Freedom Daily Archive

Regime Change: Promise and Peril, Part 3

by Stephen Kinzer February 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 This article is a transcript of Stephen Kinzer’s speech given on June 6, 2008, at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s conference “Restoring the Republic 2008: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.” I talked about unintended consequences. In the period immediately following the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh (see Freedom Daily, ...

The Financial Crisis: 9/11 Redux

by Michael Tennant February 1, 2009

Perhaps the one bit of shiny interior in the black cloud of the financial crisis is that most mainstream conservatives, heretofore bootlicking worshippers of George W. Bush and the Republican Party, have come to realize that there’s literally not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties when it comes to their willingness to bail out their Wall ...

The Second Amendment: More Important than Ever

by Scott McPherson February 1, 2009

The day after the November 4 election, Gun Owners of America (GOA), based in Springfield, Virginia, sent an email alert to supporters. With the subject heading “Gun Rights in Peril,” the message began, “Based on his voting record in the Illinois state senate and the U.S. Senate, President-elect Obama will be the most anti-Second Amendment president in the history ...

The Socialist Bailout of Wall Street, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 During the recent presidential race, Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of being a socialist, owing to Obama’s belief in using the federal government to “spread the wealth.” Obama, for his part, expressed surprise at being accused of being a socialist. Apparently, he’s always believed that he’s a strong supporter of America’s “free-enterprise” ...

What Greenspan Missed

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2009

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made headlines around the world with this admission: “hose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief. Such counterparty surveillance is a central pillar of our financial ...

The Campaign-Reform Crime, Part 1

by James Bovard January 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 In 2002, Congress passed and George Bush signed the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). The McCain-Feingold Act was supposed to create an era of clean politics — uncorrupt, untainted, and far loftier than what Americans had experienced in prior decades. If the 2008 election proved anything, it revealed that politicians cannot be trusted ...

Regime Change: Promise and Peril, Part 2

by Stephen Kinzer January 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 This article is a transcript of Stephen Kinzer’s speech given on June 6, 2008, at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s conference “Restoring the Republic 2008: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.” Let’s look at the case of Cuba. It’s another case of American intervention gone terribly wrong. When the United States ...

Paper Money and the Constitution

by Rick Lynch January 1, 2009

Why do we have a Constitution? How and why did it come into existence? Just what, exactly, prompted the calling of the Constitutional Convention, which gave birth to it? Most Americans believe, logically enough, that with the passing of the British from the scene it was simply time to create a new government to take the place of the ...

America’s Anti-Militarist Heritage

by George Leef January 1, 2009

Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism by Bill Kauffman (Metropolitan Books, 2008); 284 pages, $25. Americans don’t have much historical memory anymore. That isn’t just because of the dumbing down of the educational system and the fact that most young people read very ...

The Socialist Bailout of Wall Street, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2008

Part 1 | Part 2 The massive federal bailout of U.S. financial firms reflects everything that’s wrong with the economic system of welfare and interventionism under which the United States has operated since at least the 1930s. There are critically important lessons in the bailout that the American people ignore at their peril. While most politicians and mainstream pundits ...

Government Failure

by Sheldon Richman December 1, 2008

To hear the media pundits and presidential candidates tell it, you’d think Adam Smith had been president for the last eight years and, with a Congress full of free-market advocates, had enacted an agenda of full-blown laissez faire. Had that been the case, we would not be in the mess we are in economically. Alas, it has not been the ...

How Abu Ghraib Was Politically Defused, Part 2

by James Bovard December 1, 2008

Part 1 | Part 2 From the first days of the torture scandal, the Bush administration followed a “deny everything and praise American values” strategy to defuse the controversy over Abu Ghraib. In a May 28, 2004, interview, a French journalist mentioned Abu Ghraib and asked President Bush, “Do you feel responsible in any way for this moral failure in ...