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Inside the New Print Edition of CounterPunch: Labor at the Crossroads

First the Wedding; Now the Wake: Big Labor's New Unity Partnership by JoAnn Wypijewski; Report from Baghdad: How Did the Votes Add Up: by Patrick Cockburn. Tsunamis of Blood: Wolfowitz in Indonesia: by Joseph Nevins; ALSO Alexander Cockburn on Tsunami Aid: How the People Scored. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Wars of the Laptop Bombers

 

Today's Stories

February 21, 2005

Michael Neumann
Startegies in Palestine: a Shrinking Pie in the Sky

February 19 / 20, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Back to Salem: Paul Shanley and the Return of "Recovered Memory"

Kathleen Christison
Struggling for Justice in Palestine

Ted Honderich
On Being Persona Non Grata

Gary Leupp
Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House & Welcome to Commit Suicide

Don Santina
Reparations for the Blues

Jennifer Roesch
John Negroponte: Dirty Warrior

Scott Richard Lyons
Ward Churchill and the Identity Police

Chris Clarke
Ward Churchill and Liberal Outrage

George Beres
Censorship in the Land of Wayne Morse: Gagging W. Churchill in Oregon

Harry Browne
The Belfast Heist: the Plot Unravels

Manuel García, Jr.
Who Killed Rafik Hariri?

Mark Scaramella
Lessons from the Hidden Afghan War

Michael Donnelly
Whatever Happened to John Edwards?

John Pilger
First, They Attack the Past

Norman Madarasz
Death Wish for Reform in Brazil?

Surendra Devkota
The Monarchy in Nepal

Deborah Rich
How Anti-GMO Ballot Measures May Miss the Mark

Fred Gardner
When Dr. Tod Met Merle Haggard

CounterPunch News Service
About King Mswati: Political Developments in Swaziland

Richard Oxman
CounterPunching Arthur Miller

Poets' Basement
Albert, Giebel, Tripp, Engel and Orkin

 

February 18, 2005

Ben Moxham
In East Timor, the Nightmare Continues

Dave Lindorff
The Scum Also Rises: the Bloody Career of John Negroponte

Larry Birns
Negroponte: a Resume of Death Squads, Deceptions and Bribery

Gregory Elich
N, Korea's Phantom Nukes and the US's Subversion of Diplomacy

Samuel Logan / John Meyers
The Future of Colombia's Paramilitary Death Squads

Nicole Colson
Shock and Awe on Civil Liberties: From Lynne Stewart to Ward Churchill

Suzan Mazur
Whose National Security Are We Talking About?

Mickey Z.
"One Man Has Stopped Killing"

 

February 17, 2005

Joshua Frank
Hogtying of the Deaniacs

Paul Craig Roberts
Bush's Willing Sychophants: the Conservative Media

Robert Fisk
Under the Shadow of Death in Lebanon

Christopher Brauchli
Where Time Stands Still: Kinsey and Darwin in Cobb County, GA

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Military Recruitment TV: Why Send Them to College, When Your Kid Can be Cannon Fodder?

Alison Weir
Russia, Israel and Media Omissions

Ahrar Ahmad
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Is There an Islamic Problem?"

Saul Landau
An Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon: "The US Tramples the Laws It Wrote"

Website of the Day
Petition to Support Ward Churchill

 

 

February 16, 2005

Robert Fisk
Lebanon: a Battlefield for the Wars of Others

Kevin Zeese
Creating a Real Ownership Society: Share the Wealth; Protect Retirement

Gary Leupp
Meanwhile, in Nepal...

Ron Jacobs
Why the Iranian Opposition Should Not Trust the Bush Administration

Jessica Leight
Oil-Flush Chavez Begins to Strut His Stuff

Greg Moses
Houston, You've Got a Problem: Documenting Voting Irregularities in Texas

Mark Engler
The Last Porto Alegre

Jack McCarthy
Where's the Outrage About Pat? Buchanan Does a Churchill

Bill Christison
US Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel

Website of the Day
The World is Melting: a Photo Survey by Gary Braasch

 

 

February 15, 2005

CounterPunch News Service
Dean a "Safe" Moderate, Says NYT Citing CounterPunch

Robert Fisk
The Killing of Mr. Lebanon

Uri Avnery
"Sharm-al-Sheikh, We Have Come Back Again"

Stan Cox
Fighting Big Pharma in Little Digwal

Mickey Z.
Radio Active North of the Border: an Interview with Chris Cook

Dave Zirin
Bashing Bush: Jose Canseco Comes Clean

Nadia Martinez
Ending World Poverty? Opening at the World Bank, Apply Now

Lila Rajiva
"Little Eichmanns" and the 'Harijan': the Danger of Magical Thinking in Politics

Paul Craig Roberts
The American Job Sell Out

 

 

February 14, 2005

Robert Jensen
Ward Churchill: Right to Speak Out; Right About 9/11

Brian Cloughley
Kuwait's Freedom, Bush-style

Patrick Cockburn
Outcome of the Iraqi Elections: Shortages, Corruption, Guerrilla War

Gary Leupp
Post-election Iraq: What Next?

Michael Donnelly
Sacred Nature: Just Another Commodity?

Dave Lindorff
When Bush Came to My Neighborhood

Elaine Cassel
The Lynne Stewart Verdict

 

February 12 / 13, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Ward Churchill's Genes

Saul Landau
Alarcon Speaks: an Interview with the Vice President of Cuba

Paul Craig Roberts
Nothing to Fear But Bush Himself

Patrick Cockburn
Two Years After the Fall of Saddam, the Resistance Controls All Major Roads into Baghdad

John Feffer
Bush v. N. Korea: Round Two

Mickey Z.
Right to Remain Silent; Duty to Speak

Kurt Nimmo
Viva la Cucaracha!

Fred Gardner
Waiting for Raich

Dave Zirin
Fighting the New Republic(ans)

John Chuckman
Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Ben Tripp
A Leftist on the Bush Payroll

Carol Norris
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Dwarf?"

Robert Fisk
No Middle East Peace Without Justice

Frank / Chowkwanyun
Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror: the Case of Sherman Austin

Mike Whitney
Condi's Euro Tour

Deborah Frisch
A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Reading Khomeini in Colorado

Christine TenBarge
What's So Special About Ward?

Ron Jacobs
Curtis Mayfield's Train to Jordan

Dr. Susan Block
Chemistry of Love: a Valentine's Greeting

Poets' Basement
Louise, Smith-Ferri, Ford and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Free Sherman

 

 

 

February 11, 20055

Manuel Garcia, Jr
The Eight Percent War

Kurt Nimmo
Ann Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need Him?

Dave Lindorff
Guckert or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In

Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott Abrams

Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz

Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion

Jennifer Van Bergen
Lynne Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All

 

 

February 10, 2005

Dave Lindorff
What Academic Freedom?

Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq

Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed

Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?

Suzan Mazur
More on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha

Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition

Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little Hope"

Greg Moses
Taking Jesus Back from the Hijackers

Website of the Day
The Missionary Positions

 

 

February 9, 2005

Jeffrey St. Clair
Duck and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers

Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say

John Ross
Hecho en Mexico: the Iraqi Election

Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon

Conn Hallinan
The Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion

Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely Forbidden"

Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions

Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

 

 

February 8, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral Pact, Not a Party"

Brian Cloughley
Out of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"

Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"

Harry Browne
"Don't Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland

Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President and Ward Churchill

Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the Same Beast

Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper

David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq

 

 

February 7, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Bush's War on Jobs

Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher Ed

Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill

Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill

Patrick Cockburn
The Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism

Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried

Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI

Tariq Ali
Imperial Delusions

 

 

 

February 5 / 6, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs

Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day

Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill

P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami

Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust

Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story

Pamela Olson
West Bank Story

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West

Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court

Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents

Robert Fisk
History by Laptop

David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome

Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada

Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love

Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life

Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside

Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy

Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the Game

Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert

Website of the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File

 

February 4, 2005

Brian Cloughley
The Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"

Bill Christison
Election Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005

Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?

Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft

Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal

Ron Jacobs
The Downward Spiral in Iraq

 

 

February 3, 2005

Ward Churchill
On the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications and Gross Distortions

Sharon Smith
Resisting Soldiers Need Our Support

Mickey Z.
Leslie Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?

Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union

Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan

Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq

Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence

Dave Lindorff
The Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies

 

 

February 2, 2005

David Domke / Kevin Coe
Bush's Brand of Christianity

Noam Chomsky
Iraq After the Elections

M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me in Its Crosshairs

Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen

Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean

Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT

Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn

Website of the Day
War is a Racket

 

 

February 1, 2005

Joshua L. Dratel
The Torture Memos

Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi

Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"

Uri Avnery
The Stalemate

Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal

Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel

Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades

Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified Voters

Paul Craig Roberts
American Police State

Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 22, 2004

James Petras
An Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre Historical Amnesia

Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel

Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit

Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge

Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column

Kathleen Christison
Imagining Palestine

Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos

 

 

December 21, 2004

Greg Moses
The New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV

Dave Lindorff
Losing It in America: Bunker of the Skittish

Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk

Dragon Pierces Truth*
Concrete Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam

Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"

Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti

Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report

Paul Craig Roberts
America Locked Up: a System of Injustice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con!

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February 21, 2005

"You Could See the Fear in Their Eyes"

Mexico: the Pentagon's Proxy Army in Iraq

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico, which unlike its Central American neighbors was never a member of George Bush's "Coalition of the Willing", now has the largest contingent of any Latin nation fighting on the ground in Iraq--8000 Mexican and Mexican-descent troops who voluntarily joined the U.S. armed forces.

All Central American contingents save for Salvador, which also has a considerable number of security and construction personnel on the ground, have been withdrawn from Iraq by their governments.

Mexico's bellicose national anthem speaks glowingly of "a soldier in each son of God" and Mexico's sons have been marching off to wars--albeit U.S. wars--since Pearl Harbor. Bush's doomed aggression in Iraq is no exception.

50 miles north of Zacatecas city, in a region that has been the traditional headwaters of the great flood of "indocumentados" who have made it to El Norte, the shrine to the Santo Nino de Atocha ("Holy Child of Atocha") is crowded with migrant families asking protection for their loved ones in this dangerous journey to "the other side", with "plegarias" (prayers) stamped on ornamental tin sheets or simply written out in long hand on a sheet of school notebook paper.

In every U.S. war that the sons and now the daughters of Mexico have gone off to fight, families have come here to the shrine to hang portraits of handsome young men in U.S. dress military uniforms and ask the Santo Nino for his protection. Now, Iraq is much in evidence on the walls here. Like many, the Medina Maldonado family has come to ask the Holy Child to keep their Jaime out of harm's way "especially now that he is being sent to Iraq." The family of Jesus Gutierrez Mercado asks "the favor" that he be brought home "sano y salvo" ('safe and sound') from the American war.

Just about half of the 110,000 Latinos (Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Central Americans, Ecuadorians, Mexicans) in the U.S. military are of Mexican descent, and 22,000 out of the 37,000 non-citizens serving in anticipation of obtaining U.S. citizenship, are similarly of the Mexican persuasion--most of them smuggled into the U.S. as kids without legal documents.

Because Latino troop numbers (two thirds of all Latinos are Mexican) still do not match general population proportions, Mexican descent youth are pursued assiduously by high school recruiters--the U.S. Marine Corps is particularly aggressive and Mexicans now form 13% of that branch of service.

Because Marine units from Camp Pendleton in San Diego, which have high numbers of Mexican recruits, led the initial invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and later were brought back to level Fallujah in November, the casualty rates have come home painfully to Mexican communities on both sides of the border.

Of the first 1000 U.S. deaths recorded in Iraq, almost all of them the lowest-ranked, poorest-paid, and worst trained troops, 122 were Latinos, about 70 of them of Mexican descent. Their deaths in a war that most Mexicans strongly oppose have triggered complicated reactions north and south. Three recent deaths in particular are informed by such contradiction.

* This past January 12th, infantryman Sergio Diaz Varela who fell in Ramadi in the deadly Sunni triangle December 24th, was buried with full military honors in Guadalajara. Nine armed troops from Fort Hood, Texas led by General Ken Keene accompanied the young soldier to his final resting place, and U.S. ambassador Tony Garza commended the boy's soul to God. The funeral, the second of a Mexican-born soldier on Mexican soil, came off without a hitch.

* Last July, a U.S. honor guard accompanying the body of another young soldier, Juan Lopez Rangel, to a country graveyard in San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato was disarmed and detained by elements of the Mexican army for violating national firearms laws. With many more such funerals in the pipeline--a third Mexican youth, Jesus Fonseca, was buried in the altos of Jalisco state at the beginning of February - the Fox government is moving to ease the diplomatic pain.

* Lance Corporeal Andres Raya did not fall fighting the enemy in Iraq. A humvee driver pushing unprotected vehicles in and out of Fallujah for seven months, Raya was exposed to attacks by the resistance and roadside bombs every day he served on Iraqi soil. Home on holiday in the California central valley farming town of Ceres and haunted by rumors that his unit would soon be sent back to Iraq, Raya, 19, snapped, provoking a three hour running gun battle with back-ups from four different California police departments.

Leaping over backyard fences and dashing down dirt alleys in the town where he grew up as an undocumented field worker's son, Raya assured neighbors they were not in harm's way if they were "innocent civilians." Reportedly shaken by Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11", Raya stopped to ask one witness if he had voted for Bush,

Finally cornered after killing one officer and gravely wounding another with an outlaw assault rifle, the young Marine was cut down by 18 rounds when he charged a police barricade. "Andres Raya died like a true Mexican standing on his feet" a neighbor, Hilda Mercado, shouted out at a tension-packed reconciliation meeting a few days later. "Andy was a casualty of war," Lalo Mercado who grew up with the dead Marine told the New York Times.

Raya's rampage tripwired brown-white rage in Ceres. Andres had grown up in a migrant labor camp here and as a teenager, was often rousted by the local police--as recently as a week before his rampage, he was stopped despite being in uniform. When friends sought to build an altar to Raya in the alleyway where he died, police repeatedly tore it down and indignant graffiti was quickly painted out near the crime scene.

Ratcheting up tensions to lynch-mob levels, police cited Raya's tattoos as proof that he was a gang banger--the tattoos were symbols of Mexican pride, his farm worker father affirmed. Police later displayed a video of Raya purportedly smoking marijuana and throwing down supposed gang signs while surrounded by ripped-up swatches of a U.S. flag arranged to spell out "Fuck Bush!"

Despite the three medals Raya won while in Iraq (among them "The Global War On Terrorism Expeditionary Service Award"), the U.S. Marine Corps refused the family all military honors. In the days before his death, friends say Raya vehemently counseled his "homies" not to follow his example and join up. Marine recruiting is in crisis with the service failing to fill its monthly quota in January for the first time since 1995.

Although he is alive to tell about it, death in Iraq has also claimed a piece of the life of Army Sergeant Jonatan Cardenas Alban of Carson, California, an overwhelmingly black and Mexican suburb of Los Angeles. Last August 18th while on patrol in an inflamed Sadr City, Sergeant Cardenas, a nine year vet (the military refers to him merely as "Cardenas Alban"), saw a box drop off a truck he was following and "lit up" the vehicle, killing seven civilians who had been out scavenging garbage. When 16 year-old Qasam Hasan ran from the exploding truck, Alban gunned him down. What happened next remains clouded but when Alban and other soldiers gathered around the boy who was barely clinging to life, an argument broke out and the Sergeant turned his assault rifle on Hasan, finishing him off in what Cardenas would tell authorities was "a mercy killing."

The third member of a unit out of Fort Reilly, Kansas to be charged with murdering Iraqi civilians (one allegedly killed a member of the Iraqi National Guard after forcing him to have sex), Jonatan Cardenas Alban was sentenced in November to a minimum year in prison and stripped of all rank, and thus earned the unenviable distinction of becoming the first U.S. soldier of Mexican descent to be convicted of a war crime in Iraq.

For more than 70 families of Mexicans who served in Iraq, prayers to the Santo Nino de Atocha or any other protective deity or talisman, have not been answered. When the military came to inform the family of Isela Rubacalva in a downtrodden colony of Ciudad Juarez that she had been killed in action in the same tank that made Jesica Lynch famous, all her father could think to ask was "what for?" And when Marine guards drove up to the Los Angeles home of Carlos Arredondo, a Costa Rican immigrant, to tell him that his son had been taken in the holy city of Najef, the distraught father grabbed a can of gasoline, doused it on the Marines' van, climbed inside, and set the vehicle on fire, suffering critical burns on over 70% of his body.

Fernando Suarez del Solar has pursued a distinct path, turning his grief into social action ever since the Marines knocked on his San Diego door to inform him that his son Jesus had fallen during the first weeks of the invasion. Posthumously eligible to receive U.S. citizenship, Fernando turned down the Marines' offer--Jesus, raised in Tijuana, had been a "conchero" dancer and liked to think of himself as an Aztec warrior.

Now Fernando Suarez has created the Guerrero Azteca Project to campaign against the Bush war in Iraq. Suarez has taken on the San Diego school board over the issue of Marine recruiters in the high schools and led a march on the local Titan Corporation, which provided "interrogators" to Abu Ghraib prison. Last summer, Fernando was a prominent participant in anti-war demonstrations at both major political conventions and his wife Rosa was recently part of a delegation that brought material aid to Iraqis driven out of their homes in Fallujah by the U.S. military.

Suarez himself journeyed to Iraq soon after Jesus was killed to see where he had fallen and to talk to Latino troops serving over there. "You could see the fear in their eyes" he wrote in a recent e-mail. Today, the Guerrero Azteca Project dedicates itself to supporting young Latino soldiers who reject the war, such as Sergeant Camilo Mejia, convicted of desertion after he refused a second term in Iraq.

Sergeant Mejia is a Nicaraguan and the son of Carlos Mejia Godoy, author of the Sandanista anthem ("we fight against the Yanquis, the enemies of mankind") who joined the Yanqui army soon after arriving in Miami following the U.S.-sponsored Sandanista defeat in 1991.

John Ross has just been awarded the 2005 Upton Sinclair Award (an "Uppie") by the San Pedro California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union for his latest cult classic "Murdered By Capitalism--A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left".


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