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 April 2012
A CounterPunch Exclusive
Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lecture...
Have housing prices hit bottom?
Many analysts are saying, “Yes”.
Economist Bill McBride is one of the yea-sayers. Bill runs Calculated Risk, the Number 1 economics’s blog on the Internet. Here’s what McBride said in a post on Febr...
Last week George Zimmerman joined an elite circle that includes Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Martha Stewart, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn-media figures who owe their freedom to electronic monitoring. For the rich and famous (as well as those who can raise $200,000 onlin...
My friend, who’s a Nigerian academic, says, as we’re tootling around Calabar, “That’s where we keep Charles Taylor.”
“Hey, I taught his daughter a couple of years ago at American University. Let’s go over there and see if we can meet him.” The vill...
In Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’s opening, a voice intones, “In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous.” This television franchise has since 1991 reified the notion that sexual expe...
On April 19, India tested its first inter-continental ballistic missile, named Agni-V, and joined the select group of nations possessing both nuclear weapons and a delivery system capable of hitting targets across continents. Only a few days before, nuclear capable North ...
The most demolishing article I have seen nowadays about Latin America was written by Renán Vega Cantor, full professor at the National Pedagogical University of Bogotá, which was published three days ago by the website ‘Rebelión’ under the title “Eco...
“Pitiless glacial rain was falling in Bogota” on April 23, one observer said. Then, “as if by magic, that mute, lugubrious world fell apart as marchers rumbling by brought color, happiness, fraternal embrace, ...
1.
I have never had the patience for long-winded novels, and much less for memoirs, but I am glad I persuaded myself to read Imran Khan’s ...
Greed, insecurity and just plain old “I got mine, screw you” bullshit is making itself more and more apparent in Montana when it comes to fly fishing. The situation often involves big-money yahoos locking up land access to prime waters by purchasing land leases from r...
At the annual Wells Fargo Shareholders’ meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday April 24, 2012, at least 150 “shareholders” were denied their lawful right to attend by means of the use of police force and barricades. True, none of them were big shareholders and ...
So there I was hearing nothing but this wicked whirring Bandit Model Whole Tree Chipper rammed up against a load of Bibles, books, old newspapers, and brown-paper-covered magazines piled high as the Davis Mountains being scooped up and fed to the chipper by a Cat Ultra Hi...
Flaws in the System
...
Watch Europe tip left and right as voters rise in fury against the austerity menu that’s been bringing them to utter ruin. In Holland, the right-wing Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders brought down the governing coalition on Monday bellowing his defiance for the ̶...
The eurozone is slipping into a recession that could have been avoided. Had policymakers provided fiscal support for stricken countries in the South and guarantees on their government bonds, (as the USG does for US Treasuries) then their economies could have continued t...
I AM an Optimist. Period.
No ifs. No buts. No perhapses.
Maybe it’s genetic. My father was an optimist. Even when, at the age of 45, he had to flee his native Germany to a primitive little country in the Middle East, his spirits remained high. Though he ...
Dedicated to the students, young and old, of Southeastern Michigan and Northwestern Ohio
Dracula
On May Day sometime in the 1890s, an ordinary Englishman boarded a train in Mun...
The statistics are chilling. In a country where workers have no real right to organize a union, they face an ever falling standard of living. The workers’ attempts to organize independent unions are faced with repression – 25% of the companies illegally fire w...
The media regularly cover awards for their reporters, editors and producers. They regularly cover award ceremonies for movie stars, athletes, and business leaders. But they regularly ignore the far more important awards for people who ethically blow the whistle on corrupt...
Something is happening in Canada that seems, in the context of a majority Harper government, counter-intuitive. Harper continues implementing his right-wing revolution by fiat, and Preston Manning’s “democracy” institute says Canadians actually want “less” gover...
It was nearly half a century ago that Noam Chomsky, in his book “American Power and the New Mandarins...
On Tuesday, the Senate voted down a Republican resolution that would have blocked the National Labor Relations Board’s new election rule, the latest in a series of recent GOP efforts to undermine the board. Now, attention has returned to the real scandal at the board &#...
It was a cold January day in 2011 when I had last seen the Hotel Lafayette, the grand French Renaissance Revival styled brick that sits on the corner of Washington and Clinton Streets in downtown Buffalo, New York’s Lafayette Square. Built between 1901 and 1904, it was ...
“I watched Obama closely at the famous ‘summit gathering.’ Fatigue sometimes overcame him, he involuntarily closed his eyes and occasionally slept with his eyes open.”
- Fidel Castro [1]
The Sixth Summit of ...
Fidel Castro scored one big political victory last week, without speaking or even leaving his house – and one sort of amusing little win. By a lopsided score at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Cartagena, Fidel beat President Obama 31-2. The USA and Canada still wa...