reported in an article entitled, “The ...
Tne of the best kept secrets in Washington is the working of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Does it get the job done? Not even close.
Typically, Wall Street is awash in insider trading, accounting games, and let’s n...
It would be easy to dismiss Mekkawi Said’s Cairo Swan Song by stating that the novel nee...
Cochabamba, Bolivia.
When the crowds cheered and the band played on, the flags were waving. Fireworks sounded and surely around the world there must be have been a sense that it was a good day to be Indigenous.
...
Last Tuesday the Supreme Court patted America on the back about its specialness, its sacred right of free speech, by striking down a law which prohibited the selling of “crush” videos where kittens and other small animals are stomped ...
Most Catalans love to think of themselves as left of center, yet the Catalan bourgeoisie was a willing accomplice of Franco’s fascism, as any class analyst would have it.
One of the most infamous fascist Catalans was the re...
Prof. William Black submitted a 24-page report on the Lehman bankruptcy to the House Committee on Financial Services on Tuesday. It is the best analysis of the underlying causes of the financial crisis to date. Black, who is a former government regulator and white-co...
If soccer geniuses Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi and their Argentine team still have a lot to prove as, respectively, international manager and footballers at this summer’s World Cup, their Spanish equivalents may have reason to feel much more rel...