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 June 2011
Thinking further here in Athens about how it came to be that I joined the passengers on “The Audacity of Hope” and why I feel so strongly about the oppression in Gaza, it struck me that my Irish genes (as well as my theology) may be playing a ro...
Teresa Chambers is the luckiest whistleblower in the United States. She lost her job as the first woman chief of the U.S. Park Police after she told the media in 2004 that the department was below the number required to perform the job adequately. She sued,...
In Baltimore, the nation’s mayors debated and passed a War Dollars Home Resolution at their annual meeting, the first time they have taken a stand on war since they passed a similar resolution in 1971, during the Vietnam war. The anti-war resolution e...
The contest has begun to determine who will be the Republican candidate to square off against President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential elections. For months now, individuals have been announcing their intention to run, or to form “exploratory c...
It is hard to believe but just a few years ago one could still say the words “audacity of hope” without irony. That has become impossible now that the author of those words has become the world’s foremost destroyer of hope. But even in a context w...
For two days, Capulalpam de la Sierra Ju?rez in Oaxaca turned into a modern Babel of land disputes.
The town was the site of the Third National Forum Building Resistance to Protect our Land, May 20 and 21, and the indigenous participants spoke a variety of differen...
“We women demand!?” sang out a hundred plus voices “?Justice for Marie!” Marie, a 25 year old pregnant mother, was injured by government agents when they slammed a wooden door into her stomach during an early morning invasion of an e...
Senator Mark Kirk
Washington, DC
524 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510
June 29th, 2011
Dear Senator Kirk,
We are Illinois residents writing to you from Athens...
Then what are you going to do about the Empire? More specifically, how will you deal with the following:
Governance
The complete loss of moral authority of a government owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate...
Chicago takes center stage for teachers’ struggles in July amid the annual convention of the National Education Association (NEA), a gathering of reform activists and the battle with Chicago’s new mayor over cancellation of teachers’ raise...
“The United States has been a leader in the multinational effort to end bribery and corruption in international business practices.”
?Website of the U.S. State Department
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, why shouldn’t the United St...
As the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex continued to unfold, the nuclear gang?principals of the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear members of the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration?held a two-day “summit” in Washington...
Humankind is now threatened by the simultaneous implosion, explosion, incineration, courtroom contempt and drowning of its most lethal industry.
We know only two things for certain: worse is yet to come, and those in charge are lying about it—a...
On only the second sunny weekend of the year in Portland, Oregon, 60 plus labor activists decided to spend their Saturday at the Electricians union hall (IBEW Local 48), at the United Labor Strategy Meeting ? an event unlike any other happening in the count...
The United States Military is spending $20.2 billion a year for air-conditioning the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read that again please: $20.2 billion just to provide air-conditioning for our troops in these two desert countries....
On a balmy summer evening in 2009, a painful soreness and sensitivity suddenly developed in the upper-left-molar area. My face was swollen; it looked slightly lopsided. I called and left a message on my dentist’s voicemail.
Early the...
Western institutions have become caricatures of hypocrisy.
The International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank are violating their charters in order to bail out French, German, and Dutch private banks. The IMF is only empower...
Tripoli.
Entering Libya from Tunisia, the roughly 115 mile drive to Tripoli currently provides a fascinating if unsettling introduction to the current situation in Tripoli. By the time I arrived at the hotel my mouth tasted as if I h...
On September 18, 2009, seven former heads of the CIA publicly told President Barack Obama not to prosecute CIA torturers. On April 16, 2009, Obama had already publicly told Attorney General Eric Holder not to prosecute CIA torturers. On September 18th, Hold...
While there is an ongoing discussion about the increasing corporatization of higher education?extending from the attempted buying of faculty positions by right-wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers to the increasing casualization of faculty labor an...
Washington, DC, is a Potemkin village of alabaster and marble where the perpetually stalled and broken escalators of the city’s subway system are a perfect metaphor for the government’s inability to generate positive, upward movement. Yet w...
Everyone it seems knows something about Geronimo Pratt. To all of us, to every human being on the planet, he was a beacon of principle that we should all aspire to emulate. To those directly involved in the struggle, he was one of those gifted, tough as nai...
Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant youth have been speaking out publicly about the fear and indignity of living under constant threat of arrest and deportation in the only land they’ve ever called “home.” And for over decade they...
The Palestinians are planning something thoroughly obnoxious: they intend to apply to the UN for statehood.
Why obnoxious? Any Israeli spokesman (not to mention spokeswoman) will tell you readily: because it is a “unilateral” mov...
At periodic intervals, the American body politic has shown a marked susceptibility to messianic fevers. Whenever an especially acute attack occurs, a sort of delirium ensues, manifesting itself in delusions of grandeur and demented behavior.
...