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 July 2012
Why do we get sick and how do we get well were the enormously complex and controversial questions explored by a gathering of labor and community activists, health policy experts and academics attending a one-day conference at the University of California Berkeley on July ...
Savage: not domesticated or cultivated; wild.
In June and July the war on drugs proceeded apace as DEA agents and Honduran military goons knocked off some Miskitu people in Honduras – suspects supposedly running...
It has begun. Oscar-winning Danny Boyle is one of the artistic gatekeepers who was commissioned to deal with the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, and was given £27m to do it. There was Mary Poppins, the Red Arrows, there was the Tour de France winner Bradley ...
Oceans on Acid
...
In one of his final columns for CounterPunch (July 6-8, 2012), Alexander Cockburn gently took to task those of us, himself included, who went overboard investing hope in the Occupy movements and other spontaneous domestic uprisings of 2011. Too many of us...
Last week’s dismal “data dump” has ended all talk of a strong recovery in the US. Retail sales, factory output, jobless claims, consumer confidence, business investment and existing home sales are all down sharply indicating that the US economy is decele...
“HE TALKS Zionism,” used to be a very derogatory comment when I was young. It meant that some elderly functionary had come to waste our time with a boring speech consisting largely of empty phrases.
That was before the foundation of the State of Israel. Since t...
One wonders what Syrians are thinking as “rebels” vowing to “free Syria” take the country down the same road to destruction as “rebels” in Libya. Libya, under Gaddafi a well run country whose oil revenues were shared with the Libyan people instead of monopoliz...
The election season is upon us and along with it comes the standard Republican claims to be up against a powerful Democratic Party machine backed by the awesome clout of the “union bosses” of American labor. We have been told this endlessly by pundits on the reactio...
When we think of “resistance,” what mostly comes to mind is guerrilla warfare: Vietnamese closing in on the besieged French at Dien Bien Phu; Angolans ambushing Portuguese troops outside of Luanda; Salvadorans waging a war of attrition against their military oligarchy...
Following U.S news media coverage of the Burgas, Bulgaria bombing, one would conclude that the Hezbollah provenance of the attack can be determined from recent alleged Hezbollah terrorist plotting against Israelis in Cyprus and elsewhere. The New York Times quotes anonymo...
The name sounds like it could be the moniker of a really bad hombre – the arrogant, cold-hearted, bandolier clad bandito in a Spaghetti Western who rides down from the mountains with his grizzled gang to terrorize the humble villagers, demanding their meager harvest...
Mitt Romney recently visited a successful White-owned trucking company in the predominately Black Roxbury section of Boston to hype his repeated lie that President Obama said, “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. . . . Somebody else made that happe...
Prejudice, n. a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
It’s not 1991 in the Boy Scouts of America. That was the year that the Girl Scouts issued...
Beirut
From this observers experience in Lebanon there is only one cosmic like event that is nearly as predicable from Ramlet al Baida beach in Beirut, near Shatila Palestinian refugee camp, than the sun coming up like thunder out of Syria across the easte...
Until a few days before she died, 98-year old Dr. Lakshmi Sahgal left her home at 9am for her clinic, located in a working class district of Kanpur (India). She opened her doors of this clinic for the past sixty years, providing reliable and cheery medical care to her pat...
This Ramadan is a historic one, celebrating the triumph of the political vision of Egypt’s legendary Muslim Brotherhood (MB): to take inspiration from the Koran to regenerate Egyptian society. Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s socialist vision lies in ruins, dismantled in ...
London resident Zita Holbourne plans to participate in the Friday July 27th Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games held at the gleaming new stadium located not far from her community of Newham.
However, Holbourne, a trade union activist and poet, is not partici...
It was the largest mass environmental civil disobedience in a generation.
Over 1200 were arrested over a two week period after writer Bill McKibben had called for urgent action to pressure President Obama to deny the permits for the Keystone XL pipeline. McKibben r...
Life is full of surprises. Even though many of us were in favor of it for reasons of health and hygiene, it was nonetheless a surprise how swiftly and irrevocably the ban against smoking tobacco went into effect. On Monday, we were all smoking in our homes and offices...
I had a summer job once that involved watering pot plants twice a day. One of a few different positions I held in the industry during the 1980s, it paid the least and smelled the best. The grow area was in the woods of the Pacific Northwest and our operation was but o...
I told Laura and Erma that the trip to Istanbul was symbolic for me. I started referring to it as: Istanbul: Life After Death. It would signify a change—the realization that my husband wasn’t going to walk miraculously into the apartment and an acceptance that a rec...
Often, the world…forever unfolding, recombining, morphing, dying and transforming…changes before the mind can grasp the implications of the ongoing alterations. This is the basis of nostalgia, for memory freezes the world like an insect encased in amber.
Maturi...
Tito Gerassi lived one of the great lives of the 20th century. John Gerassi – called Tito by his friends well before that other Tito, the former head of State of united Yugoslavia took the name as well, died last night in a New York hospital. His daughters from two ...
He’s back! Or at least he would be if he got the chance. The Right Honorable Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of Great Britain is in London for the Olympics and hinting that he wouldn’t mind another crack at the job.
As if he didn’t have enough on his plat...