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 March 2013
World attention has moved away from Venezuela. So excuse me if I am slow to follow, my thoughts remaining just a little longer with Hugo Chavez and what his life represents to me. I must be one of millions on the sidelines of history who wants to be on record as an admire...
This past January the 27th was the anniversary of Howard Zinn’s death. For all who knew Howard, be it through his books, speeches or from marching along side him on the restive streets of pr...
Paris.
A few weeks ago, I decided to apply to go back to college–to one of the 20 top liberal arts colleges in America. It turned out to be deceptively simple: No SAT exams, no mammoth tuition fees, no huge student loans, no nail-biting wait to see i...
I attended the Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent wolverine listing hearings in Helena, Montana. Opponents, including a number of Montana state legislators as well as MDFWP, argued that wolverine populations were “stable” or even “increasing” and therefore did...
Innocent enough at first blush, the term healthcare delivery abets a clever linguistic ploy. It serves as the cognitive launch-point for a debate about the broken healthcare delivery systemand how best to fix it. The phraseology fosters t...
In the everyday game between man and corporation, it is taken for granted that the house always prevails. Apple’s winning streak hit a snag last week however, when I won an exception to the company’s policy governing the replacement of warrantied hard drives....
Damascus
The Imam Musa Sadr, Sheik Mohammad Yaacoub, and journalist Abbas Badreddine case, like the Tell Tale Heart in Edgar Allen’s Poe novel, will not stop crying out for justice despite more than three decades of political efforts to close the file....
The recent order by a Chilean judge to exhume and then conduct an autopsy on the remains of the poet Pablo Neruda may throw light on the real cause of death of Pablo Neruda, a Chilean writer whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez called “the greatest poet of the 20th century — i...
My mother talked to the television, disputing anyone with a pro-war message. When George Bush appeared on the screen, she’d turn away, but still talk. At first this was humorous.
After Daddy died, she became pessimistic. When she said the world should end,...
Thirty minutes into Kim Nguyen’s film War Witch (2012) (simply titled Rebelle in its original French Canadian release) I knew I was watching something like nothing I had seen before. Nguyen’s film is based on true stories of child soldiers captured in Bu...
So—if you assume as I did that Mary Roach’s Gulp will be straight narration down the ali...
Now that the salt has finally settled to the bottom of the 2012 movie season popcorn tub, it’s time to pick through the recalcitrant kernels and send them back to the molars for last rites. Today I’m rolling around two of them in my mouth: Oscar winner for best pictur...
“The execution of a scapegoat in Roman-occupied Palestine results in the birth of a false faith that will conquer the Western World.”
FADE IN.
INT. A SEALED ROCK TOMB – NIGHT.
Flickering oil lamps stand at each corner of a raised slab on which li...
from Persephone in the Underworld
by BETHANY W. POPE
1
Into the Chasm
This is what I see from the base of the yew:
Ravelled roots, twisted and hard, spri...
Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated...
Durban.
The reach of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) leaders was palpable this week, not just here in Durban where they gathered on Tuesday and Wednesday to plan investments and infrastructure, but everywhere on the continent where extra...
If your daily routine took you from one homegrown organic garden to another, bypassing vast fields choked with pesticides, you might feel pretty good about the current state of agriculture.
If your daily routine takes you from one noncommercial progressive website ...
Every Detroit teacher was fired in the fall of 2012.
Apparently, the nation did not notice. Hence, this story.
On March 26, 2013, 78% of the voting members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers ratified a contract which DFT president, Keith Johnson, called, ...
The French seem to have taken an active interest in rescuing Africa from itself. They struck Libya in the name of democracy and moved to invade Mali a year later under the same premises. So now that former French colony, the Central African Republic, has been overrun by r...
Tunis, Tunisia
Tens of thousands of people marched through downtown Tunis on Tuesday in a spirited march celebrating the beginning the 13th World Social Forum – the first to be held in an Arab country. The majority of marchers were from Tunisi...
A Marine F-35B Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter prepares to land vertically at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz.,
March 21. “This marks the first vertical landing of a Marine Corps F-35B outside of a testing environment,” the corps said.
The...
For the last two days, the Supreme Court Justices have listened to arguments for and against California’s controversial Proposition 8 law, a law that bans same-sex marriage in the state, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 law that bars the federa...