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 October 2012
Well, what do you know; mortgage applications have fallen off a cliff.
According to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) loan applications decreased by 12 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier “registering the biggest percentage decl...
Bob Meister isn’t the kind of man who comes across as a radical. He’s a bespectacled grey-haired intellectual who looks comfortable in the sort of suit and tie a distinguished professor would wear. That’s probably because he is a professor, a quite disti...
When Romney criticized outsourcing in his election campaign, he broke with Republican tradition.[i] Outsourcing had been one of the few topics in which both parties appeared to genuinely disagree on, the one issue in which the underlying clas...
Beginning in the 1970s but only gradually gaining force, a global capitalist revolution has taken place that has changed not just economic relations in the West, but the very way that we see ourselves as social beings. We can argue ideology, but the deeper question is: wh...
Everybody in Israel knows this story. When Levy Eshkol was Prime Minister, his assistants rushed up to him in panic: “Levy, there is a drought!”
“In Texas?” Eshkol asked anxiously.
“No, in Israel!” they said.
“Then it doesn’t matter,...
Slate recently published an important piece by Rebecca Watson, in which she describes the sexism she’s encountered during her career as a ‘skeptic’: that is, a member of the anti-faith, pro-science community that overlaps with the ‘New Atheist’ movement...
The world is once again in turmoil. Several Arab nations are clearly in a state of mayhem, rebelling against decades of injustice. But their struggle is not always based on ideology, and it is not well defined. The West is taking full advantage of the confusion, pushi...
Two police lieutenants face a similar criminal charge but one gets a slap on the wrist while the other is fired.
One of these two police supervisors is an officer with a distinguished record of exposing corruption and misconduct.
Guess which of those two vet...
Paris.
A friend, with good sources in the Israeli government, claims that the head of Israel’s Mossad has made several trips to deal with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia—one of the results: an agreement that the Saudis would bankroll the series of ass...
London.
Reading the transcripts of Kennedy’s meetings with his advisers is an object lesson in the pernicious effects of secrecy on government policy. No doubt Kennedy, in taping these meetings, intended them as a day by day record from which he would la...
If we needed evidence of the impoverishment of American politics, the so-called debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney gave us all we could ask for.
We normally expect a debate to highlight some disagreement, but in American politics disagreement is ...
Has there ever been a more crazed, cruel, anti-people, corporate-indentured, militaristic and monetized Republican Party in its 154-year history? An about-to-be-released list of some of the actual brutish votes by the House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner and Rep...
The real action in Sino-US relations this week was not the predictable China-bashing in the third election debate between US President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney in Florida on October 22: it was the little-noticed concurrent visit to Asia of a high...
The race is on for the up-and-coming U.S. tar sands industry. To ...
Which is more “patriotic”—to loyally refrain from criticizing your government’s foreign policies, no matter how brutal or peremptory they may be (including those that result in quasi-legal, immoral military adventurism that kills thousands of innocent civilians), ...
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) organizer Brandon Johnson, who is a black man, recently spoke about a conversation he had with veteran black educator Dr. Grady Jordan about racism in the schools today. Jordan told him, “Black teachers fought hard. This is a direct retaliat...
When it comes to bank scandals, who needs Monday morning quarterbacking when you have Timothy Geihtner to pick on? While at first blush, Mr. Geihtner seems to have come clean on the LIBOR scandal – which resulted in the recent resignation of Barclays CEO, Richard Diamon...
Jeb Sprague is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where his research is focused on Haiti. He has written for numerous publications including Al Jazeera, the Miami Herald, Inter Press Service, and many others. He received a Proje...
November 4, 1980, 9:00 PM. Jimmy Carter had conceded the presidential election earlier that evening. Hundreds had gathered at the Shattuck Avenue BART station in downtown Berkeley, CA. Most were angry and concerned. The man who had made their city the target of hi...
Listen to the right-wing these days, and you’re bound to hear ad nauseum about Barack Obama’s allegedly ‘radical socialist’ agenda.
Box office record-smashing documentary “2016: Obama’s America” argues that the president endeavors to actua...
A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana, sh...
I had a heated discussion with a friend this weekend on California Propositions 30 and 32, the draconian measures that will impact Latino and working people nationally. It surprised me that he was going to vote just the opposite of how most progressives are voting. I thou...
“Clean Coal.” Really? I heard the debate the other night and the president was promoting it. Yes, tell me about “Clean Coal”! My father died of black lung. It was a slow, agonizing death, several years in the making, till at last it did h...
The inhuman and criminal attack by the Taliban on 14-year old Pakistani education activist, Malala Yousafzai, has been hijacked here in the United States to provide moral patina to America’s equally devastating wars in South Asia. Instead of a focus on the political con...
Rome.
Hidden away somewhere within the labyrinth of the Pentagon there must be a top secret euphemism department engaged in the invention of the Orwellian surrogate words that have crept surreptitiously into the American English vocabulary and from there t...