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 June 2012
Ecuador.
When I was an activist in the anti-Vietnam war movement and a budding civil liberties attorney, I remember getting really stumped by the following: Only congress has the power to declare war. Wow, I thought. While civil libertarians and conserva...
The prevailing opinion concerning the release of the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the constitutionality of Obama’s health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, was that the court’s upholding of the law would amount to a powerful victory for Obama. The reas...
Earlier this month, the D.C. Court of Appeals—the highest court in the District of Columbia, and thus D.C.’s equivalent of a state supreme court—...
JERUSALEM.
The organizers of Israel’s J14 movement demand social justice. Outraged by the increasing concentration of wealth and the soaring cost of living, many Israelis have stood up and called for cheaper housing, food, education, and taxes, among oth...
A garden table and two chairs decorate the sidewalk in front of one of the clothing stores here in the center of the Kingdom of Cross Purposes. Annie, who worked in this shop, often sat outside, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. Her little dog hovered nearby. I ...
For months the debate has raged in Vermont over the possible replacement by the Air Force of the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16 fighter jets with state-of-the-art F-35 jets. Not only will the controversial new fighters cost $115 million a piece, but th...
Almost exactly ten years ago, in June of 2002, my wife and I were driving through Colorado, on our way from Los Angeles to New York City. In the early afternoon, while paused to tank-up our Toyota Corolla, at a massive convenience store/self-service gas island that boaste...
The subject this hour is my blog. In addition to someone being obsessed with the search term “Windy Cooler and divorc...
In Passage of Tears, twenty-nine-year-old Djibril (or “Djib” in the shortened version)...
Copenhagen
With alcohol, song, and fire, the celebration of Midsummer in Scandinavia tries to ward off the melancholy that can haunt the occasion. The beauty of the seemingly endless twilight marks a climax—the longest day of the year, but also an end. F...
Moment of Silence
by JARED CARTER
We went back to the old fieldhouse.
The band still plays the National Anthem
before the tip-off, but no Baptist minister
takes the mike to call for a moment of silence –...
Things You Could Buy Instead of Health Insurance
...
We live in new times. For about thirty years American capitalism featured a small but not insignificant concession to social democracy, what we are taught to call “the welfare state”, in which government contributed to the provision of a degree of material security wh...
It was a brilliant move by far Right (but oh so likable) Chief Justice Roberts to side with the Dem-appointed Justices and uphold ObamaCare. After all, this is a massive victory for corporate power, forcing citizens to buy an expensive insurance product that won’t...
On June 26th, 2012 the Wal-Mart PR team drove home the point of their plans to open a new store in Chinatown (Los Angeles) with a special cultural touch, a traditional Lion Dance, using dancers from the East Wind Youth Foundation, to ward off bad luck because o...
“PTSD is going to color everything you write,” came the warning from a stepmother of a Marine, a woman who keeps track of such things. That was in 2005, when post-traumatic stress disorder, a.k.a. PTSD, wasn’t getting much attention, but soon it was pr...
Anita Colon was crying when she received the telephone call, but the caller knew hers were tears of joy.
The caller was her brother dialing her from a prison in Pennsylvania, where he is one of 480 persons serving a life-without-parole sentence for a crime ending i...
The leaders of France and Germany may have their differences on the big question of the day — stimulus versus austerity. But they do agree on one thing — taxing financial transactions.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was hot on the idea of a sma...
Now that it’s painfully clear the U.S. is on a downward slide, the only question worth asking is when, precisely, did everything start to fall apart. At what point in time did the pendulum begin swinging the other way? Accordingly, history buffs, philosophers, and a...
In his penultimate novella, “Worstward Ho” (1983), Samuel Beckett writes
“...
Days before the wide release of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the filmmakers returned to Montegut to sho...
If Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio are cheering and excited about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on Arizona’s SB 1070, then you know something is wrong. And when both promise that there will be no racial profiling, that’s akin to the...
The Art of Getting Money
...
What was that Turkish F-4 Phantom II up to when the Syrians shot it down?
Ankara said the plane strayed into Syrian airspace, but quickly left and was over international waters when it was attacked, a simple case of carelessness on the part of the Turkish pilot tha...
“Then after that came us — stage six. That’s the end of the Darwinian era, when cultural evolution replaces biological evolution as the main driving force. “Cultural” means that the big changes in living conditions are driven by h...