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
Another war for oil? Surely not! But just to be on the safe side, the world’s oil barons are already moving in to seal some sweetheart deals on that sweet, sweet crude with the new, NATO-installed masters of Libya.
And guess what? It turns out that companies fro...
“Without the destructive power of the banks, hedge funds and other investment companies, the world would not be where it is today — at the edge of an abyss.”
...
That sounds like a crazy question, doesn’t it? Why would President Obama denounce Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Well, the reason I ask is that he’s done it before.
Really? But surely he wouldn’t do it on such a solemn occasion?
Well, ...
When I heard today that Steve Jobs was resigning, I noticed tears welling up in my eyes. It is not that Steve was the “greatest CEO of all time” as MSNBC says he was. It was not that he resurrected a company that was once in danger of going under and worth only $10 mi...
The latest fad among economic forecasters is to talk about the growing probability of a double-dip recession. They have raised fears that the economy will again go spiraling downward at a point where it has hardly made up any of the ground lost in the last recession. This...
Israeli writer Uri Avnery recently wrote an article entitled ‘How Godly Are Thy Tents?’, which began with the words, “First of all, a warning.” The reference was made to the tent cities that have sprung up across the country by middle class Israelis demanding chan...
We have a situation in which the government is acting as a guarantor to the process of expropriation of access of common property resources across the country and handing over those resources to private interests. This is leading to inequity… this proces...
Tripoli.
This observer’s tentative appraisal of Tuesday’s events along the north Tripoli port area as of late afternoon 8/23/11 is that the “65,000 well trained and well-armed troops” hyped Sunday by the Gaddafi government don’t in fact e...
The cost of the 2011 cutbacks in federal spending will fall most directly on consumers and retirees by scaling back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and social spending programs. The population also will suffer indirectly, by lower federal revenue sharing with U.S. sta...
Could it be that when Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama leaves office that the defining image of his presidency will have been his use of unmanned drone aircraft and military death squads to achieve the will of the Empire?
Hardly a week goes by in which we do not l...
Port-au-Prince.
Mathias O is 34 years old. He is one of about 600,000 people still homeless from the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. He lives with his wife and her 2 year old under a homemade shelter made out of several tarps. They sleep on the...
Reflecting upon growing voter indifference in democracies across the Atlantic, historian Tony Judt chalked it up to a roster of world leaders that “convey neither conviction nor authority” and “stand for nothing in particular.” These words resonate in the aftermat...
We make a bargain with our governments. We pay taxes and expect a set of government services in return. And in return for a guarantee of some measure of security, we grant the government a monopoly on legitimate violence. In theory, then, we forswear mob rule and paramili...
Reports that the US is determined to maintain a presence in Afghanistan will surprise no one except 99% of foreign policy analysts. Responding to the announcement that the US is in negotiations to maintain a presence until 2024, Mahdi Hassan, senior editor at the ...
“But (America) goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”
– President John Quincy Adams in 1821
Rep. Ron Paul, the Texan doctor running for President as a Republican libertarian, looks li...
Does America suffer from Solution-ism? by Saad Hafiz
“America suffers from ‘solutionism’”, an ex-Marine running a Washington law practice resi...
The civil war in Libya went on longer than expected, but the fall of Tripoli came faster than was forecast. As in Kabul in 2001 and Baghdad in 2003, there was no last-ditch stand by the defeated regime, whose supporters appear to have melted away once they saw that defeat...
He looks at the camera with bright eyes and the beginning of a smile, wearing a miniature dark blue zipper sweatshirt, the cuffs folded up a bit to make it fit.
I can imagine his mother dressing him that morning, making sure he would be warm enough. I wonder if she...
It was only a matter of time before the “pull down” NAFTA and WTO trade agreements on U.S. wages and jobs would be followed by “pull down” contract demands by U.S. corporations on their unionized workers toward levels of non-unionized laborers....
The world financial system had another serious scare last week. The immediate issue was the prospect that the euro could break up. With the debt crisis spreading from smaller countries such as Greece and Ireland to the eurozone giants of Spain and Italy, events were again...
The United States managed to avert a default, and that is good news. But the partisan battle in Congress sent the stock market plunging, and the decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the country’s credit rating has made matters far worse.
Party...
Stephanie Haw needed a good cry.
On the night of August 9th, the rowdy crowd inside Hawk’s bar in downtown Madison grew ever quieter as the election results trickled in. Earlier that day, with the nation watching, voters statewide cast their ballots in Wiscon...
This Sunday, Aug. 21, is the 180th anniversary of the slave rebellion led by the Rev. Nat Turner in Virginia.
Born into slavery on Oct. 2, 1800, Turner developed two characteristics that would propel him eventually to lead an insurrection: literacy skills and a rel...
If any one ever needed a better reason to throw the Democratic Party into the garbage can of history, last Tuesday night’s “Town Hall Meeting” in Oakland, California, was a perfect example of the party’s pathos, duplicity and outright arrogance.
The night h...
Texas Governor Rick Perry has ridden into the GOP presidential race on his high horse, threatening to ‘get ugly’ with Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, stopping just short of accusing him of treason, and catering, as expected, to the most radical of the ra...