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 March 2012
I’d say the chances of George Zimmerman spending time behind bars for killing Trayvon Martin are about the same as Sergeant Robert Bales doing time for killing those 16 Afghan villagers the night of March 11. Zero.
Like most things that happen in America these da...
I don’t know Temple University photojournalism major Ian Van Kuyk, despite his enrollment in Temple’s Journalism Department, where I teach.
...
MARWAN BARGHOUTI has spoken up. After a long silence, he has sent a message from prison.
In Israeli ears, this message does not sound pleasant. But for Palestinians, and for Arabs in general, it makes sense.
His message may well become the new program of the...
In ancient Greece, an “apology” was a formal speech presented by a defendant in a legal proceeding; thus Plato recounted Socrates’ defense against charges of impiety and corrupting the youth in a dialogue called “The Apology.” Early Christian writers used the ...
Tel Aviv
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling Israelis that Israel can attack Iran with minimal civilian Israeli casualties as a result of retaliation, and that reassuring message appears to have headed off any widespread Is...
London
George Galloway’s stunning electoral triumph in the Bradford by-election on Thursday 29th March has shaken the petrified world of English politics. It was unexpected and for that reason the Respect campaign was treated by much of the m...
The governments of the five large countries of the Global South, the BRICS states, met in New Delhi this week for their fourth summit. These five countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, are home to forty per cent of the world’s peoples, and their share...
The hysteria that surrounds wolf management in the Rockies has clouded rational discussion. Wolves are hardly a threat to either hunting opportunity or the livestock industry.
ELK NUMBERS ABOVE OBJECTIVES
For instance, the Wyoming Fish and Game reports: ...
It has always been difficult to convince Anglo-Americans that they should know more about Latinos. It did not seem to matter to Anglos that their ignorance spawned stereotypes that damaged Mexican American children.
Even after World War II and the Korean Wars wh...
Western media has focused attention on Sgt. Robert Bales’ background. He allegedly murdered 16 Afghan civilians, 9 of them children, near Kandahar. After the bloodbath, Bales returned to his base and confessed.
The media delved into Bales’ childhood, his marria...
On Tuesday in “Great Decisions,” I co-taught the class whose topic was “Exit from Afghanistan and Iraq.” Abandoning the textbook, I wanted current news. So much has happened in the past month that I decided to print, print, print articles more relevant to the ...
“Darwin’s theory, like all other attempts to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural.”
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, Evolution and Permanence of Type (1874)
It’s time for an update on the pr...
This year, 2012, marks the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprising, when English textile workers smashed looms with hammers. Few words in the English language invoke such perjorative connotation as Luddite. It signifies the machine breaker, someone who op...
We mourn Trayvon Martin, the young African American who, armed only with candy and a soft drink, was shot dead for the offense of “walking while black.”
George Zimmerman, the vigilante who shot him, has not been arrested, apparently pr...
One Tendulkar makes the big scores. The other wrecks the averages. The Planning Commission clearly prefers Suresh to Sachin. Using Professor Tendulkar’s methodology, it declares that there’s been another massive fall in poverty. Yes, another (‘more dramatic in the r...
When I was in junior high back in 1967-68, many of my Saturday afternoons were spent at the outdoor basketball courts across the highway from my house. These courts were where I learned about many things besides basketball, which I was never very good at. Sex, beer an...
There are ten million undocumented migrants in the United States who risk deportation if apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE only has ...
Science has a problem with morality, but will create a robot with a conscience. Is there a difference between insecure theism and insecure science? Neither accepts an element of doubt – doubting of its completeness in isolation to all else.
One can accept such ri...
If you have never heard of Ira Aldridge—“the most visible black man in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century”—his biography, by Bernth Lindfors, will come to you as a revelation. How can that be? Aldridge, who was African American, left the United Sta...
Berlin
It’s not only dangerous to have the headphones on or the earbuds in when on the bike; I want to hear what’s going on, whether it’s the blackbirds whistling in the chestnut trees or the metrobus bearing down on my back tire.
Helmet on ...
Where Sleep Lives
by PAUL LOJESKI
On waking, the feeling
of climbing rapidly
from deep beneath
the ground, of coming
up and up against my
will rushed upon me...
Footloose Montana
...
Dear Mr. Trumka,
You have come to your leadership position of our country’s labor federation of unions with 13 million members the hard way. Starting by working in the coal mines, then becoming a lawyer, heading the United Mine Workers, then becoming the Secretar...
Cairo
It is a gun battle people in the Shubra district in central Cairo still talk about six months after it happened. In a dispute over a piece of land he had seized amid the small shops and densely crowded streets, Mohammed Shaban, who had escaped from p...
It’s about time Congress focuses attention on jobs for Wall Street, and it appears they are going overboard to help in the new JOBS Act that recently passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 380-to-41. After all, last year Wall Street cash bonuses fell 14% to $1...