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'
Chen Guangchen, the Chinese human activist, got four separate articles in the New York Times for May 5.
Jane Perlez and Michael Wines reported from Beijing on the deal that would get Chen and his family visas to the US, for him to take up a fellowship at NYU.
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Apple Inc. is the largest technology company in the world, in terms of both revenue and profit. Yet, the California-based company has just 47,000 workers on its payroll in the United States.
Apple recently released ...
With news reports that legal activist Chen Guangcheng has agreed to be resettled inside China with his family away from his tormenters in Shandong, to an as yet undisclosed university where he can pursue his legal studies, the United States and China probably both breathe...
Washington has pressured the Philippines, whose government it owns, into conducting joint military exercises in the South China Sea. Washington’s excuse is that China has territorial disputes with the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries concerning island and sea...
On April 19, India tested its first inter-continental ballistic missile, named Agni-V, and joined the select group of nations possessing both nuclear weapons and a delivery system capable of hitting targets across continents. Only a few days before, nuclear capable North ...
The statistics are chilling. In a country where workers have no real right to organize a union, they face an ever falling standard of living. The workers’ attempts to organize independent unions are faced with repression – 25% of the companies illegally fire w...
On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax m...
In contrasting China and America, pundits often cite our free and independent media as one of our greatest strengths, together with the tremendous importance which our society places upon individual American lives. For us, a single wrongful death can sometimes provoke...
The Syrian conflict continued to boil — or boil over — when Syrian troops fired across the Turkish border on April 9, apparently killing either fleeing refugees or armed combatants.
Then the UN team entered and began monitoring a shaky ceasefire – sha...
After his death, George Orwell’s terrifying vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four of a future in which the past could be erased and rewritten at will by a faceless bureaucracy was quickly appropriated in the US and Britain for the purposes of Cold War propaganda. The ...
A poor jobs report, higher than expected inflation in China, and another flare-up in the Eurozone sent stocks tumbling on Monday. US Treasuries rallied on news from the Labor Department that employers added just 120,000 non-farm payrolls in March, far below analysts most ...
Behind the political crisis that saw the recent fall of powerful Communist Party leader Bo Xiali is an internal battle over how to handle China’s slowing economy and growing income disparity, while shifting from a cheap labor export driven model to one built around inte...
Politicians in the United States must ritualistically assert that the United States is and always will be the world’s leading economic, military and political power. This chant may help win elections in a country where respectable people deny global warming and evolutio...
The governments of the five large countries of the Global South, the BRICS states, met in New Delhi this week for their fourth summit. These five countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, are home to forty per cent of the world’s peoples, and their share...
On March 21, 2012, the fifteen-member UN Security Council voted unanimously, for the first time, to push the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, towards a diplomatic settlement, by ordering it to comply with the Six Point plan presented by Kofi Anan, the former UN Secretary...
For many the Retraction of the Apple story by This American Life turned Apple from a labor abuser into a corporation with best practices. Others saw this as a proof of yet another corporate cover-up and PR campaign by Apple. Meanwhile, American involvement in workplace...
When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in troubl...
In 2010 the FBI invaded the homes of peace activists in several states and seized personal possessions in what the FBI–the lead orchestrator of fake “terrorist plots”–called an investigation of “activities concerning the material support of terrorism.”...
Recent media exposure of labor abuses among Apple’s suppliers reignited public discussions about China and the human costs of globalization. Meanwhile, concerned with jobs in an election year, President Obama has called for China to play fair in international trade and...
The conventional picture of US policy in the Middle East is of a hellbound train rushing toward war with Iran, pulling burning coaches filled with European passengers howling praise of Western values out the windows at horrified bystanders. Actually, I think it’s more...
Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant? Or is he an idiot?
According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with...
Who could have imagined back in 2002, when the euro first began circulating, that ten years later, in an act of near desperation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, would travel to Beijing, hat in hand, to seek bailout funds from Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to keep th...
President Barack Obama blew a kiss to Apple in the State of the Union speech, praising the entrepreneurial spirit of its founder, the late Steve Jobs, as the cameras panned to his widow in the audience.
Obama’s timing couldn’t be weirder. In the last month, App...
Let’s start with red lines. Here it is, Washington’s ultimate red line, straight from the lion’s mouth. Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re ...
In early January the Obama Administration released the Pentagon’s new Guidance, ...