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New Special Double Issue on the War Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: The US vs. Iraq: the Thirteen Year War; The Sanctions That Killed; Bombing Iraq Every 3 Days Since the Ceasefire of 1991; What Would Gore Have Done?; The Rise of the Neocons; Israel's Proxy War Plan; Why Did It End So Quickly?; The Coming Occupation; Re-educating Iraqis, American-style; Those Reconstruction Contracts; Media Hawks; Christian Crusaders; Democratic Candidates and the War; Smart Bombs Go Haywire; Inside the Mind of Santorum; Gore Vidal on John Kerry; Thomas Pickering: the Bad Seed. Remember, the CounterPunch website is supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide web audience is soaring, with more than 60,000 visitors a day. This is inspiring news, but the work involved also compels us to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Recent Stories

May 16, 2003

Website of the Day
Iraq and Our Energy Future

May 15, 2003

Ayesha Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How Not to Help Amina Lawal: The Hidden Dangers of Letter Writing Campaigns

Julie Hilden
Moussaoui and the Camp X-Ray Detainees: Can He Get a Fair Trial?

Tanya Reinhart
Bush's Roadmap: a Ticket to Failure

Laura Carlsen
Here We Go Again: NAFTA Plus or Minus?

Kenneth Rapoza
The New Fakers: State Dept. Undercuts New Yorker's Goldberg

Stew Albert
A Story I Will Tell

Steve Perry
Bush's Little Nukes

Website of the Day
Strip-o-Rama

 

May 14, 2003

Cindy Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From

Jason Leopold
The Pentagon and Hallburton: a Secret November Deal for Iraq's Oil

David Lindorff
Fighting the Patriot Act: Now It's Alaska

John Chuckman
Giggling into Chaos

Jack McCarthy
Twin Towers of Journalism: Racism and Double Standards

Wayne Madsen
Assassinating JFK Again

M. Junaid Alam
The Longer View

Paul de Rooij
The New Hydra's Head:
Propagandists and the Selling of the US/Iraq War

James Reiss
What? Me Worry?

Steve Perry
More on Saudi Arabia Bombings

Website of the Day
A Tribute to Ted Joans

 

May 13, 2003

Saul Landau
Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves

Michael Neumann
Has Islam Failed? Not by Western Standards

Uri Avnery
My Meeting with Arafat

Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing

Jacob Levich
Democracy Comes to Iraq: Kick Their Ass and Grab Their Gas

William Lind
The Hippo and the Mongoose: a Question of Military Theory

The Black Commentator
Fraud at the Times: Blaming Blacks for White Folks' Mistakes

Stew Albert
Asylum

Hammond Guthrie
An Illogical Reign

Website of the Day
Sy Hersh: War and Intelligence

 

May 12, 2003

Chris Floyd
Bush, Bin Laden, Bechtel, and Baghdad

Dave Lindorff
America's Dirty Bombs

Sam Hamod and Elaine Cassel
Resisting the Bush Administration's War on Liberty

Uzi Benziman
Sharon and Sons, Inc.

Jason Leopold
The Decline and Fall of Thomas White

Rich Procter
George Jumps the Shark

Federico Moscogiuri
Going to Israel? Sign or Else

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/12

Book of the Day
Fooling Marty Peretz

Website of the Day
T-Shirts to Protest In

 

May 10 / 11, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Rosenthal Faces the Music in Key Med Marijuana Case

JoAnn Wypijewski
Labor in the Dawn of Empire

Annie C. Higgins
The Last Time I Saw Mus'ab

Ron Jacobs
The Devil in New England

William Mandel
One on One with Sen. Joe McCarthy

Jason Leopold
Halliburton Still Flouts the Law as It Profits from Terror

Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi Quagmire

Larry Magnuson
William Bennett: Next Viceroy of Iraq?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Good Terrorists?

Anthony Gancarski
Chalabi: Drowning in Ba'ath-water?

Steven Sherman
A Letter to My European Friends

Khaled El-Bizri
Mr. Bush Comes to Santa Clara

Bruce Jackson
How Fear Curdles the Soul

Adam Engel
Flag in the Rain

Poets Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Hamod & Albert

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/10

Website of the Weekend
Killing Again

 

May 9, 2003

Rahul Mahajan
Don't Lift the Sanctions Yet

Wayne Madsen
When Lying Pays Off: Neo-Con Fabricators

Chris Floyd
The Karamazov Question

Don Monkerud
The Great Christian Schism: War or Peace?

Sam Hamod and Elaine Cassel
Drunk on Power: Bush, Power and the Pathology of the Dry Drunk

Hammond Guthrie
Bombastic Promise Keeping

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/09

 

May 8, 2003

Julie Hilden
When It's a Crime to Visit Your Son

Mickey Z.
Partisan Protests?

Mark Zepezauer
Evil is as Evil Does

David Lindorff
The Coming Senior Revolution

Abu Spinoza
The Detention of Dr. Huda Ammash

Ben Tripp
The Other "F" Word

Norman Madarasz
God in the Service of the Security State: a Dispatch from Brazil

Stew Albert
Pushovers

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/08

Website of the Day
Department of Sexual Security

 

May 7, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Quoting Under the Influence: Breasts, Martinis, Hitchens

David Krieger
Winning the War; Alienating the World

Sen. Robert Byrd
Bush's Troubling Speech

Bruce Jackson
Bill Kunstler's Last Big Speech

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/07

Website of the Day
The Truth About Bush's Military Records

 

May 6, 2003

Paul de Rooij
An Activist in the Trenches: an Interview with Gretta Duisenberg

Anthony Gancarski
Money to Burn: in Defense of Bill Bennett

John Stanton
Bush's War on Jesus

Sam Hamod
W. Bush: the Little Snot, the Little Bully

Robert Fisk
Bush Says the War is Over: Tell It to the Shi'a

Kathleen Christison
A Roadmap to Nowhere

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/06

 

May 5, 2003

Gary Leupp
Phase Two: Syria and Iran

Jorge Mariscal
The Militarization of US Culture

Ishmael Reed
A Family Values Man

Tarif Abboushi
Sharon's Confidence: Bush Won't Come to Shove on Roadmap

Leila Matsui
Regime Change Begins at Home...Literally

Steve Perry
Bush's Wars

Sam Smith
Coalition of the Shilling

 

May 3, 2003

Ron Jacobs
Tears of Rage: Remembering May 1970

Elaine Cassel
William Bennett, a Freudian Perspective

Sam Hamod
Understanding the Shi'a of Lebanon

Scott Fleming
Getting Shot on the Oakland Docks

Mickey Z.
Cuba and Puerto Rico: 100 Years of Terror

William S. Lind
Don't Take Col. John Boyd's Name in Vain

Dr. Bruce Blair
The New Nuclear Terrorism Threat

Joanne Mariner
Cluster Bombs Over Iraq

Anthony Gancarski
Hot Fun in the Summertime

Ilian Pappe
Searching Jenin

William MacDougall
America's Kids Are All Right: Pre-Teen Conservative Commentators

Seth Sandronsky
Incarcerated and Invisible

Rich Procter
Over Our Dead Bodies

Lenni Brenner
How Bob Dylan Found His Voice

Adam Engel
American Bulk

Poets' Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Albert

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/03

 

May 2, 2003

Caoimhe Butterly
Crowd Control American-style

Neve Gordon
US: No Right to Know About the Disappeared

John Chuckman
Tom Friedman's Life as a Pet Hamster

Bradley Burston
Betting on Abu-Mazen...To Lose

Harvey Wasserman
Bush's Military Defeat

John Troyer
Question Those Writing History

Saul Landau
The Cuba Conundrum

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/02

Website of the Day
Moussaoui's Quiz

 

May 1, 2003

Jeffrey St. Clair
Santorum: That's Latin for Asshole

Iain Boal
A May Day Message to the FCC: "We Are Many; They are Few"

Diana Johnstone
About Cuba

Sam Hamod
Killings at Al Fallujah, City of Mosques

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Intelligence Fiasco

Lee Sustar
Greed Air: Airline Workers Agree to Pay Cuts, While Bosses Stuff Their Pockets

Peter Linebaugh
May Day at Kut and Kienthal

Stew Albert
Straight Shooters

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/01

Website of the Day
South Bay Mobilization

 

April 30, 2003

Ashley Smith
Under Uncle Sam's Thumb: a History of Washington's Occupations

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/30

Gary Leupp
Shooting Schoolboys: Preliminary Thoughts on the Fallujah Massacre

Robert Jensen
Fighting Alienation in the USA

Wayne Madsen
The Four Horsemen of Propaganda

Ahmad Faruqui
Bush's Strategic Myopia About the Middle East

Gabriel Kolko
Iraq, the US and the End of the European Coalition

Adolfo Perez Esquivel
A Nobel Laureat's Letter to Bush: "You Talk of Freedom; You Detest Freedom"

 

April 29, 2003

Gary Leupp
Disorder and Opportunity: the Results of the Iraq War

Uri Avnery
Don't Envy Abu-Mazen

Anthony Gancarski
Brush with the Law

Mickey Z.
POWs: Then and Now

CounterPunch Wire
How to Spin Israel on the Hill: Internal Lobbying Documents

Robert Fisk
Did the US Murder Journalists?

Chris Floyd
Bush Telegraphs His Punches on Syria

Wayne Madsen
About Those Iraqi Intelligence Documents

Wallace Gagne
Pilgrimage or Demolition Derby?

Eliot Katz
Playing Catch with Cracked Globes

Steve Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/29

 

 

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May 16, 2003

Separate and Unequal

The Resegregation of US Schools

By SHARON SMITH

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to deliver another--perhaps fatal--blow to affirmative action, in its pending decision on the University of Michigan's admissions policies. But the Bush administration is already pursuing the next target in its mission to destroy the gains of the civil rights movement.

At least 10 universities--including Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)--announced they will eliminate summer programs for Black and Latino teenagers after the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights began investigating whether they violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Accusing programs aimed at redressing decades of racial discrimination with violating the Civil Rights Act would once have been dismissed as an absurdity. But that absurdity has become reality in Bush's America, where organizations masquerading behind names such as the Center for Equal Opportunity and the American Civil Rights Institute dedicate themselves to fighting for the rights of whites only.

"If you're a member of the wrong race, you're not eligible for the program--period," huffed the Center's spokesman Roger Clegg in indignation at the idea of educational programs for Blacks and Latinos.

Yet more than 30 years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its first school desegregation decision, schools have re-segregated to the same level as before busing began, the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University reported in January.

White students attend schools that are, on average, 80 percent white. The most racially segregated schools are in the North--New York, Illinois, Michigan and California--where many rich suburban schools tend to be all-white and many of the poorest inner-city schools all-Black or -Latino.

In 2000, according to the Education Trust, New York school districts with the highest concentration of white students received $2,034 more per student in state and local funding than those with the highest concentration of minorities--a difference of more than $50,000 per classroom.

Schools in the South became more integrated than in the North--but are more rapidly re-segregating. And many Southern schools continue to cling to segregated practices even within integrated schools. For example, Taylor County High School in Butler, Georgia (80 miles south of Atlanta), still holds a whites-only senior prom each year, despite the efforts of Black students to hold a single, integrated event. Black and white seniors take separate class trips, the school yearbook chooses both a Black and white "most popular couple," and even school elections are segregated--with whites and Blacks separately voting for a white and Black class president.

School segregation is not isolated from other aspects of racism, like housing--because government policies have historically restricted Blacks from settling in more prosperous white areas. Federal housing programs that helped millions of white families buy homes from the 1940s through the 1960s excluded most African Americans by catering to local racist ordinances. Even when Blacks managed to get mortgages, armed racist mobs terrorized their families to drive them out, firmly establishing all-white enclaves across the country.

And states that are so reluctant to fund poverty-stricken schools serving minority students invest massively in prison systems to incarcerate them once they approach adulthood. Paul Street of the Chicago Urban League documented in a recent study that 90 percent of all imprisoned drug offenders in Illinois are African American--in a state that is only 15 percent Black. "The top 15 zip codes for prison releases contain 10 of the city's top 15 zip codes for poverty, 11 of the top 15 zip codes for unemployment, 10 of the lowest 15 zip codes for median income, and 10 of the lowest zip codes for possession of a high school degree," Street reported.

In 2001, just 933 African Americans received bachelor's degrees from Illinois' state universities, while 7,000 were released from prison on drug charges.

The connection between racism and education couldn't be clearer. That is why a multiracial crowd of more than 30,000 students protested outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on April 1, as it heard the University of Michigan arguments. The fight against segregation is far from over.

Sharon Smith writes for the Socialist Worker.

Yesterday's Features

Ayesha Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How Not to Help Amina Lawal: The Hidden Dangers of Letter Writing Campaigns

Julie Hilden
Moussaioui and the Camp X-Ray Detainees: Can He Get a Fair Trial?

Tanya Reinhart
Bush's Roadmap: a Ticket to Failure

Laura Carlsen
Here We Go Again: NAFTA Plus or Minus?

Kenneth Rapoza
The New Fakers: State Dept. Undercuts New Yorker's Goldberg

Stew Albert
A Story I Will Tell

Steve Perry
Bush's Little Nukes

Website of the Day
Strip-o-Rama

 

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