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 'oil'
There are so many areas of conventional democratic governance being challenged or eliminated by the Stephen Harper wrecking crew it is hard to keep up. Those searching for a line in the sand that even this government won’t cross still haven’t found it. So far, it seem...
We can phase out the three poisons – nuclear, coal and oil – in twenty-five years.
And replace them with solar, wind and energy efficiency.
...
For years, it has been believed that Guatemala led the Hemisphere in mass slaughter in the modern era, with 200,000 victims in the 1980’s – about 94% of them at the hands of the U.S.-backed state and its death squad allies. Very sadly, it appears that Colombia h...
During my time in Iran from 1977 to 1978 there were between forty and fifty thousand Americans, many of them working in the military-industrial complex. The Shah of Iran with the approval of the U.S. government had signed a contract with a U.S. manufacturer of helicopters...
Washington, DC
President Barack Obama has finally begun in recent months to signal to Israel that the United States would not get involved in a war started by Binyamin Netanyahu without US approval. If it is pursued firmly and consistently through 2012, t...
Ever since December 27th, war clouds have been gathering over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water connecting the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond. On that day, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that Tehran would block th...
Where will you be and what will you be doing when the first giant oil tanker (there will be two plying the waters every three days), carrying over 200,000 gallons of tar sands goop diluted with solvent, spills its load into the waters of northern B.C?
We often reme...
In another ridiculous moment of political trickery, Obama managed to dupe a major chunk of the American environmental movement yesterday by refusing to authorize the construction of the Keystone Pipeline now. The keyword in that sentence which seems like it is being large...
The world’s press is choc-a-bloc with “if” questions about Iran and war. Will Israel attack? Is Obama, coerced by domestic politics in an election year, being dragged into war by the Israel lobby? Will he lunch the bombers? Is the strategy to force Iran into a c...
As South Sudan implodes in a growing mass insanity of ethnic violence and once again tens of thousands have to flee for their lives the warning signs all point towards the US plan to destabilize Sudan having begun to hit its stride.
To start with, the US pays the s...
Welcome to an edgy world where a single incident at an energy “chokepoint” could set a region aflame, provoking bloody encounters, boosting oil prices, and putting the global economy at risk. With energy demand on the rise and sources of supply dwindling, we are, in...
Remember Mohamed Osman Mohamud? Of course not, no one does, and I haven’t thought about him myself until yesterday, when Iran’s ...
The last American troops will withdraw from Iraq in the next three weeks. President Obama and Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, will meet tomorrow in Washington so they can claim that the US emerges from the conflict unweakened and leaves behind an increasingl...
It’s a weird irony that Iranians know the history of Anglo-Persian relations better than the Brits. When the newly installed Ministry of Islamic Guidance asked Harvey Morris, Reuters’ man in post-revolutionary Iran, for a history of his news agency, he asked h...
I’m not crazy about Global Times (the house organ of Chinese hypernationalism) but I like the sniggering condescension of Foreign Policy magazine (the house organ of neo-lioberalism) even less.
Actually, Christine Larson’s recent profile of ...
Called by Greenpeace ‘the biggest environmental crime in history’, the expansion of oil production from Canadian tar sands is likely to get a major boost in November, courtesy of the Obama Administration. The estimated recoverable oil trapped in low-grade deposits o...
Activists in New York have drafted legislation that would criminalize the practi...
The State Department “hearings” around the country about the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline have been rigged from the get go. We were just too passionately righteous to notice. Four of us from Livingston decided to speak at the Montana event.
Flyers were posted...
The Qatari authorities are aware that hydrocarbon reserves will not last forever, and they intend to profit from the financial security that oil and natural gas exports have brought them (80% of external revenue, 60% of total revenue) by diversifying the economy. At the e...
David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy were careful during their first visit to Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi to avoid anything evoking comparisons with President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” rhetoric after the occupation of Iraq. They know ho...
Powell River, BC
When the U.S. invaded Iraq riding a pack of lies and monstrous manipulation, the entire U.S. elite, including major news services, academics, and politicians from both parties, lined up to cheerlead and off they went to war. It was one of ...
Is current U.S. foreign policy in Africa following a blueprint drawn up almost eight years ago by the rightwing ...
Since NATO began bombing Libya in March, the global peace movement has been split into two camps. One side portrays the bombing campaign as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect Libyan civilians, comparing it to 1990s attacks on Serbia. This side tends to downplay ...
The system counts on you to believe that you’re powerless, but nobody is enslaved until he or she buys into it. The first step is knowledge. The second is resistance. Resistance is still possible in this police state, but no one can say for how...
“Why are you attacking us? Why are you killing our children? Why are you destroying our infrastructure?”
– Television address by Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi, April 30, 2011
A few hours later NATO hit a target...