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 from November 2007
If you’re sure Al Gore is not running for the US election, think again. He’s trading at a 3.2% chance of winning the US elections. In case you are not very impressed by these odds, they are better than those you can get for Senator Edwards and every ot...
"Skyrocketing land prices and other costs have jeopardized the likelihood that the Everglades restoration project will ever be completed, a federal engineer said," to the AP on Thanksgiving Day, 2007. I hope its timing stirs the ire of Americans. ...
It is a deep thing that people still celebrate the survival of the early colonists at Plymouth — by giving thanks to the Christian God who supposedly protected and championed the European invasion. The real meaning of all that, then and now, nee...
I received an email last week. Almost two pages long and with only enough sentence breaks to count on one hand, it was coming from a place I knew all too well and recognized instantly the heart of a military wife who wanted to lose control but knew she was a...
The Price of Sugar is a powerful documentary about the plight of Haitians toiling on sugar plantations in the Dominic...
Searching For The Hermit In Vain I asked the boy beneath the pines. He said, "The master’s gone alone Herb-picking somewhere on the mount, Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown." – Chia Tao (777-841), transl...
Last month a close friend of mine, a man in his late 40s, got cancer. It was of the colon. He now confronts an uncertain future but his prognosis is good. He’s an unrelenting fighter so my bet is that he’ll join me in the cancer survivor’s club. ...
Mexico City. The single, spindly seven foot-tall cornstalk spiring up from the planter box outside a prominent downtown hotel here was filling out with new "elotes" (sweet corn) to the admiration of passer-bys, some of whom even paused to pat the ...
The alarms rings at 3:45 AM. I reach for the ibuprofen. Without it my hands are too sore and swollen to even close….much less hold a turkey’s legs. Wearing a pair of rubber gloves, cotton gloves and taping them doesn’t help when you’re bang...
On November 7th of this year, a major 2003 Guantanamo Standard Operating Procedures [SOP] manual was posted on the wikileaks web site. Ignored by most major sources for nearly a week, Wired and the Miami Herald picked it up the following Wednesday [the Herald ampl...
Chaos spawns rumors. Word traveled like wildfire across Pakistan in the early days of emergency that General Ashfaq Kiyani had taken General Pervez Musharraf into custody and assumed power. And that the loyalist General, who was chosen as his successor, replaced M...
James Circello sat on the edge of his bed staring at the floral pattern on a generic hotel comforter, contemplating what life would be like in prison. It was early August, and his parents had given him a one-way bus ticket to Lawton, Okla., and told him he was wel...
The "Business of Green" and "Green is Gold" are among the phrases finding their way onto the nation’s business pages and into the advertisements of major corporations. After years of corporate greenwashing, is this wave of corporat...
Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency on November 3rd after the Pakistani Supreme Court indicated it would overturn the results of an illegitimate election that would have extended Musharraf’s term as president. Mu...
The following correspondence relates to my previous blog titled "Don Imus Meets Michael Richards." Dear Mr. Krassner: I congratulate you on writing an interesting piece. However, your article...
Yet again, the Annapolis meeting between Olmert and Abbas is preconditioned upon the recognition by the Palestinian side of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Indeed the "road map" should lead to, and legitimate, once and for all, the right ...
As someone who has been writing about this crazed administration’s plans to launch an attack on Iran now for over a year, I have always noted that the real sign that it might happen would be when oil industry analysts started to worry about it. That&#...
Wajahat Ali speaks to American political scientist and writer Dr. Norman Finkelstein about the denial of his tenure at DePaul University, anti-Semitism, and challenging the academic status quo on the Palestine-Israel conflict. WAJAHAT ALI: In the recent De...
The Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for ideologically pure Republicans is open for a new entering class. The task before teachers and students is dire. The key has been lost to untangle what they mean. Indeed it is mysterious as the vanishing bees. Thei...
The media — both mainstream outlets and the blogosphere — have spent the last week consumed by the story of a leaked operating manual from Guantánamo. This is understandable in some ways. The prison’s Standard Operating Procedures have nev...
They put spaghetti on toast, drink beer out of infuriatingly small glasses and give awards to the dead for toying with animals. This, by itself, might simply be another cultural statement about Australia. But when it involves an educational institution, a universi...
In what has become the nation’s largest annual gathering for peace and human rights, over twenty thousand people protested outside the gates of Fort Benning, GA on November 18, 2007. Eleven people were arrested on federal criminal charges and face up to six ...
Having endured the Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham saga up close and personal for the last two years, most recently in the form of Mr. Brent Wilkes’ conviction on all 13 counts for the corrupt acts that he and Cunningham performed, San Diego ha...
In a recent article posted on Counterpunch entitled "When Capitalists Get a Free Ride" (November 3-4, 2007) I made reference to W.E.B. Du Bois having joined and left the Communist Party in the mid-20th century due to his f...
For Congressional Democrats, the train has already left the station–and they’re not on board. A year after the election that gave them control of both houses of Congress, they are exposed as a feckless bunch of frauds posing as an opposition....