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 'environment'
The first time I went to West Virginia my life changed forever. I was invited down by Judy Bonds and Bo Webb to take a tour of the “coalfields”. Conditions there went swiftly from John Denver’s Almost Heaven, to John Prine’s Mulenberg County in les...
A Federal Advisory Committee called the “National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee” or NCADAC, was established under the Department of Commerce in December 2010 and is supported through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (...
On visits to watery Biscayne National Park, I am reminded of the simple shock that one can still view signposts of the natural past despite a hundred years of pollution, the mangrove cutting and wetlands filling, and general disregard of elected officials for laws, regula...
In their December 29th editorial in the Billings Gazette, Scott Talbott of the Wyoming Game and Fish and Harv Forsgren of the U.S. Forest Service wrote that hunting was another step towards grizzly bear recovery.
To read their editorial, go to ...
As a longtime writer and activist campaigning for decades on food and farming issues, most recently Prop 37, the California Ballot Initiative to label genetically engineered foods, I am reminded daily of the allure, indeed the addictive pleasure, of single-issue organizin...
It’s what the county legislature in Suffolk County, New York is noted for—passing first-in-the-nation laws. It’s done that with laws banning the hand-held use of cell phones while driving, the sale of drop-side cribs and the supplement ephedra, and many statutes p...
Miranda Gibson is a 31 year old teacher, who has spent the past year engaged in a remarkably courageous act. Miranda has been living on a platform which sits 60 meters above the floor of an ancient Tasmanian forest. The tree that she has called home since December 14, 201...
Each day at its massive Grasberg mine on the Indonesian province of Papua on the island of New Guinea, Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan, the world’s largest gold, copper and molybdenum mining company, removes 3 million pounds of copper and 5,000 ounces of gold from what h...
The modern dilemma is to understand just how unreasonable the reasoning classes are in both thought and action. Political ‘progressives’ were behind efforts to obliterate Native American cultures through forced assimilation and acculturation for the purported ‘benef...
We are doomed as a parasitic, rapacious species, and with that air of certain demise, anything is possible. That, at least, seems to be behind the desperate push for a human effort to reverse, alter and adjust the environment in order to halt the previous effects of alt...
On one historic day in 1992, I marched through the State Capitol Building and adjoining Senate Offices with hundreds of recreational fishermen, commercial fishermen and environmentalists working for the passage of the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA). ...
Much recent media attention has focused on Walmart’s announcement that it is canceling Thanksgiving plans for many of its employees. These workers will now have to work on the holiday as the retail giant kicks off its holiday sale at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving D...
Have you noticed how much environmental organizations, environmental professionals and environmental activists use the word pristine? It seems that anytime and enviro wants to protect something that something must be described as pristine.
In m...
In spite of Barack Obama’s prognostication that future generations would look back at his 2008 nomination as the very point in history at which the (industrially-induced) rising levels of the oceans began to slow, as the 2012 presidential election draws near it is d...
This past weekend I went to West Virginia to say goodbye to my friend Larry Gibson.
He passed away on September 9th on his home on Kayford Mountain, West Virginia. Hundreds turned out to Charleston’s civic arena to pay homage to this simple man who had...
The Prisoner
An unusual and very original political act. An athletic milestone. A feat of endurance. A hazardous journey. These and many other words have been used to describe the maritime journey of Puerto Rican e...
When the Clean Water Act was passed by Congress forty years ago under a Republican administration, I was a clueless college undergraduate at Yale. Laws belonged to those serious looking law school students around the corner, perhaps including two I may have passed crossin...
As I walk along the Los Angeles River on a cool fall afternoon, I gaze across a graffiti-ridden concrete embankment and imagine what this landscape must have looked like less than 100 years ago. The LA River today, which dumps the area’s urban runoff directly in the Pac...
Although you would not know it from what passes for debate during the ong...
In the aftermath of a bad call in an NFL game Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker– no friend of unionized labour – tweeted for the return of the unionized refs. The NFL Referees Association argued that the NFL’s $9 billion in annual revenues was sufficient to maintain t...
Dr. Barry Commoner, equipped with a Harvard PhD in cellular biology, used his knowledge of biology, ecosystems, nuclear radiation, public communication, networking scientists, political campaigning, and community organizing to become the greatest environmentalist in the 2...
The arrival of tsunami debris along the west coast this summer has triggered the latest frenzy to stop invasive species. How ironic that one invasive species, us, presumes to control others. But never underestimate the power of a major myth in modern American environmenta...
When I was in college, one of my favorite courses was animal behavior. One of the more memorable lessons I learned was the difference between proximate and ultimate causes of behavior. Proximate and ultimate causes of events are important to distinguish.
For inst...
At 7 a.m. an awful humming is giving me a headache. I stagger out of bed, wander into each room, bend my ear to the bottom of the bathtub, open the front door and lean outside–and even check out the basement. But nothing changes, the pulsating sound coming from ever...
“I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.”
– Dr. Seuss
It seems more and more there are fewer conservation organizations who speak for the forest, and more that speak for the timber industry. Witne...