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 'neoliberalism'
Albert Camus is arguably one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His relatively short life is well chronicled and the fodder of multiple conversations in university literature classes. His novels and essays raise fundamental questions about life in a world w...
Durban, South Africa.
Thanks are due to an odd man, the brutally-frank Zambian vice president Guy Scott who last week pronounced, “I dislike South Africa for the same reason that Latin Americans dislike the United States”, and to our own president Jaco...
In 1984 I wrote a hostile (to both music and words) review of U2’s Unforgettable Fire. Some weeks later, I found myself dragooned (by a force too absurd to mention) into a late afternoon conversation with Bono. It wasn’t an interview. He wanted to talk one-on-o...
“We have now grown used to the idea that most ordinary or natural growth processes (the growth of organisms, or populations of organisms or, for example, of cities) is not merely limited, but self-limited, i.e. is slowed down or eventually brought to a stand...
Imperialists are not just arrogant, they are stupid. Pretending that they might get a different result than previous US administrations have obtained before, the Obama administration is planning to send lethal arms to Syrian rebels. According to the Washington Post...
Eating has always been an intensely political issue: those with money eat, those without starve. With food in abundance, the only thing stopping its fair distribution is the profit motive. This explanation not only helps us understand the regularity of famines, but likewi...
Too bad for corporate moguls that they can’t yet patent news events. If they could, they could turn the dedication ceremony for George W. Bush’s presidential library in Dallas last Thursday into one hell of a moneymaker. Big Pharma could market the DVD as an emeti...
Margaret Thatcher’s face stares out at me from the front ...
Though Margaret Thatcher is no longer among the living, her ideology lives on. That ideology – known today as neoliberalism, “free market fundamentalism” in a phrase coined by George Soros – is strikingly unique. Apart from religious beliefs, is there any example ...
This interview with Tariq Ali was conducted by Die Presse in Vienna and appears in German in the paper’s Sunday edition.
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Vijay Prashad is fast becoming the historian of the Global South. His books and articles discussing the relationships between the oligarchs of global capitalism and the people and institutions of those it manipulates into its money pit of debt are detailed discussions o...
We are witnessing the slow-motion collapse of the second Anglo-Saxon imperium in less than a hundred years. There was something called ...
Mexico City.
According to rumors spread by everyone from The Economist to The New York Times, Mexico has gone from being the bloody epicenter of the “drug war” to a roaring “Aztec tiger” in the space of three short months. Following l...
Democrats are masters of illusion – especially self-delusion. Their abject performance over the past few decades has shorn them of identity and conviction. They have lost on every front against a Republican opponent that has abandoned the mainstream for cloud cuckoo lan...
‘Rothschild’ is a household name. It belongs to a family banking dynasty with a two hundred year lineage, reputedly once supremely powerful. Omnipresent historian Niall Ferguson has devoted two volumes to this history.
The Rothschild name is now bestowed on a s...
Upon a foundation of deep spirituality and philosophical treasures, proclaiming unity, justice and service, New India, horns honking in violation of the good; is racing, no time to spare towards the Alter of Materiality and Market Fundamentalism.
Under the careful ...
In the harsh Ogaden region of Ethiopia, impoverished ethnic Somali people are being murdered and tortured, raped, persecuted and displaced by government paramilitary forces. Illegal actions carried out with the knowledge and tacit support of donor countries, seemingly con...
A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were...
All through the fall, you could hear them chanting their glib platitudes, each candidate posturing as a champion of hardworking Americans. Now, as the country lists toward our season of mass consumption, you can listen to the publicans gravely intone the perils of the “...
Dublin.
Targeting young families, the elderly and the sick, as the government slashes child benefits, triples prescription charges and rubber-stamps controversial property tax.
Another political party is selflessly sacrificing itself to the ‘preyi...
In Quentin Tarantino’s movie ‘Jackie Brown’ the illegal arms dealer played by Samuel L. Jackson laughs as he recounts the sales slogan used by the manufacturer of the ‘Tech Nine’ semi-automatic weapon—“the most popular gun in American crime, like they p...
Durban, South Africa.
This week’s World Toilet Summit offers an opportunity to contemplate how we curate our crap. Increasingly the calculus seems to be cash, generating contradictions ranging from local to global scales, across race, gender, generation ...
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...
If you often wonder why ‘free market capitalism’ feels like it is failing despite universal assurances from economists and political pundits that it is working as intended, your intuition is correct. Free market capitalism has become a thing of the past. In t...