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 February 2013
Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield succumbed to a fit of honesty earlier this month: “When the drug war turns bloody, he said, the strategy is working,” journalist Martha Mendoza reported. By Brownfield’s standards, the strategy has been an enormous s...
All the sturm and drang in Washington over the March 1 deadline for a budget deal is an act. Two acts really.
The Republicans are pretending that if we don’t have budget cuts this year, the whole US economy will collapse because of the nation’s enormous indebte...
These are comments on an election in which votes are still being counted, so some slight changes in outcome are possible. I just want to note a few things in broad outline about the apparent results of the elections in Italy.
First, the current, caretaker governmen...
Drones are the latest step in the application of high-tech electronics to armaments. The much heralded Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) first appeared on the world stage in the Gulf War of 1991where precision-guided smart weapons were used with devastating effect. The...
Usually “revolving door” connotes a transition from a stint a...
In early February, new U.S. Sanctions against Iran went into effect despite the growing sentiment that Washington is discreetly moving towards a more nuanced policy with respect to Iran. To wit, the nomination of Chuck Hagel for the post of Secretary of Defense, whose vie...
As the Great Horsemeat Crisis continues to spread—“gallops” is the verb favored by the European press—across the continent, and countries pile on to blame Romania (France, Holland, Cyprus, etc.), what is becoming increasingly clear is that old-fashioned corporate ...
Israeli and Palestinian officials have been in Washington laying the ground for President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel and the West Bank, scheduled for next month and the first since he took office four years ago.
Topping the agenda, Israeli Prime Minister ...
In the waning stages of his career, Gore Vidal nicknamed America the “United States of Amnesia.” Although he was much derided for speculating on U.S. involvement in 9/11, and in interviews was prone to exchange factual analysis for comic mimicry of George W. Bush, his...
The announcement (Feb. 22) that the US has opened a drone base in Niger has been deliberately couched in abstract counterterrorism terms: unarmed Predator drones for reconnaissance purposes in order to track Al Qaeda and, never to be missed, “its affiliates.” Who co...
Another element of the LA Times’ well-mannered coverage of the Christopher Dorner case that struck me was the incident in which police officers on the lookout for Dorner’s pickup truck shot up a vehicle driven by two newsies delivering the LA Times to homes in Torranc...
Delhi.
Early this morning, on the busy bylanes of Zamrudpur (Delhi), I passed a young girl being taken to school on a cycle-rickshaw. In her lap she held fast to her day’s homework. It was a three dimensional representation of “my town,” made with wh...
“Those jobs are not coming back.”
The late Steve Jobs to Barack Obama.
Hot on the heels of his State of the Union address with its emphasis on the moribund job market,...
During the last night’s tedious Oscar telecast, host Seth McFarland was talking about portrayals of Abraham Lincoln in film. He first noted Daniel Day Lewis in Steven Speilburg’s Lincolnand then Raymond Massey in the 1940 film Abe Lincoln ...
U.S. politicians have cried wolf over austerity long enough for the public to ignore them. A perfect time, then, for politicians to actually unleash the wolves. Barring an unlikely last minute deal, here’s a short list of some of the massive, national bi-partisan-cr...
It’s February, early evening. I’m on the Q train heading home. A young man in a beat-up, threadbare coat with a large backpack gets on at Union Square. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he announces. “It’s your money, and I know you’ve worked hard to earn it....
On 2/26/2013 Iran is expected to meet with other world powers in Almaty, Kazakhstan to discuss its nuclear program. Discussions that the occupiers of Palestine fervently hope will not be successful. It is toward this end that their key demand this week to the US Congress,...
“I wouldn’t want to end up like Bradley Manning.” Those words were the beginning of an outpouring this week by an associate of mine who claimed to have experienced government and corporate corruption that many only read about in alternative media reports. I sat for ...
Leaving the scandal of horsemeat contamination of processed meat products behind, the British prime minister David Cameron flew to India for a three-day visit (February 18-20), boasting the largest-ever trade delegation he had led to a foreign country. The aim of youn...
The most striking fact about ex cop Christopher Dorner’s rampage against his brothers in blue is that it stems from the LAPD’s apparent cover-up of a single, minor excessive force incident of the kind we seldom talk about, ubiquitous though it is.
Beyond that, ...
The most telling line from PBS’s Frontline piece ‘The Untouchables,’ on the absence of criminal prosecutions ...
Are you ready for a good laugh?
The head of the New York Fed wants Congress to grant the Central Bank extraordinary new powers to deal with future financial system emergencies like the bank run that followed Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008. Here’s ...
Bill McKibben, a prolific writer and organizer on global warming and climate change, has had a busy year teaching environmentalists not to despair and will soon be learning some lessons himself.
In August 2011, he organized an unprecedented demonstration in front o...
‘Rothschild’ is a household name. It belongs to a family banking dynasty with a two hundred year lineage, reputedly once supremely powerful. Omnipresent historian Niall Ferguson has devoted two volumes to this history.
The Rothschild name is now bestowed on a s...
Golan Heights.
If someone would say: “Israel, Palestine and Golan Heights! And you have only two seconds to describe what first comes to your mind.”
Then I would immediately put into words two images that would enter my mind: “Mental asylum, a...