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
The 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day is upon us, and many seasoned environmentalists are nostalgic for the heady days of the 1970s, when 20 million people hit in the streets and eventually got Richard Nixon to sign a series of ambitious environmental laws. ...
Once again the But-There’s-Money-In-It apparatus has sprung to life to resuscitate hormone therapy (HT) in an article called The Estrogen Dilemma in this week’s New York Times magazine.
For reporters and scientists aware of the cascade of hormone ...
Americans are once again hearing of the perils of extremism. But the definition of this offense is slippier than a politician’s campaign promise. The definition of extremism has continually been amended to permit government policies that few sober people previo...
It was fitting that the Mar. 31 "International Donors Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti" was held in the Trusteeship Council at the United Nations headquarters in New York. At the event, Haitian President René Préval in effect turned o...
Two days before Earth Day 2010, the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate released a report on efforts by the U.S. military to “reduce dependence on fossil fuels and cut global warming pollution by enhancing energy efficiency and h...
“You must come to Kathmandu with shroud cloth wrapped around your heads and flour in your bags. It will be our last battle. If we succeed, we survive, else it will be the end of our party.”
— General Secretary Badal...
I got into an e-mail conversation recently with a former CIA officer and ex-Marine, who, in horror at the Obama administration, went into a Tea Partyist fit denouncing the “communists, socialists, wealth redistribution folks, Democrats in Congress.” ...
Staying alive is not a simple business for people in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. The local Taliban and the army compete mercilessly to establish their authority along the border with Afghanistan. "If we support the army, the Tal...
This is a grim story about the care and feeding of a Blue Dog.
Right now, Congresswoman Jane Harman is facing a serious primary challenge from a genuine progressive, Marcy Winograd, in Southern California’s 36th congressional district....
Housing has been going sideways for seven months now, mainly due to lax lending standards (at FHA), the Firsttime Homebuyers Credit, and the Fed’s mortgage-backed securities (MBS) buyback program. But once the props are removed, the market w...
In the April 5, 2010 issue of “The Nation”, historian Eric Foner of Columbia University wrote about “Twisting History in Texas”. The “conservative-dominated Texas Board of Education,” he said, has made sweeping chang...
Wiesel is simply “a terrible fraud.”
– Noam Chomsky
Every now and then Israel’s enablers in the US embark on a public campaign to apply as much political pressure on US policymakers as they can po...
Of all the harmful actions of modern psychiatry, "the mass diagnosing and drugging of children is the most appalling with the most serious consequences for the future of individual lives and for society," warns the world-renowned expert, Dr P...
President Obama has long decried our “out of control” government spending. He clearly gets this nonsense from the manic deficit terrorists who do not understand these accounting relationships that we’ve sketched out. As a ...
My warmest regards to our host, Bolivian President Evo Morales.
To Presidents Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and other esteemed Heads of State; national representatives; and all concerned citizens in attendance at the ...
When you’re called to testify before Congress, and you’ve already decided to avoid responsibility or culpability, the standard routine is to resort to amnesia. You know nothing and you remember nothing. Again and again, you lean...
In addition to being the world’s leading producer of opium, Afghanistan has now become the largest producer of hashish, according to the first ever cannabis survey released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) earlier this mont...
It is an unfortunate truth that organizations ranging from the mildly amusing to the extremely dangerous have all co-opted the term ‘Christian.’ Christian Right, Christian Coalition, etc., all use the term without, apparently, knowing...
The Climate Bill is due on Earth Day. By all accounts it will be a nuclear bomb.
It will be the ultimate challenge of the global grassroots green movement to transform it into something that can actually save the planet.
...
I’m not Israeli. I’m not Palestinian. Nor Jewish, nor Arab, nor Muslim. I’ve never been to Jerusalem, nor Ramallah. I’m not sure if I’ll ever go there. I have no relatives who live there, no family who ever went there, or ...
If only for a moment, things look a little sour for Wall Street. Amid the SEC’s indictment of Goldman-Sachs and consequent reminder to the citizenry of the crookedness rampant in the financial “services” industry, a hitherto loyal ally, Senate...
Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided shocking new testimony from inside the Bush Administration that hundreds of the men jailed at Guantanamo were innocent, the top people in the Bush Administr...
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut
As of mid-April 2010 there are no fewer than six draft laws, half of them ‘embargoed for now’ being circulated and debated in Lebanon, any one of which if adopted by Parliament, would grant Lebanon’s ...
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut
As of mid-April 2010 there are no fewer than six draft laws, half of them ‘embargoed for now’ being circulated and debated in Lebanon, any one of which if adopted by Parliament, would grant Lebanon’s ...
The United Nations is seeking an "eminent individual" for the difficult if not impossible task of bringing fairness to the UN Security Council’s Al Qaeda and Taliban targeted sanctions regime.
The effort is praiseworthy, albeit l...