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 2008
Two documents appeared side by side in Haaretz last week, on November 21: a giant advertisement from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the results of a public opinion poll.The proximity was accidental, but to the point. The PLO ad sets out...
"How fitting is it that this storied political life that began here in Texas will write its final chapters right here in the good old Lone Star state and right here on this campus. Now the work begins to plan and build the site."
R...
The late night of January 19, 2001 was as wretchedly cold as any evening could be during a New England winter. There was no snow on the ground, which would have once been an anomaly at that latitude, but global warming long ago skewed and juxtaposed what was ex...
Citigroup’s two best known ad campaigns, “Citi Never Sleeps” and “Live Richly,” will hopefully become a cautionary warning for the next generation: don’t take advice from sleep-deprived money managers and live within your means. As...
As conditions in the Gaza strip approach a catastrophic level of deprivation, the worldedia, and in particular the U.S. media, remain largely silent. The United Nations, whose truckloads of food and medical supplies continue to be denied entry into Gaza by Israel, ap...
One clue that this recession is going to be long and brutal is the fact that vocational guidance counselors are now suggesting to college graduates that they consider careers as open sea pirates. Okay, that’s not true. But still, one can imagine how...
I feel cheated. I feel betrayed. And I’m not even a Democrat.
Our nation hasn’t yet finished counting all the election returns, but the outlines of a future Obama Administration are already clear: Clinton at State, Geithner at Treasury, Summers to...
It’s a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it’s through, and it will fail in the end.
The reason is before ou...
"The problems we face today cannot be solved by the minds that created them"
–Albert Einstein
Obama hasn’t even been sworn in yet, and already the Wall Street cheerleaders are celebrating his first...
A friend sticketh closer than a brother, or could, is how I recall the good book summarizing our duty. Oh my friends, there is no friend. That’s from Aristotle, or at least that’s what several Frenchmen have told me. More on that soon, b...
Like Frankenstein’s monster, opera squeezes all it can out of those who bring it to life. Among musical pursuits, opera reigns supreme at bankrupting its proponents financially and emotionally. Like the inveterate gambler, the opera-maker feeds off the thrills ...
On Thursday, November 20, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presented, even by his own lamentably low standards, an amazingly deceptive speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. In its false framing of Washington’s financ...
Tamar Yorum is a young Israeli woman who represents an important phenomenon in her country: the transfer of allegiance of the Israeli intelligentsia from support of established ideas and institutions to an alternative vision of social existence. To criticize service ...
"The Winter of 2008-2009 will prove to be the winter of global economic discontent that marks the rejection of the flawed ideology that unregulated global financial markets promote financial innovation, market efficiency, unhampered growth and endles...
While the liberal intelligentsia was swooning over Barack Obama during his presidential campaign, I counseled “prepare to be disappointed.” His record as a Illinois state and U.S. Senator, together with the many progressive and long overdue courses of act...
Two years without a single leak and suddenly, last week, Obama’s operation was like a sieve. That’s what happens when you pick up the phone and call one of the Clintons. Or, to put it another way, that’s what happens when someone claims you, the pre...
Qurban-Bibi and Nahil Abu-Rada are two women, one Afghan and the other Palestinian, who made news with similar tragedies. But their losses also helped further delineate the plight of millions of women in war zones and poor countries.
The United Nations news s...
From the questionable elections in 2000 and 2004 though the recent election and its recounts, I’ve received oodles of e-mails about mass voter disenfranchisement and problems with punch-screen voting machines. I’ve read articles about voter flipping, syst...
Let’s not mince words. The Zastava Koral, known simply as the Yugo, was an abomination, but an endearing one. The last car, assembled by car workers Radoslav Simovic and Zarko Niciforovic, rolled off the line in the Serbian town of Kragujevac earlie...
“… Detroit has redirected decades of consumer frustration with American automakers for their lackluster designs and poor quality into widespread resentment of rank-and-file auto workers for their company-paid health care and pensions. The auto...
While China’s leadership is faced with the political need to provide the majority of its residents with the fruits of capital development—the goods, services and opportunities that citizens of OECD countries have taken for granted for three to five genera...
In the part of the world that I’m from, a fondness for country music is looked at with uninhibited distain. Especially amongst musicians, it’s a character flaw to own anything other than maybe a little Gram Parsons. If one record could shatter these preco...
Pity the poor whale. All it wants is to peacefully swim in the ocean. Instead it finds itself caught up in a net of litigation and rule making processes.
Although whales off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States have been affected by recent...
The New York Times November 18 editorial urging passage of a free-trade agreement with Colombia is factually challenged and wrong-headed – politically, economically and morally – in many ways. The editorial’s expressed sense of false urgency (...
In 1952, when the US was at the very height of its power, General Douglas MacArthur – hero of the Republican right since President Harry Truman relieved him of his command in Korea – warned fellow Americans of "our own relative decline, our inability...