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 2012
Today’s economic warfare is not the kind waged a century ago between labor and its industrial employers. Finance has moved to capture the economy at large, industry and mining, public infrastructure (via privatization) and now even the educational system. (At over $1 tr...
One of the most pressing problems facing the incoming Secretary of Defense is posed by our denouement in Afghanistan. For reasons ...
There’s a ...
On December 28, a potential strike by the ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association), representing East Coast dockworkers, was averted when union negotiators agreed to extend the contract for another month, and continue bargaining. Both sides took this to be a hop...
In case you hadn’t heard of ‘Ergenokon’, it’s an alleged plot by a gang of ultranationalist secularists, who are accused of plotting to trigger a military coup to topple the ruling Islamic-slanted Justice and Develoment Party (AKP) in Turkey by fomenting chaos in ...
Burma’s president Thein Sein — through his envoy, former general Aung Min — has in just one year renewed most of the ceasefires agreed by the previous junta, including one with the powerful militia of the Wa minority in the north, who have produced and trafficked op...
La Maison d’Avocats, Damascus.
Even before the historic 139 to 8 vote of the UN General Assembly on November 29 of this year which opened up a plethora of legal remedies for Palestinians, a “legal intifada” — to borrow a phrase from Franc...
In a 2012 Status of World Nuclear Forces report, The Federation of American Scientists (FAS, founded in 1945 by many of the original group of scientists who invented and built the first atomic bombs and who later came to oppose them) estimates that 1,800 Russian and U.S. ...
One of, if not the last, Eritrean askari, aboy Welday Tecle Weldekidan Melkai Tensai of the village of Damba Minche in the Serai region has passed away at the age of 93.
Aboy Welday was drafted into the Italian African Colonial Army, or “askaris” as they were k...
I logged onto the Internet between classes on Friday, December 14 in Troy, New York. Since the classes I teach would take the second part of their final exam, I quickly passed by the New York Times breaking news item that stated a shooting had taken place at a ...
The NY Times arrived this morning with the magazine devoted to “The Lives They Lived,” an extra round of obits for those who exited in 2012. Guess who wasn’t mentioned? I suppose if they’d included you we’d say “Nothing they love more than ...
I went to see Django Unchained with a screenwriter friend yesterday, forgetting that it was Christmas week and the matinees would be crowded. I’ve always been a little ambivalent about the already legendary director Quentin Tarantino’s movies. I think the...
When World War I broke out in August 1914, economists on both sides forecast that hostilities could not last more than about six months. Wars had grown so expensive that governments quickly would run out of money. It seemed that if...
New documents obtained from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security by the Partnership for Civil Justice and released this past week show that the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies began a campaign of monitoring, spying and disrupting the Occ...
In the mid 1990s Republican New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman ...
There is no point denying it any longer: those of us who thought that Barack Obama’s invocations of “hope” and “change” was all hot air were wrong; we didn’t get it. We didn’t realize that he wasn’t talking about the hopes for change of the people whose ...
SUDDENLY, I realized that a new star had appeared on the political firmament of Israel. Until yesterday I did not even know of its existence.
A respected public opinion poll posed a Nixonesque question: From which politician would you buy a used car? The answer was...
It’s easier than you think. That’s the way I start discussions and interviews about my new book titled, “Seventeen Solutions.”
The “solutions” were selected for their long-overdue practicality, fairness, efficiency, safety, employment potential and re...
The top geopolitical tragedy in 2012 is bound to remain the top geopolitical tragedy in 2013: the rape of Syria.
Just as once in a while I go back to my favorite Hemingway passages, lately I’ve been going back to some footage I shot years ago of the Aleppo so...
On December 10, community leaders all across the country held vigils and rallies outside Congressional offices to defend the safety net and protest the so-called “fiscal cliff” negotiations in Washington, DC. It was part of a coordinated national campaign on Internati...
December 29th marks the 122nd anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee. It is a story that remains fresh in the lives of many indigenous peoples across America. Each generation is taught to never forget.
In 1891, reviewing the history lea...
Mexico City.
Welcome to a new era in Mexico – or so some would have you believe. Twelve years after finally losing power in the democratic transition of 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), aka “the dinosaur”, is back and attempting to ...
Year on year the numbers of men women and children leaving Ethiopia in search of work and freedom from repression in one of the Gulf States and beyond is increasing. Lured by the often hollow prospect of earning enough money to support their family, United Nations High Co...