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 August 2012
Sixty-Seven years after the end of World War II, a team of researchers and cameramen from the Anne Frank House in Holland showed up at the Capitol Lakes retirement center in Madison, Wisconsin to interview my father-in-law, Fritz Loewenstein. Fritz is the only known perso...
The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the sam...
A sort of joke making the rounds a few years back had (billionaire) Bill Gates walking into a working class bar. The joke was that the moment he did everyone in the bar on average became a billionaire. Understand—he didn’t give away any money or, other than possibly o...
You’re a lot poorer than you thought you were.
According to a report by Sentier Research “real median annual household income… has fallen by 4.8 percent since the ‘economic recovery’ began in June 2009.”
That’s worse...
Cheri Honkala was born into poverty in Minneapolis in 1963. For the past twenty-five years she has served as national director of the ...
Avigdor Lieberman has a restless nature. From time to time he has to do something, anything.
As Minister of Foreign Affairs he should be doing something about, well, foreign affairs. Trouble is, Israel’s foreign affairs are managed by others.
The most impo...
An Aug. 23 segment on NPR’s Morning Edition about the 2012 drought touched my sentimental side when a Kentucky farmer’s voice quivered while he spoke to correspondent David Schaper. “My wife and I just look at each other every night, and we look at our c...
With Labor Day weekend approaching, it’s appropriate to take a moment and consider the status of the American worker. Given the unemployment figures, the devastating export of American jobs to foreign countries, and, accordingly, the paucity of full-time jobs that off...
Jean Bricmont teaches physics at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He is author of ...
Every four years this happens to me again. My phone stops ringing, my emails aren’t returned, my liberal friends avert their gaze if we chance upon the same aisle at Safeway.
Was it something I said? Did I hog the mushroom dip and the Cote du Rhone at their l...
A season has passed since I have checked in with you. My lack of communing is in part because I have been writing. I finished my first novel, called Objects, and am now working with a translator to submit a Spanish rendition to Bolivian publisher Plural Editores....
Two weeks ago an earthquake in northwest Iran killed 300, injured 3000 and affected 300,000 more people yet Canadians have raised relatively little for the victims. The reasons include a dearth of Canadian charities in Iran, general media indifference to suffering in an ...
In March 2001, a random group of travelers, artists, and aid workers gathered on the rooftop of a budget hotel in Essaouria, Morocco, a town best known for inspiring the Jimi Hendrix song “Castles in the Sand” – at least according to legend. Among the people sharing...
The reign of capitalism is now a worldwide phenomenon, achieving a pinnacle of influence that dominates politics and societal behaviour. Never before throughout the history of humankind has one principle of socio/economic theory had such profound impact on the world, riva...
The patient, by the name of Israel, walks into the room and instantly bursts into a tirade of arguments conclusively proving his credentials, and says that he is better than everyone else.
- Ofer Grosbard, ...
On Saturday August 18 several cars and a pickup truck with signs on top, in the windows or on bumpers drove into the Whole Foods Market (WFM) parking lot in Brentwood, which borders St. Louis, Missouri. Police approached as soon as they arrived.
“Yes, officer, ...
The International Association of Machinists just succeeded in negotiating a humiliating defeat with Caterpillar after a 15-week strike. Workers lost considerable money by striking, and then lost even more with the new contract, accepting almost every concession the ...
Novels that teach history by telling the life story of an individual can be fascinating journeys into humanity’s misadventures. Likewise, they can also be equally tragic and entertaining. Two such books that fit all of these adjectives and more are Michael Moorcock...
It’s a steamy, overcast monsoon morning in Nogales, Sonora, just across the border from the United States. I’ve come to learn more about what happens to Mexican deportees, many parents of children, who are left off by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in do...
Idle hands do the devil’s work
– Anonymous
The fault lies with us and not Scott Gessler. If we’d left him alone he’d not have focused on mischief. And if the pay were better, a brighter lawyer would have sought the offi...
Seated in the upper upper deck at San Francisco’s AT&T Park, during a Giants-Rockies game, one would not know millions of people around the nation faced foreclosure or had already lost their homes and jobs, or that the country was in the midst of a presidential elec...
“Sustainability” has become a buzzword. But what does “sustainability” really mean? One definition is that it requires a triple-E bottom line—economics, the environment and equity. However, this word sometimes is used to “green-wash” and promote things that ...
I came to the United States in, June of 1972, the month Nixon’s burglars broke into the Watergate, and I am writing these lines fifteen years later while Colonel North lectures Congress about the role of executive power in the Iran-Contra scandal. Looking at North&#...
“I’m going to move.”
“You’re going to move?”
“I should move.”
“Why should you move?”
“Where will I move?”
“Where will you move?”
“Am I serious?”
“Are you serious?”
This is the dial...
Valetta, Malta.
Malta, a small island in the Mediterranean with a long history of colonisation, paid tribute last week to its former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff who died, on Monday 20 August, at the age of 96. He ranks with the likes of Michael Manley, Kwam...