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
The best way to understand Napoleon Chagnon’s contribution to anthropology is to tune in to one of those television wildlife documentaries showing an alpha-male baboon beating and biting the living bejeezus out of a rival, or being beaten into submission himself. As the...
Today’s New York Times (Feb. 21) features an article on White House strategy for pushing through John Brennan’s appointment as CIA Director, with a photograph of him standing alongside an admiring Diane Feinstein, aka Madame Apologist for CIA-JSOC Paramilitary ...
I met this girl, when I was 10 years old
And what I loved most, she had so much soul
She was old school, when I was just a shorty
Never knew throughout my life she would be there for me
On the regular, not a church girl, she was sec...
Barack Obama loves basketball, and the media loves to analyze his maneuvering of U.S. Foreign Policy as if it were a basketball game. The first term was the “Asia Pivot,”—Barack backing down China in the lane, clearing out space for U.S. influence in Vietn...
I’m fed up with the trashing of the Baby Boom generation.
Sure you can find plenty of scoundrels, freeloaders, charlatans and thugs who were born between 1946 and 1964, but you can find bad and lazy people in every generation. In fact, the so called “Greatest G...
To say Paul Krassner has lived an eventful life is an understatement. He invented The Realist, America’s premiere counter-culture journal. He co-founded the Youth International Party (Yippies). He was a child violin prodigy who, at age 6, was the youngest person ...
One of the most interesting and prolonged private debates I have had in my life was with the brilliant Dr. Nahum Goldmann. The subject: American peace initiatives.
It was an unequal debate, of course. Goldmann was my elder by 28 years. While I was a mere editor of ...
In 20...
Upon a foundation of deep spirituality and philosophical treasures, proclaiming unity, justice and service, New India, horns honking in violation of the good; is racing, no time to spare towards the Alter of Materiality and Market Fundamentalism.
Under the careful ...
Evan Osnos is the China columnist for the New Yorker.
My impression is that he usually covers the social issues/human rights/dissident beat.
However, yesterday, riffing off the news about organized Chinese hacking of US government and private websites, he ...
Senator Marco Rubio strongly criticized the first draft of President Obama’s immigration reform plan saying “It’s a mistake for the White House to draft immigration legislation without seeking input from Republican members of Congress… ,” predicting that...
The “Western Way Of Life” is an eating disorder. We are increasingly a culturally stunted, attention-deficit herd of obese individuals, the gooey interiors of mechanical beetles whose carapaces are the obese automobile-like trucks we drive in a constant tangle...
One of the signature traits of LGBT subculture in the United States is its adoration of celebrity. If a well-known person voices the most milk-toast notion that gays are human beings, let alone deserving of legal equality, banner headlines in the gay press are guarantee...
In 1860, pro-slavery apologist Edmund Ruffin forcefully argued in support of a proposition: “[T]he greater profits of slaves as property, compared to other investments for industrial operations.”
I’ve no doubt that IG Farben functionaries, touring their shiny...
The “unbreakable alliance,” which will be confirmed by the upcoming visit of President Barak Obama to Israel, will disqualify the United States as an honest broker of peace in the Arab – Israeli conflict in Palestine, a Palestinian veteran peace negotiator says....
An extraordinary investigative piece appeared in the NYT Magazine...
On Thursday, January 24th Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the US military will lift the ban on women serving in combat. Many women’s groups and feminist activists saw this announcement as an unqualified victory. According to Kiki Cardenas writ...
Let’s set aside my issues with TED talks for the moment to… Oh OK, since you asked the $6,000 price ticket and the fact t...
“Good Words are better than bad strokes.”
-Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
President Obama candidly remarked in his State of the Union address that, “The greatest nation on earth cannot go from one manufactured crisis to another”...
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week announced that he would push for a ban on polystyrene food packaging. “One product that is virtually impossible to recycle and never biodegrades is Styrofoam—something that we know is environmentally destructive and that...
The United States invaded Afghanistan over eleven years ago. Men and women who were seven and eight years old are now enlisting in the military. Some of them will end up walking the streets and trails of that faraway land before their enlistments are up. Even if the Obama...
As an activist, I receive many requests for help from people who suffer from injustice or are imprisoned. Recouping lost freedom is the ultimate goal, but it is rarely achieved. However, once in a blue moon, through determination and help from others, this goal is met....
The play Hate, written with sparkling venom by Stephen Sewell, is a bitter, corrosive account of a wealthy Australian rural family. The family is political, the scheming father John Gleason, a believer of hate – for it is hate that built the country, hate that ...
Recent events in Europe have demonstrated the fallacy of free market Capitalism as a neoliberal Orthodoxy, context of Food Standards enforcement. The presence of horse DNA in burgers and ready meals offered up unknowingly by such Corporate behemoths in Little Britain as T...
An email arrived from Jon Carson, Executive Director of Organizing for Action. You know, one of those mass sends with a personal touch, (“Missy~”). If you opened yours, you’ll recognize these sentences:
Maybe you’ve seen firsthand how gun violen...