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 April 2011
Last Sunday most Christians probably heard a traditional Easter message. Like “Hope is Back!,” sponsored by the National Council of Churches, produced by Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, and televised on ABC stations. ...
April 2011 marked the anniversary of the two most seminal events in American history.
Naturally enough, both involve violence.
The first is the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord when members...
OK, maybe just one cup of tea and not three, and just three schools not eleven. Whatever the truth about numbers, Greg Mortenson did a commendable job of building some schools in the peaceful and never-Talibanised Baltistan, and some in restless and Ta...
It’s a modest notion.
Companies that bid for government contracts should disclose their campaign spending, in order to diminish the likelihood that contracts are a payoff for political expenditures.
The...
The flurry of poll-driven news like ...
Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I’ll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a ...
In recent weeks, Yemeni protesters calling for an immediate end to the 32-year reign of U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh have been met with increasing violence at the hands of state security forces. A recent pledge by Saleh to step down, one of...
In May 2009, Congressmen Eric Cantor (R., Va.) and Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) wrote to President Barack Obama about U.S. policy toward Israel. Their staff sent the letter as a PDF but forgot to change the name of the file to something other than "AIPAC...
With all the bad news organized labor has received recently—and there’s been plenty of it, from attacks on the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers, to smear campaigns against school teachers, to more jobs being lost to globali...
There’s no doubt the ongoing Middle Eastern revolutions make ample use of democratic slogans, encouraged by the civic spirit of millions that have marched for liberty and equality. Though many factors are contributing to the historic changes that...
Two days after Kate Middleton and Prince William walk down the aisle, a group of workers will take to the streets to celebrate the working class. If there is any contradiction it will be ignored. Or perhaps, there is no contradiction. The working class...
Starting in late 2005, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan began turning detainees over to the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS), despite its well-known reputation for torture.
Interviews with former U.S. and NATO dipl...
The Syrian army is moving to crush in blood the protesters calling for democracy and the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad and his regime. Unburied bodies lie in the streets of Deraa, the city in the south which has been at the centre of the popul...
Benton Harbor, Mich., is a town of nearly 11,000 people, about 90 percent of whom are African American. It is a catalogue of the misery of the industrial Midwest. It was the headquarters and manufacturing center of Whirlpool, but the last Whirlpool pla...
The disaster at Chernobyl’s reactor on April 26, 1986 continues to expose humans, flora and fauna to radioactive lethality especially in, but not restricted to, Ukraine and Belarus. Western countries continue to reflect an under-estimation of cas...
"The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man."
–Huey Newton
For as long as I can remember, Baltimore has had the reputation as a corrupt and tough town. City Hall...
The Federal Reserve is not going to push the economy into Zimbabwean hyperinflation. That’s pure bunkum. The Fed’s plan is to weaken the dollar to boost exports and to force China to let its currency appreciate to its fair-market value. By ...
The federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in a stunning smack at the U.S. Supreme Court, has issued a ruling upholding its earlier decision backing a new sentencing hearing in the controversial case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted k...
Last Monday, I attended the funeral service of Virginia Davis in Savannah, GA. Reverend Dr. Warnock delivered a passionate eulogy for Virginia, which ended with a powerful call to action: The best way to honor Virginia’s life, he said, is to figh...
As someone who writes about deportation, I hear and write about heartbreaking stories on a regular basis. Trust me, then, when I say that the deportation of people born in the Bahamas from the United States to Haiti is just about as bad as it gets. ...
Bangladesh’s once-legendary banking environment is now fatally polluted. The rot is spreading so fast and far that the entire global microfinance industry is threatened. Controversy ranges far beyond poisonous local politics, the factor most ofte...
When the current economic crisis hit Europe in 2008, small countries on the periphery were its first victims: Iceland, Ireland, and Latvia. Within a year it had spread to Greece and Portugal, though the GDP of both nations—respectively 11th and 12th ...