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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 by Tag 'poverty'
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s stirring call for austerity tugs at the national tear ducts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pleaded for it in the past and watched his flock embrace it creatively. With the finance ministry even acting on Dr. Singh’s call in 20...
Outside the Gallery, Philadelphia’s low-class shopping mall, Jimbo si...
What’s 50 percent of 99 percent?
This isn’t a math quiz. To put the question in non-numerical terms: where are women in the global economic crisis?
The movement of the 99 percent that began in the United States made visible the human beings who suffer th...
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But asBusiness Week ...
The citizens of Spain have taken to the streets and squares in great numbers to demand their rights. Estimates vary enormously. Spain’s right-wing government claims that 22,000 people came out in Barcelona in the demonstrations on 12th May while the organiser...
On 7 May 2012 ...
It’s not easy to get the President of the United States to provide meaningful answers to questions regarding issues of serious concern to the population. During a Q&A session with Obama put together by YouTube in January, a woman pressed him about her husband’s ...
On April 22, 1968, the National Welfare Rights Organization held a vigil on Capitol Hill in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been murdered eighteen days earlier. This was to have been the day that King presented the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign to Co...
“A heart that’s full up like a landfill. A job that slowly kills you. Bruises that won’t heal. You look so tired, unhappy. Bring down the government, they don’t speak for us. I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide....
In a few days time, the Global Atheist Convention meets in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, a huge building sprawling out next to the Yarra River, just south of the central business district of Australia’s second biggest city.
But walk north for fi...
We mourn Trayvon Martin, the young African American who, armed only with candy and a soft drink, was shot dead for the offense of “walking while black.”
George Zimmerman, the vigilante who shot him, has not been arrested, apparently pr...
One Tendulkar makes the big scores. The other wrecks the averages. The Planning Commission clearly prefers Suresh to Sachin. Using Professor Tendulkar’s methodology, it declares that there’s been another massive fall in poverty. Yes, another (‘more dramatic in the r...
I have seen a number of articles written recently about the problem of Child Soldiers in various conflicts abroad – most notably in Africa and Colombia. What has struck me about these pieces, and the discourse about this phenomenon in general, is that they treat the...
Now here is what sounds like a New York Times headline to celebrate: “...
You may be forgiven for missing the good news recently reported by the World Bank: that the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined in almost every region of the developing world. According to the ...
47% of young children in India are malnourished, and up to a third of the world’s undernourished children are Indian.
United Nations Children’s Fund, 2011
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says India has t...
It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book ...
It’s not likely that an Occupy Pyongyang movement will set up tents in Kim Il Sung Square anytime soon. Protest, after all, is virtually non-existent in that society. But the same widening inequalities that plague the United States and the global economy can also be fou...
On March 8, 1997 workers at the University of Vermont were at the beginning of a struggle to unionize. The units of the workforce that were prime for unionization (and most likely to vote in a union) were those units that maintained the buildings and grounds of the univ...
Americans are living on borrowed time, economically. Like air conditioners, copper pipes and aluminum siding of a foreclosed home, what remains of our prosperity will be violently stripped away. There is no economic recovery because the foundations for such are simply not...
It is good luck for Good Men that sex slavery has been identified as a terrible new phenomenon requiring extraordinary actions. In the chivalric tradition, to rescue a damsel in distress ranked high as a way knights errant could prove themselves, along with slaying dragon...
Ever since the first tent was pitched in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, the Occupy protests have been giving life to a “99 percent movement.” Expect to hear a lot more from them: plans for a ...
If you take a train in Jakarta, be warned: the images that would unwind behind your windows could be too disturbing to bear for someone who is not a war correspondent or a medical doctor. It would often feel as if hundreds of thousands of the wretched of the earth decided...
I know the areas of Philadelphia that Charles Murray refers to in his new book Coming Apart and I...
Nicholas Kristof and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have much in common. Namely, they have constructed variations on the “culture of poverty” argument. In “The White Underclass,” his recent op-ed piece for the New York Times, Kristof brings our nation’s favorite blame ...