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 November 2006
Dear compatriots and friends from all over the world: In this period I have worked intensively ensure the objectives set for our country in the Proclamation of July 31st. Currently, we are facing an adversary who has dragged the United States to such...
in Nazareth If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties — a grandmother — chose last week to strap on a sui...
Press reporting on information provided to the Senate by Robert Gates, President George W. Bush’s nominee for the post of defense secretary, show Gates hewing closely to the rhetoric of his predecessor. Gates is shown to be more parrot than innovator in his ...
I’ve watched the U.S. Senate exercise its constitutional duty to consider and vote on presidential nominees for major offices for more than 30 years, up close and personal. Over that time, I’ve come to the conclusion that the last thing a modern senato...
The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No. Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably l...
The impact of Oaxaca, Mexico’s struggle is hitting home. Gerardo Bonilla, painter and friend of many in the Austin artistic, activist, and student communities, was one of 149 arrested this past Saturday in a federal police sweep of Oaxaca city that is increa...
In the Muslim world religious groups that are militarily effective, but politically limited dominate resistance to the American Empire. Asia is infatuated with capital. Europe lies buried deep in neo-liberal torpor, and the Left and social movements in the EU (Ita...
United States sponsored secret flights and clandestine detention centres in Europe and elsewhere have received plenty of comment recently. Politicians and journalists tell us the "war on terror" demands extreme measures. At the same time, in countries wh...
AOn November 28, 2006 George Bush used the NATO meeting in "new Europe " in Riga , Latvia as the stage for the last act of his tragedy being played out in Iraq. The venue was the University of Latvia where Bush invoked the history of occupation and the s...
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." —Justice Felix Frankfurter It used to be the three branches–congress, the executive, and the courts&#...
Barack Obama is a windblown politician. The junior Illinois senator avoids anchoring himself to any principle, lest his political sails fail to catch the slightest breeze blowing from the left or the right. His political direction is always tentative, although his...
Even by the grim standards of Gaza, the past five months have been cruel ones. Some four hundred Palestinians, mostly unarmed civilians, have been killed during Israeli attacks. (Four Israeli soldiers and two civilians have been killed.) Israel has sealed o...
So the news is finally out, after months of speculation. Pfizer, the #1 drug company which started the arms race among pharmaceutical sales forces, is finally cutting back. And they’re not cutting back lightly. 20% reduction is a huge change when it c...
Running as fast as I can, surrounded by hundreds of others, I can hear screams behind me. Glancing back, through the darkness of night I can only differentiate between the masses running with me and the federal police by the light reflecting off their shields and ...
According to Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker shocker, the CIA has found no evidence of a sec...
in Kabul. As the powers that be met in Latvia for a NATO summit, the first snowflakes of winter were falling lightly on Kabul city. The suits thousands of miles away talked about the progress being made here. The Afghan people huddled around pathetic...
"When you own a big chunk of the bloody third world, dead babies just come with the scenery" Chrissie Hynde, from "Middle of the Road", by The Pretenders In November of 2005, the United States used white...
Bright, windless September morning in Manhattan, looking south and slightly west across Vesey Street from the 12th floor of WTC 7. The eight story US Customs House (WTC 6) lies directly across the way, and beyond it the North Tower (WTC 1), slightly rightward to t...
Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad the police often pick up over 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other. A new and ominous stage in the disintegration of the Iraqi...
Last week comedian Michael Richards fired a round of angry racial epithets at several young black men heckling him in a comedy club in Los Angeles. Just one week later, Sean Bell, a 23 year old groom-to-be and his two friends (all black) were gunned down by five p...
Five years after the events of September 11, 2001, conspiracy theories abound as an anxious public seeks to find a comprehensible story for that day and more broadly for their socio-political world. People need reliable foundations upon which to base the many assu...
There was one positive side-effect of 9/11/01, and it was that people in New York actually talked to one another, and not just about pain and suffering. Those were sharp, but the whole grief machine has been grossly overplayed. This last anniversary of 9/11 there ...
The November issue of the magazine Marie Clare did an outstanding job of in remedying the media’s woeful lack of coverage of the impact of war on fashion. With several hard-hitting articles and a photo spread, MC gives this aspect of war reporting it’s...
Where was the American left in the campaign that ended in recapture of both houses of Congress by the Democrats on November 7, 2006? Was it in the streets, fomenting opposition to the war in Iraq? Not at all. The antiwar movement has been inert for months. When I ...
The pogram against independent journalists who refuse to conform to corporate media definitions of what a reporter should be continues full throttle. The murder of Indymedia correspondent Brad Will this past October 27th on the barricades in Oaxaca by death squads...