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 October 2010
Studies on poverty and the poor abound but studies on wealth and the wealthy are not so plentiful. Around the world, university departments of Sociology, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, academic publications in the social sciences, a host of government department...
For all its much-hyped and massively expensive high-tech stage machinery, the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold seems surprisingly underpowered, as if so much money and mental power went into the behemoth contraption dominating...
The most telling aspect of Barack Obama’s trip to India in early November is his planned visit to all the sites targeted in the Mumbai attacks of November 28, 2008. He will also stay at the Taj Hotel. Commentators have been quick to gloat that this move will co...
I usually discount China-bashing rhetoric pretty heavily.
But then I read a quote from David Shambaugh in the New York Times:
“This administration came in with one dominant idea: make China a global partne...
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
-Opening line in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”
I recently took a tour of Best Buy to see what’s going on in the world of cons...
Way back in the early 1960s, my brother and I would buy Bob Dylan songbooks. They would usually, though not always follow an album’s release and be titled after the album title. These songbooks didn’t always include all the songs that were on ...
The good news first: we’re getting the encouraging impression that more and more of you CounterPunchers out there are taking us seriously when we tell you it’s crunch time and the wolves are circling the wagons and we need your money to keep CounterPunch ...
Studies on poverty and the poor abound but studies on wealth and the wealthy are not so plentiful. Around the world, university departments of Sociology, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, academic publications in the social sciences, a host of government department...
Citizens around the world, particularly in self described progressive nations, have long been suspicious and distrustful of government(s) that exclude the public from decision making. While they have rarely done anything about transgressions of their democratic right...
Question: What is the difference between a full-blown Depression and an excruciatingly "slow recovery"?
Answer–Inventories and a bit of fiscal stimulus.
On Friday, The Bureau of Economic Analysi...
Ferrara, Italy.
Sitting in a bottliberia, one of those wine bars that brings out food to match your particular choice of wine, mystified by the table setting. What was that tiny baby spoon for? Cappuccino surely, at some point, but why no big spoon to go with ...
Over the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, GOP lawmakers and some Democrats turned a budget surplus into the $1.2 trillion hot potato handed off to President Obama. Suddenly, having gotten fiscal religion, GOP lawmakers and some Democrats speak piousl...
“Prejudice squints when it looks and lies when it talks.”
– Duchess d’Abrantès
Prejudice is insidious.
It rears its head in the least expected situations and...
Nazareth.
Israeli police injured two Arab legislators yesterday in violent clashes provoked by Jewish rightwing extremists staging a march through the northern Arab town of Umm al-Fahm.
Haneen Zoubi, a parliament member who has become a...
Election Day is mental illness in plain view—unabashed, unfettered lunacy not even trying to masquerade as sanity. If we woke up, it would take perhaps 3-5 seconds to recognize this: Obama is a heinous criminal. His Republican rivals (sic) are heinous criminals...
The great unspoken two words of American political discourse are class war. The moral and political premise of the modern, post-World War II “American Century” is that the U.S. had overcome class divisions and struggle. Everyone, or nearly everyone save t...
When the United States first entered the war in Vietnam in defense of colonial France, the conflict was already decades old. Indeed, it may have been the most protracted anti-colonial struggle of the twentieth century. France’s domination of the reg...
In 2008, after a financial seizure that was the inevitable consequence of 40 years of rising inequality, a spectre was haunting America – the spectre of economic reform. Yet by means of skillful misrule Obama and the congressional Democrats managed to avoid dir...
The reason our financial system has routinely gotten into trouble, with periodic waves of depression like the one we’re battling now, may be due to a flawed perception not just of the roles of banking and credit but of the nature of money itself. In our economi...
Ohio election attorney Cliff Arnebeck has filed a two-count complaint against The Partnership for Ohio’s Future, an affiliate of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.
Arenbeck charges that the Partnership is "…not truly independent, bu...
Those who have, those who used to have, and those who are trying to have. But they are all united in their imbecile worship of Authority.
—Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
You’ve s...
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to claim that the resumption of peace talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have thus far yielded nothing of value, at least not as far as settling the decades-long struggle.
For one, the media...
When I lived in China back in the early 1990s, it was entertaining to read the Chinese newspapers, all of them state-owned. In them, China’s government was always making excellent decisions, the economy was always improving, the leaders of other nations were al...
When people the world over think of Arizona, nowadays, they generally think of Gov. Jan Brewer, Sheriff Joe Arapio or state rep. Russell Pearce – the poster children of the state’s move toward legalized discrimination and racial profiling. If they are clo...
"Not based on a true story. Not based on true events. Just true.”
These are the opening lines of the movie Catfish. Packaged and sold like as a documentary, the movie follows the exploits of two “real life” brothers, Ariel...