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 August 2010
My adventure in life began with action, and I know it will end with action.
At a young age I began to construct public moments for myself without asking for an audience. I thought I could garner the attention of passersby and loiterers, who might be...
Exiting its premiere on the last night of Cannes in May of 2009, director Jan Kounen’s Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky recently tiptoed to the end of a its very long red carpet and made a glamorous appearance in the wilds of Upstate New York. Another few days and th...
August has not seen a week without Lebanon making headlines. And mounting domestic and foreign pressures indicate the same may hold true in September.
The need for an unprecedented joint visit by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and Syrian Presiden...
All right, I confess. I’ve spent a major part of the last month reading Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: ...
The middle class is getting whacked by the Great Recession. Fifteen million people are out of work, another 9 million workers can only find part-time jobs, and millions more have given up looking for work altogether. Those lucky enough to be employed are unlikely to see a...
On August 9, the California Assembly took the historic step of becoming the first state to agree to publicize the text of three ratified U.N. human rights treaties, and to submit the required reports to the State Department for consideration by the U.N. treaty committees....
Timothy McVeigh, convicted of killing 168 people in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, was parented by Irish Catholics. He referred to himself as agnostic yet wrote to a friend, prior to his crime: “I have come to peace with myself, ...
History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.
That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Neta...
Imagine the reaction at the White House when the Department of Labor released its weekly unemployment figures on Thursday. Jobless claims rose by 12,000 to 500,000 in the second week of August. There’s been no improvement in the jobs market in 9 months and now unemp...
It is time to distinguish between the truths and the myths propagated by Wall Street, among them the hoary old stand-by, that “if you don’t do anything with spending cuts, it doesn’t get you credibility.”
This, in a word, enca...
To anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s clear that there aren’t enough strikes in the U.S. There used to be thousands of strikes during the heyday of the post-war and 1950s. Today there are but a scattered handful. Even acknowledgin...
The Los Angeles Times has been publishing articles about the files on Ruben Salazar’s death being kept secret. Here’s an excerpt from my autobiography, ...
It is true that in any given population there will always be a range of decency. Some might use the term morality instead of decency, but morality is loaded with too many disputed meanings. The term decency, hopefully, has a broader recognizable footprint. At the lowest e...
The great threat to America’s security is United States’ foreign policy. Why? Because it commits the very “brutalities” attributed to the so-called “terrorists” it purports to be fighting. How can this be in “the...
The last American combat brigade in Iraq has left the country, so the Pentagon announced this week. The 40,000 personnel from 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division began crossing into Kuwait August 19. The US combat mission in Iraq – Operation Iraqi Freedom ...
The devices employed in US election cycles and its national politics, in general, are akin to the dramatic conventions of children’s theatre. Every two to four years, voters are instructed to clap their hands and believe in Tinker Bell. "Children, you have to b...
Click here to read Part One.
Click here to read Part Two.
I am standing next to the perimeter fence, looking across Hanford’s secret geography. Behind t...
The shock much of the world felt upon first hearing the news of the May 31, 2010 Israeli attack on the aid to Gaza flotilla has diminished since those first days. The daily degradation and despair felt by many of Gaza’s residents hasn’t. While UN o...
What to do with a defense instrument that does not work in practice, agitates neighboring regional powers, and costs a lot of money in times of economic crisis? Common sense would suggest you abandon it. NATO, however, has a different idea. As part of th...
The controversy over the right of Muslim Americans to build community center and mosque a short distance from the site of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is both strange and outright inappropriate. It should never be necessary for law-abiding Americans to justif...
So, psycho-babble specialist Dr. Laura Schlessinger spins her shamed retreat from nationally syndicated conservative talk radio with claims that she’s collateral damage in America’s N-word War.
Schlessinger sparked ire in some circles rec...
On July 22, a New York state-court judge dismissed a defamation case based on comments that were posted by a group of teenagers to their private Facebook group.
The Facebook group appears to have had only at most ten (and possibly, at times, fewer) ...
There has been a bit of an uproar made over Howard Dean’s recent comments on the proposed cultural center to be built near Ground Zero. Joining Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Dean is the second high profile Democrat to oppose the building.
If you missed ...
While President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and the new President of Colombia, Manuel Santos, met in Santa Marta, Colombia, last Tuesday and agreed to normalize relations after a fierce diplomatic fight, there are no indications that such détente is in the card...
What is it about the nature of human sexuality that virtually all civilizations throughout history have tried like the dickens to suppress? Why is sex so often such a problem when it really *should* be a pleasure? Why might your otherwi...