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 January 2008
A NY Times report of the "monster deal" for a uranium-mining concession in Kazakhstan...
Judging from the violence of Rudy Guiliani’s collapse as a presidential candidate, Republicans are in big trouble. The American voter, who whistled to work while the foundation of the national economy eroded, is awake. Rudy Giuliani bet the farm on th...
It really doesn’t get any worse than this. Candace Gorman, lawyer for Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan detainee at Guantánamo, reports that her client has been infected with AIDS. Mr. al-Ghizzawi explained to his lawyer in a letter that he was...
Attorney General Michael Mukasey, this country’s chief legal officer, discussed the torture known as water boarding Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Chair Patrick Leahy insisted that water boarding "has been recognized as torture for the...
After six plus years, the war in Afghanistan drags on. The media occasionally cites casualties, but if it doesn’t involve NFL veteran Pat Tillman’s execution by his own comrades, Afghanistan gets sparse attention. A few stories feature the growing numb...
With the presidential race now effectively pared down to four candidates, thanks to the departure of John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani, we’re left with a really "B-grade" contest: a bomber (John McCain), a bummer (Hillary Clinton), a betrayer (Mitt Ro...
As the 40 day period of mourning comes to an end, nothing very good seems to have come out of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Eager to capitalize on the outpouring of outrage in the aftermath of the assassination, the Pakistan People’s Party, le...
Cleveland, a small town with less than 1,000 residents in western North Carolina, is an unlikely home for an active autoworkers’ union. Freightliner LLC (now owned by Daimler) opened a truck-manufacturing plant in the town in 1989. The United Auto Wor...
Somebody goofed. When Fed chairman Ben Bernanke cut interest rates to 3 per cent yesterday, the price of a new mortgage went up. How does that help the flagging housing industry? About an hour after Bernanke made the announcement that the Fed Funds rate wou...
On January 23, the Congressional Budget Office released an update on spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for reconstruction, and for "war on terror" associated projects. CBO put the combined costs at $691 billion, of which nearly two-th...
A very significant part of human communication is non-verbal. Anyone who attends only to words, and ignores the non-verbals is apt to be blind-sided. The non-verbal aspects of President George W. Bush’s final State of the Union address were remarkable...
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Before his handlers told the press Bill Clinton wouldn’t be taking any more questions, the former president gave it as his considered opinion that his wife and John McCain are a lot alike, and that assuming the two become their part...
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is already into the twelfth week of its strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), They’ve been out since November 5. That’s one hellaciously long time to be out of work, even for ...
Restrictions of all sorts have multiplied in the heightened security environment of the last six-and-a-half years, so it should be no surprise that, around the world, legal restrictions on speech have tightened. Since 2001, there has been a clear trend toward proh...
The latest federal government data on 2007′s salmon run on the Sacramento River point to an "unprecedented collapse" in the fishery considered for years to be one of the most healthy on the West Coast. If the data is verified in upcoming mee...
Libertarians preach the morality of the market, and socialists preach the morality of the state. Those convinced of the market’s morality want de-regulation; those convinced of the state’s morality want regulation. In truth, neither seems to wor...
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. -the land ethic of Aldo Leopold Money has proved the mo...
Sloganeers, propagandists and politicians often use the word "genocide" in ways that the law does not permit. But rarely is the crime of genocide invoked when Western militaries murder Muslim groups. This essay argues that the internationally recognized ...
Here’s one thing everyone should be able to agree upon from George Bush’s State of the Union address: "We have unfinished business before us." Apart from that, it’s a little difficult to credit much of what he said. "...
The experiment in famine began on January 18, 2008. Israel hermetically closed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing even food, medicine and fuel from entering the Strip. Power cuts, which had been frequent for many months, were extended to 12 hours per day. Due...
Caroline Kennedy’s New York Times op-ed endorsement of Senator Barack Obama alludes to the idealism and inspiration unleashed by her father during his presidency and its resonances in the Obama campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. She contend...
Last week in Currituck County, N.C., Superior Court Judge Russell Duke presided over the final step in securing the first criminal conviction stemming from the deadly actions of Blackwater Worldwide, the Bush administration’s favorite mercenary company. Lest...
The President’s FY 2009-13 budget plan, which he will submit to Congress next week, includes $70 billion to cover only the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the first four months of Fiscal Year 2009, which begins next October 1. This budgetary...
For decades, from the time Hispanic builders began to profit from construction of low cost housing in Miami Dade farmland, the Latin Builders Association has been the de facto political arm of south Florida construction and development interests. They gained hundr...
Carl Oglesby was once the president of the original Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Before that he was working for a defense contractor. His last project with the company was to develop a method of delivering Agent Orange so that it would cover the Vietna...