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 May 2011
The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off America’s Public Enemy Number One, it formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the word...
The election of 2008 put the final nail in the coffin. The debates between Obama and McCain for President and Biden and Palin for VP were mile stones in electoral sanity. There was never a clearer choice. A mad crazy man teamed up with a know nothing w...
I love Raymond Carver’s writing and his ability to capture small, seemingly mundane human moments and turn them into things of beauty and art. When I discovered that the movie Everything Must Go is based on a Raymond Carver short story, there was...
Descartes, I’ve heard tale: On the night before you published your treatise, Rules For The Direction Of The Mind, you dreamed: Walking a city street, you found yourself leaning so far to the right, that, as you proceeded along the sidewalk, your ...
Tuches aufn tish: Buttocks on the table. That’s the colorful way my Yiddish-speaking ancestors said, “Let’s cut the BS and talk about honest truth.” It seems like a particularly apt expression after a week watching the shadow-boxing ...
When the euro was launched, leading German politicians used to argue, with evident relish (and much to the chagrin of the British in particular), that monetary union would eventually require political union. The Greek crisis was precisely the sort of event ...
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side.”
? Hunter Thompson
On Christmas eve, 1967, John Fogerty announced ...
Last month Iceland voted against submitting to British and Dutch demands that it compensate their national bank insurance agencies for bailing out their own domestic Icesave depositors. This was the second vote against settlement (by a ratio of 3:2), and Ic...
420 Cafe, Amsterdam
I’m crossing the English Channel on the Stena Line steamship as I write this, moving on from London to Amsterdam for the next 10 days, and then on to Italy. It was a rough April in the Motor City with one cold, gray day afte...
Barcelona.
Let he (or she) who has never broken the law hurl the first insult.
One of the most popular refrains we hear these days about undocumented migrants is that they are criminals because they broke the...
New readings show levels of radioisotopes found up to 30 kilometers offshore from the on-going crisis at Fukushima are ten times higher than those measured in the Baltic and Black Seas during Chernobyl.
"When it comes to the...
French Finance Minster Christine Lagarde has emerged as the front-runner in the race to replace ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. She is a champion swimmer, an accomplished attorney, and a competent bureaucrat. She’s also a friend of Wall Stre...
Now, the BBC is even trying to stop the politicisation of British youth!
The BBC has released a statement proclaiming that late night music shows were not the place for political controversy ? young people might be listening. It c...
It was all rather disgusting.
There they were, the members of the highest legislative bodies of the world’s only superpower, flying up and down like so many yo-yos, applauding wildly, every few minutes or seconds, the most o...
Mariem Megalla is a 24-year veteran forensic technician with the New York Police Department. She was suspended from her job last year when she was caught falsifying drug test results at the NYPD’s crime lab in Jamaica, Queens. Because of this, t...
In times of war, U.S. presidents have often talked about yearning for peace. But the last decade has brought a gradual shift in the rhetorical zeitgeist while a tacit assumption has taken hold — war must go on, one way or another.
"I...
On Tuesday, at a rare joint session of Congress for a foreign leader, members of Congress will clapped hands raw for Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel — a nation many members of congress are incapable of speaking simple truths abou...
The Supreme Court’s recent decision ordering California to reduce its overcrowded prisons by 30,000 inmates is as welcome as a ray of sunlight streaming through prison bars. State officials have known for decades of the horrific, if not criminal,...
Osama bin Laden’s death has laid to rest the mystery of his whereabouts. His body lies under the ocean. But now his death raises another increasingly popular question. Was he tracked down thanks to tips elicited through the torture of captured al...
The former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is to be tried for conspiring to kill demonstrators whose protests brought an end to his 30-year rule.
The move by the military government is seen as an attempt to satisfy growing popula...
If you thought the bipartisan crusade against workers to roll back union rights would be enough to soften the saber rattling of corporate class warfare, think again.
Not content with the legislative assault on workers’ rights in states...
London
The tabloid media here are going to have a feeding frenzy over the next few days after international soccer star Ryan Giggs was dramatically revealed as the figure behind the so-called super privacy injunction.
Now t...
One very important fact has been largely absent from the coverage of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and leading candidate to be the next president of France. The hotel ho...
As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the world’s most powerful financial institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), spends a few nights in Rikers Island prison awaiting a hearing, the world is learning a lot about his history of treating w...
John Fleming is a 58-year-old African American born and raised in Philadelphia who served in the Army from 1969 to 1972 maintaining nuclear weapons in silos in Germany.
It was 10:45 AM on Friday outside Courtroom 1006 in Philadelp...