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 December 2011
Support Foreign Policy in Focus
...
Seven weeks before Jill Stein declared her candidacy for president, the Lexington, Mass., physician outlined her priorities in a plan she called the “Green New Deal” – jobs, climate change, universal health care and peace. When she announced her bid fo...
Students of California, arise, you have nothing to lose but a crushing debt!
The corporate state of California, ever ready to seize its ideological and commercial hour during a recession, has a chokehold on California’s public universities. With its tax-coddl...
At this time of year it is not uncommon to become wistful and look back at the time that has passed, but oddly enough, I find myself becoming nostalgic for the time of the last Bush administration. I remember it as a time when people still expressed opposition to a regime...
During the recent Republican presidential primary debates, three candid...
For the second time in three years, the banking system has collapsed, which means that the banks are no longer able to fund themselves through the normal means, the wholesale markets. This same thing happened in July 2007 when two Bear Stearns hedge funds defaulted and tr...
US press coverage has usually cast the Tea Party as an authentic expression of popular anger against Washington insiders. Anthony DiMaggio’s new book, ...
Cameron Douglas, the son of Academy Award winner Michael Douglas who is serving a five-year sentence for drug dealing, was just sentenced to an additional four and a half years in prison. Judge Richard Berman, who has to be one of the most clueless justices in the federal...
Having spent the better part of two months as an embedded reporter with Occupy OKC’s camp in Kerr Park (aka Poet’s Park) I have often praised both the city and police department. Oklahoma City’s occupation has so far managed to avoid the mass arrests and...
Drill, Baby, Drill … Strike That!...
It’s the first thing you notice. Electric orange, ripe and luscious hoshigaki hang from every bough. As we drive through the country and over the glittering, snow-specked mountain range from Fukushima city to Soma on the northeast coast of Japan, we pass ma...
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi is either a liar or a fool. Either way, he should be canned immediately before he dumps more money into an EU banking system sinkhole.
What’s all the fuss about? Here’s a clip from Bloomberg that explains...
ON December 16, the United States armed forces handed over Camp Adder to the Iraqi government. It was the last base to be officially handed over, as the troops boarded their trucks for the convoy ride to Kuwait. “We have turned the last page of the occupation,” Hussei...
The calls by the “moderate left” for passively following behind the liberals are supposedly based on the need to “work among the people”, to go where the masses are. But how, and with whom, are the forces of the left to set out after these ardently pursued masses?...
Through the last year the defense industries and their supporters in Congress worked overtime to ensure the federal government kept the armed forces in a perpetual procurement cycle. Inside the Pentagon, t...
Germany towers over Europe like a colossus. Its economy is the biggest in the European Union, accounting for 20 percent of the EU’s gross domestic product. While most of Europe’s economies are stagnating, Germany’s will have grown by some 2.9 percent in 2011. It boa...
Kabul.
It’s early evening near Pole Sorkh (po-lay sork) Square in western Kabul. Although it’s barely 6:00, winter’s cold bare feet have already started their walk across our apartment. Ali, Abdulai, Roz Mohammend, and Faiz have joined Maya and me ...
On a dreary, rainy evening in late November my friend Pat Carmeli and I were driving to Syracuse to hear Jeremy Ben-Ami speak. I smiled when Pat turned to me and said, “I’m going to ask him a question about human rights and the Palestinians.” I responded enthusi...
In 1649 at St. George’s Hill in England, as recounted in the revolutionary anthem “The World Turned Upside Down,” a band of landless peasants who called themselves the Diggers tore down enclosures, built themselves cottages, and began spading up land to ...
Treating illness involves getting to the root of a health condition. Or, ideally at least, it should. In the real world much medical practice is geared toward ameliorating symptoms, without necessarily curing the underlying condition. Certainly the modern pharmaceutical i...
...
It’s fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, now that according to some mainstream polls he has become the front-running candidate in the Jan. 3 GOP caucus race in Iowa, and perhaps also in the first primary campaign in New Ha...
A political campaign by San Francisco’s well-heeled “property owners” was launched to influence police and politicians to aggressively demobilize Occupy SF and to dismantle their encampments. And, there are documents to prove it.
Things did not start out this...