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'
A flare up of multiple sclerosis has made me quite disabled the past few months. Housebound, my mother and I have been taking the temperature of America as we approach Obama’s second term.
Obama.
Remermber him?
The messiah of hope and change....
Yesterday morning the orgies of the lone gunman took hold in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a town in the dragnet of Milwaukee. He targeted a Gurdwara, the religious home of the local Sikh community. The gunman entered the Gurdwara, and as if in mimicry of the sc...
What Americans just don’t get is that most people see history differently than they do. In order to break this down, every semester I show Robert Wuhl’s HBO special “Assume the Position 101.” Wuhl proposes that U.S. history is Pop Culture and he discusses differen...
Some thoughts on the political legacy of Andy Griffith. Griffith, who was born in Mount Airy, North Carolina, on June 1, 1926, died on July 3 at the age of 86 in the town of Manteo.
“Funerals are for the living,” my mother is quick to say, but Griffith barely...
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Before you get into… what the case is about, I’d like to clear up at the outset what it’s not about. No part of your argument has to do with racial or ethnic profiling, does it? Saw none of that in your bri...
Most readers probably know the outline of this story: beginning in the 1970s the incarceration rate in America, the proportion of the population sent to prison, started to rise exponentially. The rate of incarceration in America is now the highest in the world. And in abs...
The Death of a Team Society pays more attention to its sports teams than to its children. Today in L.A. the world shattering concern is whether to keep the Lakers’ roster intact or break it up and get new players. A great deal o...
“The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around.”
– Martin Luther King’s final speech, ...
I am having trouble getting into this essay on the war on critical thinking. I cannot figure out whether it is dumb or ignorant. My mother would say that the people conducting the war are malditos, mean. The reality is that the criminalization of rational thought goes...
The ‘birthing’ controversy is news again. Is the President really American? He doesn’t really look it! Or always act like he is: remember the Barrack-Michelle closed-fist salute?
I moved to the US from India fourteen years ago, and am still struck by...
“We shall not be a normal people, until we have Jewish whores and Jewish thieves in the Land of Israel,” our national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, said some 80 years ago.
This dream has come true. We have Jewish murderers, Jewish robbers and Jewish whores (though ...
We have allowed the uninformed and ignorant to define what Mexican American Studies is. Every time I discuss the subject I feel as frustrated as a scientist trying to explain science to a creationist. No matter how well you know the field those who do not want to believe ...
A heart in love will decipher every squiggle in a letter as a kiss. In the final days of the 2008 campaign and in the opening ones of his administration, Obama and his top legal aides seemed to the eager ears of marijuana legalizers on the West Coast to be opening the doo...
I pick up the phone at my office at the University of Arizona and learn that I have three recorded messages waiting for me. The first one begins with the caller claiming to be half White and half Native American, addressing me as an “(expletive) Mexican” and a...
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, ...
Outside the Gallery, Philadelphia’s low-class shopping mall, Jimbo si...
Beirut
As many visitors to Lebanon can attest, some Lebanese have the rather charming habit of asking them, “Do you love Lebanon?” One assumes they actually mean to inquire if the visitor likes Lebanon and is enjoying their visit. ...
The news is in. White births are no longer a majority in the United States. The Bureau of the Census confirms that non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 of all births in the year ending July, 2011, while minorities including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mix...
A great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.
– G.B. Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession
I hope he remembers them. The explanations that is. They could be handy if anyone ever asks him about his days as a missionary....
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 ...
It is Sunday afternoon. My daughter and I are at home. I am on my (borrowed) laptop in the kitchen, revising chapter forwards for Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, an anthology on how to support parents and children in social justice movements that I am co-edit...
In August 1964, Malcolm X spent several weeks in Egypt. While in Cairo, he wrote an essay in the Egypt Gazette entitled “Racism: the Cancer that is Destroying America.” Here, Malcolm X noted, “The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect and HUMA...
Even after twenty years, the Los Angeles riots that were precipitated as a reaction to the Rodney King trial verdict of acquittal for the cops divide rather than affirm positions. So much in the pursuit of life’s answers lies in exposing errors rather than unearthin...
Despite a generation of sensitivity trainings and multicultural studies, an astonishing number of people still feel emboldened to express their misbegotten bigotry in very public arenas. Cops and vigilantes alike are caught on tape throwing down racial slurs before they...
Would a young Martin Luther King Jr. be able to get a job in America today? Would one of the thousands who went to jail in support of Nelson Mandela? Or the brilliant kids at the center of Occupy Wall Street? Unless we begin to enforce the Civil Rights Act, m...