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 September 2011
Consider the present dilemma of Texas governor Rick Perry, whose trajectory as the potential Republican presidential nominee now threatens to emulate the fate of the Challenger spaceshuttle in 1986.
What went wrong?
The necessary political attributes appea...
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has recently been elevated to near godlike status by the political Left in the United States. Some of his fans have even suggested that he should challenge Barack Obama in the Democratic Presidential Primary. The more often he is accused...
For a brief time in December of 2008, just months after the mainstream press admitted that the US economy had been sustained by the dreams of bankers and traders, American progressives turned their eyes to Illinois to lead the way in what might become a template for a c...
The deepening debt crisis in the eurozone and increasingly poor economic data in the US, have overshadowed rapidly deteriorating conditions in the world’s second biggest economy. The China miracle is quickly becoming a nightmare as credit default swaps (CDS) spike p...
Here is a story that has never been told before:
When the Titanic was well out into the Atlantic, its crew mutinied.
They demanded higher wages, less cramped quarters, better food. They assembled on the lower decks and refused to budge from there.
A f...
Bahrain’s military court has sentenced 20 doctors, nurses and paramedics who treated protesters injured during pro-democracy rallies earlier in the year to up to 15 years in prison. The defendants say they were tortured during interrogation to extract false confessi...
Now that the 9/11 celebrations of memories, oaths of determination, endless renditions of God Bless America and Nowhere else, and flying of flags have become old news, my wife and I take an overnight vacation. Driving north on scenic Highway 29 in Napa County, admiring th...
Alice Walker is Pulitzer Prize winning poet, author and activist. She participated recently in the U.S. Boat to Gaza, which was a part of the Freedom Flotilla, to break the Israeli embargo on the Gaza Strip.
Last year, a flotilla was attacked by Israeli commandos a...
This week marks the beginning of what is supposed to be the final 100 days of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But if U.S. troops are to leave Iraq at the end of this year as promised – repeatedly – it will take grassroots pressure to counter the growing “occupy-Iraq-fo...
Over the last few months, the U.S. has witnessed repeated calls for vengeance, for revenge, punishment, retribution … for blood. These calls express one of the most disturbing facets of the American “character,” the Old Testament call for an eye-for-an-eye, a to...
Rick Perry and the other Republican presidential candidates are right. Americans are fed up, as Perry writes in his book Fed Up!, with “old guard politicians” dedicated to protecting the “establishment” and the federal government’s “culture of waste.”
...
At the Wall Street protest, a young woman carried a sign, “REVOLUTION IS FUN,” and I don’t doubt that she was having a great time, because it can be exhilarating to engage in a just and noble fight, and to feel that you are an agent of change, a participant in histo...
Hamburg’s most fashionable district is also its greenest, though this is not immediately apparent from the foot of the Marco Polo Tower — 16 storeys of luxury apartments that look like a sliced loaf. (They cost an average €3.7m.) A love of nature isn’t obvio...
The stench of elitism is permeating Washington, just as it did a decade ago when everyone of consequence bought the proposition that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction-and even if there was room for doubt, he was a threat and “had to go.” Today,...
If you were wondering where the United States ranks, relative to the rest of the world, in the general category of “worker protection,” there is now a precise answer available—one supplied by Professor Kenneth Thomas of the University of Missouri (St. Louis), who ba...
North Africa erupted in the final days of the life of renowned movement attorney Leonard Weinglass. As images of men and women filling the streets of Cairo scrolled across the television monitor in his hospital room, he pointed out to Tom Hayden exactly how many square mi...
Ankara.
In September 2010, the UN General Assembly’s Human Rights Council issued a report on the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara. It concluded that the blockade of the Gaza Strip was unlawful; that the blockade constituted collective punishment of...
On day 12 of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), I helped moderate a meeting of the “open source” OWS working group by keeping a list of speakers and co-chairing. I am not sure what the open source group is supposed to do exactly, but I decided to attend this meeting af...
“Without Okinawa, we cannot carry on the Vietnam war.”
– Admiral Ulysses Sharp, Commander of U.S. Pacific Forces, December 1965.
During the 1960s and ‘70s, the United States military transformed Okinawa into a f...
Probably the biggest accomplishment of the Occupy Wall Street movement to date has not been the light these courageous and indomitable young activists have shined on the gangsters of Wall Street, as important as that has been. Rather it has been how they have exposed the ...
Where is Henry Ford when you need him?
You may remember Henry — the ruthless industrialist who nonetheless refused to be hobbled by suicidal ideology when it came to doing business. He realized as his workers cranked thousands of new cars off the assembly lin...
In 1969, after nearly 14 years of constant gigging in small blues clubs and cutting scorching singles for obscure labels, songs that received limited radio play but were greedily snatched up by young white rockers desperate to learn the rudiments of the Chicago blues, it ...
My sister Laura and I took the train to Manhattan on Wednesday to participate in the occupation of Wall Street. But Wall Street is barricaded. Yes, pedestrians move on the sidewalks, but police and metal prevent anyone from walking or entering the street.
The ...
Mumbai
Is distress migration on a massive scale responsible for one of the most striking findings of Census 2011: that for the first time since 1921, urban India added more numbers to its population in a decade than rural India did?
At 833.1 million...
Not because it was brutal or clumsy or anticipated was there any less indignation about the Yankee judge from the South Florida District denying René González, the Cuban anti-terrorist hero, the right to return to the heart of his family in Cuba after having served the ...