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
It’s a news article! It’s a news analysis! It’s an op-ed! The Times’ is at it again in Gaza. Fares Akram’s recent piece about Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s visit to the Strip can’t quite make up its mind about what it is. It’s clear, howeve...
The news that the United Kingdom is facing the prospect of a triple-dip recession with a negative growth figure in the fourth quarter of 2012 should be the final blow to the intellectual credibility of the deficit hawks. You just can’t get more wrong that this flat eart...
Death for dinner and death for afters. Nightclubs and venues of evening entertainment with poor safety policies, aided by authorities indifferent to the welfare of pleasure seekers are the weeds of entertainment. The body count from such negligence keeps rising, but s...
To the many crimes of President Vladimir Putin, a new one was added last month: kicking babies, sweet, innocent, plump babies — out of sheer wickedness. This crime was discussed ad nauseam, until it became a meme which was ...
I thought Michael Moore was supposed to be a director… I thought he was supposed to have made some documentaries…
I guess Michael Moore, having become “Inc.”, now has other priorities, such as propagandizing for those institutions that have “honored...
Quito.
“I’d like to thank the members of the Academy. Or at least, one of them…”
You won’t hear that speech at the upcoming Oscar ceremonies. But movie fans in Ecuador, where I live, and in many other so-called “developing” countries, ...
Cairo, January 28, 2013.
The smoke everywhere, tear gas, riot police with light and heavy weapons, protesters, religious cadres, even common thugs. Passionate speeches and confusion: I spoke to dozens of people and nobody knows what to do. Where are the p...
Cairo.
Late this evening, President Mohammad Morsi declared Emergency Law in three provinces around the Suez Canal that are ablaze in protests. He frankly conceded the government was losing control.
The strategic area around the Suez Canal earns the...
I personally found the president’s inaugural speech not just insipid, but disgusting. It reached its gut-churning nadir near the end where he said:
“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war&...
Wow!
Michael Moore sure can make up a lot of dialogue for scenes he thinks happened off screen, in “Zero Dark Thirty.”
He freely invents quotes for President Obama, writing words no one else has ever quoted Obama as saying. ...
Tales of madness are subjective. I mean, what is insanity exactly? If all of your ghastly indiscretions, mental and actual, were strung together, they could wrap this earth many times over, ditto mine, so all of us can easily be deemed deranged, including you, solemn past...
The January 26 edition of the New York Times has three items relevant to the issue of gun control, an editorial pleading for the restoration of funds for the CDC for the study of gun violence, its argument being that this is really a public health problem; an arti...
Port-au-Prince.
How long should we let hundreds of thousands of Haitians live in horrid tents and shacks after the earthquake of 2010? They have been living in squalid conditions for three years now.
And how long should we let a two year old little b...
My article on the competing strategies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar received a considerable amount of thoughtful comment and pushback by e-mail and on the Web, more than I’m accustomed to ...
An economic recovery has begun.
- President Obama, Second Inaugural Address
President Obama’s optimism — baseless as it may be — was s...
Several commentators and activists have remarked in the past week that, if Martin Luther King, Jr. were still alive, he likely would have supported the left-wing protesters at Obama’s inauguration, rather than celebrating the event as some kind of culmination of the civ...
The New York Times and its cult followers in the American media, amongst others, manufactured an attempted “coup” that never happened in the small East African country of Eritrea.
The story of this “attempted coup” began last Monday morning, Januar...
Dear Representative Brown,
Brava! Author!
It takes real hard work and quite a bit of creativity to outdo the extraordinary comments and efforts of many of your peers in public office regarding rape. To name but a few, we start off with the “legitimate ...
Only in science fiction can humans escape the consequences of destroying their own habitat. In Robert A. Heinlein’s ...
Since American democracy is in the process of disintegrating, it might be worthwhile to reflect on the nature of the phenomenon, and the sources of its dialectical death. In 1982 the eminent French scholar, Pierre Manent, published a study of Alexis de Tocqueville’s ...
Has housing really turned the corner?
According to Calculated Risk— the nation’s number 1 economics’s blog– it has. Back in February 2012, CR’s Bill McBride boldly announced “The Bottom is Here”, and, sure enough, prices ha...
The Obama administration scored two victories this month, both of which expand its ability to wage its targeted killing campaign against America’s “enemies” unencumbered by checks from the Judicial Branch, Congress or the American people. The first vic...
The Supreme Court Decision legalizing a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy turned forty years old this week. Protestors turned out at the court in support of the decision and also against. For opponents, the problem is the way Roe was decided. The problem for suppor...
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw multiple discourses on the relationship between concepts of ‘truth’ and power—social, political and economic. The ‘view from nowhere,’ the rhetorical device of science and economics used to claim that truth exists in ...
Between 1892 and 1997, a total of 2.1 million people were deported from the United States. A change in laws in 1996 permitted the number of deportees to increase from 70,000 in 1996 to 114,000 in 1997. In 1998, the number of deportees rose to 173,000. The numbers stayed f...