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 May 2012
The rule of law is rapidly breaking down at the top levels of our government. As officers of the court, we have sworn to “support the Constitution,” which clearly implies an affirmative commitment on our part.
Take the administrations of George W. Bush and Bara...
In the war fever being ramped up against Syria, there is broad public indignation over the massacre of more than 100 civilians in the town of Houla last weekend.
Would that the U.S. diplomatic corps and the commercial press were equally outraged over our own milita...
On May 20 I was arrested for yelling “liar” and “warmonger” at Tony Blair as he spoke to the graduating one percenters at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, 50 miles from my Bangor home. As the cops led me away, before they arrested me, I calmly led fully 4-6 o...
Juan Cole jumped the gun a bit by attributing the hund...
For seven years, Dr. Ed Weisbart was the medical director at Express Scripts.
That would be medical director for the largest pharmacy benefit manager in the United States.
Express Scripts fills prescriptions for one in three Americans.
Are you a membe...
Leading up to the NATO Conference in Chicago last Friday, the U.S. was hopeful that President Zardari of Pakistan would announce the reopening of U.S. military supply routes in Pakistan, according to an article published in the Guardian of London on May 21, but their hope...
America today lives with a cultivated sense of victimhood. That is the legacy of 9/11. It fills us with anxieties. It warps our self-image. It distorts our foreign relations. It is self-perpetuating. Yet we need it. Too many benefit – politically or materially ...
In an extraordinary article in Tuesday’s New York Times, “S...
Mexico City.
You can blame it on those damn students. Ever since over a hundred of them at a private university, the Iberoamericana in Mexico City, ran presidential frontrunner Enrique Peña Nieto off campus with cries of “Coward!” and “Get out!” o...
At a point in the election season when politicians of the same party tend to sweep their differences under the rug, two senior Democrats have sent a strong letter to the Obama administration on a subject unknown to most American voters.
This is the issue of capital...
The Paris Review and the CIA
...
When all else fails, Obama apologists conjure up what FDR is supposed to have said to some of his liberal supporters: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” In the early days of the Obama presidency, this was a call to action. It quickly degenerat...
Acknowledging the alarming polarization and gridlock of Congress, and the startling, rightward shift of the political spectrum, you regularly hear people declare that there is no way we could get something as ambitious as OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act) passed t...
This morning sun is shining. The sea is calm and blue, off the mole of Cefalu; an ancient port on the northern coast of Sicily.
The summer throngs and heat have yet to arrive in a region that features in the story of Western civilization. Long before Homer and Odys...
Kabul.
One thing true we can say about war is that truth is its greatest casualty.
I am a volunteer teacher. Four years ago I responded to a call from then candidate Barack Obama for a new kind of soldier to wage peace, one without a uniform, withou...
Because humanity has taken so avidly to the burning of fossil hydrocarbon deposits for the heat and energy to drive its industrialized way of life, an excessive amount of carbon dioxide gas has been exhausted into the atmosphere, especially during the 20th century. The at...
The expulsion of diplomats always looks like a weedy response to an atrocity, particularly one as outrageous as the murder of children at Houla. Unsurprisingly, news reports about kicking out the diplomats yesterday often concluded mournfully that the move wouldn’...
I pick up the phone at my office at the University of Arizona and learn that I have three recorded messages waiting for me. The first one begins with the caller claiming to be half White and half Native American, addressing me as an “(expletive) Mexican” and a...
Who could have ever imagined that tiny Vermont, the home of “socialist” Bernie Sanders and once considered to be the most left-leaning state in the United States, would now find itself under the political control of five hard-core military superhawks committed to tran...
Marian Price has been imprisoned in Northern Ireland for more than a year on the basis of secret evidence neither she nor her lawyers have been allowed to see. She is effectively interned without a trial, sentence, or release date. Unless the courts intervene, she will ...
The UN announced its budget for feeding the over one million Somali refugees under its care for the next year and have allocated less than 10 cents a day to do so.
Anthony Lake, once nominated to head the CIA, now UNICEF supremo, held a press conference in April 20...
Doc Watson, 1923 – 2012
...
“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensi...
The Egyptian people are still in shock ever since the announcement of the results of the presidential elections late last week. They refuse to accept an outcome that sees Gen. Ahmad Shafiq, the last Prime Minister of deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak, having received more th...