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 2013
It seems an odd time for environment policy wonks to throw a party. The level of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is higher than it has been in three million years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US.
That sober...
How different are the big Wall Street banks circa 2008 from the loan sharks of the 1970s?
Not very.
Laura Gottesdiener has written a remarkable book that hits hard against the big Wall Street banks.
It’s called –...
Some of the Air Force’s self-styled nuclear “missileers” — sitting at launch controls in Minot, North Dakota — recently earned a “D” on their intercontinental ballistic missile firing (ICBM) skills. More than 10 percent of the Minot Air Force Base’s 91st ...
Russians’ love for vodka has a long history. Legend holds that vodka arrived in Moscow in the 14th century, brought by Genovese merchants to Prince Dmitry Ivanovich. Legend also says that monk Isidore, who lived in the Chudov Monastery, inside the Kremlin, made a recipe...
Two schools, one a vocational technical high school and the other an elementary school, sit on tracts of land a few blocks from the house in which I grew up, in Ford City (Armstrong County), Pennsylvania. The communities served by them are, for the most part, not particul...
Kabul–Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Even with details culled from news reports,...
You know that gold bear market that the financial press keeps touting? The one George Soros keeps proclaiming? Well, it is not there. The gold bear market is disinformation that is helping elites acquire the gold.
Certainly, Soros himself doesn’t believe it, as t...
“It’s not your enemies who corrupt you, it’s your friends.”
Bob Edgar, 1943-2013
Before I went to work for Bob Edgar, the President of Common Cause, who passed away in April at the age of 69, all I really knew about...
It has been a fiction that has held sway for a time. Mining booms create trickledown wealth. It is tagged as “sustainable” when it is premised on temporariness. Natural resources work for countries that possess them in abundance. Only on the periphery do we se...
Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler published a book last year entitled Abundance: The Future is Bette...
I am heartbroken that our brave and underpaid teachers had nowhere
to take these terrified beautiful children today. To survive a F4 tornado
you must be underground. A F4/F5 strips the grass right off the ground!
It churns everything abov...
Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, republished by Verso Book...
A “territorial” tax system – in which overseas profits of U.S. corporations would be lightly taxed in the U.S. or not taxed at all – is likely to be the top tax reform proposal advocated by Apple CEO Tim Cook when he testifies before the Senate on Tuesday...
The Green Shadow Cabinet, launched in spring 2013, is led by 2012 Green Party presidential nominee ...
That the fix was in was confirmed when the Godfather himself, son of a Kenyan, Barack Obama, called Uhuru Kenyatta, indicted for “Crimes Against Humanity” by those minions of Pax Americana, the International Criminal Court, to congratulate him for successfully conduct...
“Truth is the first casualty of war.”
The well-worn aphorism could have served as a refrain for the Mussalaha International Peace Delegation to Syria, May 2-10, 2013. We were reminded constantly of the very different interpreta...
The person providing moral leadership in the wake of the horrific Boston Marathon bombings is not a faith leader, but a funeral home director. Killed in a shootout with police after he and his younger brother allegedly set off the two bombs, Tamerlan Tsarnaev laid, unbu...
Picture with me a vast luxurious hunting lodge, high-ceilinged, massive oak beams, bear and other trophy rugs, an inner sanctum of America’s ruling groups, formally known as “Interpenetration,” but more affectionately, to its members, “Co-Partnership,” to signif...
‘I am not afraid of anything except for God and poison gas,” said an Iraqi officer who had fought in the Iran-Iraq war. “It’s like a ghost. You have no defence against it.” Though not a target of poison gas as a member of the army using...
A rich, powerful celebrity renowned for bad action movies, sex appeal and humanitarian missions in predominantly brown and black developing countries, writes an Op-Ed which reads like a press release in The New York Times. This Op-Ed, written in the first person, informs ...
I do not like the expression “African-American.” It’s patronizing, condescending, and racist. It was coined, rumor has it, to help counteract the corrosive effect of racism on the self-esteem of black Americans. But how is that supposed to work? In practice, I w...
Note: This column was written while breastfeeding.
Catching a glimpse of a Facebook discussion this weekend, I noticed that Sharon Smith had written a piece entitled, “Why CounterPunch Owes Women an Apology” in the online weekly SocialistWorker.org reg...
Following the April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed (at last count) 1,127 factory workers, a group of the world’s leading apparel and retail companies got together to adopt a new set of safety rules, in t...
Over the past month there has been a statistically improbable concurrence of events that can only be explained as a conspiracy to protect the dollar from the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing (QE).
Quantitative Easing is the term given to the Federa...
A whistleblower has revealed extraordinary information on the U.S. government’s support for international terrorist networks and organised crime. The government has denied the allegations yet gone to extraordinary lengths to silence her. Her critics have derided her as ...