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 February 2012
The possibility of an authoritarian and ethically dysfunctional family in the White House in 2013 certainly has caught the attention of a number of liberals and other progressives. After all, what progressive or decent conservative for that matter would support Rick Santo...
The stupid Attack Iran obsession seems to have infected virtually all discussion of the Middle East.
Marc Lynch of G.W. University said something stupid…then Amnesty International said something stupid…and how about those stupid Islamic terrorist plots?
...
Fazillah, age 25, lives in Maidan Shar, the central city of Afghanistan’s Wardak province. She married about six years ago, and gave birth to a son, Aymal, who just turned five without a father. Fazillah tells her son, Aymal, that his father was killed by an American...
Two positive steps have just been taken toward limiting the scope of the detention provisions of the...
Greetings. I write from Niles, Ohio, near Youngstown. I take part in Occupy Youngstown (OY). I was asked to make some “keynote” remarks on the occasion of OY’s first public meeting on October 15, 2011. I am a member of the le...
There is an attack on workers going on across America. Corporate bosses are turning to the lockout as their first measure of negotiating with workers who strike for legitimate grievances and economic justice. There were 17 lockouts across the country in 2011 with the most...
Lahore.
Relations between the Pakistani government and the military have been tense recently, even resulting in rumours of an impending military coup. A coup is not very likely at this stage, but the situation has created the environment for at least one n...
Even though the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially in the United States, is winter-hibernating – Oakland, California’s dorky vandals notwithstanding – I can’t forget an image from last October’s Zuccotti Park events. If you recall, down in Times Square,...
In 2007, Tullow Oil and partner Kosmos Energy discovered substantial petroleum reserves in the Ju...
Durban.
In 2007, former World Bank chief economist Nick Stern termed climate change the worst ‘market failure’ in history – since those who pollute greenhouse gases are not charged, and since they threaten future generations and vast swathes of natur...
Gary Weiss, the Wall Street writer who was ahead of his time with his comprehensive chronicle of Wall Street corruption in 2006 (...
My favorite reaction to the NYPD interventions into the lives of Muslims in the greater NYC area was at the website Gawker. The website decided to read the NYPD dossier on Newark, NJ for restaurant suggestions. Amin’s Halal Restaurant, on Williams Avenue, gets a good ra...
A sizeable minority has opposed the “government” – actually representatives of a crony corrupt elite – for decades, now. Members of that minority have been imprisoned in per capita numbers higher than Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. The government sancti...
I teach English at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, California. I love my school, my amazing colleagues, and the kids who enter my classroom each year. But I hate what is happening to public education.
From the national to the local level, our public schoo...
Is the Fed’s “Easy Money” policy pushing up the price of gas? The editors of the Wall Street Journal seem to think so. Here’s how they summed it up in an article last week:
“Oil is traded in dollars, and its price ...
What happened recently at the Hershey candy factory, in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, has to be considered one of the weirdest and most outrageous labor stories of the new year.
First the outrageous part. According to a story in the New York Times (February 21)...
You can say one thing for the powers that be in the banking industry. They’ve got a lot of nerve.
This past week, our own finance minister, Jim Flaherty, along with Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, came out strongly in opposition to a modest p...
Every individual is a blend of struggling motivations, except perhaps for the garden variety sociopaths that seem to occupy many places of power these days. Most of us, however endeavor to exhibit the noble of our character as we try to calm the howls of ego that so often...
With the publication of his courageous new book, Why America Failed (John Wiley, 2012), Mo...
Conservatives, God bless them, refuse to apply their beloved “market theory” to the issue of abortion. They say they want to save unborn children, but they give pregnant women little incentive to carry a baby to term.
An abortion is inexpensive, at least rel...
Should Target Tell Your Parents You’re Pregnant?
...
Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, has written a new book, due out this week from St. Martin’s Press, on the rising influence of Ayn Rand in modern politics. Titled ...
When I was Chairman of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC), we had two bombing incidents. I had no idea who was responsible, but I had a guess. Someone unknown placed a bomb in the doorway of ADC’s Boston headquarters. The staff there called the ...