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
I have so far chosen to follow the Keystone campaign from a safe distance. After staring into a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence in West Virginia and barely escaping, I was pretty sure I wasn’t ready for jail again.
I had had the choice, as it were, but st...
London.
When I lived in Moscow, occasionally Russians would fix me with a stern gaze and gravely pose the question ‘who won the war?’ Circumspectly, I would answer that Russia had without doubt borne the principal burden of vanquishing Nazi Germany. ...
Bill Maher is a funny guy.
But he’s not very reflective.
That’s because, quite ironically, he’s fallen into the War on Terror trap—the comfortable and comforting stereotype of angry Muslims as irrational ideologues armed with religious hair-triggers ...
Melbourne.
It was a crime of sorts, perpetuated against the international community with a brazen disregard that has come to mark the politics of the country. On Thursday, the bill that had been promised excising the Australian mainland for the purposes ...
Rio Chico, Bolivia.
I have two pieces of art in my hands. One is a postcard of a painting by Bolivian artist Ricardo Pérez Alcalá. It shows a human skull morphed into a 1900s Remington typewriter — keys as teeth; paper-turning roll, ears; inner mecha...
One of the great moments in Spanish television last year was when Diego Cañamero appeared in the right-wing program El Gat...
Reliable sources in Washington D.C. have informed the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) that Monsanto has begun secretly lobbying its Congressional allies to attach one or more “Monsanto Riders” or amendments to the 2013 Farm Bill that would preempt or prohibit stat...
Before Attorney General Eric Holder oversaw a Justice Department that secretly seized AP journalists’ phone records, he was guilty of something even worse, and closely related to the AP scandal. He argued a little-known case before the Supreme Court called Holder v. Hum...
I believe our case on weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq] is very, very clear indeed. It’s perfectly obvious Saddam has them.
– British Prime Minister Blair, February 25, 2003.
North Korea does now have missile technology t...
There is a delicious—well, delicious to me, anyway—flavor of Western bewilderment about the neverending parade of Japanese nationalist shenanigans.
The most recent entry was Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto’s ...
In 1933, the writer Arna Bontemps, a fellow member with Langston Hughes of a collection of writers, artists, and musicians that history has dubbed “the Harlem Renaissance,” in recognition of the creative contributions they offered to the world, penned a moving...
It is an event “of cosmic proportions”, said one Palestinian academic, a befitting description regarding Stephen Hawking’s decision to boycott an Israeli academic conference slated for next June. It was also a decisive moral call which was communicated on May 8 by C...
I was running the path parallel to the main road when I heard brakes wail and then a BOOM. Unable to see anything through the dense tree leaves that partition the Kingdom of Intersections from the larger world, I looked up at billowing, grayish white smoke.
...
In January, it seemed the restart of San Onofre Unit 2 would be a corporate cake walk.
With its massive money and clout, Southern California Edison
was ready to ram through a license exception for a reactor whose botched $770 million steam generator fix had k...
Industrialized capitalism is destructive, by its very nature, to all life on Earth. This is even more so when wedded to investment capital. Every living thing on the planet is now on its way to being commodified – including people, who are now considered “human ca...
Although many Americans believe their universities are places where administrators and faculty members coexist on a fairly equal basis, the reality is that this is far from the case.
According to recent surveys by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 35 priva...
In most European cities and towns, the church is at the center, with a square in front of it. In Texas towns, it’s the courthouse. In ...
The difference in the devastation was enormous-so was the difference in the response.
When the nine-story building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed, 1127 people were killed. When the fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, exploded 15 people died. The prope...
Every week we are inspired by the many people throughout the country who are doing excellent work to challenge the power structure and put forward a new path for the country. The popular resistance to plutocracy, concentrated wealth and corporatism is decentralized, creat...
Alan Hart is an author and a journalist. He is the former Middle East Chief Correspondent for Britain’s Independent Television News and a former BBC Panorama presenter whose beat was the Middle East. He has written a number of books, including Arafat: Terrorist or P...
Three years ago, I left Britain and flew to Turkey with the intention of joining the Freedom Flotilla bound for the shores of Gaza. Our intention was to break the illegal and immoral siege that was slowly draining the life from the densely populated land. I boarded the Ma...
Undoubtedly, Pakistan is now a “democracy”, that is, the Western style democracy where the elections are held, people vote, and the people ...
In a world run by emperors or presidents, perhaps we should ignore Socrates’ injunction to know ourselves and instead know those who rule us. During his recent speech to Ohio University graduates, posted at ...
Federal authorities publicly plot encouraging bounty hunters to kidnap a fugitive black radical from a foreign country for return to prison in the U.S. to achieve long-delayed justice.
This sounds like the FBI action on May 2, 2013 in placing former Black Panther a...
It’s not hard to find critics of the Assad government in the Governorate (Muhafazat) of Homs or for that matter, to varying degrees in Syria’s other thirteen Governorates according to Syrian analysts interviewed by this observer and reports from human rights groups in...