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 December 2010
Peter King is the envy of (a) former Senator Joseph McCarthy and (b) the folks in Salem MA who were looking for, respectively, communists and witches. It was a hard task that they each attacked with persistence and fortitude. It was hard because to the untutored eye,...
Political leaders, NGO representatives and the corporate media have incessantly greenwashed the deplorable environmental legacy of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a series of photo opportunities, press releases, news conferences and awards ceremonies over the past ...
Arguably the greatest critical historian of science and technology died on Monday December 27, 2010, suddenly and unexpectedly of natural causes and within a few days of being admitted to hospital.
His family was by his side. David Noble is sur...
In the early summer of 1995, Jay Hair quietly resigned as head of the National Wildlife Federation. This Napoleonic figure had transformed a once scruffy, apolitical collection of local hunting and gun clubs into the cautious colossus of the environmental movement wi...
At long last the Scott sisters will be free! Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour in a totally bizarre act of compassion, based on public pressure, used his commutation powers to grant the sisters their freedom.
Governor Haley Barbour suspended the life senten...
On December 3, President Obama exercised the constitutional power of pardon for the first time in his presidency. He could not have made a more politically and morally inconsequential use of this power. Sadly, it is another manifestation of the Obama admi...
Creating jobs is not the raison d’?tre nor the primary goal of a Capitalist economy. Creating profits for the purpose of Capital accumulation and expansion is the sine qua non and essential function of Capitalism.
Often larger profits can ...
The widespread celebration around the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) was certainly justified. The fundamental unfairness of a policy–at its core a free speech issue?that forced U.S. servicewomen and men to lie about an important part of thei...
Arguably the greatest critical historian of science and technology died on Monday December 27, 2010, suddenly and unexpectedly of natural causes and within a few days of being admitted to hospital.
His family was by his side. David Noble is sur...
Along with the staggering theft in broad daylight of Americans’ assets that has occurred in the course of the ongoing financial crisis, as taxpayers funded multi-trillion bank bailouts and banks stole homes through foreclosures with the help of fraudulent paper...
Anyone who doesn’t believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports on antiwar.com that Fox...
Author’s Note: With the news of President Obama’s plan to make indefinite detentions a permanent feature of our legal landscape, we thought it apropos to re-publish an updated, edited excerpt from a law review article we wrote in 2006 (THE ...
War, the old saying goes, is "hell." But what about video war? Polls show that many Americans are fast souring on US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, paradoxically, sales of video war-games like Call of Duty, which allow consumers to beco...
The fall and decline of an empire can take many years, but certain "benchmarks" (as imperial courts have been known to call them) can measure the progress in one year alone. Take, for example, the year 2010.
This year opened with the U...
Eight young people, who the Fire Department said were “trying to stay warm,” perished in a raging fire during the night in New Orleans. The young people were squatting in an abandoned wood framed tin walled warehouse in a Ninth Ward neighborhood bor...
I wonder if Hillary Clinton really believes in the pompous invective that sprays from her lips with the rapidity of machine gun fire.
We had a classic example of it just the other day when she let rip in her grating, robotic monotone over a Moscow court?s deci...
Prod a Democrat Party loyalist on the shortcomings of ObamaCare and you are likely to get two retorts: come 2014 at least everyone will be covered; and from the moment when Obama signed the law pre-existing conditions can no longer be used by the insurers to deny cov...
On December 21, the Central Intelligence Agency gave its Agency Seal Medal to Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. Hoekstra has labored almost ceaselessly to assure that the CIA can break federal laws with impunity.
CIA ...
The UN, at the instigation of the US, creator of poverty and chaos in the Republic of Haiti, had decided to send its occupation troops into Haitian territory, the MINUSTAH (UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti), which in passing introduced the cholera epidemic int...
This Fall and Winter, an unusual First Amendment conflict has been playing itself out in public schools across the country — from California, to Minnesota, to Montana, to Pennsylvania, to Utah. On one side are students who are wearing bracelets proclaiming &quo...
Nazareth.
A sign posted a few kilometres north of Beersheba, the Negev’s main city, announces plans to plant a total of a million trees over a large area of desert that has already been designated "God-TV Forest".
The Jew...
“Anything that can be digitalized can be outsourced.”
?John Sweeney, former president, AFL-CIO
It didn’t get much media attention, but on December 8, Wal-Mart announced that beginning January 1, 2011, it woul...
If we often define "freedom" in entirely political terms, we will understandably focus on the recent assault on civil liberties, notably in the United States. Yet in today’s all-encompassing, profit-driven Marketplace (erroneously termed a "socie...
A note recently came to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation that said: "Are you folks out of your minds? The nuclear genie is out of the bottle and isn’t going back in. Shortly even non-state actors will have nukes! Quit wasting your time on this silly dream....
In 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church called "Beyond Vietnam," where he declared that his conscience would not allow him to remain silent on the question of Vietnam, on the horrors of war, on the threat of violence to our ...