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 2010
South Africans of Indian descent are commemorating the arrival of the first indentured Indian workers here one hundred fifty years ago. In November 1860, two ships brought nearly 700 laborers from India to Durban. By 1911 more than 150,000 indentured Indian workers h...
Maybe because he’s from Australia, a U.S. satrap on the far rim of the American Empire, that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange doesn’t know that Washington does not allow anyone to steal information unless it orders them to do so. Attorney General Eric Hol...
“Information is the currency of democracy.”
– Thomas Jefferson.
Since 9-11, the US government, through Presidents Bush and Obama, has increasingly told the US public that “state secrets” will not...
The recent reports by the two deficit commissions–one appointed by President Obama (fiscalcommission.gov) and the...
Why does the FBI orchestrate fake terror plots?
The latest one snared Osman Mohamud, a Somali-American teenager in Portland, Oregon. The Associated Press report by William Mall and Nedra Pickler (11-27-10) is headlined in Yahoo News: “Som...
The Wikileaks disclosure this week of confidential cables from United States embassies has been debated chiefly in terms either of the damage to Washington’s reputation or of the questions it raises about national security and freedom of the press.
The ...
It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradat...
Now would you just stop arguing, and listen a minute? The days of this “yeoman-farmer” you mentioned are gone, pal! People need jobs, “good jobs,” sure, even jobs with a “Living Wage.” What do mean, this fella Mar...
The events that unfolded in Haiti’s presidential elections yesterday came as no surprise. There was fraud, confusion and mayhem. It had been predicted. Voters showed up to polls and did not find their names on registration lists. In some instances, there ...
For a mainstream economist Brad DeLong is about as good as you get. He is widely read in a number of areas including even (heaven forbid) economic history. He also is extraordinarily open-minded, recognizing that neo-classical economics may not hold all truths past, ...
Not only has the so-called “trickle-down” theory of economics been revealed to be a cruel hoax, but most of the good industrial jobs have left the country, the middle-class has been eviscerated, the wealthiest Americans (even in the wake of the recession) ha...
Now that the media’s gush and drool over the Obama visit has run dry — thanks to other far more interesting events — it might be worth looking at a couple of ‘outcomes’ that much of our media seemed pretty taken with.
...
Our real-life Neo did it again! In this new installment of Wiki-Matrix, the intrepid Julian Assange assaults the Empire while being pursued by ravenous Pentagon generals, shadowy CIA agents and overheated Swedish feminists.
Excuse me ...
To: Senators-elect Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Kentucky), Marco Rubio (Florida), and Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania)
From: WINSLOW WHEELER and SANFORD GOTTLIEB, Center for Defense Information, Washington, D.C.
Subject: The Pentagon ...
The present Pope Benedict XVI has made headlines by changing his moral position on the use of condoms. Where he before said such use was always ‘an intrinsic evil,’ he last week said that use of a condom by a male prostitute might be the beginning of moral r...
I walked to church in LaPlaine this Sunday morning. I usually go to Mass at La Chapelle Marie Auxiliatrice de Sarthre. Salesian priests say Mass and run the parish.
The fifteen minute walk was very easy. There were hardly any moving vehicles in the...
One of the major talking points issued by the Republican Party to its newly elected members of Congress is that they should always say in interviews that they are worried about the impact of government deficit spending on their grandchildren.
It s...
The terms of the EU/IMF’s €85 billion ($113 billion) bailout for Ireland are much worse than analysts had anticipated. Ireland will be required to use its National Pension Reserve Fund (NPRF) to shore up its insolvent banks and to maintain government opera...
Several hundred pilots from the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) picketed Newark Liberty International airport on November 22 and Houston airport on November 23 with signs reading “Who’s Flying Your Plane?”
The union also schedu...
For those who pay attention to the battle of ideas that constantly goes on in the United States, two people presently have center stage. One is a man whose expertise is in the creation of alternate realities by playing fast and loose with the facts. This sort of ente...
On Thanksgiving eve the English-language China Daily and People’s Daily Online reported that Russia and China have concluded an agreement to abandon the use of the US dollar in their bilateral trade and to use their own currencies in its place. The Russia...
Almost all children hear a set of conflicting statements from their parents, relatives, and friends. They’re told if they study hard, if they work hard, they can achieve whatever they want. It’s the "American Dream." But they’re also told ...
Just before I arrived in Vietnam in 1970, as a young, gung-ho, kill-a-commie-for-freedom, Australian army captain, President Richard Nixon of the United States ordered the invasion of a neighboring nation. Not a neighbor of America, of course, but a place...
Seeing gurneys of babies trundled through the chiaroscuro of old black-and-white footage at the start of Scott Noble’s Human Resources, the gurneys in the tunnels of God only knows what kind of institution, the viewer does well to brace herself for the coming o...
Amid rising deficits, engagement in wars in the Middle East, and a crisis of joblessness and unemployment, President Obama embarked upon a three day trip to India during the second week of November. As it turns out the centerpiece of the president’s agend...