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 September 2012
On Sept. 25, Professor-turned President Barack Obama lectured the Muslim World and world leaders during his annual address before the United Nations.
The beautifully crafted speech of the Nobel peace laureate would have been believed – and better received—had i...
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu seemed inspired by the Road Runner cartoons, Glenn Beck and Reverend Gene Scott. The bizarre, almost hand drawn, “bomb” in one of his hands was complemented by the red marker in another: man enough, Bibi suggested, to draw his own red lin...
Every four or so years an absence of political and cultural imagination is celebrated with calls to ‘participate’ in a political establishment that long ago abandoned any pretense of working in the interests of the citizenry it claims to represent. The arguments in fa...
I am sitting here writing this article 39 years to the minute from that moment when the sirens started screaming, announcing the beginning of the war.
A minute before, total quiet reigned, as it does now. No traffic, no activity in the street, except a few children...
On August 25, 2012 Occupy Brooklyn TV sat down with Norman Finkelstein – political dissident and world renowned scholar on the Israeli-Palestine conflict – to talk about Gandhi, the Occupy movement, Julian Assange, the economic crisis, and a possible Israeli attack on...
Mitt Romney was on to something: about forty-seven percent of the country is repelled by the sense of entitlement he and his wife Ann, she especially, exude, along with their fellow one per-centers. Meanwhile the one per-centers themselves and their useful idiots, anoth...
On October 7th, Venezuelans head to the polls for an election that will determine not only the future of the country and its Bolivarian Revolution, but that could also have powerful implications for the anti-capitalist struggle in Latin America and beyond.
...
A writer’s greatest disappointments are readers who have knee-jerk responses. Not all readers, of course. Some readers are thoughtful and supportive. Others express thanks for opening their eyes. But the majority are happy when a writer tells them what they want...
It’s election time again and that brings on the national pastime of analytical blather from all sides. (Yours truly, like so many others, certainly feels compelled to write more during this season.) Most are “rah rah, my team rocks” missives; many mainstream media o...
“Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial”
– Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene 1, William Shakespeare
“Blood...
Since his election as governor, Republican Tom Corbett has left no stone unturned in his assault on the people of Pennsylvania. To boil it down to a simple formula: he cuts food stamps to 1.8 million people while giving $1.7 billion in tax breaks to Shell oil. Neolibe...
The entire strategy of the War on Terror is simply to ‘exterminate the brutes’ even though it is becoming clearer, particularly in Yemen and in Afghanistan, now Libya, that for every ‘brute’ we exterminate at least one further friend, relative, out-raged passer-...
Vietnam just sentenced three dissident bloggers to 12, 10 and 5 years respectively. Their trials were preposterous. The lawyer for ...
Writing books and writing blogs are similar. They should be truth. If they were not the author loses credibility and his/her ability to convince suffers. This is how it should be. But Arizona is testing this rule of thumb.
The assault on the truth in Arizona mak...
Historically, Washington has been more comfortable extolling democracy than accepting its consequences, particularly in the strategically important Middle East. Algerian democracy had no place in the “new world order” of former President George H.W. Bush. His ...
London.
A general strike in Greece, massive protests by the indignados in Spain, public transport strikes in Portugal (and Spain), and industrial action by aluminium, steel and public sector workers in Italy headlined this week.
On Saturday mass pro...
There’s got to be some symbolism—if not irony–in the fact that just as the last of the 33,000 troops surged by Obama two years ago supposedly to pacify Afghanistan pulled out, the highest ...
Since we will not learn in school the lessons about the 1% we ought to know, many of us rely on movies and TV, so that through images and sound we can form ideas of who the men were who screwed upp our economy. In Arbitrage, we see how How Hollywood conceives of a cinemat...
At 7 a.m. an awful humming is giving me a headache. I stagger out of bed, wander into each room, bend my ear to the bottom of the bathtub, open the front door and lean outside–and even check out the basement. But nothing changes, the pulsating sound coming from ever...
It was a serious point of disagreement Plato had with Athenian democracy. Made up of citizens and ostensibly judging his teacher Socrates for crimes against the community, this was a form of crude democracy in action. It was arguably democratic, but it was hardly reason...
Back in 2008, now-president Barack Obama ran against the Bush administration’s runaway national security state, created partly via legislation like USA PATRIOT and partly via executive practices like warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding and the like. One of Obama&...
Stephen Harper’s no-longer-secret agenda to implement a revolution from the right and dismantle Canada has one major impediment that must really stick in his craw. He is constrained in what he can do by the constitutional division of powers which gives the provinces so ...
A neighbor of mine, of many years ago from a Gaza refugee camp, was a sacrilegious person par excellence. Unemployed like most inhabitants of the camp, he was extremely poor. His family responsibilities were daunting, yet prolonged Israeli military curfews made it impossi...