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 2012
Following the trajectory of a cinematic biopic, the new documentary Marley is organized as a straightforward biography, starting with Bob’s birth and ending with his death. But the movie is so much more than a linear story of one man’s life and music. Its 144...
In an astonishing scene in Kei Miller’s amazing novel, The Last Warner Woman, seventeen-...
Berlin
Just as wallpaper sometimes tells you almost everything you need to know about the people who live in the house it decorates, so too can even the most banal soundtrack to a political ad reveal far more about the candidate than word and image. So it ...
The Lord of the Drones:
The President and the White House Fly
By HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS
“Events of great consequence often spring from trifling circumstances.”
(Ex parvis saepe magnarum momenta...
Obama’s Hedge Funders
...
It seems pretty clear by now that the three young “domestic terrorists” arrested by Chicago police in a warrantless house invasion reminiscent of what US military forces are doing on a daily basis in Afghanistan, are the victims of planted evidence — part of the...
Asia is currently in the middle of an unprecedented arms race that is not only sharpening tensions in the region, but competing with efforts by Asian countries to address poverty and growing economic disparity. The gap between rich and poor—calculated by the Gini coeffi...
One of South Africa’s largest tertiary institutions, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, is a site of multiple controversies, but a near-disaster on Monday deserves more reflection because it points us in a positive direction: away from allying with the Is...
Whether or not you’re an investor, it’s important to grasp the significance of what’s happened with the Facebook initial public offering (IPO).
In the few days since its IPO, Facebook’s stock price has fallen almost 20 percent amidst news th...
While it may be premature to speculate on the legacy left by the various social upheavals that have occurred since early-2011, the electoral tide sweeping across Europe offers additional evidence that something fundamental is happening. In Greece and France, vote...
A recent op-ed by NY Times columnist, David Brooks, asserts that “Forty years ago, corporate America was bloated, sluggish, and losing ground to competitors in Japan and beyond.” However, the rise of private equity firms and “bare-knuckled corporate executives” ...
I have a confession to make. I am part of a vast international conspiracy that is bent on violently destroying our way of life and, ultimately, threatening our very survival itself. This cabal has as its unstated purpose the erosion of public institutions, theft on a glob...
Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times has been traveling to “third world” countries to find evidence of male cruelty to women. He’s found plenty. He recently visited a Native-American reservation. His article left out the statistics that show that among Ame...
Progress toward ending prison rape has been excruciatingly slow.
Over 30 years ago, activist Russell Smith founded People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons, which later, under the leadership of Stephen Donaldson, became the organization Stop Prisoner Rap...
Daniel has returned home. He had felt a lump in his stomach even before stepping on the plane in Mumbai. He felt sick when he saw all the young boys and girls checking everyone’s identity at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.
Mom, dad, his older sister and younger b...
The Only True Revolution in Syria
...
The Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy took place under the dominion of the conservative forces that controlled the apparatus of the fascist state from1939 – 1978. The leadership of the democratic forces had just come out of jail or returned to Spain fr...
“Austerity has failed because Greek society has been destroyed, the production base has been dissolved. Our country has been in a deep recession for five consecutive years. This has never happened in Europe in peacetime.”
–Alexis Tsipr...
Paris
Since graveyard humor is a Serbian specialty, it seems appropriate that Serbs just played a little joke on everybody by electing a former undertaker as President.
In the May 20 runoff, affable former funeral home manager Tomislav Nikolic won s...
Apollo is a small town in western Pennsylvania, part of the old coal and steel belt that surrounds Pittsburgh. The shallow Kiskiminitas River, a tributary of the Allegheny, flows through the borough. Although it is close to my hometown, I never knew much about it, except ...
Do protests and marches accomplish anything? Should I go? These questions collided in my head. One friend advised against. Another said I should. My children phoned, “If you do, be careful.” I knew. I just knew. I knew I would be in Chicago.
I arriv...
Last month, Eileen Foster was at the National Press Club to receive the $10,000 Ron Ridenhour P...
Thanks to fawning coverage from the country’s ever-so-partial TV giants, Enrique Peña Nieto has been favorite for July’s Mexican presidential election for more than two years. With just over a month to go, the majority of the polls still show the Institutional Revolu...
Until 1982, Philadelphia had three daily newspapers, and the surviving two, the Inquirer and Daily News, are owned by the same company. Both are hurting. Fewer and fewer readers force extreme cost-cutting measures that reduce the quality of each rag, whi...
On Friday, 93% of the U.S. House of Representatives affirmed a resolution escalating America’s already aggressive position on Iran, from “crippling” sanctions to a zero-tolerance policy on nuclear weapons. The Congressional Research Service summarized the bill (emph...