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
World sales of Merck’s blockbuster asthma drug, Singulair, were about $5 billion a year until last year when its patent expired in the United States. But the drug also has a darkening cloud over it. The ...
Last week news coverage around the world heralded the conviction of Efrain Rios Montt on the charges of genocide against the Mayan people during his 17 month tenure as Guatemala’s head of government and military strongman. The three-judge panel led by Jazmin Barrios d...
Guantanamo Bay’s back in the news. President Obama described it as “not sustainable” in a news conference on April 30th at the White House.
Pundits on both sides ...
POTUS has been caught with his pants down, even if just this once and confined to government spying on the Associated Press. Only when its own ox is gored does the press, here the New York Times in a blistering editorial (May 14), fight back, yet still without to...
One of the great disappointments with – and indeed key weakness of – the indignados movement in Spain, which this May 15 celebrates its second birthday, has been its failure to pursue a strategy that turns power in the streets into the real power needed to change ...
Melbourne.
Popular culture, and celebrity, have come to this. A well-endowed personality, a figure of celluloid appeal, has to justify to the other-worldliness of an action personal and specific to the person in question. That a woman has to have a maste...
I saw the masked men
throwing truth into a well.
When I began to weep for it
I found it everywhere.
- Claudia Lars (El Salvador)
Those of us who have struggled for peace and justice over the past decades don’t hav...
Gilad Atzmon’s tour of the USA.
Berkeley, CA
Monday, May 13 5pm KPFA radio interview for Flashpoints
Portland, OR
Tuesday, May 14 6:30pm- 830pm ...
Angelina Jolie, scion of Hollywood beauty, has gone under the knife for medical, rather than cosmetic reasons and guess what – it’s news! Angelina’s double-mastectomy, undertaken because she carries the ...
It looks like the Fed will be tapping on the brakes sometime in the near future, although the date has yet to be determined.
Stocks headed lower on Monday following an unofficial announcement from the Fed that the Central Bank had settled on a process for winding ...
If you happen to follow the American and international labor scene, and want to kill a leisurely hour, an entertaining way of doing that is to visit the Department of Labor’s (DOL) official website. It offers a wide selection of labor tidbits, explanations of bureaucr...
Al Jazeera Stream contacted me a few days ago asking if I would participate on a show commemorating the Nakbe. I would be the only Palestinian, the producer said, “to balance things out” amidst various Israeli voices. Here’s the exact excerpt of the email:
...
A cruel and heart-rending civil war rages in Syria, and this tragedy is fueling a heated political debate in the rest of the world between interventionists (whether sincere R2P humanitarians, or opportunistic imperialists) and non-interventionists.
Syrians opposed ...
It was around noon on a hot summer day in Tehran and I was working on the rundown for the 13:30 news bulletin. As one of Press TV Newsroom’s senior producers back then in 2009, I used to assign stories to producers and news writers on my shifts. But that day, I was the ...
Mark Zuckerberg’s complaint box is filling up. The billionaire founder of FaceBook is behaving as destructively as other sociopaths who hoard vast riches while others starve and die for lack of medical care. And people are letting him know how they feel about it...
Breaking news of DOJ surveillance of the AP brought a welcome fighting back, a rare display of calling Obama on his running roughshod over civil liberties and here freedom of the press. The Holder-DOJ record so tarnishes the Constitution, all with Obama’s knowledge an...
Remember “Peak Oil?”
Neither does anyone else.
That’s because the operational theory of why, at...
On Friday, May 10th, Warner Bros. released Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. It stars leading Hollywood talent, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton and Carey Mulligan. During its 1st weekend release, it topped ...
It’s not every day that a former corporate lawyer comes out in favor of stronger regulation of big business.
And it’s not every day the former general counsel of a major American corporation comes out and urges the federal government to force major corporate wr...
Pakistan’s elections come at a key junction in the region’s geopolitics, with the public firmly opposed to the US ‘war on terror’ being conducted on Pakistani soil with no regard for its sovereignty. Pakistan’s new prime minister has a mandate to...
In the aftermath of the First World War, Britain and France famously created the modern Middle East by carving up what had been the Ottoman Empire. The borders of new states such as Iraq and Syria were determined in keeping with British and French needs and interests. The...
Recent remarks by Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss investigator of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, have changed the nature of debate on the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war. Momentum had been building up for months against Bashar al-Assad’s government, ...
The tempo of events in Syria has accelerated in recent weeks. The government forces have scored ...
Alternate realities in the conflict Pakistan is waging against insurgents in its tribal areas tend to be regular affairs. Intrinsic to them is the contorted relationship the country has with the United States, three bits domestic violence to two bits political expediency....
“These people who are commonly known as leaders, view politics and religion as that crippled, lame and injured man, displaying whom our beggars normally beg for money. These so-called leaders go about carrying the carcasses of politics and religion on their ...