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 'unions'
There has been an alarming escalation of repression against rural populations in Colombia. Much of this is focused against the National Unified Federation of Agricultural Workers Unions, or Fensuagro–the country’s largest labor organization representing rura...
What person smokes a ton of marijuana, loves animals but doesn’t like kids, digs girls and sex but never wants to get married, rejoices in using dirty words, hates fat people, likes the beach, and enjoys shocking us with wisecracks about religion and hillbillies? It...
What a difference five years make! In 2008, when a few hundred union workers at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago voted to occupy their plant instead of submitting meekly to being laid off, theirs was a rare act of courage in a cold winter of crisis for o...
Only a few years ago there were six major US airlines. All of them went bankrupt and all of them received financial relief off the backs of employees amounting to billions of dollars.
As it turns out, the funds generated in bankruptcy courts resulted in a buying sp...
Yesterday, a media outlet contacted us to be on a show about how Occupy had “fizzled coming into this year’s May 1.” The media keeps looking for encampments or last year’s protests and is missing how popular resistance is growing and demonstrating all over the...
“I am not here to take marching orders from union bosses,” said Mr. Poilievre. “I represent taxpayers and frankly taxpayers expect us to keep costs under control so that we can keep taxes down. It is for those taxpayers that we work. Not union ...
In northern Africa, winters are usually mild and summers normally dry and hot. The glorious Arab Spring revolts in this part of the world can also be measured in this same way – sometimes hot, in fact, blazing hot; sometimes warm; sometimes mild and sometimes just p...
Why is it easier to respect (maybe “respect” isn’t the right word) a self-confessed racist (“I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t like black people.”) than an obvious racist who goes around sanctimoniously pretending he has no prejudices? Dante was awar...
We’re now in nail-biting time for workers at California’s huge HMO, Kaiser Permanente. Some 45,000 service and technical employees there received ballots from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) at the beginning of April; the ballots must be returned by May 1, w...
London.
No sooner had the news broken of Margaret Thatcher’s death than the glorious tributes came flooding in, a veritable deluge of unreserved praise for the Britain’s first female Prime Minister. ...
By now most of us have heard the gruesome details of how Atlanta’s elementary and middle school teachers (and principals) conspired to falsify the scores on state proficiency tests. The investigation not only implicated teachers and administrators, it reached all the ...
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of old-fashioned “resistance.” Indeed, without resistance (e.g., pushing back, taking an aggressive stand, demonstrating that you’re willing to fight, etc.), things can get out of hand very quickly, whether we’re tal...
Tianna Smalls had planned on working Thursday, but her colleagues convinced her otherwise. “You’re either with us, or you’re for Wendy’s,” Smalls remembers her co-workers telling her. Her mother also weighed in Thursday morning as Smalls was heading to work at t...
This is the conclusion of a two-part series on the TRADOC worker’s cooperative in Mexico. Click here to read part one.
A tire is not just a piece of rubber with ...
“If the owners don’t want it, let’s run it ourselves.” When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes up—and usually dies.
The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and once in business,...
On March 18, U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe spoke at a National Postal Forum in San Francisco, prompting picketing by rank and file postal employees and their supporters. Protestors opposed Donahoe’s support for post office closures and layoffs of USPS worker...
Every Detroit teacher was fired in the fall of 2012.
Apparently, the nation did not notice. Hence, this story.
On March 26, 2013, 78% of the voting members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers ratified a contract which DFT president, Keith Johnson, called, ...
All of us at one time or another had things pounded into our heads so often that ultimately a light bulb goes off. Finally, one or more of our experiences, good or bad, influences our behavior.
This is not new. The esteemed 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaar...
Except for maybe the famously intractable George Bush and Dick Cheney, it’s pretty common to want to take back something we did in life.
American slang celebrates this new opportunity – we get “another swing at the bat,” “another crack at it” or we take...
North Dakota ushered in spring this year with temperatures dipping below zero, but the physical climate was relatively balmy when compared with the political ice age emanating from the state capitol in Bismarck.
The state has grabbed national headlines over the leg...
“It’s time for unions to stop being clever about excuses for why membership is declining and it’s time to figure out how to devise appeals to the workers out there. Workers should be looking to unions because of job insecurity and stagnant wa...
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...
The Democratic Party’s participation in the recent national “sequester” cuts is yet another big dent in their love affair with organized labor. But break-ups are often a protracted process. Before a relationship ends there is usually a gradual deterioration based o...
The decline of organized labor (from more than 30% of non-farm private sector workers in the ’50s to around 6% today) is often presented as something that “just happened” — a spontaneous fact of nature beyond human control, like glaciation or asteroid strikes. Far...
It’s astonishing that we have all these people out there—all these wildly opinionated, patriotic folks—who, without any prompting, will spontaneously burst into rhapsodic discourse about how much they admire the “checks and balances” written into the U.S. consti...