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 September 2007
I returned at the end of last week from the Imperial fall maneuvers, held this year in Ostland. His Majesty’s forces prevailed, for much the same reasons that Blue usually wins in American war games. As someone who has led Red to victory in several senior-le...
It was a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking. Only 457 Palestinians and 10 Israelis were killed, according to the B’Tselem human rights organization, including the victims of Qassam rockets. Fewer casualties than in many previous years. However, it was st...
The Official Workers Center of Herndon, Virginia closed on September 14th, the day that a conditional use permit expired. The day laborer center had been highly controversial even before its opening in December of 2005. The town council that approved the center ha...
A respected American paper posted a scoop this week: Vice-President Dick Cheney, the King of Hawks, has thought up a Machiavellian scheme for an attack on Iran. Its main point: Israel will start by bombing an Iranian nuclear installation, Iran will respond by...
A former senior UN diplomat has revealed to me details of how, just over 10 years ago, the Clinton administration deliberately sabotaged UN weapons inspections in Iraq. American officials were fearful that Iraq would be officially certified as weapons-free,...
The Military Commissions, the Stalinesque show trials dreamt up in November 2001 by Dick Cheney and his cabal of close advisors, including David Addington, have been dogged by controversy ever since. Killed off by the Supreme Court in June 2006, brought back to li...
The U.S. military capabilities, personnel and hardware alike, having reached a stalemate in Iraq, are said to be increasingly more likely to be sent on more insane and murderous missions in the region. There have been a growing number of reports of intended attack...
The author of the lame "General Petraeus or ‘General Betrayus?’" ad for MoveOn.org was none other than Bill Zimmerman, the Santa Monica p.r. man installed as Prop 215 campaign manager in the Spring of 1996. Zimmerman was assigned to repl...
Just like the architect of the Tower of Babel bustling out of his studio with a fresh set of drawings, Hillary Clinton has produced a new health plan. Politicians don’t care to admit they messed up, and Mrs Clinton is no exception to this rule. In fact she i...
What makes the U.S. so unlike other rich nations? There is no single answer. At the top of a list is the power of the business class to shape policy-making and the lives of the nation’s populace. In ...
"Privatize first, ask questions later." William D Hartung "I would like to have the largest, most professional private army in the world" Ga...
I don’t know about you, but I for one am getting sick and tired of all these right-wing hacks righteously and publicly jumping ship on the Bush administration and the national nightmare they’ve been so kind as to bequeath to us this last awful decade....
"They want to kick you out so they can build housing they know you can’t afford and allow rich San Franciscans to enjoy it. They don’t feel that poor Blacks or other people of color deserve to have a view like that." ...
"There’s an old saw in the military that goes, ‘Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.’ And when it comes down to the essential elements of the Iraq war, the fight is about logistics." ...
On September 26, 2007, the powerful National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) bought two pages in the Wall Street Journal to tout a prosperous, expanding group of member-companies producing products. It occurred to me as I began the copy, that the NA...
The Gates of Lodore confront us from the river like a misty portal in a Romantic ode. That must be why John Wesley Powell lifted the name from Robert Southey’s clunky poem, "The Cataract of Lodore." Jack Sumner, the most seasoned outdoorsman o...
"Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain." T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land On September 10, 1810, Chile declared independence from Spain. On September 4 197...
When 50,000 people — many young, many poor, overwhelmingly African- American — marched in Jena, La., last Thursday, the political impact was felt around the country. Marching on behalf of six young men known as the Jena 6, who face prison time for a sc...
There is much concern over SB 866, the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007. Librarians, historians and archivists from around the country have issued position statements regarding the bill and have worked diligently to keep it moving. SB 866 would r...
"Before addressing our speaker, I have a few critical points to emphasize. First, just because we invite some nutcase here to sound off does not mean we endorse his ideas. Does the term political pressure’ mean anything to you people? Enough said. Secon...
When anthropologists work overseas, they typically arrive with an array of equipment including notebooks, trowels, tape recorders, and cameras. But in the new context of the Bush Administration’s "war on terror," a growing number of anthropologists...
Since in Burma the number 9 is a fraught digit astrologers predicted 9/27/2007 would be a day of turbulence and the government was presumably expecting this, since it regularly consults astrologers on policy, just as President Reagan did. Perhaps the US State Depa...
Two recent offhand comments, both widely publicized, have seriously undermined whatever progress might have been made in exposing the fact that the Iraq war was initiated at least in large part to guarantee Israel’s safety and regional dominance in the Middl...
It was beef and almonds. The whole time we were fussing about the Chinese government’s failure to impose strict standards on production of toys and Mattel was recalling toys because of lead paint and other manufacturing deficiencies, (some of which Mattel no...
It proved a painful exercise to witness, and those on the left of British labour must have had an aneurism. Aspiring less to high politics than stooping to low-brow, cudgelling tactics, the Brown government has decided to emulate Ronald Reagan. If Labour is no lon...