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'
The cold, hard numbers of the poor and the dead are familiar.
Instead we are told that we should care—or rather, worry—about Mexico for a very different reason. The State Department, the Pentagon, the press and members of Congress tell us, with increasing shril...
Mexico City
The same week that a coalition of Mexican activists appealed to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate President Felipe Calderon for war crimes, a leading member of the country’s peace movement was gunned down in the northern s...
Amsterdam.
Highest greetings from the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, where I’m enjoying the heady ambience of this society where they just don’t care if you want to get high and where a couple thousand American youths are staggering around this we...
Occasionally the iron heel comes down on people who are widely respected and/or have the resources and will to fight back effectively. “The feds have overreached,” says Steve DeAngelo, who runs Harborside Health Center in Oakland and has been presented by the IRS wi...
On February 18, 2011 the Nassau County Crime lab was closed down because of grave concerns about the integrity of testing evidence. A multitude of errors were found to be committed that jeopardized thousands of cases. It was estimated that 3,000 drug convictions might h...
American capitalism consists of a constellation of rackets. The Occupy Wall Street movement has focused a spotlight on the banking and financial-services racket. Others have exposed the military-industrial complex, the extraction industries, the insurance, pharmaceu...
After a lifetime in law enforcement former Detroit Police Chief Dr. Isaiah “Ike” McKinnon was first moved to change his outlook on Michigan’s draconian marijuana laws by my own case was particularly thrilling: “John Sinclair was arrested for one ...
Americans have descended into a legal drug culture, while simultaneously retaining the “illegal” one – at great expense. But the government responds by denying the evidence its own agencies produce.
Last month, a funding “highlights” of the Office...
Mexico City
How quickly a large Mexican city can go from relative tranquillity to a powder keg fought over by drug gangs was recently illustrated clearly in the Gulf resort of Veracruz. Until two months ago, the historic port – which witnessed the arriva...
There is an unspoken law in modern electoral politics: Take care of your adversaries; your friends can take care of themselves.
In today’s political universe, progressives have no place to go but Democrat. So it is for minorities, labor advocates, environment...
The Congress doesn’t run-it waltzes.
–Charles Joseph, Comment to Comte Auguste de LaGardeChambonas (1814)
Congress is not as idle as it may seem. Whereas much of the publicity it is getting suggests it is not getti...
Rick Perry and the other Republican presidential candidates are right. Americans are fed up, as Perry writes in his book Fed Up!, with “old guard politicians” dedicated to protecting the “establishment” and the federal government’s “culture of waste.”
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I was born into the crack era. Although not old enough to take part in the crack game, it did not leave me immune to the detrimental effects the drug had on my community. Growing up in the Bronx, I was surrounded by crack users, drug sellers and poverty. I f...
Mexico City
Many Mexicans may breathe a sigh of relief that last Thursday’s “Grito de Independencia” (the “Cry of Independence” enacted every September 15) was the last under “drug warrior” Felipe Calderon, whose six-year term has unleashed n...
“Carl Oglesby dies at 76; led Students for a Democratic Society,” was the headline on the obit in the LA Times. The description of SDS seems accurate (although nobody ever called it “the SDS”):
”The SDS had been...
I left Amsterdam last week, after the shit hit the fan in Michigan, and the Dutch authorities were striving to match the sheer idiocy of the anti-marijuana crusaders in the United States by forcing 58 licensed cannabis coffeeshops out of business pursuant to a recent ...
Arizona and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are the “ground zero in the war on drugs.”
That’s the assessment of the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission (ACJC), the state office that receives federal criminal-justice grants — and which then redistributes the...
The Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, released in late July by the White House, offers the strategic context for the increasing rhetorical focus of the Obama administration on “transnational crime,” “transnational threats,” and “transnat...
Mexico City
The plea filed in a US federal court by Mexican drug-trafficker Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla – one of the top members of the Sinaloa Cartel – that he was protected by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in exchange for information ...
In 1982, Nancy Reagan formally launched the post-modern prohibition movement, the war on drugs. While begun under President Richard Nixon, her infamous “Just Say No” speech at the Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland, CA, officially established the war o...
Amsterdam.
Last week, Michigan moved into the spotlight in the War on Drugs when the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act (MMMA) does not permit patients to sell marijuana to each other, and that marijuana dispensaries m...
Reports that the US is determined to maintain a presence in Afghanistan will surprise no one except 99% of foreign policy analysts. Responding to the announcement that the US is in negotiations to maintain a presence until 2024, Mahdi Hassan, senior editor at the ...
Cocaine, the drug fueling the trade that’s left thousands dead in Mexico and Central America since 2007 and which 1.4 million Americans are addicted to, originates with two species of the coca plant grown in the South American Andes. Ninety percent of the U.S. marke...
Oklahoma State Senator Connie Johnson of Oklahoma thinks Larry Yarbrough should be free. Larry, a model prisoner, is in his 17th year of a life-without-parole sentence for a nonviolent drug crime. On August 17, Sen. Johnson will speak on behalf of Yarbrough at an Oklahoma...
“If you can’t control drugs in a maximum security prison, then how can you control drugs in a free society”? Those are my words that close Breaking the Taboo, a poignant new film about the global drug war.
On May 31st...