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 December 2012
It is all about barbed wire, warnings and checkpoints. And to make it worse, Futenma air force base is right in the middle of an extremely densely populated urban area.
Several middle-aged Japanese citizens are besieging the sedans and SUV’s driven by the US mili...
“Automaton—person who behaves like a robot…”
—Oxford Desk Dictionary...
Southern California Edison, the operator of the (non-operating) San Onofre Nuclear Waste Generating Station, is running out of options.
Even the federal regulators are coming down hard on them. The public remains deeply skeptical, while local elected officials co...
It must have been 2007, although I cannot remember the exact date. I do recall getting lost in what seemed like a futile search for the headquarters of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in Rome. There was a meeting of NGOs and some General Assembly body, consist...
Nancy Lanza ...
Van Nuys.
The Hernandez family, who became ...
Each year seems to go quicker than the last. This phenomenon is partially related to the shrinking proportion of my life each year represents. It is is also due to the ever-increasing volume of events that seem to occur every annum and our expanding awareness of them. The...
Talk show hosts and other bloviators have spent hours giving their versions of the fiscal cliff.
In fewer than 750 words, I’ll explain the truth.
Taxes and the deficit are intertwined. If Congress can’t come up with a plan to solve those problems, the U....
This week’s elective conference of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa highlighted what has become an ever more apparent and painful reality to working people in that country and political observers around the world – the revolution of 1994 effe...
One contributing factor to Pres. Obama 2012 reelection victory was that the Christian right shot itself in the proverbial foot over of the issues of rape and abortion. The now (in)famous comments by a half-dozen Republican candidates regarding rape helped expose the fu...
Now that we know that Mr. Obama has been re-selected as President, will he be Mr. Hope or Mr. Nope. Real estate experts (i.e., think tankers, economists, investors and hedge fund managers), are in general agreement on about half a dozen policy points that could shift t...
“Fight not unless the position is critical.”
–Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The ”...
Such as do build their faith upon
Holy text of pike and gun.
– Samuel Butler, Hudibras, pt.I
The NRA showed the importance of a thoughtful response to the tragic events in Newtown by maintaining a respectful s...
It was a few days before Christmas, 1970, and Elvis Presley was suddenly obsessed with a strange notion. Not another late-night private shopping spree for Lisa Marie, or a cross-country hamburger run this time. No, what Presley had in mind was far more important: the trum...
The left loves to cry over shit it can’t do anything about, and one of the favorite objects of its whining is Facebook.
If you believe in capitalism — if you believe that an economy should be organized along the lines of private ownership of the means o...
This on Facebook: “See Your 2012 Year in Review. Look back at your 20 biggest moments from the past year.”
I read the announcement, balked, and refused to click the link. How dare they? How dare “it”? As if this social networking service unde...
Africa’s first Nobel Prize laureate, Wole Soyinka, has published his latest book: Of Africa...
Lamentations in Times of Peace qnd War
by JOSÈ TIRADO
Part 1. American Snapshots: The Blinking Lost
I.
On Sundays, the drive-by church frenzy awakens
evange...
Imperial adventures are nothing new in the Middle East. Neither is their glorification, as Peter O’Toole’s pained Lawrence of Arabia eternally reminds us. But for a decade or so now, things have been heating up, as if to coincide with climate change and fears...
In 1940, when I was six years old, we were living in a small town in the Netherlands at the mouth of one of the Rhine subsidiaries. My father who was an eye surgeon needed a large house so that he could have the correct distance in his practice room for measuring people...
In March 1990, Time Magazine titled an article “Ripples in The American Lake.” It was not about small waves in that body of water just north of Fort Lewis, Washington. It was talking about the Pacific Ocean, the largest on the planet, embracing over half of...
“The problems started for me at eighteen,” Madleen Kulab said quietly, sitting just meters from the shore of the Mediterranean. “The police and port authorities did not want me to sail as a woman.” Though Madleen has emerged from this recent challenge, receiving a...
Supporting all aspects of the Israeli assault on Gaza in November, President Obama gave Israeli forces a green light, ...
Only the resonating echo of rain pattering down on the cobblestone streets of Chiapas’ colonial cities sounded as tourists from around the globe awaiting the end of the world in the center of the Mayan Civilization were surprised by the silent marches of more than 4...
It’s noon, and Etienne Bokoli, a Congolese translator, is getting impatient. Babasar, from Senegal, has been inside the refugee reception centre since seven this morning. The high winter sun is beating down on the tin roofs of Messina, a small South African town near th...