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 November 2011
A CounterPunch Exclusive
On October 27, 2011 Levy Itzhak Rosenbaum, 60, a portly, sometimes risqué, “self-described” kidney matchmaker, pleaded guilty in a Trenton, NJ federal courtroom to three counts of acquiring,...
Ten years ago in America, War Party fervor was on the rise, the media was in tow, and many a liberal was on board. Thus began the Bush-Cheney era, one of the darkest moments in American history. Those years seem like only yesterday, probably because on matters of subs...
In an October 9 article for the website Truthdig.com, Chris Hedges, the former New York Times bureau chief turned dissident journalist, gives us a...
Throughout the first several weeks of Occupy Oakland’s existence the analysis and discussion at the General Assembly and elsewhere has been about the need to construct an entirely different social order. It is not so much that “the system is broken” but that it is...
The Syrian revolution—a broad-based, non-sectarian, democratic anti-despot national movement—has failed.
Mass demonstrations never materialized in Damascus and Aleppo. The military and security forces didn’t crack. The Alawite on Sunni crackdown (Alawites...
When I team taught a course on corporate strategy back in 1980 at the Yale School of Management with economist Martin Shubik and former New York Times chief financial officer Leonard Forman, I never dreamed I would be invited back to Yale thirty years later to be...
Oklahoma City.
In the early morning hours of Black Friday, 10 members of Occupy OKC discovered that chanting “Buy local!” in a crowded Walmart is an arrestable offense in the United States of America.
It all started with a group of ...
Back in the 1980s the Johns-Manville Corporation got hit with so many asbestos-related lawsuits that—given the company’s culpability and the gravity of the medical problems (asbestosis is incurable, and there were tens of thousands of valid cases)—it was forced to s...
Brave New Films, the film studio that produced the ground-breaking documentary, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,” is holding an online vote to pick the “worst of the 1%.” They’re looking for the person who is doing the most with their...
On Monday, leaders from dozens of countries began meeting at the 17th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa. They might as well have stayed home.
The meeting in Durban will fail, just as all previous climate confabs have fail...
Q: Who killed more Americans —al Qaeda crashing airplanes into the World Trade Center, or Merck pushing Vioxx?
A: Merck, by a factor of 18.
One of the most downplayed stories of our time ended with a whim...
“Jack Abramoff – he’s scum.” – Paul Begala, CNN Crossfire.
“The most evil lobbyist ever to be operating in Washington.” – Margaret Car...
While nuclear weapons exist, there remains a danger that they will be used. After all, for centuries national conflicts have led to wars, with nations employing their deadliest weapons. The current deterioration of U.S. relations with China might end up providing us w...
“In every crisis there’s a point of no return….I’m increasingly convinced we’ve already passed that point of no return in Europe. The banks won’t lend to each other, the Germans won’t do Eurobonds, and the ECB won’t act as a lender of l...
The comforting thing about those sham wrestling ‘championships’ on television is that everybody knows they are a farce. Steroid-stuffed Cro-Magnons stomp the living daylights out of painkiller-primed Neanderthals. Good, unclean fun. The results are safely pred...
Around this time last year, both the New York Times and the ...
This terrible idea will not die: that the only way to revive the US economy is to reduce mortgages on homes and property purchased at speculative values. The fact that so many homeowners (like me) did not buy more house than they could afford, did not buy into the specula...
In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a ...
Embassy of Palestine, Tripoli, Libya
Every year on November 29, approximately a quarter million Palestinian refugees who were forced into Lebanon, along with those in more than 130 countries where they have sought refuge following their ethnic cleansing fr...
Most of the rich nations gathering at this year’s UN climate summit have already ...
Someone Else’s Children
...
On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35 per cent of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private bank...
On November 16 about two-hundred and fifty Oaklanders convened a general assembly in the city’s central square, Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. It was yet another experiment in direct democracy, one of many public meetings held since the city’s encampment was e...
Iran has long been denounced in Washington as the source of much of the evil in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies see the hand of Tehran behind protests in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province. As the last US forces leave Iraq by the...