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 'immigration'
Last month I learned about a genocide I had never known of before. It happened not in an isolated unknown part of the world, but in Southern Italy, the ancestral home of members of my own family. Even more shocking to me, Southern Italians themselves are only now beginnin...
Two bits of bad news to dampen any cheer earlier reports might have warranted. It is accompanied by one bit of good news. The bad news comes from Alabama and Iowa. The good news comes from Arizona, a state normally known as a bellwether for bad news.
Early...
It’s true, Pérez Méndez doesn’t look 21. He has the soft facial features of a 14 year old child or younger, which make the interaction between him and U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Marshall in the Tucson federal courthouse even more painful to watch. Pérez Ménd...
Drones along the U.S. boundaries with Mexico and Canada are coming under criticism from an unexpected source: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—or, more specifically, the department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The critique helps open the door to t...
Eyewitness accounts and video footage shown in a PBS documentary last week provide shocking proof that U.S. federal agents brutally beat Anastasio Hernández Rojas, tased him five times, and ultimately killed him—this while he lay on the ground with his arms handcuffed ...
I recently read Wendi Adelson’s book on human trafficking This is Our Story, and ...
It’s hard to keep Alabama out of the news. Two of its recent newsworthy events deserve attention. The first is its attempt to improve on the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, a 76-page statutory creation as remarkable for its length as for...
A recent poster prepared by Michigan State University assistant professor and artist, Dylan Miner, asks that we R...
Among animals, one has a sense of humor.
– Marianne Moore, The Pangolin
It is always refreshing when folks who are charged with dealing with really serious subject matter bring a note of levity into the proc...
This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is lauding itself for deporting more than 3,100 convicted criminal aliens, immigration fugitives and immigration violators in a six day national “...
There are ten million undocumented migrants in the United States who risk deportation if apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE only has ...
Money matters, in politics as in other aspects of American life. The March 6’s Super Tuesday Republican playoffs in 10 states were one more round in the political-Nascar crash-dummy derby. And for all his money and organizational muscle, Mitt Romney’s campaign yet...
Vice President Joe Biden landed in Mexico City last night and he’s left little doubt about his mission—to lock in the regional drug war. His visit comes at a time ...
When the great Muhammad Ali was asked how many sit ups he did, he responded, “I don’t count my sit-ups, I only start counting when it starts hurting, that is when I start counting, because then it really counts, that’s what makes you a champion.”
These wo...
The surge of neo-racism in Arizona, especially racism directed at people of Mexican descent, has received sporadic media coverage over the past year. But for the most part news about the economy and presidential politics has pushed off the front page Arizona’s attack ...
Time has worn down embossed lettering on the bronze plaque on the 6-ft. obelisk marking the U.S.-Mexico border.
My friend and I had stopped to look at the boundary monument, and were trying to decipher the lettering (English on north side of monument, Spanish on so...
Early on the morning of the 7th day, God wrote HB 2281; then he rested.
That’s the way conservative Arizonans view this clearly unconstitutional and immoral anti-Ethnic Studies measure.
The opponents of Tucson’s Mexican American Studies (MAS)...
Not a single person’s eyes were dry when Melchor Torres of Madera , California recounted the story of his son’s murder while in police custody on the night of October 22, 2002. Melchor was an invited guest to the Merced-based October 7, 2011 meeting of the ...
Nations and organizations around the globe observed yesterday as International Migrants Day. Twenty-two years ago, on December 18, 1990 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers a...
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...
“The UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, are coming.” So says Candice Miller, the Republican congresswoman from the Michigan borderlands near Detroit.
She should know. Miller chairs the Border and Maritime Security of the House Committee on Homeland Security, whi...
Last Friday Joaquin Luna put on a white shirt and black tie—the same ones he wore every Sunday at the church he attended. The eighteen-year-old high school senior then kissed family members, went into the bathroom of his mother’s house in south Texas, and shot and kil...
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
–Part of t...
Much of the controversy over Alabama’s HB 56 and Arizona’s SB 1070 is related to those provisions that criminalize undocumented migrants. What is rarely mentioned is that criminal law requires more procedural protections than immigration law. If immigration law treate...
The experiment in Democracy seems to be failing badly in Arizona. Here, government, the state legislature, law enforcement, the educational system, the courts and the media are a testament to this colossal failure. Here, rampant hate and bigotry starts at the top and here...