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.

Weekend Edition December 21-23, 2012

Obama and Guns

The Conviction Gap

by NORMAN POLLACK

“I don’t think I’ve been on vacation.”

No, Obama, you have been too busy servicing corporate wealth and major banking interests–as well as keeping the US embroiled in war, intervention, and your signature, armed drones for targeted assassination.

How can we expect you to feel sorrow for the deaths of children at home, when you personally through your authorization inflict death on children abroad?

The world has your number, if America doesn’t. There will be no substantial and substantive gun control in your tenure. By echoing Republican themes of mental health, you will sidetrack DIRECT attacks on the issue of gun control.

Shed no more crocodile tears, and please don’t be irritated, as the article points out, when your four years of INACTION are brought up. If you can’t take criticism, and enough has been written to know that you CANNOT, it’s time to stop the fakery and begin to lead America in a small “d” democratic direction. You claim having been busy. True, all on the wrong side of issues concerning peace and justice.

Perhaps if you take up gun control, I mean, not give off pious platitudes, but get down to business, then maybe that would give you a taste for why you were elected, and perhaps then you will also address climate change, oil drilling, civil liberties, job creation, mortgage foreclosures, and a host of things from which you have run away. Get real, scrap the teleprompter, Axelrod, and Rhodes, and say somethiing that shows conviction.

Norman Pollack is a Harvard Ph.D. and the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.