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 2013
Lately, feminist activists are organizing against a litany of misogynist Facebook pages that glorify violence against women or treat it as a joke, pages with names like “Raping Your Girlfriend” and “Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus.” The activists’ primary tact...
It seems that passing ineffectual resolutions isn’t the United Nation’s only forte. The recent suggestion by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) to harvest and consume insects like bees, grasshoppers, ants and beetles, completely omits an undeniable human pro...
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” asks Sir Toby Belch of the puritanical teetotal steward, Malvolio, in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’.
It seems that if you are virtuous puritanical teetotal Turkish Prime M...
When I wrote that first opinion piece after my nephew Chase was killed in Iraq, I naively believed my words could make a difference, would prevent others from hearing the sentence of death, “We regret to inform you.”
Jeez, I’ve written more than 600 articles....
Forty years ago, during the Nixon administration of the early 1970s, Congress passed several truly visionary environmental laws. The strength of these laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, along with ...
The philosopher Epicurus speculated that, despite the overwhelming regularity of nature, atoms traveling in a straight line, in a moment of sheer unpredictability, might deviate from their course – or swerve. From this he gathered that we possess free will.
&...
During a tour of some of the neighborhoods in Homs, Syria’s third largest city after Aleppo and Damascus, with a pre-conflict population of approximately 800,000 (nearly half Homs residents have fled over the past two years) located maybe about 22 miles NE of the curre...
The novel is generally acknowledged to be a bourgeois form of literature. It wasn’t until there were enough literate people with time for leisurely reading that this entertainment came along. The crime novel reflects the bourgeois obsession with order and usually ...
This was a week that exemplified the historic moment in which we live. We will look back at these times and see the seeds of a national revolt against concentrated wealth that puts profits ahead of people and the planet. Not only were there a wide array of resistance ac...
Modern literature suffers from the lack of an epic novel that encompasses and defines the times in which we live, containing as a result that elusive but necessary quality of timelessness necessary to accord it the status of the cl...
Patricio Pron’s publishers refer to My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain as an auto...
This week I had the pleasure of visiting the editorial offices of the Last Newspaper in America, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, having not been there for a few years. Amongst the cluttered paraphernalia of old-fashioned newspapering and with the magnificent golden hills ...
We All Die of Our Nightmares in the End. ( R )
by BRENDAN McCORMACK
The trains are darkly packed in the station,
Hundreds of carriages
Brooding next to each other
Upon tracks leading nowhere.
We are underground....
There has been an alarming escalation of repression against rural populations in Colombia. Much of this is focused against the National Unified Federation of Agricultural Workers Unions, or Fensuagro–the country’s largest labor organization representing rura...
“The US kill rate in the 1950-53 Korean War equaled more than one 9-11 every day… for the whole 1,100 day war…The US may have killed 20% of the population of Korea, said General Curtis Lemay, who was involved in the US air war on Korea. If so...
It is an object study. Two men in a car, which is driven into another man. The attacked individual is then hacked to death by a meat cleaver or kitchen implement in broad daylight. There may be several instruments used. There are religious chants – or at least t...
Former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner is back. Having given up his House seat following being exposed in a 2011 sexting scandal, Weiner bowed out of politics for the last two years.
On May 22nd, Weiner threw his proverbial hat into the New York Ci...
There must be reasons why people are weary of the flood of excellent documentary films, books and articles showing us what the corporate state – that is, the fusion of big business and government to constantly serve the former against the peoples’ interest – is doin...
The ancient Greeks attributed weather to the god Zeus; today we can safely attribute it to industrial capitalism and its voracious consumption of fossil fuels. The carnage left by a tornado in Oklahoma yesterday is just the latest in our economic system’s daunting body ...
In an article published May 15, 2013, American historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote, “Nothing illustrates more the limitations of Western power than the internal controversy its elites are having in public about what the United States in particular and...
Journalist Scott Shane, with an assist from Mark Mazzetti, reports in the New York Times (May 22) on the decline in armed drone strikes. Perhaps, for all the wrong reasons, drone warfare is now under review–i.e., in the words of one national-security expert, these s...
A tipoff from a prominent Toronto imam more than a year ago appears to be at the heart of arrests at the end of April in the alleged VIA Rail terror plot in Canada. In fact, counterterrorism police began their press briefing by ...
Finally – it’s over. The goal of Simpson and Bowles has been met, the deficit is shrinking rapidly. And the intellectual underpinning for deficit reduction, based on the ...
To observe the Republicans, one would think that the U.S. military was involved in nothing more controversial than a Marine holding an umbrella for President Barack Obama while he gave a speech in the rain. Sarah Palin, one of the many darlings of the rightwing, has sta...