Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives from August 2003
MEXICO CITY. Although the historic August 14th blackout shut down crucial industrial and financial centers in two out of the three North American Energy Alliance nations, and virtually killed the prospects for the privatization of electricity in a third, co...
Spain has emerged recently as a middling power, well integrated in the European Union, and participating in international institutions and treaties. She took pride in siding with the majority of States within the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies in issues ...
We saw "Northfork" by accident. "The Swimming Pool" with Charlotte Rampling was playing at our local art house, but we got the times mixed up. I remembered seeing trailers for Northfork, and it seemed like a good bet, an anti-Western Western ab...
All right, Godless CounterPunchers, we know that you are snickering about Alabama’s Chief Justice Roy Moore’s 10 Commandments rock. Now his eight associate judges have repudiated "Roy’s Rock," and the state’s Attorney General remo...
It would be tempting to dismiss the recent media flap around the candidacy of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and his membership in the student organization Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) as much to do about nothing. But for those of us who have ...
A number of readers of this column have said, in effect, "You are critical of our current policies in Iraq. What would you do instead?" I addressed this in an earlier column, but there are a good number of new readers, so it is probably time to revisit w...
The day after the truck bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan remarked, "The blue flag has never been so viciously assaulted as it was yesterday." Whether executed by remnants of Saddam Hussein’s B...
Last week the Washington Post commented on claims made about Iraq’s supposed possession of nuclear weapons. "Bush evoked the mushroom cloud on Oct 7 [2002], and on Nov 12 General Tommy Franks, [then] chief of US Central Command, said inaction might brin...
It’s rare that I read books about drug policy. After just a little exposure to the genre, one finds, over and over again, the same dates, the same key people, the same arguments from the government and the same arguments from the policy reform camp. There is...
Even Arnold Schwarzenegger loves immigrants. "I’m one myself," he reminds California voters. But in 1994 The Terminator supported California’s immigrant bashing Proposition 187, which the courts voided in 1999. The measure aimed to "prev...
1. Mel Gibson’s forthcoming film "The Passion," based on the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus as depicted in the New Testament, has even before its release generated controversy. This is good and appropriate. 2. The film might, just concei...
Members of the World Trade Organization worry that their Sept. 10-14 meeting in Cancun, Mexico, might turn into a rerun of the tumultuous Seattle gathering in 1999. To defuse one of several high-profile controversies, the United States agreed to relax some pharmac...
Seems, my entire political career I’ve had my back against the ropes. The Good Ol’ Boys in Georgia . . . trying to take me to the canvass for a full ten count. But each time they thought they had me, women, including women from Detroit, rose to stop th...
It may be a lot of fun to wave the flag and scowl and loudly "support our troops" and, when in the comfortable center of a mob, call for tar and feathers for those who don’t agree, but it’s not necessarily relevant to the issue at hand. For b...
"Why don’t these damned oil companies fly their own flags on their personal property-maybe a flag with a gas pump on it." Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler (1937) On August 26, 2003, CBS.com wrote of a &quo...
According to a report in The Washington Post, support for the Patriot Act is waning in the country, including Idaho, where Ashcroft’s summer revival tour traveled this week. Idaho’s Rep. C.L. "Butch" Otter (R), is leading an effort in Congres...
Americans spend more time working than the Japanese. Europeans work nine less weeks a year than U.S. workers. Even medieval peasants worked less hours than we do! It is time to fight overwork and time poverty in America. Our time is all we have and none of us know...
"One has to be careful," said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in late August, "not to confuse the UN with the US." If the Secretary General had taken his own advice, then maybe his Brazilian subordinate, Sergio Vieira de Mello, might not have b...
CHICO, CA., Sept. 13, 2003. White House aides today staged another significant photo opportunity involving the USS Abraham Lincoln, in order to declare that "major combat in Iraq has resumed." President Bush had previously mentioned the policy shi...
(The Editorial Collective of the Old North End RAG) Howard Dean the liberal, anti-war candidate? The laughter rings most loudly in Vermont. As Dean’s candidacy caught fire over the summer, a number of articles have appeared on the net examining his his...
This August, during the very same week that the world commemorated the 58th anniversary of the only use of nuclear weapons-an act which obliterated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki– more than 150 military contractors, scientists from the weapons labs, an...
What a difference a few months can make. At the end of April 2003, just four months ago, Donald Rumsfeld was in the Qatar headquarters of General Tommy Franks, effusively comparing the US victory in Iraq to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of ...
Editors’ Note: NICHOLAS ROWE teaches dance to Palestinian children on the West Bank. He has recently returned to the Occupied Territories from a trip to Brazil, where he gave a speech to the Dance and the Child International conference. His spe...
During the boom of the 1990s, neoliberal economists and the financial press promoted the the high tech revolution for its ability to reduce production costs. As long as government did not interfere with markets, technology would lead to an improvement in the quali...
Remember Pete from college, circa 1971? Older than most under-grads–early twenties. Quiet, introverted, so it’s no big deal if you can’t place him. Didn’t do anything special except lead that small chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the Wa...