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 February 2012
On 24 February, the Scientific American carried a revealing blog by John Horgan entitled, ...
Americans are living on borrowed time, economically. Like air conditioners, copper pipes and aluminum siding of a foreclosed home, what remains of our prosperity will be violently stripped away. There is no economic recovery because the foundations for such are simply not...
It is good luck for Good Men that sex slavery has been identified as a terrible new phenomenon requiring extraordinary actions. In the chivalric tradition, to rescue a damsel in distress ranked high as a way knights errant could prove themselves, along with slaying dragon...
I just received an object lesson into how easily we Americans are able to compartmentalize our principles and our sense of basic human decency.
My father, David Lindorff Sr., who is 89, recently took a bad fall, hitting the back of his head on the bedpost and suffe...
On February 21, to great media fanfare, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed the 13,000 mark for the first time since the 2008 collapse. Appearing on NBC’s Today Show the following morning, Jim “Bear Sterns is not in trouble” Cramer jubilantly pro...
HIGH NOON is a 1952 morality play about people deciding whether or not to stand up to the forces of corruption and criminality. Scenes from it often come to mind, since I’ve repeatedly seen people around me facing up to analogous situations here in Oakland, at the...
The stumbling of the Australian Labor Party into a realm of dark psychosis is being affirmed on an hourly basis. With the party being torn apart in true civil war fashion (the enemy, in such wars, is always within the household), the blood is flowing onto the streets. ...
Surely Rick Santorum is the most fanatical Christian to run for the Republican nomination in the modern era, maybe any era. Next to him Pat Robertson, billionaire founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, who ran for the nomination in 1988, has the tolerant, glassy-e...
A PALESTINIAN village, somewhere in the West Bank.
In the middle of the night, banging on the door and shouts in Arabic: “Israeli army. Open up!”
Somebody – most often the mother – opens the door. The heavily armed soldiers rush in and drag the v...
Wars are fought because some people decide it is in their interests to fight them. World War I was not started over the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination, nor was it triggered by the alliance system. An “incident” may set the stage for war, but no one keeps shootin...
On September 11, 1973 (28 years before the World Trade Center-Pentagon attack), General Augusto Pinochet, leading a gang of treasonous officers, ordered Chilean air force jets to fire missiles at the Presidential Palace. By the end of the day Pinochet had seized power in ...
James Abourezk represented South Dakota in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1971 to 1973 and in the U.S. Senate from 1973 to 1979. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including ...
Anthony Shadid, called the “most gifted foreign correspondent in a generation” by his then Washington Post colleague, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (author of the widely heralded book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City”), didn’t really need a byline. ...
Maria Svoronou has three jobs and was finishing a twelve hour day as euro zone leaders were finalizing Greece’s rescue package in Brussels. For all her hard work, she earns only Eur 870 a month and says that “if the situation gets any worse, I won’t be able to survi...
Political strategy in the West operates on contrived dualisms where an “in” group argues of the dangers that an out group poses and the “out” group argues that life under the in group is an ongoing disaster that will only end when the out group replaces the in gro...
Barack Obama is coming to the town where I live. Like most other towns he will visit this election year, the state this town is in voted for Mr. Obama in 2008. It is a state full of Democrats and liberals. Many of those Democ...
There are so many areas of conventional democratic governance being challenged or eliminated by the Stephen Harper wrecking crew it is hard to keep up. Those searching for a line in the sand that even this government won’t cross still haven’t found it. So far, it seem...
Last Fall, George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr reported on the ...
Marie Colvin left Beirut on Valentine’s Day on a mission to illegally enter Syria from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley en route to Homs, Syria. Her clear intention was to document the conditions of the civilian population in Homs who had been under heavy attack for the pre...
Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s much-publicized visit to Ciudad Juarez on the US border last week – the proverbial “scene of the crime” – was as well-timed as it was cynical. With his National Action Party (PAN) facing a tough re-election campaign ahead of J...
Throughout the history of Mexican Americans, education has been considered the stairway to the middle-class. Education meant security and basics such as health insurance. This heaven meant better jobs and a small house or two for old age.
As with the European immig...
We can phase out the three poisons – nuclear, coal and oil – in twenty-five years.
And replace them with solar, wind and energy efficiency.
...
“When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the futu...