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 'Racism'
Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, republished by Verso Book...
I do not like the expression “African-American.” It’s patronizing, condescending, and racist. It was coined, rumor has it, to help counteract the corrosive effect of racism on the self-esteem of black Americans. But how is that supposed to work? In practice, I w...
My good friend, a Chinese Indonesian lady, recently got grabbed and assaulted, in the middle of Jakarta, in broad daylight.
When it happened, I was in Japan and we exchanged several messages, and emails. This was not the first time such a thing had happened to he...
Books considered in this essay: Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transfo...
There’s been a lot about affirmative action in the media recently because the Supreme Court is considering a case that challenges the constitutionality of any consideration of race in university admissions decisions. The poster girl for the case is 23-year old Abigail N...
Sometimes a story breaks that touches so many issues that one is left with mouth agape. The recent news involving technology “evangelist” Adria Richards is one such story and it’s burning across all kinds of media and cutting an intense divide within the...
On Sunday night February 24 three Eritrean community centers in Stockholm, Sweden were firebombed and burnt to the ground following a vicious attack on the Swedish Eritrean population by a program broadcast by Stockholm television station SVT.
The pogrom style “d...
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 struck down laws supporting Jim Crow segregation and other measures designed to disenfranchise or disempower black voters. When Congress enacted the law in 1965, it determined that racial di...
Narendra Modi is a big man. He does not seem his 62 years – energetic and brash, larger than life. There is something in him of Bhima-parakrama, of terrible prowess. It is this edge that makes many uneasy with him. It also earns him the enthusiasm of those who fa...
During the last night’s tedious Oscar telecast, host Seth McFarland was talking about portrayals of Abraham Lincoln in film. He first noted Daniel Day Lewis in Steven Speilburg’s Lincolnand then Raymond Massey in the 1940 film Abe Lincoln ...
Defenders of the for-profit prison industry reflexively insist that privatization—or the process of subjecting “correctional services” to market pressures—will naturally generate efficiencies as companies respond to competitive forces. They claim that the “marke...
The death by fire of Christopher Dorner evoked a rush of memories dating back to September 1971, when, in the wake of the Attica Prison Massacre, I began making plans to migrate from New York State to California.
At age 21, I had no master plan, other than to get f...
If the murder of Oscar Grant on an Oakland transit platform marked the dawn of the Obama era, the cold-blooded murder of former Naval reservist and Los Angeles Police officer Christopher Dorner might just mark the end of whatever optimistic hope people can muster in his a...
On September 10, 2012 the Los Angeles Times published an article with the headline: “LAPD to hold meetings on use of force policies.”
Top Los Angeles police officials announced those community meetings to counter growing criticism about videoed brutali...
Ted Nugent is slated to make a live appearance tonight at the State of the Union speech, arriving as a guest of his Congressman, Steve Stockman, who recently announced he was pursuing impeachment of the President. Presuming Ted shows, and presuming the Secret Service lets...
In The New York Times February 6th on pages 20 and 21, across from each other, there were two tragic stories centered around the themes of sex, race and power. You might call them love stories, though they were definitely not Hallmark card or Harlequin romances....
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. Martin Luther King, Jr. was 26 years old; Coretta had just given birth to their first child.
E D. Dixon, another Montgomery pastor, asked to host a meeting in Ki...
Elvis Presley borrowed so much from James Brown that when James Brown saw him perform he said, “That’s me up there.” Like music critics who give credit to Elvis Presley for the creation of rock ‘n roll, ignoring Ike Turner or Chuck Berry, the same kind of chauvi...
On Dec. 31, outgoing North Carolina governor, Beverly Perdue, pardoned The Wilmington 10 – Rev. Benjamin Chavis, Connie Tindall, Marvin Patrick, Wayne Moore, Reginald Epps, Jerry Jacobs, James McKoy, Willie Earl Vereen, William Wright, Jr. and Ann Shepard – who had se...
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Libya are in shambles, crushed by the heavy boots of Western imperialism.
But we are told to fear China.
The entire nations of Indochina were bombed back to the stone age, because Western demi-gods would not tolerate, and fe...
During an interview with Chris Hedges carried at the site Truthdig, I cited Eve Ensler as the type of middle class white feminist who singles out black men as the leading culprits in the practice of cruelty to women, a theme that has earned hundreds of millions of dollars...
I saw my first film of the new year last night – The Central Park Five, a documentary about the five ...
I had little dog, his name was Dash
I’d ruther be a nigger than be white trash
–African American saying
In order for a joke to work, Mary Douglas, the eminent British anthropologist, wrote that one had to have a soci...
The cracks in the American cannabis control system just got wider with the states of Washington and Colorado passing referendums legalizing the recreational use of marijuana for adults. It is nothing short of historic in a country that arrests over 850,000 people every ye...
Police brutality and murder are arguably the most visible, direct and clear expressions of racialized state power in the United States. To say this is an epidemic, however, as many have, is somewhat of a simplification. An epidemic is an indiscriminate force of natu...