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 January 2011
Brooklyn College fired PhD student Kristofer Petersen-Overton yesterday, one day after New York state assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) sent a letter to BC president Karen Gould accusing Petersen-Overton of being an "overt supporter of terrorism." Hikind ...
While people in Tunisia and Egypt have taken to the streets in attempts to gain their liberty, Americans are losing their liberty with minimal protest. Even the American Civil Liberties Union seems unfocused. At a time when we are being surrounded by a po...
Let us begin with a "defining moment," courtesy of the Oxford World Dictionary:
Commissariat (k?m??s??r??t)
Definition: chiefly Military department for the supply of food and equipment.
...
If humans were smart, we would bet on our ignorance.
That advice comes early in the Hebrew Bible. Adam and Eve’s banishment in chapters two and three of Genesis can be read as a warning that hubris is our tragic flaw. In the garden, God told them they c...
This observer tends to get a haircut about every four months whether he needs it or not. But this morning I got more than a trim from my Hezbollah friend and barber, Abass, named after Abass ibn Ali, the brother of Hussein, both martyrs and heroes of the ...
The public rebellion against the bi-partisan campaign to cut entitlement and welfare spending appears to be gaining steam among the American public. Nothing close to the rebellions in the streets against austerity that we’ve seen throughout the rest of th...
After watching President Obama’s state of the union, plus the first Republican response to it by Rep Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and the second response by Rep Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, chair of the Tea Party caucus in Congress, it‘s hard to ...
President Reagan did not make any bones about his intention to reverse the New Deal economics when he set out to promote the Neoliberal economics. Likewise, President George W. Bush did not conceal his agenda of aggressive, unilateral militarism abroad and curtailmen...
Leandro Andrade, 52, sits in Ironwood State Prison, about 200 miles east of Los Angeles, California.
He’s there for life.
What did Leandro do wrong?
In 1995, he stole five videotapes from a K-Mart in ...
Parliamentary democracy is a tricky thing. Prime ministers come and go as alliances shift and majorities change. As this week’s uproar in Lebanon proved, it is a reality outgoing Prime Minister Saad Hariri has yet to grasp.
Lebanon’s sectarian po...
In recent remarks on U.S.-Latin American relations made at the Brookings Institute, Arturo Valenzuela, a State Department official with responsibility for the region, commented that Honduras, two years removed from a coup that U.S. officials on the ground called illeg...
The corrosive, solitary confinement being inflicted upon PFC Bradley Manning in the Quantico, Va., brig is no exceptional torture devised exclusively for him. Across the length and breadth of the Great American Prison State, the world’s largest, with its 2.4-million...
The future of Palestine was at stake in the 1940s, and the fundamental clash of interests, between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs, was also a fundamental clash of principles. The differences are shown by a comparison of the liberal Arab nationalist, the Zionist binati...
To me, the word is Moonscape. It is a sanitary color of manilla or yellow. It is sterile. It is a phone call from a woman who will be making three phone calls soon after mine. It is a broken light bulb laying near a trash bag. It is a pile of laundry to be washed. It is a...
The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was more than a financial and political crisis. At root, it was a moral crisis.
Bernie Madoff and a handful of other racketeers were prosecuted, but all those actively or passively involved in the financial scam were ...
Looking back on it, was it wildly optimistic for organized labor to assume that a people who’d been as screwed-over as Native Americans—who’d been disrespected, slandered, lied to, disenfranchised, and systematically murdered—would automatically be sympathetic to ...
Flood waters are coursing through three continents. After the devastating Asian floods of last summer, the latest flooding has claimed more than a hundred lives in South Africa; the Canadians are now darkly forecasting Spring floods in Manitoba that could surpass the Floo...
It’s hard to get behind any food movement (if they can even be categorized as such) these days. While I tend to eat healthy—spending roughly a third of my income (which as a graduate student isn’t very hard) on organic, local foodstuff (mostly bulk grains, v...
Lebanon is a complex place indeed, but it is not quite the labyrinth it is made out to be, and, if France, the United States, and Israel would stop putting their irons in the fire, the country’s difficulties are wholly resolvable. But solutions will require some und...
I listened to the State of the Union speech. What I heard, though, was not President Obama’s string of irritating platitudes, but the sound of a nation bent on self-destruction.
I don’t say this lightly. Intellectuals have been talking about the fall of...
Republicans have begun describing how the United States of America at the state and national level can become a better place by spending a lot less money and not raising taxes. Congress took the first step at the end of 2010 when it dealt with the tax law. It decided to e...
The prophets of social media are getting excited. Not only can such forms of media as Twitter and Facebook often prove to be banal time wasters, they can also generate revolutionary excitement. Communities connected by messages instantaneously gather to promote their ...
January 28, 2011, Day of Rage.
I’m watching live coverage of the Egyptian revolution on Al-Jazeera TV. Cairo is swarming with hundreds of thousands, defying the curfew, hurling stones at the police. The images recall the Palestinian youth waging ...
It’s funny how one can remember the very first time we heard a particular song. Usually, it’s because that song dramatically shifts the idea of what music can be. Other times, it’s because that song speaks so accurately to the listener about somethin...
In the 1980s, when the armed forces of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime set about exterminating "Haiti’s Creole pigs", they would come to Haiti’s rural villages, seize all of the "pigs", pile them up, one on top of the other, in lar...