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
Little brothers exist to be abused by their older siblings. The United Kingdom has willingly played the role of abused sibling for the United States for decades.
When our president wanted to launch a hare-brained invasion of Iraq, n...
Juan Williams should have been fired – by NPR AND Fox News. And a preponderance of evidence and a logical benefit of the doubt indicates that it is Clarence Thomas who should apologize to Anita Hill. However, in the bizzaro world of Williams and Th...
Kabul, Afghanistan.
After a week visiting Bamiyan, a rural Afghan Province, one thing has been made abundantly clear to me: the experience of being a woman in this country is much different than being a woman in the United States. Here, the inesca...
Delaware.
A number of children at a Halloween parade this Sunday in Newark, Delaware, came as Zombies. It’s a simple get-up: talcum powder hair, ashen face, black-rimmed, vacant eyes. The blank stare is vital, but the kids usually let exu...
One of the cases the Supreme Court of the United States will take up in its 2011 session is Ashcroft vs. al-Kidd. John Ashcroft was the Attorney General under President George Bush Jr. In that capacity he appears to have knowingly violated the U.S. Const...
N. Gregory Mankiw, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers from 2003-2005, now teaches at Harvard and writes a column for the New York Times. His recent piece, “I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less,” evoked Ayn ...
The Wikileaks release of the Iraq War Logs on Friday has rightly aroused great interest. There has been excellent ...
A secretive libertarian nonprofit with ties to Charles Koch bankrolled what was widely perceived to be a fear mongering effort to throw the Presidential election to Senator John McCain in 2008. Until now, where the money came from has been a hotly debated mystery....
A newly released Wikileaks document on Iraq and the new political alignment between Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki both provide fresh evidence that Gen. David Petraeus’s war against Shi’a militias in 2007-2008 was a ...
The rich and their paid false prophets are doing a bang up job deceiving the poor and middle class. They have convinced many that an evil socialism is alive in the land and it is taking their fair share. But the deception cannot last – facts say oth...
Editorial Note: NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the doctoral program in medicine and society. Since 1996, she has been involved in active field research on the...
She’s a tough-talking New Mexico state prosecutor whose zeal for catching and deporting illegal aliens rivals that of Joe Arapaio, the Arizona county sheriff who’s come to symbolize America’s resurgent "nativism" toward immigrants.
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The Iraqi documents released by Wikileaks produce significantly more detail on US actions in the war in Iraq. The Pentagon will huff and puff with rage as it did over the Wikileaks release of US military documents about Afghanistan, when it took the contradictory pos...
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Congress and the Defense Department have added more than $2 trillion to the Pentagon budget. About half that increase covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the rest covered the "base" (non-war) parts of the Defense Department. Agai...
You are not likely to learn this from corporate press but WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange have received the 2010 Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award for their resourcefulness in making available secret U.S. military documents on t...
According to a report published by the Public Welfare Foundation (PWF), more than 160 countries in the world (including Mexico, Canada, Australia, virtually all of Europe and Asia, all of Central and South America, and the majority of Africa) provide guaranteed paid ...
“Firas, said Ali, “if bombings start again near your house [inGaza], please go someplace else!”
“Yes,” said Ghulamai. “Come to Afghanistan!”
A week ago, at th...
In a suburban home’s family room, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is watching a DVD. Hearing the garage door grind open, he jumps up, ejects a Long Dong Silver cassette, quickly places it in a case, titled “Recount,” and shoves it behind the B...
Ben Bernanke is in a real fix. His quantitative easing (QE) program is designed to boost stock prices, lower bond yields, and weaken the dollar. But the market has already priced all that in, so when he announces the start of the program on November 3, there’s ...
Dinaw Mengestu’s first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was not only widel...
A few days ago I received an email entitled “CounterPunch openly publishes blatant Israeli-CIA agitprop against Iran.” The email was in reference to a recent article in CounterPunch by an Iranian-American ...
NPR should have fired Juan Williams not last Wednesday but nine years ago. The cause for dismissal should have been this ...
In the days following 9/11, the world was told the “official" story. People “jealous of our freedoms” wanted to destroy our way of life.
George Bush said, “Anybody who would attack America the way they did, anybody who would take ...
I believe Obama’s schtick during his campaign for president was to subtly encourage his adversaries to impale themselves of the horns of their own contradictions. This kind of strategy can be particularly effective in the all-important moral dimension of ...
Germany celebrated twenty years of reunification on October 3. Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a child of the GDR, has declared the merger a success at last, in spite of shrinking populations and the massive deindustrialization in what are still cond...