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 March 2011
What does the world think? Obama has been using air strikes and drones against civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and probably Somalia. In his March 28 speech, Obama justified his air strikes against Libya on the grounds that the em...
The answer is: liberals. No surprise there; liberals are as confused about "humanitarian interventions" now as they were in the (Bill) Clinton days. They just don’t get it, and the ones who get it least are the ones who are most incline...
When the dangerous dust and gases settle and we discover just how much radiation escaped the damaged Fukushima reactors and spent fuel rods, we may never know how many people are being exposed to radiation from the burning fuel rods and reactor cores, ...
On 19 March 2011, Western nations started the third international armed conflict against a Muslim country in the last decade. They went to great pains to claim that the use of force against Libya was legal, but an application of international law to th...
Conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are deteriorating and the doomsday scenario is beginning to unfold. On Sunday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) officials reported that the levels of radiation leaking into seawater at the Unit 2 reacto...
Touring Spain over Spring Break last week I didn’t have much time to follow the news about Libya; I was in a plane over the Atlantic as the “coalition” strikes began and kept up by watching al-Jazeera, BBC and CNN in Madrid and Barcel...
Frequently these days I am asked whether our past polling at Zogby International gave us any advance clues on the uprisings that have occurred in several Arab countries. The answer, of course, is no. We were surprised, as I believe were the demonstrato...
The president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, is expected to announce reforms today including the end of the 50-year-old state of emergency, to try to defuse protests as thousands of people continue to confront troops.
President Assad ...
The GOP dream ticket has finally emerged. Last week was a heady time for Republicans. As the world as we have known it continued crumbling, the Republicans/Conservatives/Tea Partiers plowed on with their agendas (reduce the budget, eliminate the budget...
America is, in fact, exceptionally bad when it comes to any of a whole host of measures, such as health, longevity, economic equality, crime, pollution, etc. Over there in Sweden, on the other hand, the application of socialist ideas has turned o...
Since the Fukushima accident we have seen a stream of experts on radiation telling us not to worry, that the doses are too low, that the accident is nothing like Chernobyl and so forth. They appear on television and we read their articles in the newspa...
IN A rare late-night session, the Knesset has finally adopted two obnoxious racist laws. Both are clearly directed against Israel’s Arab citizens, a fifth of the population.
The first makes it possible to annul the citizensh...
Within hours of the NFL’s collective bargaining talks breaking down, the owners initiated their anticipated Plan B, locking out the players (on March 12). And it wasn’t long after the lockout was announced that TV sports commentators ...
When the U.S. and its allies imposed a no-fly zone over Libya, cruise missile liberals at the New York Times and MSNBC jumped for joy. No surprise there. The surprise came when Marxist and self-described anti-imperialist Gilbert Achcar ...
Using the testimony of the journalist Ann Louise Bardach, the Government was able to introduce the Solo fax as evidence against Luis Posada Carriles. In the fax, the defendant alerts his co-conspirators to the money orders they would receive from...
I was arrested outside Fortnum & Mason after the UK Uncut protest on suspicion of Aggrevated Trespass and Criminal Damage. Below is a summary of my experiences of the arrest and of being held. But before I write it, I want to be clear – I am not ...
Aneth, Utah.
I first climbed the sacred butte at the edge of the Greater Aneth oil field in 1998. My husband, Doug, had been here before and knew where to find hand- and footholds in a break along the steep sides. He told me there...
Cynicism is not a healthy sentiment, and as the late Molly Ivins pointed out, it absolutely wrecks good journalism. But watching events in the Middle East unfold these days makes it a pretty difficult point of view to avoid.
Let&...
The housing market is now in full retreat. This week, the Commerce Department reported that sales of new homes plunged nearly 17 percent in February to a 250,000 annual pace. That’s a record low. At the same time, the median price fell 8.9 percen...
The human mind doesn’t easily process catastrophe. As Libyan forces battled, tens of millions witnessed televised images of ocean water rising over barricades, picking up cars, trucks, houses and other edifices and carrying them away – to somew...
Afghans expect Americans to see the terrorism they bring to this poor country in the name of fighting terrorism. In Kabul, on the same day that ...
The bomb attack on a bus in Jerusalem this week killed one woman and wounded 24 people. The casualties were not high compared with similar bombings in the city over the last 20 years. I lived off the Jaffa Road for four years in the mid-1990s when bus ...
This is a review of a book you will probably never read: Ameen Fares Rihani’s ...
"The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
T...
A legal dispute in the rural Louisiana town of Waterproof has attracted the attention of national civil rights organizations and activists. Color Of Change, an online activist group that helped garner national attention for the Jena Six Case, recently ...