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
A funny thing, wonderful in its own small way, happened last week.
Amidst an endless series of votes on amendments to a federal budget bill, the United States Senate voted 99-0 in favor of an amendment to end subsidies to too-big-to-fail financial institutions....
On April 25th the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum and General Rehabilitation Project will be dedicated in Dallas, Texas. It takes up 23 acres at Southern Methodist University, 23 acres that neither humanity nor any other species may ever reclai...
There’s been a lot about affirmative action in the media recently because the Supreme Court is considering a case that challenges the constitutionality of any consideration of race in university admissions decisions. The poster girl for the case is 23-year old Abigail N...
An old colonial saw worries about the entry of the Asians into European colonies in Africa and its settler colonies (of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) – they will arrive to be field labor and shop-keepers, multiply by migration and by procreation and then supp...
One thing you can say about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is that he’s a crafty politician. His thirteen-hour filibuster to protest President Obama’s nomination of National Security Advisor John Brennan as CIA...
In today’s Washington Post (Mar. 27) Greg Miller and Julie Tate report on John Brennan’s facing “a quandary over clandestine service appointment,” the term “quandary,” in this case, ordinarily signifying perplexity or doubt, is really not quite accurate...
Many highly respected Washington types have been running around for the last three years yelling that because of its large budget deficits, the United States is Greece. We learned last week that the immediate danger is the United States being Cyprus.
As we now know...
The American media is full of praise for President Obama for “brokering” a detente between Israel and Turkey, two former allies who have been at loggerheads since May 31, 2010 when heavily armed Israeli Defense Force fighters boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-flagge...
It is billed as one of the great battles of legal history. In truth, the battle over Proposition 8’s legality in the highest court in the United States might well be a fizzer, a side-step rather than a full trot. When California’s electors voted for Proposition 8 in...
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Almost 11 years ago in June 2002, ...
All of us at one time or another had things pounded into our heads so often that ultimately a light bulb goes off. Finally, one or more of our experiences, good or bad, influences our behavior.
This is not new. The esteemed 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaar...
Sometimes a story breaks that touches so many issues that one is left with mouth agape. The recent news involving technology “evangelist” Adria Richards is one such story and it’s burning across all kinds of media and cutting an intense divide within the...
Nicosia.
The municipal theatre of Nicosia sits directly behind the Cypriot parliament. Its prominence within the capital suggests the importance of such civic buildings to a population seeing itself as the inheritors to the grand heritage of Greek traditio...
It was supposed to be a bailout. It turned out to be a death sentence. Given the checkered and unremarkable history of the Brussels bureaucrats, is anyone really surprised?
Yes, an agreement was reached between Cypriot government officials and the so-called troi...
Boos and hisses fill the auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High as the governing board for New York City’s public schools, the Panel on Education Policy, takes the stage. It’s March 11 and the PEP is meeting to consider a proposal from Schools Chancellor Dennis...
Radicalism comes in many varieties. A certain orthodoxy, however, breeds intolerance when one appears to stray beyond approved boundaries, or, when one, as in introducing my St. Bernard puppy to a Marxist study group in Cambridge years ago as “Karl Marx,” to be gree...
Most people know that Ben & Jerry’s, headquartered in South Burlington, Vermont, makes premium ice cream and champions “Peace” and “Love.” What they don’t know is that this iconic leader of the socially responsible business community and supporter of Occ...
Except for maybe the famously intractable George Bush and Dick Cheney, it’s pretty common to want to take back something we did in life.
American slang celebrates this new opportunity – we get “another swing at the bat,” “another crack at it” or we take...
Some years ago I was stricken with an unforeseen religious fervor. Until then, I’d been your normal, rational secular Jew raised on the fusty ideas of those apostles of reason, “the great agnostic” Robert Ingersoll, and the free thinking criminal defense lawyer Cl...
To restore good relations with Latin America and the Caribbean, damaged by several years of neglect, is one of many difficult tasks now facing the Obama administration. A measure that could have far-reaching consequences and notably improve the U.S.’ battered image in t...
In the final decade before his demise, the late Christopher Hitchens had become the Phil Spector of American politics. Ala Spector, even his hair looked crazy.
After injecting himself into the Clinton-Lewinsky affair...
On Sunday night February 24 three Eritrean community centers in Stockholm, Sweden were firebombed and burnt to the ground following a vicious attack on the Swedish Eritrean population by a program broadcast by Stockholm television station SVT.
The pogrom style “d...
I am a Los Angeles resident who has spent most of my life on the west side of the city. After leaving Long Island, New York in 1963 and moving to San Diego for a year, I’ve lived in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades and Westwood with six months off for good...