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 July 2010
Liquor stores, or more colloquially “corner stores,” in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Washington, and other major metropolitan cities located in economically under-served, urban, majority-black neighborhoods have be...
We did not hear much about “sovereign debt” until early this year, when Greece hit the skids. Investment adviser Martin Weiss wrote in a February 24 newsletter:
“On October 8, Greece’s ben...
One of the reasons the left doesn’t do better is because it tends to view the right’s transgressions as a moral issue rather than as a pragmatic problem as, for example, a baseball coach would do if the Tea Party were the other team.
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The peace movement needs to stand with Bradley Manning and Wikileaks in their efforts to let Americans see the truth about what the military is doing in our name. We can handle the truth! Indeed, we need to hear the truth, not propaganda about how grea...
If you’re going to be six years old at some point in your life (and most of my readers have probably moved beyond that point) it is important to (a) carefully select where you choose to live and (b) behave. This is all brought to mind by a recen...
"Was this corporation willing to trade justice in the murder of 270 innocent people for oil profits?” Not too many guesses as to which oil company is under discussion: BP, current epitome of Big Oil at its foulest. But what populist rabble-...
There seems to be broad agreement – both on the left and the right – that the US faces a crisis of democracy. Americans simply don’t vote. Turn-out for off year elections averages between 25-33% of registered voters. In presidential ...
Critical evidence from the British government and other sources suggest that the “War on Terror” has actually destabilized the Middle East and increased the terror threat throughout the globe. The former head of Britain&rsqu...
July 18th: I left New Orleans yesterday. On my way to the airport, I saw the front page of the Times-Picayune screaming “Leak Stopped.” Half of me aches for this to be true, but I’m terrified that the rest of the country will officia...
Credit conditions are improving for speculators and bubblemakers, but they continue to worsen for households, consumers and small businesses. An article in the Wall Street Journal confirms that the Fed’s efforts to revive the so-called shadow ba...
The recently sacked US commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal, was a special forces freak who was complicit in or actually caused the cloak-and-dagger deaths of an unknown number of people. He and his knuckle-dragging rabble were and are unaccountable t...
Since 9/11, a collection of secret intelligence groups called the United States Intelligence Community (IC) has become a monstrous, overlapping hodge-podge of spooks with some 850,000 people having top secret clearances, according to the Washington Pos...
In 1943, on his return from the Teheran conference, Stalin placed an important task before Beria: at all costs, to penetrate the working office of the U.S. ambassador, Averell Harriman. The ensuing operation, resulting in the successful eavesdropping o...
In the Middle East, the link between political machinations, espionage and assassination is either clear as day, or clear as mud.
As for the yet unsolved case of the February 2005 murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, ...
In October of 2009, I wrote a column about a brilliant high school DREAM student whose goal is to attend college in the fall of 2010. I referred to her as Leticia X. When she spoke to my class at the University of Arizona last fall, she had my student...
The two short stories (“Man on Pink Corner” and “The South”) that bookend ...
Each time Israel fails to keep its ‘side of the bargain’, the Palestinian Authority responds with the same redundant language. The cycle has become so utterly predictable that one wonders why the Palestinian Authority officials even bother...
On July 8, the Washington Post lead story ["Cuba to release 52 political prisoners, Catholic Church says"] reported Cuba had released five political prisoners with assurances of forty-seven more to come in the near future. Cuban President Ra...
The late Howard Zinn’s new book "The Bomb" is a brilliant little dissection of some of the central myths of our militarized society. Those who’ve read "...
Operation No Compromise will see us retiring one of our tactical devices and implementing some new ones.
Starting with the next campaign, Sea Shepherd crews will no longer deploy C6H12O6 > C4H8O2 + 2CO2 + 2H2, also known as Bu...
On July 22, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on the following question posed to it by Serbia: "Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance wi...
Cutting the federal deficit is a hot topic on Capitol Hill, and some kind of action seems certain. Congress is due to take up taxes for the first time in President Obama’s term (including the expiration of the Bush tax cuts), and a report from t...
So what if it is a capital strike that we’re facing? Wouldn’t the answer lie in a genuine national bank? It’s an interesting question to raise this month as China privatizes a fifty-year-old agricultural bank. What ...
Practically everyone now understands that the war in Afghanistan is going very badly. This is not because the Taliban and other “insurgent” forces are strong and their foreign foes weak. It is because of the Afghans’ indomitable spir...
While U.S. military psychiatrists are prescribing increasing amounts of chill pills, America’s psychologists are teaching soldiers how to think more positively about their tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever else they are next ordered to ki...