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 July 2011
THE FABLE OF OBAMA AND THE SAND
We are trekking through the Sahara at noon, canteens empty, dying of thirst. The Republicans cry: look! Look at the beautiful lake! We’re saved! Let’s kneel down and drink our fill! The scouts report: sadly, it’s a ...
If Congress doesn’t reach a deal to extend our debt ceiling, the economy might collapse, and We the People will become We the Paupers. As the author of a new “financial advice” book, I investigate below whether some time-tested money tips might still app...
As grains of sand drip one by one through the hour glass, marking time as we move toward the debt ceiling deadline, the political posturing takes on the appearance of a game of chicken or Russian Roulette.
The comparisons are apt but as time slips on and the postur...
I walk the line.
—Johnny Cash
Cedarville, Ontario.
Back to Grey County of the heart. I filed from here in May last year, describing a crawl through a rare old cedar copse destined to disappear before the new tr...
Where have all the village greens gone? They have been destroyed one by one. Oh, when will we ever learn, sang Pete Seeger, a long time ago.
America needs a lot more village greens and far fewer unmanned drone aircraft, F-35s, and SUVs. Village greens are sma...
Let me say this up front: Mat Johnson’s Pym is one of the most inve...
Spencer Susser’s Hesher is a great little independent movie with a hard steel exterior and a tender heart. The movie features Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a kind of heavy-metal Shaman who arrives on the scene in a beat-up black van, a blur of tattoos and long hair. He barrel...
In contrast to their still-life ancestors from the 17th-century, modern visual depictions of music would best concentrate on technologies of sound and the regulation of the senses: instead of a lute reclining alongside a half-filled goblet, the artist would present an iPo...
An Orange Peel
by CHARLES ORLOSKI
Today a technician
displayed X-rays of my brain.
It was orange, snarled spaghetti strands,
something compound, had pre-frontal CEOs,
thousands of sentimental sections,
and a stri...
So you don’t like the way your Representatives and your Senators are acting? So you voted for Obama but now that you’ve seen his true colors you won’t vote for him again? So you think the Tea Party is running the country?
Item: Airlines are ...
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans—even more s...
Late last year, I called the first shots in Cyber World War One. I got the timing completely wrong. In fact, I was off by about 27 years.
The real first shot in that war — heard ’round the world and widely lauded, but its implications not really unde...
On July 25, 2011, after an imposed hiatus of 15 months, Allan Frankel, MD, resumed seeing patients and authorizing Cannabis use.
The Medical Board of California had suspended Frankel’s license for reasons unrelated to Cannabis —and then sought to revoke it pe...
Fenway Park, Boston, July 4, 2011. On this warm summer day, the Red Sox will play the Toronto Blue Jays. First come pre-game festivities, especially tailored for the occasion. The ensuing spectacle — a carefully scripted encounter between the armed forces and...
Even though union membership hovers at about a 12-percent (down from a high of 35-percent in the 1940s and 1950s), there’s a way of looking at these figures that gives us cheer. With the U.S. population at more than 300 million, that 12-percent figure converts to ...
Policy debates in Washington are moving ever further from reality as a small elite is moving to strip benefits that the vast majority need and support. The battle over raising the debt ceiling is playing a central role in this effort.
The United States is currently...
The Taliban leadership is ready to negotiate peace with the United States right now if Washington indicates its willingness to provide a timetable for complete withdrawal, according to a former Afghan prime minister who set up a secret meeting between a senior Taliban...
The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai in Kandahar July 12 is one of those moments when the long and bloody Afghanistan war suddenly comes into focus. It is not a picture one is eager to put up on the wall.
Karzai, a younger half brother (because their father h...
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and aspirant to the ...
Societies, if we are to take the Freudian line, prefer to subordinate chaotic urges in favour of dull order. Civilization implies stability. By the nineteenth century, human society was digesting a range of theories on ‘constants&rsqu...
Damaged goods, send them back
I can’t work, I can’t achieve, send me back
Open the till, give me the change
You said would do me good
Refund the cost
You said you’re cheap, but you’re too much...
Not a week goes in Colombia without reports of assassinations and persecution of labor and political activists. Ana Fabricia Cordoba, gender activist and leader of displaced peasants, was shot dead on June 7th inside a street bus, after she foretold he...
In 1979, my life changed while I was covering the trial of Dan White for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Former police officer White had confessed to killing the progressive Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, who was...
As exposed here on CounterPunch the lies used to justify the NATO war against Libya have surpassed those created to justify the invasion of Iraq. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both had honest observers on the ground for months following ...