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
According to Science Times[1], the Tues...
Once again Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir waved his walking stick in the air. Once again he spoke of splendid victories over his enemies as thousands of jubilant supporters danced and cheered. But this time around the stakes are too high.
An all out war against...
In these days of a dying, raving and hallucinating empire, its best known poet, and a master at being anti-war, is accepting a Presidential Freedom Award from a cynical if affable, still, to many people, master of war. What is Dylan thinking? He and Obama are no strangers...
Anti-capitalist protests in Union Square brutally attacked by police. Economic hardship among the workers. Ostentatious expenditure by the wealthy. This scenario sounds like the news headlines of the past couple of years, yet the...
Last week, I picked up Cindy Sheehan at her hotel near Baltimore Washington International Airport, and we drove to the Cuban Interests Section in D.C. for lunch. This was just one event among many during which international representatives gathered on behalf of the Cuban ...
May 1st is May Day, the international workers’ holiday honoring the labor movement. May Day is celebrated in at least 80 countries worldwide, from Argentina to Vietnam, but not in the United States. Here, our “Labor Day” was carefully put into September – by Presi...
One commentator observed that he seemed like a potentate disputing an arrangement of borders and obligations. Others noted that he was back to his calculating best, having abandoned his previously doddering manner after the closure of The News of the World. ...
Except for Clarence Thomas, things are not nearly as bleak as commentators would have had us believe after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ...
If you work in history you are an historian, if you work in archive you are an archivist and if you write for a newspaper you are a journalist, in the rest of the world but not here in Italy.
If you want become a journalist, in Italy, it is complicated. The ODJ (or...
Despite a generation of sensitivity trainings and multicultural studies, an astonishing number of people still feel emboldened to express their misbegotten bigotry in very public arenas. Cops and vigilantes alike are caught on tape throwing down racial slurs before they...
The setting for Kristin Ómarsdóttir’s Children in Reindeer Woods is a forest in the mi...
Every two years Berlin hosts one of the most imaginatively conceived, brilliantly executed, and consistently entertaining early music festivals in the world. Founded in 2002, this international biennale bursts not only with music, but also with ideas. The often-vexed rela...
In the Woods
by ROBERT A. DAVIES
In bed last night I smelled like firs
unmistakably
and was in Timber again
no other task than watching.
Again I was looking for beaver....
The Story of a Chernobyl Liquidator
...
Americans might remember that when the first mad cow was confirmed in the United States in December, 2003, it was major news. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been petitioned for years by lawyers from far...
Eyewitness accounts and video footage shown in a PBS documentary last week provide shocking proof that U.S. federal agents brutally beat Anastasio Hernández Rojas, tased him five times, and ultimately killed him—this while he lay on the ground with his arms handcuffed ...
In late March, Hillary Clinton traveled to Riyadh, the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There she met with King Abdullah, the primus inter pares of the Arabian Peninsula. Shortly afterwards, she inaugurated the US-GCC Strategic Cooperation Forum. The GCC i...
A little over a month ago, back on March 19, at 3:00 in the morning, the Limerick Nuclear Power Station, which runs two aging GE nuclear reactors along the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia, had a...
On April 22, 1968, the National Welfare Rights Organization held a vigil on Capitol Hill in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been murdered eighteen days earlier. This was to have been the day that King presented the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign to Co...
The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi’s administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, ...
It’s been a remarkable week in corporate crime.
And it’s only Wednesday.
This week drives home the reality – corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined.
Once again, it’s not the black kid with the hood o...
If you try to defend or make excuses for the actions of Obama’s Secret Service agents in Colombia (consorting with prostitutes), you’re probably going to come off as a pig or male chauvinist. That said, unless these agents’ actions constituted dereliction of duty ...
In an era of defeat and decline for the labor movement, path breaking organizing victories are rare. Union activity in these times is more likely to revolve around defensive battles than conquering new territory or reclaiming ground that was lost decades ago.
Earli...
I recently read Wendi Adelson’s book on human trafficking This is Our Story, and ...
Free Salameh Kaileh!
...