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 September 2010
The war on drugs. We keep calling it that, it seems, because we like wars on abstract concepts. Like the war on terror, the war on drugs racks up one hell of a body count, and its victims are mostly innocent civilians with no more love for the corrupt regimes that rule th...
SURFING THE television channels, I came across an interview with the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi on an American network (Fox – would you believe it).
“My grandfather told us to love the enemy even while fighting him,” he said, &ldquo...
As the 2009 graduates of Liberty High School in Frisco, Texas begin their sophomore year of college under new stresses of time and study, they do not forget that their classmate Saad Nabeel never got to finish the first semester of his freshman year. And Nabeel&rsqu...
How stupid are you?
I mean, let’s just face it, shall we? That is precisely the question the right has been asking the American public for thirty years (and more) now. And that is the question the American public has been enthusiast...
A year ago I wrote a CounterPunch column asking rhetorically if hunters were stupid. In that article I wondered if hunters were aware of the fact that shooting wolves is unpopular with most Americans and if hunting of wolves continued,...
On September 24, 2010 the FBI raided several houses and a couple offices in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago and North Carolina under the guise of looking for proof that the people living in those houses were involved with organizations that "lent material support...
The United States is undergoing a great redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. President Obama and the Congress have done nothing to alter this trend. Despite the corporate media’s obsession with the alleged differences between the Democrats and the Rep...
All the furor, and media feeding frenzy over Ahmadinejad’s comments at a meeting of the United Nations on Thursday couldn’t have been better timed.
When Iran’s Machiavelli decided to vent about the U.S. exploiting the bombing of th...
US-led forces in Afghanistan sure did a bang-up job this week at promoting the concept of Western “democracy.”
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the puppet intelligence agency of the Afghan government, between them, ...
Thanks to an ever growing influx of Ph.D.s from the Ivies and an insatiable demand for an algorithmic trading edge by secretive hedge funds and proprietary trading desks at the largest firms, Wall Street has become part physics lab, part ...
Today is sunny and warm where I happen to be, with a light breeze, perfect for riding bikes with the dogs, enjoying a cool swim and eating lunch outside under the trees. But for thirty-three Chilean miners trapped more than two thousand feet below the earth’s surfac...
The situation in Bahrain has deteriorated to such an extent that it can no longer be called a political crisis; it is now a human rights crisis. And the silence of those in the Middle East and West, particularly the United States, has been shameful.
...
On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, some of which were extremely demonizing in their outspoken anti-Muslim symbolism. Four months later violent protests erupted outside Danish embassies in some Muslim ...
The majority of Israel’s anti-occupation movement, unfortunately, does not focus on the rights of Palestinians to live free, but on the damage that the occupation causes to Israeli society (Sternhell, 2009).
The arguments that the occupation is a m...
On September 4, approximately 43,000 healthcare workers at 331 Kaiser facilities in California began voting on whether or not to stay affiliated with their current union, the large (1.9 million) and influential Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which was forme...
One key difference between Hamas and its rival, the Fatah movement in the West Bank, is that Hamas is accountable to a much more complex set of priorities and expectations. While Fatah is effortlessly co-opted, Hamas remains confined by ideological standards and the strin...
There are few things worth giving up a perfect fall afternoon in Upstate New York for, but Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman with live music is one of them. A dinner break and a return for F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise,beginning as the sun sets on the other side of Lake Cayuga s...
Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse.
In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japa...
Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; drones flying over Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen Pakistan, special ops assassins in 70 countries; aid to Israel, Turkey, Columbia, Pakistan  and over 700 bases around the world. All these actions are a result of policies conceived in the U.S....
From the barred windows of a four-storey house, strings run across the narrow main street of Aida Camp, well above head height, to the caged fence atop the walls of the Aida Camp Basic Boys School. Small plastic Palestinian flags hang down limply from the string. The outs...
Arizona’s legislature passed the highly contested Senate Bill 1070 last April. The bill targets people who have crossed our southern border without documentation in a variety of ways. One example is that Arizona law enforcement officers, if following SB1070 as it was wr...
The Glasgow Art Club, housed in a Victorian mansion among the offices, wine bars and boutiques of the Merchant City district, was founded at the height of the industrial revolution, in 1867, by a painter who sold his work to cotton and sugar traders. Once a week Scotlandâ...
The Internet was all a-Twitter when news broke that Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, will step down by the end of the year.
Summers — ring a bell? Maybe you remember his comments as president of Harvard that gender skew...
A couple of years ago when I spend some time in Vietnam, I was struck by the country’s virulent form of capitalism. Consumer goods were stacked up everywhere; the people seemed prosperous; the streets were clean and pretty much free of trash; moreover, everyone seemed t...
How does the Big Business-indentured Republican Party get away with expectations of a runaway election victory this November? If such a victory should occur in Congress and for many governorships and state legislatures, it will be due to a ten percent or so shift in voter...