Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'Mitt Romney'
“White supremacy was all but world-wide . . . [t]he using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention . . . [t]he imperial width of the thing, – the heaven defying audacity – makes its modern newness.”
W.E.B Du Bois, Darkwater: V...
The Democrats could not have won so handily without the Citizens United ruling. That is what enabled the Koch Brothers to spend their billions to support right-wing candidates that barked and growled like sheep dogs to give voters little civilized option but to vote for ...
As Mormon missionaries in the 1960s, Mitt Romney and I were required to present six “discussions” to “investigators” before baptizing them – he in France and I in northern California. Central to those discussions was the “Plan of Salvation” (POS); and centra...
Susan Katz asked, “Governor Romney, I am an undecided voter, because I’m disappointed with the lack of progress I’ve seen in the last four years.
However, I do attribute much of America’s economic and international problems to the failings and missteps ...
As a child, I was taught that American presidents were paragons of truth-telling. My first grade teacher told us children that George Washington never told a lie—even as a child. The story of young George saying “I cannot tell a lie,” and confessing to his fathe...
In May of 2012, Mitt Romney made his now famous 47% speech to a secret group of very wealthy donors. In this presentation, we see the “Romney Doctrine” in full relief. In fact, we rarely, (perhaps never), have seen a more open class analysis of our country made by a p...
Mitt Romney’s three debate performances in October 2012 have exposed his political cynicism, with the Republican candidate abandoning long-term positions in order to adopt more moderate ideas for the run-up to next month’s election. Prior to the debates, Rom...
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to car...
In the beginning, as we know, was the Word of one Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Mormon Church, finder of the so-called Golden Plates from which he was able to translate the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith today in Mormon theology is considered “the prophet, priest and...
US elections are manifestly linked to the Middle East, at least rhetorically. In practical terms, however, US foreign policies in the region are compelled by the Middle East’s own dynamics and the US’ own political climate, economic woes, or ambitions. There is little...
Our two fathers would have much to say to today’s presidential and Senate candidates who are pandering for middle class votes? As if tens of millions of economically struggling families, like the ones in which we were raised, did not even exist. In the face of such ...
The budget plan of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney includes large unspecified consequences; these are tallied here, and the complete implications of the plan are briefly illustrated. The tally includes not only the unspecified tax increases his plan dictates t...
Mitt Romney might be the most brazen political liar since James Polk. Polk, who was the 11th U.S. president (1845-1849), lied through his teeth–to Congress,Johnson (Vietnam) and Bush Jr. (Iraq), but Polk had the same audacious, “lying is part of what I do,” dis...
President Barack Obama’s sin at the first Presidential debate was one of misunderstanding the rules. The rules, that is, of theatre. American presidential politics has for at least two generations been a matter of the forced smile, the folksy refrain, the false sens...
During the first Presidential debate Barak Obama gave Mitt Romney a pass on what has to be one of the most egregiously insipid and outright stupid statements uttered by a White House aspirant. The man who likes to fire people, play loose with the facts, change his philoso...
It came as no surprise that Mitt Romney secured the GOP nomination for the 2012 elections. The current Republican Party is dominated by right-wing extremists hell-bent on galvanizing the United States into a militant Christian hegemony. Because of this fanatical atmospher...
On Wednesday night, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made news by substantially “etch-a-sketching” the tax policy he had been running on since the GOP primaries began. In making up policy on the fly, he promised that his tax cuts would be entirely...
Quito.
Down at the neighborhood tavern, I was listening for the umpteenth time to my friend Barney lament how food stamps are not accepted for alcohol. Like me, Barney’s been out of work almost two years now. He’s been through the five stages of grief ...
Mitt Romney claims his tax rate of 14% on investment income of $20 million is “fair,” which means he is comfortable with the fact that he has a lower tax rate than average middle class American families. He made this proclamation on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sund...
It is always gratifying to find a politician or celebrity behaving in the same way as malign caricatures of themselves. In Dickens’s Hard Times the stereotypical capitalist is Mr Bounderby, a banker who denounces his workers for expecting “to be set up i...
Mitt Romney’s meltdown has Democrats in a celebratory mood. They are so accustomed to living on thin political rations that their enthusiasm waxes whenever fortune smiles upon them. This sudden brightening of prospects in the Presidential election may have nothing t...
It was Spring of 2010, less than a year after the official end of the last recession but still deep in the throes of the Great Recession, that Barack Obama’s ‘deficit commission’ met for the first time. With close to twenty-five million people unemployed ...
There was something missing from the release of a tape showing Mitt Romney pandering to fat cats in Boca Raton, Florida with these very inflammatory words: “There are 47 percent who are with him, (Obama) who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victi...
Once upon a time, President Richard Nixon wanted to appoint a certain lawyer to the US Supreme Court.
“But the man is a complete moron!” one senator exclaimed.
“So what,” answered another, “There are a great many morons in the US, and they have a r...
The wealthy capitalist elites are at war against taxes!
This undeclared war is so substantive that its consequences have undermined the ability of major governments to provide social services to ordinary citizens, and it is a direct cause of unsustainable, mushroom...