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 'poverty'
The United States has collapsed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally, environmentally, and morally. The country that exists today is not even a shell of the country into which I was born. In this article I will deal with America’s economic co...
Since the recession of 2008, it has become increasingly apparent that for the past four decades the majority of the American population has gotten a raw economic deal. Computer applications and internet technology have made accessible raw data from the Census, the Bureau ...
Peter Edelman has battled poverty for nearly half a century — first as a top aide to Senator Robert Kennedy, later as a state and federal official, and currently as a key figure at a widely respected law and public policy center in Washington.
Over his years in a...
The recession has been hard on everyone. Tens of millions of people lost their jobs. Many of those who didn’t lose their jobs suffered salary cuts. Retirement savings and home values have plummeted.
Even people who have kept their jobs and homes have ha...
Downtown Bloomington, Indiana with its upscale restaurants, bustling bars and East Coast-style boutiques and nail salons – all brimming with the rich and their progeny – has always advanced a false image of the Southern Indiana town so many describe with utopian super...
London resident Zita Holbourne plans to participate in the Friday July 27th Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games held at the gleaming new stadium located not far from her community of Newham.
However, Holbourne, a trade union activist and poet, is not partici...
Poverty and extreme wealth on Long Island, where I live, have been in the national spotlight in recent days. HBO this month broadcast a powerful documentary “Hard Times: Lost on Long Island.” Filmmaker Marc Levin followed four Long Island families who suddenly became ...
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...
A Mitt Romney presidency would greatly worsen America’s moral decline. It is not about his money, but about his moral sense. It is not about his worth, but his views on other people’s worthiness. Not about his inheritance, but his attitude toward the disinherite...
Shame on the U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee for slashing food and nutrition programs in its version of the 2012 Farm Bill.
According to The New York Times, the House measure cuts $16.5 billion from the food stamp program, part of $35 billio...
Studying inequality in America reveals some facts that are truly hard to believe. Amidst all the absurdity a few stand out.
1. U.S. companies in total pay a smaller percentage of taxes than the lowest-income 20% of Americans.
Total corporate profits for 2011...
Not Ralph Nader. Not Amy Goodman. Not Noam Chomsky. Not Chris Hedges. Not Cornel West. Not Alexander Cockburn. Not one of the great left critics in the United States have dared say what Harvard Law School Professor Roberto Unger said last week. “President Obama must be ...
New York City’s wealth stands in stark contrast to the countless people begging on its streets.
New York is different of course, but not for the 1% who live well across the country; the rest of the population less or far less well. That’s America in 2012, where...
“The lifespan of any civilization can be measured by the respect and care that is given to its elderly citizens, and those societies which treat their elderly with contempt have the seeds of their own destruction within them.”
...
The Occupy movement in the United States is part of a global upsurge that began in Tunisia in late 2010, spread to Egypt and the Middle East, Wisconsin, Chile, Spain, Greece, Wall Street and the rest of the United States and now Quebec. I focus on the United States, parti...
Kabul.
Here in Kabul, Voices co-coordinator Buddy Bell and I are guests at the home of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, (APV), where we’ve gotten to know four young boys who are being tutored by the Volunteers in the afternoons, having “retired” from the...
The civil rights movement illuminated the hypocrisy of the liberal promise. It made overt, and recorded on television for the world to see, an old daily fact of American life: that a black person who protested his condition, or moved one step out of line, ...
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s stirring call for austerity tugs at the national tear ducts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pleaded for it in the past and watched his flock embrace it creatively. With the finance ministry even acting on Dr. Singh’s call in 20...
Outside the Gallery, Philadelphia’s low-class shopping mall, Jimbo si...
What’s 50 percent of 99 percent?
This isn’t a math quiz. To put the question in non-numerical terms: where are women in the global economic crisis?
The movement of the 99 percent that began in the United States made visible the human beings who suffer th...
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But asBusiness Week ...
The citizens of Spain have taken to the streets and squares in great numbers to demand their rights. Estimates vary enormously. Spain’s right-wing government claims that 22,000 people came out in Barcelona in the demonstrations on 12th May while the organiser...
On 7 May 2012 ...
It’s not easy to get the President of the United States to provide meaningful answers to questions regarding issues of serious concern to the population. During a Q&A session with Obama put together by YouTube in January, a woman pressed him about her husband’s ...
On April 22, 1968, the National Welfare Rights Organization held a vigil on Capitol Hill in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been murdered eighteen days earlier. This was to have been the day that King presented the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign to Co...