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Today's Stories

November 26 - 28, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
Run, Russ, Run

Ramzy Baroud
Obama Surrenders Palestinian Rights

Harry Browne
Ireland and the House of Cards

Bill Quigley /
Nicole Phillips
Haiti's Sham Elections

Saul Landau
Bombing the Senses: Ads to the Brain

Brian Cloughley
Thanksgiving of the Drones

Fidel Castro
The Lights of Rebellion: Evo Answers NATO

Francis Shor
Normalizing Blowback

Steve Heilig, MD
How (Not) to Legalize Pot

Brenda Norrell
The Women of AIM: Watching for the Men in Shiny Shoes

Missy Beattie
The Greedy and the Needy

Linh Dinh
Power Grabs at the Airport

Christopher Brauchli
Gouged While Flying

Eric Walberg
Russia and NATO

Ron Jacobs
Zizek and the End Times

Harvey Wasserman
Terror! Oil!! Opium!!!

Ingmar Lee
The Appalling BC Tar Sands Pipeline

November 25, 2010

Michael Hudson
A "Flat Tax" for the Rich?

Mike Whitney
Memo to Ireland: "Tell the EU and IMF to Shove It!"

Gareth Porter
Why Gen. Petraeus was Snookered by the "Taliban" Imposter

Sarah Anderson
Food Should Not be a Poker Chip

Karl Grossman
The Skin of Our Teeth: Avoiding Nuclear Destruction

David Ker Thomson
Canadian Thanksgiving: If We Didn't Have It, We'd Have to Invent It

Rajesh Makwana / Adam Parsons
Rethinking the Global Economy: the Case for Sharing

Charles R. Larson
Palintology 101 (Part One)

Website of the Day
"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us"

 

November 24, 2010

Jeffrey St. Clair
BP's Inside Game

Paul Craig Roberts
TSA's Gestapo Empire

James Ridgeway Invasion of the Body Scanners: Is TSA Spreading Cancer?

Michael Scott
First a Hand on Your Crotch, Next a Boot in Your Face

Nick Dearden
The Climate Loan Crisis: Making Poor Countries Pay Twice

Russell Mokhiber
Private Insurance Induced Stress Disorder?

Daniel Moss
Tear Down the Dam; Restore the Commons

Farzana Versey
The Media as Middle Man

Yasin Gaber
The Marvels of Exile: Judith Butler on Edward Said

Dan Beaton
A Tale of Two Elections: Burma and Haiti

Website of the Day
Useless Gobshites!

November 23, 2010

Pam Martens
Ten Ideas to Starve the Wall Street Beast

Patrick Cockburn
The Dangers of Embedded Journalism

Ben Rosenfeld /
Lauren Regan
When the Constitution is No Obastacle for the FBI: Legal Lessons From the Green Scare

Franklin C. Spinney
Another Free Ride for the Pentagon?

Dean Baker
Sinking Ireland

Ralph Nader
Obamabush: Semper Fi, Barack

Ray McGovern
Bush the Warmonger in His Own Words

George Wuerthner
Livestock and Predators: How to Stop the Killing

Don Monkerud
America's New Entertainment

Clare Bayard
Healing From Empire

Website of the Day
The American Galapagos

 

November 22, 2010

Michael Hudson
Why Paul Krugman Waves the Flag for Uncle Sam

James Abourezk
Honoring Helen Thomas

Paul Craig Roberts
Insouciant Americans

Sasan Fayazmanesh
When Sanctions Are Not Enough

Richard Forno
TSA and the New "Americanism"

Gary Leupp
Ignorance There ... and Here

Martha Rosenberg
Seven Ways Medical Conflicts of Interest are Disguised

Lawrence Davidson
Obama Plays the Fox

Patrick Bond
"Leave the Oil in the Soil!"

Michael Dickinson
Kiss My Ring: the Vatican Versus Jesus

Website of the Day
Globeistan

November 19 - 21, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
Time for a Real Mutiny

Jeffrey St. Clair
Let Them Eat Oil

Mike Whitney
Tying Bernanke's Hands

Joanne Mariner
The Banalization of Torture

Gareth Porter
The Fatal Flaw in the Iran Missile Docs

Karen Greenberg
Guilty Until Proven Guilty

Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, Franklin Spinney et al.
How to Cut the Defense Budget

Rannie Amiri
Way Beyond Chutzpah: Cantor Crosses the Line

Dr. Jim Morgan Haiti's New Normal: Dispatch from Cite Soleil

Lawrence Swaim
Israel's War Against the Dead

Ramzy Baroud
Education at Gunpoint

Ron Jacobs
No Alternative in Afghanistan?

Robert Alvarez
Shelving START

Russell Mokhiber
War is a Drug

P. Sainath
India's Great Drain Robbery

David Macaray
194 Years of Scabs

Carl Finamore
Hyatt's Dirty Safety Record

Brian Tierney
Hotel Workers Rising

Franklin Lamb
How the US and Israel Hope to Destroy Hezbollah

Gerald E. Scorse
The Truth About Capital Gains

Joshua Brollier
Natives Without a Nation

Missy Beattie
So Many Messages

Stewart J. Lawrence
Immigration Supporters Win Big Victory in California

Brenda Norrell
On the Border: Where Skin Color is the Dividing Line

Christopher Brauchli
Pot and the Deficit: the Hidden Cost of Prohibition

Carol Polsgrove
The Governor and the Power Plant

David Ker Thomson
Against Jane Jacobs

Dave Lindorff
No News is Not Good News

Jeff Deasy
Here Come the FrankenSalmon

Bill Manson
The Politics of Nice

Clifton Ross
Dancing With Dangl

Charles R. Larson Twain: the Last Word, One Hundred Years Later

Richard Estes
"Carlos:" An Orientalist Masterpiece

David Yearsley
Schumann and the Warm Bath of Memory

Poets' Basement
Springate, Orloski and Cirino

Website of the Weekend
Buy Nothing

November 18, 2010

Diana Johnstone
NATO's True Role in US Grand Strategy

Mike Whitney
Ireland's Suicide Pact with the EU

Behzad Yaghmaian
Facing a Leaderless Globalization

Kenneth E. Hartman
Are They Really Opposed to the Death Penalty?

Norman Solomon
Wooing the Economic Royalists

Michael Winship
Don't Ask, Don't Care

Patrick Bond
Will Zimbabwe Regress Again?

Joel S. Hirschhorn
The Anti-Incumbent Movement Failed

Website of the Day
Free Speech on Trial

November 17, 2010

Vicente Navarro
The Hypocrisies of Mario Vargas Llosa

James Bovard
The Political Slaughterhouse

Jonathan Cook
Obama's Bribe

Dean Baker
Seoul Searching on Trade and Currency

Ralph Nader
Bush at Large

Nick Turse
Off-Base America

Sherry Wolf Alienation 101: the Online Learning Rip Off

Judith Scherr
Why Aristide's Party Won't Vote

Peter Certo
Defense Cuts Go Mainstream

Website of the Day
The Last Outsider Director: an Interview with Jean-Luc Godard

 

November 16, 2010

Pam Martens
How the Fed and the Treasury Stonewalled Mark Pittman to His Dying Breath

Richard Forno
TSA and America's Zero Risk Culture

Gareth Porter
The Unending Occupation of Iraq

Harry Browne
Bruce Springsteen's "Promise" and the Price You Pay

Peter Lee
QE2 as Self-Inflicted Wound

Alan Farago
How Much Gold Does George Bush Own?

Franklin Lamb
Is the American Public About to Toss Israel?

Frank Green
Conspiracy in Theory: Truthers Slog On

Sheldon Richman
Blood on His Hands

Thomas H. Naylor
Shattering the Myth of Vermont

Website of the Day
Peaceful Uprising

November 15, 2010

Michael Hudson
Obama's Greatest Betrayal

Steve Hendricks
More Torture, Please?

Paul Craig Roberts
Eyes Only on Burma

Harvey Wasserman
Accidents in Progress: America's Eggshell Nukes

Lawrence Davidson
Palestine and the Fate of the UN

Clancy Sigal
The Long Disease of War

David Macaray
The War Over Food Stamps

Tom Engelhardt
The Stimulus Package in Kabul

Steven Fake
Liberating Thought

Website of the Day
Whatever ...

November 12 - 14, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
A Very Bitter Woman

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq's Stalemate Ends

Mike Whitney
Erin Go Broke

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Militarization of the World: the Case of Iran

Dean Baker
The Perverse Priorities and Fatal Flaws of the Deficit Commission Report

Gareth Porter
Intel Failure in Yemen

William E. Alberts
Why Are the Feds Targeting Black Officials?

Bill Hatch
Jerry Brown's Parable of the Rocking Boat

Jonathan Cook
Re-Unifying the Palestinian Nation

Patrick Madden Mystifying the Crisis: Deadlock at the G20

Ramzy Baroud
Another Baghdad Massacre

Rannie Amiri
The Quest for Power in Iraq

James Zogby
Whither Obama's Middle East Agenda?

Ron Jacobs
Palestine, a Family's Story

Mark Weisbrot
Why It Could Get Even Worse for the Democrats

Tanya Golash-Boza
Targeting Jamaicans

Paul Wright
The Case Against Stacia A. Hylton

Steve Early
TDU in Chicago: Still Punching

Martha Rosenberg
Vioxx All Over Again?

Celia McAteer
London Calling: Student Militancy a Welcome Surprise

Larry Portis
Imperialist Architecture in Egypt

Michael Winship
Riding the Rails, Looking for Work

Brian McKenna
Anorexia and Capitalism

Gerald E. Scorse
Channeling Reagan on Tax Reform

Christopher Brauchli
Making Oklahoma Safe From Sharia Law

Roberto Rodriguez
Arizona: Where Fear is the Predicate

Dr. Susan Block
My Porn Star Girlfriend

J. T. Cassidy
Unlocking Imagination in Japan

Linh Dinh
Revolution Number 10

Farzana Versey
The Misinterpreters of Kashmir's Maladies

David Ker Thomson
The Elizabethan Era: Life in the Ice Age

Phil Rockstroh
Public Like a Frog

Charles R. Larson
Abused Women ... Still a Growth Industry

David Swanson
Tall Tillman Tales

Saul Landau
"Stone:" Walking Invisibly in the American Crowd

Kim Nicolini
An Intimate Look at How Things are Made in China

David Yearsley
The Esserzici Work-Out Book

Poets' Basement
Three by Lee Stern

Website of the Day
Bombs Away!

 

November 11, 2010

Peter Linebaugh
Laying Down of Arms

Paul Craig Roberts Licensed to Kill

Bill Quigley
Bush Pens True Crime Book

David Macaray Dissing the Boss: the NLRB Files a Landmark Complaint on Free Expression in the Workplace

Liaquat Ali Khan / Jasmine Abou-Kassem
Why the Oklahoma Shariah Law is Unconstitutional

Dedrick Muhammad
Race and Economics

Robert Bryce
Cars for the Elite: Obama's Electric Vehicle Fetish

Alan Farago
What, No Phone Books?

Website of the Day
London Calling

November 10, 2010

Allan Nairn
US-Backed Death Squad Files Surface in Indonesia

Dean Baker
Wall Street's TARP Gang Rides Again: Now They're Coming After Your Social Security!

Nicola Nasser
Waiting for Godot in Palestine

Missy Beattie
Running Scared: My Colonoscopy Saga

Sergio Ferrari
Worrying Signs From Venezuela to Ecuador

Patrick Cockburn
Can Iraq's Leaders Do a Deal?

Dave Lindorff Mumia: New Lawyer, New Round

Sherwood Ross
How Affirmative Action Brought Willie Mays to the Giants

Joshua Frank
Sinking the Breakwater

Website of the Day
Stiglitz: "Throw the Bankers in Jail to Save the Economy"

November 9, 2010

Uri Avnery
Obama's Defeat

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Dollar Policy

Jordan Flaherty
The Incarceration Capital of the US: the Crisis Inside New Orleans' Jails

Afshin Rattansi
Red Poppies

Annie Gell
Haiti's Unnatural Disasters

Dean Baker
The Fed's Second Shot

Dave Lindorff
BS From the BLS: Things are Much Worse Than They are Telling Us

Stewart J. Lawrence
The Nancy Monster That Refuses to Die

Walter Brasch
Love and Loss Among the Wild Horses

Website of the Day
Cut This: an Open Letter to the Tea Party

November 8, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts
Phantom Jobs

Thomas Healy
An Interview with Wendell Berry

David Swanson
A CIA Kidnapping in Milan

David Smith-Ferri
What Laila Sees

Ralph Nader
When Betrayed Voters Go to the Polls

Ray McGovern Torture Sans Regrets: Bush's Confessions

John Feffer
The Lies of Islamophobia

Christopher Ketcham
TV Toxicosis: What the Stewart / Colbert News Clowns Are Really Up To

Website of the Day
Sam Husseini Interrogates Rand Paul and Mike Pence

November 5 - 7, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
Now for the Good News

Vijay Prashad
Obama in India: a Tide of Turbans

Patrick Cockburn
If al-Qa'ida Really Want to Hit the West, They Can

Darwin Bond-Graham
Guess Who's Not Coming to Tea?

Mike Whitney
Dollar in the Dustbin

Linn Washington, Jr.
An Epidemic of Brutality: Oakland Filmmaker Feels Police Wrath

Rannie Amiri
STL = Sandbag the Lebanese

Ramzy Baroud
The Middle East's Stagnant "Change"

Larry Portis
Chou Sar? What Happened in Lebanon?

Gary Leupp
The Yemeni Toner Cartridge Bomb Story

William Loren Katz
Are Cruel Years Coming to a Neighborhood Near You?

Brian Cloughley
Spheres of Influence

Mark Weisbrot
The Fatal Mistake

Rubén M. Lo Vuolo, Daniel Raventós / Pablo Yanes
Basic Income in Times of Economic Crisis

Joseph Nevins
Ecological Privilege and the Frequent Flyer Activist

Neve Gordon
Thought Crimes

Alan Farago
The Bhopal Economy

Stewart J. Lawrence
Immigration Policy After the Midterm Elections

James R. King
The Other Side of Yemen

Ron Jacobs
How Ken Kesey Turned On America

Franklin Lamb
Israel Claims Victory in US Midterm Elections

James McEnteer
Beyond the Rational: the Alamo Election

Richard Phelps
Guy Fawkes and the Pressure of a Terrorism Spotlight

Saul Landau
Where's the Sanity Clause?

David Ker Thomson The Long Argument

Evelyn Pringle
The Vaccination Profiteers

Joseph G. Ramsey Until Pigs Fly: the Morning After With Michael Moore

Stanley Heller
Up Yours, John Stewart

Missy Beattie
The Big Universe

Harvey Wasserman
Vermont's Great Green Election Day Victory

Billy Wharton
Where Did Everybody Go?

Shamus Cooke
Democrats Run to the Right

Linh Dinh
War Games: Guns and Balls

Windy Cooler
Rallying Through This

Charles R. Larson
Witnesses of Haiti's History
: Edwidge Danticat's "Create Dangerously"

Phyllis Pollack
Keith Richards' Demon Life

David Yearsley
Bach and the Music of Time

Website of the Weekend
Smearing Jean-Luc Godard as an "Anti-Semite"

November 4, 2010

Doug Peacock
Desert Solitaire, Revisited

Andrew Cockburn
Why Summers Goes and Geithner Stays

Iain Boal
Crisis at Pacifica: the Two-Percent Putsch

Paul Craig Roberts
The Impotence of Elections

Chase Madar
Guantánamo: Exception or Rule?

Dave Lindorff
Take That You Smug Bastards!

Russell Mokhiber
Bought and Paid For

Laura Flanders
Lessons From Elizabeth Warren

Website of the Day
Moyers: the Howard Zinn Lecture

November 3, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
America the Clueless

Franklin C. Spinney
Democratic Debacle

Chris Floyd Dissatisfied Mind: Flickers of Hope in a Deadly Political Cycle

William Blum
Jon Stewart and the Left

Sheldon Richman
Provoking Yemeni Terrorism

Stephen Soldz
Fleecing Members, Colluding in Torture

Mark Weisbrot
Dilma's Victory in Brazil

Stewart J. Lawrence
Court Sends Mixed Signals on Arizona Immigration Law

Manuel Garcia, Jr. Election Night in Oakland

Norman Solomon
Now What?

Website of the Day
Save Our Social Security

November 2, 2010

Vincent Navarro
What's Happening in Europe?

Ishmael Reed
Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, T-Shirts

Uri Avnery
The Occupation and Political Corruption in Israel

Mark Driscoll
When the Pentagon "Kill Machines" Came to an Okinawan Paradise

Mike Whitney
Midterm Day of Reckoning: "Let the Landslide Begin"

Linh Dinh
Prone Pioneers: Punishing the Desperate for Being Desperate

David Macaray
Bring Back the Fifties! America's Most Misunderstood Decade

Randall Amster Wikilessons: War is a Joke, But It Isn't Funny

Betsy Ross
How the Banks Trumped Keynes

Yves Engler
A Sad Spectacle: Canada and the Jewish National Fund

Website of the Day
Gulf Oil Toxic to Humans

 

November 1, 2010

Ted Honderich
The Farce of Fairness

Steven Higgs
Don't Act Don't Sell: Why Liberals Will Get What They Deserve on Election Day

John Ross
A Ding-Dong Year for Death in Mexico

Dean Baker
A Darkening Future: Why Growth Still Feels Like a Recession

Ralph Nader
When Corporations are the Government

Justin E. H. Smith
The People Without History

Marjorie Cohn
Hyping Fear

Scott Boehm
Juan Williams and Katrina

Brian Tierney
The Struggle of DC's Nurses

Trish Kahle
Jon Stewart, Are You Really That Sane?

Martha Rosenberg Bathrobe Erectus: Feting Hugh Hefner

Website of the Day
Scary New Wage Data

 

 

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Weekend Edition
November 26 - 28, 2010

Scott Noble's New Film, "Human Resources"

Asking For Whom the Bell Tolls

By DAVID Ker THOMSON

Seeing gurneys of babies trundled through the chiaroscuro of old black-and-white footage at the start of Scott Noble’s Human Resources, the gurneys in the tunnels of God only knows what kind of institution, the viewer does well to brace herself for the coming onslaught. 

The piano accompaniment is not so much music as it is the hammering of wires in the industrial mode, a harbinger of doom.  And as it turns out, there is nothing in the film to save us from its earliest suggestion of menace.  Not the reassurance that the institution is a hospital rather than a death camp, not the good-natured and wacky antics of the scientist donning a fierce mask to impress Little Albert the plucky human baby in a famous set of experiments, not a single routine bell of work or school by which we recognize ourselves as modern subjects.  Not one of these scenes can silence the tolling bell of modernity as it calls out to us across a century of darkness and names us as we sit, not quite cowering, before the flitframes of Human Resources, our faces backlit by our computer screens like so many ancients clustered around a faggot fire at the center of the night.

Perhaps we have seen some or most of these images before.  They lurk in the sensorium as a subliminal archive of what it is we know collectively—but Noble’s synthesis cracks the code of their proper arrangement.  This is the order in which they need to be seen, these are the appropriate experts interviewed and brought to the film with just the right finesse of juxtaposition.  Appreciating Noble’s relentlessly inquisitorial talent as a film-maker is like the moment when you first realize that a piano is not a plucked-string instrument but an instrument of percussion.  Listen and learn.  Noble’s skill is at such an exalted level that the wise viewer might well hold something in reserve, a suspicion that anything this good, eliciting these sorts of responses from us, might possess its own dark behaviourist powers.  Glad we might be to have such a mage as Noble on our side.

While I was a grad student at Princeton, I went to Duke University for a couple of years to hang out in classes with Fred Jameson, the theorist and critic of modernism.  It took me a while to get up to speed.  Human Resources is the film I wish I had been able to see before sitting in on Jameson’s lectures on Fordism, Taylorism, and the whole shtick of capital and Western civ in the 20th-century industrial mode, and what that portends for culture and for the 21st century.

Is Human Resources a masterpiece?  To know this, you’d have to answer the old zen conundrums, like whether a truckload of dead babies is worse than the possibly-less unsettling notion of a live one eating its way up from the bottom.  I advise viewing the first half of Human Resources in the educative mode, learning the ropes of that skein of modernity that has held us so resourcefully to our tasks as good worker bees and advocates of box-style public education.  I advise viewing the second half of the film with the willingness to weep that is the corollary of modernist inquiry.  Unless you weep, you may be damaged by this film.  It answers the significant events of the last century the way a glass answers the implicit questions of a man who peers into its reflective surface—point for point.  It corresponds, in short, to reality.  Perhaps this is what we mean when we say that a work is a piece of the master. 

Human Resources, by Scott Noble.  Viewer discretion, and love, advised.

David Ker Thomson is a once-and-future prof at the University of Toronto.  He teaches in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College.  dave.thomson@utoronto.ca


 

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The Best Tea Partier Corporate Money Could Buy

Pam Martens on the rise of the Tea Party’s Rand Paul. What was wrong with Prop 19? Fred Gardner on California’s failed bid to legalize pot. John Sugg on the rise and fall of Steve Emerson, “terror expert.” Daniel Wolff on the framing of Ernest Withers” – was he an FBI informant? Subscribe now! If you find our site useful please: Click here to make a donation. CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents. Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year!


    

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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