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 January 2012
Zimbabwe again, though not through the eyes of the typical critic. No white observer, flaying Robert Mugabe and his cohorts; no African narrator crying in despair and frustration. Instead, a narrator who—although white—ponders the question of cause and effect, how...
Berlin
Probably no one sitting in the House of Representatives chamber last Tuesday night for Barack Obama’s State of the Union address knew that January 24 also marked the 300th birthday of Frederick the Great. Poster boy for Enlightened Desp...
Friends
by EDWARD BEATTY
Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues sanctify the living room,
ring throughout the cold mobile home. It is late autumn and
a man, his gloved hands deep in the pockets of a ...
Finally, a Democrat Worth ...
President Barack Obama blew a kiss to Apple in the State of the Union speech, praising the entrepreneurial spirit of its founder, the late Steve Jobs, as the cameras panned to his widow in the audience.
Obama’s timing couldn’t be weirder. In the last month, App...
Washington DC
The Pakistani military leadership’s response to the U.S. report on its helicopter attack on two Pakistani border posts Nov. 26 assailed the credibility of the investigation by Air Force Brig. Gen. Steven Clark and expressed doubt that t...
Polio forever seared two images in my mind. That may account for my reaction to the story in the January 17th New York Times, “After Years of Decline, Polio Cases in Afghanistan Triple in a Year”.
There are other images, of lines of school...
Three years ago this Friday (Jan. 27), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andy Stern declared war on one-quarter of his California membership. SEIU headquarters in Washington dispatched an army of paid staffers to seize the Oakland office of United Hea...
French researchers have confirmed that childhood leukemia rates are shockingly elevated among children living near nuclear power reactors.
The “International Journal of Cancer” has published in January a scientific study establishing a clear correlation between...
Private equity firms recruit investors—pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, wealthy individuals—for an investment fund. The ...
I made a mistake.
An article I wrote recently for CounterPunch about the Pennsylvania prison system’s latest punitive assault on now ex-death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal (unnecessarily continuing his solitary confinement) contained a factual misstatement.
M...
The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it’s chilling to see just how few hits the President takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military.
Speaking of the troo...
Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadi...
We’ve all heard of copyrighted works falling into the public domain, but can public-domain works constitutionally be pulled out of the public domain, and placed under the protection of the copyright law?
That was the question resolved by the Supreme Court’s Jan...
Rubio Under Water
...
Reasons abound to be turned off by the New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof. He is too pleased with himself and demonstrates no capacity for self-reflection. He is too earnest. He claims to be in the vanguard of journalism because he tweets. He is said to b...
The U.S. war in Afghanistan is testing so much futuristic detect and destroy weaponry that it can be called the most advanced all-seeing invasion in military history. From blanket satellite surveillance to soldiers’ infra-red vision to the remotely guided photographing,...
The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy. Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the ...
A federal judge has told the people of Vermont that a solemn contract between them and the reactor owner Entergy need not be honored.
The fight will almost certainly now go to the US Supreme Court. At stake is not only the future of atomic power, but the legitimacy o...
“The Egyptian voices will be heard, and if not heard, it will be only because the blood already shed has not been enough…”
With these words, Saad Zaghloul, one of 20th century Egypt’s most celebrated nati...
“It’s not that I’m a good debater. It’s that I articulate the deepest-felt values of the American people,” announced the victorious Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. Republican voters [only 2% were African Americans] saw his tough, angry, ra...
Those still wondering why the Obama Administration surrendered so quickly on the drive for stimulus and joined the deficit reduction crusade, got the smoking gun in an ...
As Noam Chomsky has often cautioned, when considering foreign relations, and especially military intervention, states should always heed the primary Hippocratic oath – “First, do no harm.” The U.S. has certainly disregarded this admonition with reckless abandon ...
In light of the economic crisis and the collapse of dreams of economic security for millions of Americans, it is worth looking back at the “Ownership Society” that helped trigger the housing boom, then bust. This is along the same lines as President Obama̵...
The Iraq war may be over, at least for US troops, but the cover-up of the atrocities committed there by American forces goes on, even in retrospectives about the war. A prime example is reporting on the destroyed city of Fallujah, where some of the heaviest fighting of th...