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 by Tag 'China'
“Those jobs are gone and they’re not coming back” snapped Apple Ceo Steve Jobs. The scene was a 2011 dinner held at the home of venture capitalist John Doerr in Woodside, California, a short drive south of San Francisco. Those on the guest list–the...
Further my speculation that Edward Snowden, as a CIA guy, may have chosen Hong Kong because the PRC would be less eager than most jurisdictions to assist the CIA in whatever derring-do it might try to practice on Snowden in Hong Kong, Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch...
A lot of people in the US media are asking why America’s most famous whistleblower, 29-year old Edward Snowden, hied himself off to the city state of Hong Kong, a wholly owned subsidiary of the People’s Republic of China, to seek at least temporary refuge....
First, why Hong Kong?
My answer: Because he’s a spook.
There has been no end of sniggering from the liberal Colonel Blimps that Snowden chose to reveal his identity in Hong Kong.
As in (from the Twitter feed of a journalist who relentlessly works th...
On April 21, the BBC obtained disturbing video footage shot in Burma. It confirmed extreme reports of what has been taking place in that country, even as it is being touted by the US and European governments as a success story pertaining to political reforms and democracy...
Last week, some people questioned our ...
Sometimes, as an observer of the news, one comes across a particular opinion column that is so brazen, so audacious, that one must stare at the headline for thirty seconds or so, simply to make sure it’s not a hallucination. Such was my experience this morning when ...
Hong Kong.
The IMF cut China’s growth outlook from 8 per cent to 7.75 per cent for the coming year. These are still the strongest figures to be anticipated for any of the leading industrial countries so the leadership in Beijing is not immediately anxious....
Wars, particularly when wholly unjustified (though usually disguised as just wars), frequently, as now, have strange outcomes, often to the detriment of the power that inflicted the misery and destruction in the first place. The presumably conquered, strangely enough, s...
When I heard that Andre Vltchek was going to visit Cuba and Venezuela, I understood this would be a rare opportunity to discuss the issue of China’s international presence with someone who is unapologetically hailing China as a great hope for the world. Those who read C...
Despite being potentially one of the richest countries in the world, Russia still confronts several challenges such as youth emigration, and demographic and public health issues that hinder the country’s development.
The lack of opportunities and growing economic...
Perhaps there should be a statue to the anticommunist US senator Joseph McCarthy in Beijing, since he’s the inadvertent father of China’s nuclear programme. Just after the second world war, a young engineer from Hangzhou, Qian Xuesen, was working for the Pentagon at C...
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 ...
My good friend, a Chinese Indonesian lady, recently got grabbed and assaulted, in the middle of Jakarta, in broad daylight.
When it happened, I was in Japan and we exchanged several messages, and emails. This was not the first time such a thing had happened to he...
The deadly influenza virus H7N9 was first detected in China this March. “When we look at influenza viruses, this is an ...
The battle of the Hong Kong dockers, as union Secretary Wong Yu Loy reveals, was important not only because of the rarity of strikes in Hong Kong, or because it was a pitched battle with Hong Kong’s wealthiest corporate magnate, but also because of the way corporate glo...
Oscar Wilde wrote, “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” Perhaps this is how Kurt Campbell feels today.
Campbell, after all, as assistant secretary for East Asia in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, was a key architect and ...
Things seemed to have calmed on the Korean peninsula for now. This despite the fact that the U.S. and South Korea are continuing their outrageously provocative Foal Eagle “war games” through April 30. The Foal Eagle is one of the ...
Will President Obama become a late and unlikely convert to realpolitik and allow John Kerry to sacrifice America’s nuclear non-proliferation principles on the battered altar of North Korean diplomacy?
And will the fearsome pivot to Asia turn into a dainty pirouet...
For readers outside the Americas who are unfamiliar with what a pinata is, the ATOl editors included a helpful description. To explain further, a pinata is a diversion frequently rolled out at birthday parties for children of Latin American ancestry. It’...
China’s influence on North Korea’s nuclear policy is minimal. The DPRK knows that the PRC values North Korea both as a buffer and as a profitable hinterland for cheap labor and raw materials that it is completely unwilling to cede to South Korea. Therefore, the ...
One of the least discussed and least reported issues is the Obama administration’s effort to bring the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement to the forefront, an oppressive plurilateral US-led free trade agreement currently being negotiated with several Pacific Rim countr...
“China is displaying the same three symptoms that Japan, the U.S. and parts of Europe all showed before suffering financial crises: a rapid build-up of leverage, elevated property prices and a decline in potential growth.”
– Zhiwei Zhang, No...
Since receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, Chinese writer Mo Yan has been subjected to a torrent of criticism from western reviewers and other scribes. Most of this criticism focuses on what they perceive to be a lackluster criticism of the Chinese governme...
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...