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 2011
American Muslim communities celebrating Thanksgiving with a traditional Turkey feast represents an encouraging sign of integration with American values and rituals.
But, of course, we Muslims fooled you.
Yet again.
You should have known that our baked...
For 76 years it’s been the job of the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) to enforce the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act (passed in 1935 and better known as the Wagner Act). The National Labor Relations Act is the legislation that governs such things ...
Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
– Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
The question is why the United States was even thinking of selling arms to Bahrain. The answer ...
On November 2, a two-judge panel majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued its second opinion in a high-profile broadcast indecency case. The opinion was especially interesting, for three reasons:
First, the Supreme Court had sent the cas...
SAN SALVADOR.
At the U.S. embassy here on Thursday (Nov. 24), Ambassador Carmen Aponte held a gala Thanksgiving dinner for a select group of local and North American guests. Outside the castle-like embassy compound, there were some uninvited visitors as w...
Last week I attended a presentation by Robert Ford, the first United States Ambassador to Syria in five years. Just two months ago, Ford was recalled from Syria because of safety concerns. More than 3500 people, including children, have been killed there.
Charm...
St. James Park, Toronto.
It seems churlish to complain about having been insufficiently buffeted about the head, ears, and spleen, what with our community having experienced so many satisfactions in that regard during last year’s G20 and all. But it mu...
It’s not exactly “The Gift of the Magi” -the inevitable Black Friday footage that so marvelously serves to reinforce the notion that Americans are simply a cloudy plague of consumer beasts. And in most ways that really is what the country has become. Feeding on ...
“The spectators laughed. And my lawyer, rolling up one of his sleeves, said with finality, ‘Here we have a perfect reflection of this entire trial: everything is true and nothing is true!’”
...
Thanksgiving is the occasion or requirement, not necessarily welcome, that one eats with many other people, while looking at their faces even. As a contemporary American, I take many meals alone while staring at a medium, which in my case is the computer and, before that,...
Amsterdam.
Highest greetings from the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, where I’m enjoying the heady ambience of this society where they just don’t care if you want to get high and where a couple thousand American youths are staggering around this we...
Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia.
By Andrej...
Click here to read Part One: Chet Baker: the Junkie Beat.
Chet Baker finally hit New York in May of 1954, fronting his own band, for a month long engagement at Birdland. By all accounts...
You have to hand it to Dan Abrams. He’s in his mid-forties, never married, and either hoping that his book will get him hitched or frightened to death that, if it does, he’ll never live up to his wife’s expectations. The claim on the back cover will probably dri...
I marched with Occupy Oakland last Saturday, but I’ve had a change of heart. I’m joining the One Percent.
The One Percent have fun. They have jobs and money. Or just money, because when you have a lot of money, you don’t need to work. They live in houses, n...
Mic Check: Now We Are The People!
by GARY CORSERI
(NOTE: “Mic Check” is one of the many wholesome developments of the Occupy Movement. A single speaker’s words are echoed by a spontaneous “chorus” of listeners. ...
Hitler: “Why Would Anybody Care About a Bunch of Dirty Hippies, Any Way?”
...
When former Vice President (and intelligence chief) Omar Suleiman announced on state television last February 11the transfer of power from Hosni Mubarak to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), millions of Egyptians began celebrating in the streets the culminati...
November 23, 2011: The day before the Thanksgiving holiday brought three extraordinary news items. One was the report on the Republican presidential campaign debate. One was the Russian President’s statement about his country’s response to Washington’s mi...
From New York City to Oakland, and several cities in between, the police, on orders from city officials, have smashed the Occupy encampments and evicted the protestors from public parks and spaces. More politicians from Congress to the state and local level want the Occu...
The detention of 7,000 people in prisons and camps by the anti-Gaddafi forces is not surprising. The conflict in Libya was always much more of a civil war between Libyans than foreign governments pretended or the foreign media reported.
The winning anti-Gaddafi mil...
With NASA intending to launch a plutonium-fueled rover from Florida on Saturday—and admitting that a launch pad accident releasing the deadly plutonium fuel could reach as far as 62 miles away—the issue being raised by the area’s tourism officials is whether the lau...
“I’m not supposed to know anything about foreign policy.”
—GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain
Not everything, mind you, but anything, which would put him on par with the dumbest American living under the heaviest...
Padua, Italy.
Making economics and politics appear separate is one of the chief characteristics of capitalism as a system of class rule, as Ellen Mieksins Wood has pointed out in many of her writings. But it is how politics is manifested AS economics and e...
Brandenburg, Germany
Expatriate Thanksgivings have a paradoxical feeling of closeness and distance. There’s the longing to recapture the spirit and flavor of the family table back home, but also a sometimes irresistible urge to take advantage of the remo...