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
About five years ago, I swore I would never watch the Academy Awards again because every year watching the awards pissed me off more and more. The Oscars aren’t about awarding the “best” of anything. They aren’t about honoring great filmmaking or acting but about ...
At the end of James Lasdun’s chilling account of being stalked, Give Me Everything You Have...
Sweeping the Beach
(for Karen)
by PAUL LOJESKI
The island man extended
the broom out and then
drew it in, piling up last
night’s seaweed on
the white sand...
In their landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman devote a chapter to the media’s unbalanced coverage of the murder of one priest in Poland in 1984 as compared to the coverage of the 72 religious killed throughout Latin America bet...
On January 22, the Mexican Supreme Court (SCJN) freed Florence Cassez, a French citizen imprisoned since 2005 on kidnaping and related charges. The court could not decide her guilt or innocenc...
The coarsening of a people doesn’t happen overnight. When I came to the States in 1975, the Gong Show was about as rude as it got on television. Some earnest sap would get bumped for crooning, “Feelings, nothing more than feelings,” but no one ever got screamed at, ...
(A commentary on Noam Chomsky’s talk “Public Education and the Common Good.”)
“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub”
– Hamlet
The United States before nineteen sixty were for the European e...
Morgan Stanley director Erskine ...
Congress waited six years to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution after it opened the bloody floodgates for the Vietnam War in August 1964.
If that seems slow, consider the continuing failure of Congress to repeal the “war on terror” resolution — the Authori...
In the dead of winter, 1994, a mysterious caller left a voice-message on my answering machine. Speaking in English, but with a Mexican-sounding accent, the female voice simply said, “The compañeros asked me to call you to thank you for the pamphlet you made abou...
The UK Guardian recently featured a heartrending story on ...
“ … the passage to humanity today is called ‘rebellion’…”
I’m going to tell you something very secret, but don’t go spreading it around…or, go ahead, spread it around, it’s up to you.
In the early days o...
José Lara just wanted a job.
A company working in the natural gas fields needed a man to power wash wastewater tanks.
Clean off the debris. Make them shining again.
And so José Lara became a power washer for the Rain for Rent Co.
“The chemi...
There is something to be grateful for: lesser evil arguments for reelecting Barack Obama are “so last year.” Should we be grateful too that he won? Very likely. But that is small consolation for the fact that we must now look “forward” to four more years...
Is liberal fascism a misnomer? Perhaps Sinclair Lewis’s antecedent question is more basic, Can it happen here?
Fascism comes in several varieties without losing its distinctive structural-ideological-political features, all of which point to an hierarchical soc...
As “the peril of guerrilla war looms” for t...
Most Haitians have very difficult lives and many of them suffer from painful conditions that are never treated. And their pain is ignored too, not because “Haitians have a higher pain tolerance”, but because Haitians are poor.
When Haitians have medical...
Hollywood likes to pretend that things aren’t political when they are. It’s that bi-partisan nationalist myth that if both corporate parties agree to cheer for the empire, then everyone cheers for the empire. It’s gotten so bad now that races like the Oscars and...
In the madness of our media-fed consciousness, the greatest threat to an informative news story is time. Given enough time, and the dysfunctional and disinformative way the mainstream media cover news, even the most important and revealing story quickly dies out.
T...
As the economy shows signs of recession, the leeches return. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles have issued a new report calling for even deeper austerity. It is not what the economy needs as it stagnates and sputters toward a possible new collapse. Their report combined wit...
When one looks at scenes of fleeing refugees from Syria via images of their squalid refugee camps and hears their pleas for solidarity, mercy or for God’s help to end their suffering, one finds eerie similarities between their experiences and those of the Palestinians, ...
Two long-awaited reports were published today at ShaleBubble.org by the ...
Another exciting and productive romp is underway in the Alaska Legislature as our chosen lords decide on a slew of important topics including (but not limited to): homosexuality in the Boyscouts, exempti...
This weekend, marking the second anniversary of the start of protests that would usher in a bloody and prolonged NATO-led coup to overthrow the Libyan Jamahiriya and Muammar Gaddafi, offers many reasons to celebrate for those whose intention was the demolition of Libyan s...
“I still worry about further price declines. There’s no really concrete reason for an upturn now. A recent survey of home buyers didn’t find any sudden change in optimism and there seems to be a souring on the idea of home ownership. That might reverse again...