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 'health care'
Since his election as governor, Republican Tom Corbett has left no stone unturned in his assault on the people of Pennsylvania. To boil it down to a simple formula: he cuts food stamps to 1.8 million people while giving $1.7 billion in tax breaks to Shell oil. Neolibe...
Atul Gawande.
Rock star surgeon.
I’d want him to operate on me.
If I needed an operation.
And I had health insurance.
He actually listens to patients.
And Gawande washes his hands. A lot.
To avoid Complications....
Mass killings by a lone gunman lead to speculation about the sanity – or lack of it – of the killer who often turns out to have expressed doubts about his own mental stability prior to the attack. For instance, James Holmes, who shot dead 12 people and wounded 58 as ...
Bill Clinton raised a good deal of applause the other night in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, pointing out that the Republicans made a huge mess out of the economy. And while what Clinton said was to some degree the case, it was only the case insofar as...
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 ...
London.
The musician and satirist Tom Lehrer famously quipped that satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. He might have saved his breath if he had known what was coming. This week, the UK’s Conservative-led coalition gov...
1 Rank of New Orleans in fastest growing US cities between 2010 and 2011. Source: Census Bureau.
1 Rank of New Orleans, Louisiana in world prison rate. Louisiana imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of the other 50 states. Louisiana rate is five t...
Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for President of the United States, promises a Manhattan-project jobs program that would ignite our economy, repair our crumbling infrastructure, and put the US in the lead at the forefront of the world’s newest and hottest tech...
Economists tend not to be very good at economics, which is one of the main reasons that the world is facing such a prolonged downturn. Few economists were able to recognize the enormous imbalances created by housing bubbles in the United States and elsewhere, nor to under...
Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential pick, Paul Ryan, as with himself, is an uninformed opportunist who was born into wealth and privilege and whose proposed policies aim to perpetuate that privilege at the expense of the rest of the population with whom he nominally s...
The federal panel charged with allocating funds for autism research has squandered hundreds of millions in taxpayer money on ideological, nonscientific priorities. Its decisions have been financially irresponsible and practically ineffective. Its chairman should be fired ...
A lot has been said over the last few years about the grueling nature of the yearly football schedule around the world. Several competitions have been expanded to include more teams. Consequently, players play an increased number of matches every season. Additionally, som...
The bumper sticker on the beat-up pickup truck read: “Friends don’t let friends vote Democrat.”
The driver was obviously not affluent. Yet, despite all the news about mega-trillion dollar bankster bailouts, mega-million dollar bonuses for financial crooks, ...
Why do we get sick and how do we get well were the enormously complex and controversial questions explored by a gathering of labor and community activists, health policy experts and academics attending a one-day conference at the University of California Berkeley on July ...
Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Many years ago while working in a free clinic in Peoria, Illinois, I came to realize how a house call could teach much more about a patient than seeing the patient in the office. Office visits are artificial and don’t tell you near...
Single payer, living wage, cutting the military industrial complex. The American people want it. And we can’t get it. Why not?
Because good people continue to lie to themselves.
The big lie? The Democratic Party is better than the Republican Party.
...
President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act sucks. It isn’t change in the dysfunctional American health care system that any one should believe in or defend. And yet that is exactly what liberals and progressives are doing. Led by spin doctors at ...
Reactionaries on the American right are seething in anger at the Supreme Court’s validation of health care reform, while liberals and center-right Democrats are predictably celebrating the ruling as a step forward in solidifying Obama’s “progressive” public policy...
Last week America engaged in one of its perennial paroxysms of constitutional cogitation – this time over the Obama health care bill – with (mostly) predictable results.
Four of the great legal priests on our High Temple’s Council of Scriptural Interpretation...
A big hurdle was passed on June 28, when the Supreme Court decided that the Affordable Care Act was legal. After years of vitriol, fighting, malicious ad campaigns, exaggeration from all sides, and lawsuits, the court reaffirmed anticlimactically that the government has t...
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
– John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address
Not all of the states’ reactions to the recent health care decision by the U.S. Supreme C...
Elite rule is system-wide and highly encouraged across organizations of all types. It’s now approaching a religious concept, this power to lord over others and exploit one’s underlings for personal advancement. Look for the Ayn Randians to establish some sort of c...
Let me preface this column by saying that I don’t think all conservatives and right-wingers are stupid. In fact I have some right-leaning friends of a libertarian bent who are really smart, and a lot of fun to argue with. They may have an unquestioning faith, bordering ...
The political victory for President Obama in the Supreme Court has created an interesting shift in American politics. More important than the blow against his Republican opponent has been the re-energizing of Obama’s base, a loose coalition of liberals, labor, and ...
Looking on the bright side, the Supreme Court has ruled that something that President Obama has done is definitively not unconstitutional.
That’s probably the best that can be said of the 5-4 decision by the High Court today in upholding the ironically named Affo...