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 February 2011
Dear 112th Congress:
You are surely as inspired by events in Cairo, Tunis, and Benghazi as the rest of us. And you are surely as distressed by events in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as your fellow Americans. Now is as good a ti...
"Why Didn’t the U.S. Foresee the Arab Revolts?" was the title of an article in Friday’s New York Times. Six scholars, academics, political appointees and think tankers debate the issue in The Times online. They all appear to belie...
The story of Raymond Allen Davis is one familiar to me and I wish our government would quit doing these things – they cost us credibility.
Davis is the American being held as a spy working under diplomatic cover out o...
He has visited many private law firms.
In both in the UK and the USA.
He has given private briefings.
And advised corporate clients of what would be acceptable under the new UK Bribery A...
Dublin.
Something changed in Ireland last Friday, when we cast our votes in parliamentary elections to replace the government that has overseen the utter collapse of the house of cards that was the state’s economy, and ratif...
The large demonstrations at the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin are driven by a middle class awakening to the spectre of its destruction by the corporate reactionaries and their toady Governor Scott Walker.
For years the middl...
"WHY DON’T the masses stream to the square here, too, and throw Bibi out?” my taxi driver exclaimed when we were passing Rabin Square. The wide expanse was almost empty, with only a few mothers and their children enjoying the mild wint...
‘Take up the White Man’s burden send forth the best ye breed […] To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild Your new-caught, sullen peoples Half-devil and half-child.
– Rudyard Kipling, &...
Congress should think twice before forcing a government shutdown as the consequences could be the loss of the power of Congress to control spending through authorization and appropriation bills.
Congress permitted President George...
Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball" by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes r...
At 9:00 a.m. sharp, Judge Kathleen Cardone entered the courtroom. Her last encounter with the defense attorneys and prosecutors had been exactly one week ago, when the judge continued the trial to "calmly deliberate" about whether to grant ei...
The Koch Brothers have instructed Scott Walker to go for complete victory. Wisconsin’s governor is implementing that order. Yet, what does complete victory mean?
The United States has had three major economic cri...
Great story-tellers leave a unique signature on their work–usually something amorphous but so distinct that you recognize their genius immediately, even though it may take years to fully understand them. Part of the pleasure of reading is figurin...
In the midst of cries for freedom in the Middle East and Africa, Ian McEwan claimed the Jerusalem Prize for Literature, in a sumptuous convention center in a city officially described as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel.
...
So that’s what they mean by from welfare to work. First you go force the poorest Americans into the workforce, then you go after their bargaining power. Wisconsin has long been the eye of this storm.
"We have an environ...
"I am extremely pleased with the announcement that BP has given the green light for the Sunrise project in Alberta."
– Ohio Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur
Democratic leaders in Congress are...
We now have even more evidence that inept policies from Washington are causing enormous suffering across the country. It is not quite the line that the right-wingers are pushing. The new evidence is that the stimulus worked and was in fact more effecti...
One bit news coming out of Iraq suggests that in at least one respect Iraq has modeled itself after its invaders. It comes as a welcome antidote to the bad news coming out of other places in that part of the world.
In Bahrain whe...
There’s no denying it: In politics and commerce, slogans are gold. No matter how inane or inaccurate, a clever slogan has a good chance of changing public opinion. Recall Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign from some ...
Pakistani and Indian newspapers are reporting that Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor in jail in Lahore facing murder charges for the execution-slayings of two young men believed to by Pakistani intelligence operatives, was actually involved in organizi...
The siege of the capitol in Wisconsin has moved trade unionism center stage – quite rightly and none too soon, as the right now has placed public workers in its crosshairs. More, this bottom-up (so far) rebellion, led by groups like the Madison teach...
This past Monday was the seventh anniversary of my father’s death. Were he still alive, he would have been 98 the previous week; as it was he made it to 91, and in his latter years was fond of telling me that while he’d witnessed both...
From Washington DC we hear brave talk about Uncle Sam leading the charge for democracy across the Arab world, and thus restoring himself to high esteem in Arab eyes as something other than the sponsor of tyranny and torture by neoliberalism, the electr...
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his supporters in the Fatah party want us to believe that dramatic changes are underway in the occupied Palestinian territories.
This is part of a strategy intended to offset any public dissatis...
“Saudi Arabia did not build a causeway to Bahrain just so that Saudis could party on weekends. It was designed for moments like this, for keeping Bahrain under control.”
– Dr. ...