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 November 2010
Imagine that Yasser Arafat had succeeded in ending Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Now imagine that 10 or 15 years later, new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, agreed to hand over control of his country’s b...
As Thanksgiving 2010 arrives, thanks should be given for something that never happened decades ago: the use as planned of bases built all over the United States armed with BOMARC and Nike Hercules nuclear-tipped missiles.
It was the 1950s and 60...
Well, students, in the last twenty-four hours Sarah Palin has put her foot in her mouth again—at least twice.
First, she diced that icon of the twentieth-century feminism, Barbara Bush, calling her a blue-blood, which is certainly the col...
The revelation that the man presumed to be a high-ranking Taliban leader who had met with top Afghan officials was an impostor sheds light on Gen. David Petraeus’s aggressive propaganda about the supposed Taliban approach to the Hamid Karzai regime.
...
The danger the United States faces today is that the government debt crisis scheduled to hit Congress next spring (when Republicans are threatening to vote against raising the federal debt limit as the government deficit soars) will provide an opportunity for the wea...
UK loans to low income countries will make the poor pay twice for climate change.
On Thursday, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell promised to stump up funds to ensure developing countries are better heard in climate negotiations. But it is di...
It doesn’t take a bureaucrat long to create an empire. John Pistole, the FBI agent who took over the Transportation Security Administration on July 1 told USA Today 16 days later that protecting trains and subways from terrorist attacks will be as high a priori...
On November 7, Burma’s military regime held the country’s first elections in 20 years. While several parties participated, the electoral process, and the results that saw the regime’s Union Solidarity and Development Party win, have rightly been con...
If the American public does not stand up and oppose the TSA enforced false choice between potentially dangerous irradiating body scanners or what amounts to federally mandated sexual harassment, then the Republic is almost certainly lost.(1) In the cause of fighting ...
Pissed off?
Maybe it’s your insurance company.
A Maryland psychiatrist thinks it might be.
Writing in the current issue of Psychiatric Times, Dr. Carol Paris lays out the diagnostic criteria for ...
By the morning of May 24, the tide had turned against President Barack Obama in the Gulf. Weeks of indecision at the White House and the Interior Department had shifted the balance of blame. BP was no longer seen as the lone culprit. Now, the Obama administration was...
On the eve of some of the busiest travel days of the year, airport scanners are causing hysteria–and with good reason. Never mind the puerile TSA screeners giggling at your naked body. It turns out that the things may pose serious health concerns. In a letter t...
"The eyes of the world are on Temacapulin.”
So declared an anti-dam banner wrapped around a gazebo in the tiny Mexican village. Alongside it, banners named the Mekong River and the Naradama Valley. Solidarity is probably the single be...
Celebrating what would have been the late Edward Said’s 75th birthday, Professor Judith Butler was invited by the American University in Cairo to give the sixth Edward W Said Memorial Lecture, organised around his birth anniversary (1 November 1935).
...
Mumbai.
The sudden interest in the involvement of some Indian media persons in what appears to be lobbying has posed the question about ethics, but it has a lot more to do with the cult of icons. Readers and viewers tend to blindly believe in t...
Dialogue on the economic crisis has focused on symptoms: bailouts, corruption on Wall Street, collapse in housing prices, intractable unemployment, Federal Reserve monetary policy. Most people have been socialized to silence on the topic of the disease itself: ...
A senator has an affair with the treasurer of his election campaign and political action committee, gives her a no-interest loan of $40,000, and pays $15,000 for her children’s private school tuition. After their affair becomes public, he fires her, gives her h...
Why should George W. Bush have been “angry” to learn in late 2007 of the “high-confidence” unanimous judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four years earlier? Seems to me he might have ...
"Anna” the 19-year-old FBI informant bought the materials and worked to keep the group focused on targets and timeframes. When 28-year-old Eric McDavid and his two younger friends failed to muster sufficient enthusiasm for Anna&rsqu...
After nearly two years out, I can imagine George W. Bush writing his successor the following letter:
Dear President Obama:
As you know I’ve been peddling my book Decision Points and while doing interviews, people ask ...
Embedded journalism earned itself a bad name in Iraq and Afghanistan. The phrase came to evoke an image of the supposedly independent correspondent truckling to military mentors who spoon-feed him or her absurdly optimistic information about the course of the w...
“Today we asking for more than a moment of silence. We are demanding justice.”
This statement, published in a Veterans’ Day open letter from the Central Illinois chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), expla...
The Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission will be reporting out its results in early December. We can expect that it will focus on domestic spending, especially entitlements, including Social Security. By the time the dust settles, it is quite likely that the Pentagon &#...
One of the unquestioned and unspoken assumptions heard across the West is that ranchers have a right to a predator free environment. Even environmental groups like Defenders of Wildlife more or less legitimize this perspective by supporting unqualified compensation f...
When a firefighter or medical team make a rescue, the person is usually better off as a result. This is less clear when the rescuer is the European Central Bank (ECB) or the IMF.
Ireland is currently experiencing a 14.1 percent unemployment rate. As a result o...