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 January 2013
The violent uprising in Syria has produced some predictable and sorry results. Aside from the numbers of people dying prematurely as a result of the fighting, there are tens of thousands of Syrian civilians, consisting mostly women and children, both inside and outside ...
Saint-Cyr, Coëtquidan, France.
In his essay “A Hanging,” George Orwell recounts, in great de...
London.
Years before George Orwell wrote such books as ‘...
The Pentagon — and the United States government in thrall to it — is congratulating itself on overcoming a hurdle that other nations have long gotten beyond or never faced in the first place. Feminists and progressives sympathetic to women’s rights are expec...
Last week there was a real media hate-fest for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, with some of the more influential publications on both sides of the Atlantic really hating on the guy. Even by the hate-filled standards to which we have become accustomed, it was impressi...
My friend Sema and I were sitting on the rooftop of her parents’ house. We overlooked the landscape of her little village called Aknehir, a name which in English translates into white river, and a suburb of the southern Turkish province of Hatay.
Focused in our v...
It took the British government five weeks to take note of the mass demonstrations in Iraq. These started last week of 2012 and are comparable in size, energy, and peaceful nature to the protests that toppled other Arab regimes, albeit expanding mainly in the capitals of...
Over the past month the British Socialist Workers Party has been convulsed over the revelation that a central leader of the party might not only have been guilty of sexual assault but that the central committee covered up for him.
Before the days of the Internet, t...
Following recent events in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi has asked that foreign governments take a more active role in increasing aid. This is the right time to support Burma’s precarious public health system as a way to improve the Burmese people’s dismal health status. Th...
He might have written a very indulgent autobiography about his travails and joys as the world’s most conspicuous writer in persecution, but a few authorities are certainly not willing to let him forget his mischief making potential.
There is more than just a litt...
Long the disclaimer of those bearing bad news, the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” may soon become a rallying cry of the American public.
Under an ostensibly liberal, Democratic president, government prosecutors have ushered in a new era of targeting whist...
The bloodshed at the In Amenas gas facility in Algeria has brought into focus the deteriorating situation in north and west Africa and the role of France in the region. The rhetoric of the “long war” against terrorism is back. So is Western military involvement in yet...
It is hard to pinpoint the precise moment when “good jobs” disappeared from national discourse, ignored by our leaders and the media that cover their agenda. The phrase was invoked during President Obama’s campaign—that is, his first run for the presidency. ...
It’s 2013 and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is still conflicted about torture. Why? The proximate cause is that he went to the movies, and saw “Zero Dark Thirty,” which impressed upon some viewers the efficacy of torture in unearthing the whereabout...
Efraín Rios Montt, Guatemala’s former dictator, may yet face the consequences of his actions. Last Monday, Judge Miguel Angel Gálvez announced that both Montt, 86, and José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, another former general, must “stand trial on charges of geno...
They say you can’t kill that which has never lived. It’s useful advice when analyzing the persistence of the so-called “Iranian nuclear threat.”
According to a report in ...
There are lots of inter...
Celebrities have been speaking out against the movie Zero Dark Thirty because of its favorable portrayal of torture used in pursuit of Osama Bin Laden. Some have even risked their membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I wish these celebri...
For decades the peace movement has been satisfied with scraps from the table of nuclear weapons and their beneficiaries. Even the New START Treaty was offset by the Obama administration promise to spend $185 billion in this decade on modernization of nuclear weapons and d...
“Woman and children first” is redefined in the nuclear age, now that science has shown that they are far more susceptible to the ravages of radiation than men and boys.
The nuclear power and weapons industry, people living near reactors, practitioners of nuclea...
For 112 years, the Jewish National Fund has played a central role in the on-going displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their land and homes. The JNF was instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and continues to play a central role in maint...
Western peoples have long viewed the Muslim world through an “orientalist” filter –imagining a backward, exotic and vaguely sinister “other.” But, until recently, they were seldom preoccupied with what they imagined.
There was scholarly interest, of cou...
Stock bubble? What stock bubble?
As the Dow Jones edges closer to its October 9, 2007 closing high of 14,164, the mood on Wall Street has changed from cautious optimism to outright euphoria. Traders are now in seventh heaven as shares continue to charge upwards buo...
The time has come and almost gone for Washington to repair its broken relations with Cuba. For 53 years the White House has maintained a punishing embargo on trade with Cuba. Its proponents, with the goal of removing Cuba’s revolutionary government, still plead: ...
There’s no longer any doubt. Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, governor of Louisiana, clearly wants to be our president. Having vaulted onto the national stage in February, 2009, when he gave the Republican’s response to Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress (a...