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
In Honduras there is almost no middle class. Either you are wealthy and politically connected, or you make ends meet with agricultural work, probably on a banana plantation or coffee finca. You work, your children work, and the lack of social mobility means you will proba...
Would a young Martin Luther King Jr. be able to get a job in America today? Would one of the thousands who went to jail in support of Nelson Mandela? Or the brilliant kids at the center of Occupy Wall Street? Unless we begin to enforce the Civil Rights Act, m...
For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name ...
At the end of March, Keith Olbermann was terminated from his position as the anchor of “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” and Chief News Officer at Current TV. A few days later, on April 3, Keith appeared on David Letterman’s “The Late Show,” where he talked abo...
I am a late-comer to the case of the Cuban Five. I stumbled on the story a few years ago while researching a novel—a love story—set partly in Cuba.
During a trip to Havana in the spring of 2009, I struck up a friendship with a guide who was showing me the city ...
Political commentator Fareed Zakaria, in a recent Time magazine article entitled ”A Region at War with Its History,” ponders the question, “Why does it seem that democracy has such a hard time taking root in the Arab world?”
For...
Patrick Seale’s 1965 classic, The Struggle for Syria, describes the battle for control ...
The first round of nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 countries – the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany – concluded in Istanbul with a rare expression of optimism and satisfaction by both sides. The two sides agreed to resume t...
Inside and outside of Wells Fargo’s annual meeting in San Francisco yesterday, thousands of angry protesters decried the bank’s leading role in the loss of millions of American homes to foreclosure.
If you want to know why the protesters are so angry, consider ...
In a wake-up call to corporate boards across the United States, Citigroup’s shareholders recently took advantage of the new “say-on-pay” provisions of the Dodd-Frank law to vote down CEO Vikram Pandit’s $15 million pay package. Shareholders have be...
Wendell Berry: Jefferson Lecture
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In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over. After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese offi...
Democratic elections in the NATO member states serve one clear purpose. They contribute to the self-satisfaction concerning “our values” needed to justify military intervention in the imperfect internal affairs of other countries. But do the citizens really decide p...
How, exactly, could a right-wing terrorist convince liberals he was, in fact, a right-wing terrorist?
It’s a question Anders Breivik no doubt ponders.
Remember, before embarking on his murderous mission, Breivik compiled and distributed a lengthy manifesto...
August 2011’s 350.org/BillMcKibben-lead ...
Mexico City
Let’s all praise democracy! Until twelve years ago, Mexicans had to bite their collective tongue while each crooked Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) president appointed his successor via the “dedazo” – or big finger-point. But th...
The aircraft carrier Enterprise has moved into the Persian Gulf, although it’s an antique, slow-moving target and a potential lightening rod for war on Iran. As a retired Navy man told me last month, “A couple of torpedoes would stagger the thing, and then ...
For the first time in the Fifth republic, an incumbent president was beaten into second place in a first round marked by a solid turnout (80.16%). Nicolas Sarkozy has qualified for the second round, but François Hollande is on course to become the next French president....
One of the issues driving protesters participating in the April 24, 2012 Occupy The Justice Department demonstration is an issue that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder knows well: prosecutorial misconduct.
Holder knows this misconduct issue well because he has crit...
Just before last weekend’s meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) board in Washington, South Africa’s Finance Minister dropped us an obscure news item: “Gordhan concerned about rand volatility”(Reuters, April 16).
Hid...
If the the international press is to be believed, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is a dictator, a menace to the region and is driving his country to the ground. If that is so, why do his people vote for him in landslide numbers? Why does he have an enormous follo...
39 Ways to Limit Free Speech
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Late last week Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a piece on his NY Times blog that history will view as the best evidence to appear in at least several decades of the utter irrelevance of mainstream economics. The piece purport...
On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax m...