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 August 2011
Tripoli.
The new rulers of Libya, the Transitional National Council (TNC), have arrived in town. I know this because they just kicked me out of my painfully acquired hotel room when they took over the whole of the eighth floor of the Radisson Blu Hotel whe...
Over the coming weeks and months, a deluge of blogs, articles and essays will attempt to make sense of the most widespread social unrest Britain has seen in recent memory. Undoubtedly, a period of collective reflection will be vital...
Although born and raised and raised in a small town in the Finger Lakes region of New York, I’m the hybrid child of an upstate NY father and a mother from Texas — they met at Fort Hood (then Camp Hood) during World War II. And you thought different species cou...
At 11:40AM on Friday August 26 Fratney Street seemed as unremarkable as ever as I walked north towards the Art Bar on Burleigh Street in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood. The only thing out of the ordinary was the line of school buses blocking the view of Messmer P...
For the past two weeks, the world has been captivated by the bitter confrontation between the Indian government and a short, bespectacled, seventy-four-year old man called Anna Hazare, a self-styled anti-corruption crusader.
On August 16th, Hazare’s ar...
As this weekend’s storm has reminded us, hurricanes can be a threat to U.S. cities on the East Coast as well the Gulf. But the vast changes that have taken place in New Orleans since Katrina have had little to do with weather, and everything to do with polit...
The Midwest Rising Convergence 2011, on Aug. 12–15 at the University of Missouri–St. Louis conference center, wasn’t an ordinary conference. It featured no experts or celebrities. The 200 or so participants co-operatively ran it, cooking and serving meals, working a...
You might not be aware of this news from northern Arizona, since the reporting of it in the media has been less than robust, but in recent weeks there have been dozens of arrests at the Snowbowl ski expansion site in the San Francisco Peaks, just outside of Flagstaff. Fol...
Here’s what we said before they got here: The Environmental Justice Task Force of the Detroit City Council welcomes the United States Environmental Protection Agency and national Environmental Justice (EJ) activists to Detroit. In recognition of the historic EPA con...
Light Up LA’s Skies
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The White House that shook in last Tuesday’s earthquake has been home to its present incumbent for 32 months. Obama wasn’t around to watch the furniture shake. He’s up on Martha’s Vineyard for the third year in a row, with Michelle and their two daughters, bunkere...
For a while it looked as if Western Europe’s imperial-colonial era had drawn to a close and as if the imperial benefits and burdens it bequeathed to the U.S. were about to be liquidated, as well. But this turns out to be a gross historical misconstruction.
The...
The sight of hundreds of people getting arrested in front of the White House is one of the most hopeful signals that I’ve seen yet that at least some Americans are taking the climate crisis seriously. For me, the only question was what took so long?
The XL pipeli...
“The economy is now mired in an anemic balance-sheet recovery in which many consumers and businesses continue to curtail their spending relative to their income, increase their saving and reduce their debt even though interest rates are near zero. And th...
Tripoli
Rumors and repeated rumors ricochet like shell casings off concrete walls this morning and depending on what one is inclined to believe, Libya’s former leader Colonel Gaddafi is safely in Algeria, his hometown of Sirte, Libya’s vast southern de...
The oldest human remains so far discovered in California belong to the Elem Pomo Nation, who have lived on the eastern and southern shores of the Clear Lake basin for at least 10,000 years, also inhabiting much of the peninsula between eastern and southern arms of the lak...
Tripoli
Freedom from fear has not yet reached the people of Tripoli. Streets are empty and shops shuttered. For miles there is nobody to be seen in the city, aside from militiamen dressed in T-shirts, shorts and an occasional item of uniform, manning barri...
The character of our present moment is undeniable, and the tangled web of causes and consequences is the same from London to Cairo to Santiago: budget cuts in the name of “austerity,” rising unemployment, incre...
These are bleak times on both sides of America’s partisan divide.
It’s not looking good for the Republican establishment; their (ever less) useful idiots have taken charge of the GOP, and the hooligans are out of control. But the plutocrats who enlisted them ...
Believe it or not, just two generations ago, many families in Morgan County, West Virginia were self sufficient.
Hunting, fishing, growing vegetables, canning for winter.
Subsistence farmers they called them.
Some families spent only $100 cash a year....
This weekend it has taken a hurricane to postpone the dedication of the long-awaited monument to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington — the first time a man who is not a president, not white man and not a war leader has been so honored on the Mall. Major corp...
Iowa, which gave us the carnival known as the Iowa Straw Poll and artery-clogging Deep Fried butter, will unleash another health problem, beginning Sept. 1....
I haven’t seen The Help and, unless someone pays me $13.00 or I develop acute masochism, I don’t intend to. But watching the preview and reading the Association of Black Women Historians’ ...