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
Sometime in the first half of the 1980s, diminutive white New York Jewish boy Paul Simon, already an iconic music figure rarely out of the charts or the limelight throughout the 1960s and 1970s, placed a wobbly tape featuring some can’t-keep-still South African popu...
When it comes to giving the US empire a bad rap, few can be more qualified than radical rapper Marcel Cartier.
“I was born in 1984 in Heidelberg, West Germany, to a Finnish mother and American father, who was at that time working for the US Army,” says ...
Silly, narcissistic cutie pie gets his ass kicked, and so be it, says the visual track on Dylan’s new single, “Duquesne Whistle.” Meanwhile the music track calls to mind a concert-induced rhythmic euphoria such that I saw the Dylan gang stoke up when t...
Martin Amis’s protagonist in his most recent novel, Lionel Asbo, changed his last name ...
Many have been the political leaders who have sought to bolster a flagging popularity through public music making. Tacitus relates how Nero took to the stage on one memorable occasion with his lyre and sweet voice. Insulating himself from failure, Nero packed the audience...
Rachel’s Song
by KEMMER ANDERSON
for Rachel Corrie
A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and lamenting,
Rachel weeping for her children
...
Editor’s Note: Tonight Mitt Romney will accept the Republican nomination for president and publicly embrace his Mormon faith. For the first time, a Mormon stands a very good a chance of being the president. But what is Mormonism? What is it like to be a ...
Biologists sometimes do thought experiments in which they reflect on the consequences of imaginary catastrophic events wiping out particular populations. For a day or two, one could hope that a natural experiment of a similar type would soon transpire: that Hurricane Is...
The dry dollar numbers in the latest Congressional Research Service annual arms sales report paint an...
“Why should I listen to anything Harry Kelber says?” exclaimed a visibly indignant Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.
Maybe because Kelber, 98 years young, has been honestly fighting for labor rights as a worker, union organizer, pamphleteer, author, pro...
Awkwardness seems to be a defining characteristic of the Mitt Romney campaign to be the next United States president and of his China policy, as well as of the candidate himself.
Certainly, Romney does not have an easy row to hoe. A moderate Mormon plutocrat who se...
Virtually every media outlet has reported that the stage for the Republican convention is “inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright,” seemingly all reading off the same RNC press release. The claim is quite a stretch by any account. Christopher Hawthorne, architectura...
Hello friends! Have you heard the terrific news? President Obama stands up for women, and speaks out against rape! “Rape is rape!” Except when the U.S. Military is doing the raping, of course, in which case political expediency requires Barack Obama to whitewash and c...
“It sounds to me like Arabian Tales from One Thousand and One Nights.”
Moshe Yaalon, Israeli Vice Premier, Aug 29, 2012
It is the language ...
Sometimes a journalist just has to go with the story, even if it’s going all wrong.
I had set out to stand up for the rights of hitchhikers everywhere, and against abusive policing, when I left the house yesterday afternoon and walked up the road to an intersecti...
If you haven’t read David Dorado Romo’s “Ringside Seat To a Revolution: An Underground Cultural H...
How about taking a moment this Labor Day to reflect about those Americans who earn the least for their labor?
These Americans — workers paid the federal minimum wage — are now making $7.25 an hour. On paper, they’re making the same wage they made in July ...
“Only 17 percent of the all-volunteer force serves for more than 20 years, and they are endowed with a lifetime benefit. The current US military retirement system does not compensate for those in high risk situations or extenuating circumstances (e....
Anne Montgomery died yesterday. I remember her words to me and to our young Iraqi friend Eva, sitting in the Al Monzer hotel in Amman, Jordan. This was in 2006, and she’d waited three weeks for a visa to enter Iraq as a peace witness. Anne had crossed into zones of conf...
What was the New Deal of the 1930s? There are so many myths surrounding it, and to a large extent the Democratic Party’s credibility today is based on the assumption they were fundamental social innovators, progressive if you will, during the New Deal.
But the ...
The perplexing predicament confronting Daryl Brooks could confound writers Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, two authors acclaimed for their works about individuals subjected to surreal forms of injustice.
Brooks, a community activist in Trenton, New Jersey, is facing ...
A new film, “Compliance,” examines “the human desire to follow and obey autho...
I have never much liked football. But after 20 years as a professor at the University of Texas, I have learned to hate football, and really hate Longhorn football.
I’ve also learned that some players hate the football machine as much as I do.
As a child, I...
US drone strikes make news every day, fostering worldwide outrage and public scrutiny. The drone has become an icon of US lethality and dominance, and it has understandably become a principal focus of our antiwar effort.
But recent controversial revelations about p...