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 'drug war'
With American drug use levels essentially the same as — and levels of drug-related violence either the same as or lower than — those in countries like the Netherlands with liberal drug laws, public support for the War on Drugs appears to be faltering. This was most re...
The Associated Press reports that eight former DEA administrators are urging the Obama administration to sue Washington and Colorado over their voter-approved moves toward marijuana legalization.
One former chief, Peter Bensinger, fears that successful legalizati...
Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield succumbed to a fit of honesty earlier this month: “When the drug war turns bloody, he said, the strategy is working,” journalist Martha Mendoza reported. By Brownfield’s standards, the strategy has been an enormous s...
A two-headed Martian recently dropped in on us and challenged me: “Folks back home love to ask what’s the wackiest thing about planets we visit. What should we say about this one?”
Of course I told them that Marijuana is illegal. Thirty million American...
Many people hate drugs. It is easy to see why. Most families have had a loved one with a problematic relationship to alcohol or other drugs. People who struggle with drug problems can cause incredible pain to themselves and their loved ones. Broken marriages, loss of ...
Two recent court cases in southern California provide insight into the identity of those smuggle drugs across the international boundary between the two countries. But more importantly what they do is highlight how the ludicrous “war on drugs” produces casualties of m...
Eugene Jarecki is an author and a filmmaker. The director behind “Freakanomics,” “The Trials of Harry Kissinger,” “Why We Fight,” and most recently “The House I Live In.”
“The House I Live In” his documentary about the drug war leaves one thinki...
I lived in South Africa from 1991 until 2002, during the difficult transition from apartheid to democracy. An interesting part of this history was that by 1994, apartheid had become so discredited that it was difficult to find a single white person who admitted to ever su...
The cracks in the American cannabis control system just got wider with the states of Washington and Colorado passing referendums legalizing the recreational use of marijuana for adults. It is nothing short of historic in a country that arrests over 850,000 people every ye...
The push to rebrand and re-sell the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez is in full swing. With violence way down as 2012 draws to a close, business and political leaders are extolling the return of security, inaugurating public works and opening new restaurants. Accordi...
Thomas Jefferson said a revolution every 20 years would be a good thing. Regardless of what one thinks of that, perhaps a little constitutional crisis every now and then would have its benefits.
One such crisis may be brewing now. On election day, solid majorities ...
Mexico City.
Mexico awoke Tuesday to the news that one of its leading drug lords had bit the dust. Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (aka El Lazca), presumed leader of Los Zetas and arguably the country’s third most wanted man, had been killed in a fire...
Another Portland Hempstalk has come and gone. This free annual weekend after Labor Day celebration of Cannabis Culture, bi...
The Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity arrived in New York today and hit the ground running. In the early evening, hundreds of caravan members and New York supporters met each other in ...
Recently, the city of Denver said it was going to deny medical marijuana dispensaries the right to advertise on city billboards. A few years ago, I remember other cities denying strip clubs the right to solicit on billboards as well, claiming the ads distracted drivers ...
San Diego.
If the Mexico-US border is the most surreal international boundary in the western hemisphere – often described as the only place where the so-called “First World” meets the Third, with all the envy, prejudice and distrust that implies – ...
Savage: not domesticated or cultivated; wild.
In June and July the war on drugs proceeded apace as DEA agents and Honduran military goons knocked off some Miskitu people in Honduras – suspects supposedly running...
Joseph “Jazz:” Hayden is a community activist from Harlem whose main goal was to expose the ...
Most readers probably know the outline of this story: beginning in the 1970s the incarceration rate in America, the proportion of the population sent to prison, started to rise exponentially. The rate of incarceration in America is now the highest in the world. And in abs...
On the night of July 1, Enrique Peña Nieto shouted before cameras, “this Sunday, Mexico won!” The presidential candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Peña used the speech to declare himself the winner, promising an “honest” and “democrat...
All my life I would have sympathized with the Black man being hounded by a vicious Caucasian (who happens to be the richest man in the United States Congress). But watching Attorney General Eric Holder taking verbal abuse from Rep. Darrell Issa last week, all that came to...
Good evening, my fellow Americans. I’m here tonight to clear up some misperceptions about Operation Fast and Furious. Many of you are confused, even angry, and I fully understand. Why did the United States sell thousands of guns to vicious Mexican drug cartels, so that ...
Earlier this week, political activist and comedian Randy Credico engaged in a novel protest and civil ...
The US is once again hell bent on establishing death squads in its militarization of Central America. This is a stark reminder of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and Ollie North were funding the contras with drug money, but now it is reinforced with lessons learned in terror...