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 April 2008
New Orleans.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon was not having a good day. His plan to arrive in New Orleans for the NAFTA Summit April 21-22 with a freshly minted law privatizing Mexico’s oil industry in his pocket had been foi...
The US Supreme Court has just dealt a serious blow to voters’ rights that could help put John McCain in the White House by eliminating tens of thousands of voters who generally vote Democratic.
By 6-3 the Court has upheld an Indiana law that requires ci...
When I was nineteen I was stationed in a remote Laotian village on the Mekong River. I was an Irish kid from the Bronx, over twelve thousand miles from home. It had been a twenty-two hour plane ride to get, “in country” and another four excru...
A storm swept the world in 1968. It arose in Vietnam, and then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. The signs and portents had been there for some years, but the speed with which it spread was not foreseen. A b...
Can the world settle on a medical research and development (R&D) system that develops medicines and other products to meet priority health needs and makes those products available on an affordable basis?
Developing a strategy to meet these twi...
Barack Obama’s strategy to win the White House was to run a "race-neutral" campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on race. The very premise — that race neutrality is possible in a nation built on white supremacy –&...
This is what it has come to.
Hillary Clinton seems poised to damage Barack Obama so badly in the Democratic primary that he will end up flopping around like a suffocating trout in the general election when he faces John McCain. From the progressi...
More than any other Administration in recent history, this Administration has a penchant for secrecy. To an unprecedented degree, it has invoked executive privilege to thwart congressional oversight and the state secrets privilege to shut down laws...
The trumpeted success of the Bush administration’s surge was built on flimsy foundations. They were, principally, the employing of the Sunni resistance to fight al-Qaeda, effectively bribing a large section of the Sunni resistance to stop attacking...
It is dry, it is hot. Black string bikinis descend the small steps meeting black flapping swimming trunks. They look naked thanks to the black mud. Both bodies entirely black, only the feet remain white. Salt easily penetrates the skin, making it soft an...
As the presidential horse race grows more frenzied and absurd — Flag pins! Bowling! Obliteration!– it is important to keep in mind what the election is really about: torture.
Specifically, the use of torture as an openly admitted...
Washington, DC
The First Family Security Bubble was nearly pried open for a moment last Friday; but in the end Disneyland remained blessedly undisturbed.
On a particularly warm spring evening, Laura and Jenna Bush alighted fro...
War with Syria? Peace with Syria?
A big military operation against Hamas in the Gaza strip? A cease-fire with Hamas?
Our media discuss these questions dispassionately, as if they were equivalent options. Like a person in a showroom making a...
When I watched General Musharraf a few days ago on TV, he looked like the captain of a sinking ship, the wind of defeat in his hair.
Those who hold power and shape the destiny of others should never be judged when they are dead and g...
Responding to a question about Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the Olympic Torch Relay at the Coca-Cola shareholders meeting last week, Mr. Isdell, CEO of Coca-Cola, defended the sponsorship by referring to the Olympic Torch as a symbol of hope and open...
It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel.
...
Not satisfied that the entire contents of the Colorado River sloshes inside the bloated bellies of the seven basin states, this monster is now searching for water beyond their horizons. They call it river augmentation, or the mechanical harvesting of wat...
The Federal Reserve will almost certainly cut the target federal funds rate a quarter point to two percent on Wednesday. Fed watchers will be looking at the policy statement for clues as to whether the Fed will pause after cutting rates 3.25 percentage p...
Is America at the mercy of an invasion of the pumpheads?
The bizarre behavior of Bill Clinton during this campaign season, which has seen this once smooth-talking and politically uber-sophisticated campaigner repeatedly stick a foot in his mouth a...
The new "surge" strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military’s application of the "lessons of history" from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among th...
On Wednesday, April 23, U.S. and Guatemalan labor groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor, changing the workers’ rights provisions of CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) are being violated. The petitioners a...
In May 2005, FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism John Lewis told a Senate panel that ecoterrorism is "one of today’s most serious domestic terrorism threats." Then the FBI’s James Jarboe estimated that two organizatio...
Last week Michael Moore published an ardent declaration of support for Barack Obama. In case you missed it, you can read it ...
Friday dusk in Queens, the first march after the verdict in the police killing of Sean Bell started among the cherry blossoms. In front of the cool stone courthouse, where that morning Judge Arthur Cooperman announced that essentially his decision had pi...
In 1967, a caprice of fate found me assimilated and married into an Arab family living in east Jerusalem within two weeks of my arrival. Forty years later, I am reliving the war with a view of the front line from the safety of my armchair. I ...