The Libertarian Angle: What Shutdown? by Future of Freedom Foundation October 7, 2013 Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss the government shutdown that is anything but. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.
TGIF: Treating People Like Garbage by Sheldon Richman October 4, 2013 The government “closed” this week. The quotation marks are meant to indicate that the worst parts of the government remain open at some level. It would be preferable to keep the monuments and national parks, like the Grand Canyon, going while closing the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the NSA, ICE, FBI, ATF, and all related so-called national-security ...
The War State by Michael Swanson October 4, 2013 Of course the most famous warning about the power of the military came from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who commanded the Allied forces in Europe during World War II and went on to serve as president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. On his last day in office, he gave a televised farewell address to the nation in ...
Starbucks, Gun Control, and Property Rights by Laurence M. Vance October 3, 2013 The recent shooting at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard has once again thrust the issue of gun control into the news. But it is recent events at the Starbucks Coffee Company that are more relevant to the specific issue of gun control and property rights. This past summer, Illinois became the last of the 50 states to allow the carrying ...
Can Iran Trust the United States? by Sheldon Richman October 2, 2013 People ask whether the United States can trust Iran. The better question is whether Iran can trust the United States. Since 1979 the U.S. government has prosecuted a covert and proxy war against Iran. The objective has been regime change and installation of a government that will loyally serve U.S. state objectives. This war began after the popular overthrow of ...
Syria Remains a Target of the U.S. Empire by Tim Kelly October 1, 2013 A Russian diplomatic initiative has forestalled U.S. military strikes against Syria. The U.S.-Russian-Syrian agreement would have Bashar al-Assad’s regime turn over its chemical-weapons to the UN Security Council so that they can be destroyed under international control. The deal was proposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made an apparently off-the-cuff remark suggesting that ...
Egypt’s Lessons for Americans, Part 1 by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2013 Part 1 | Part 2 The military coup in Egypt last summer holds some valuable lessons for Americans, especially with respect to such things as freedom, democracy, and the U.S. national-security state, which has been an important part of American life since the end of World War II. The coup provides an especially important lesson with respect ...
Is Edward Snowden a Lawbreaker? by Sheldon Richman October 1, 2013 Most people believe that Edward Snowden, who has confirmed that the U.S. government spies on us, broke the law. Even many of his defenders concede this. While in one sense the statement “Snowden broke the law” may be trivially true, in another, deeper sense it is untrue. He may have violated the terms of legislation passed by Congress and signed ...
Voting Rights as Bogus Panaceas by James Bovard October 1, 2013 The Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last June. “Liberals” were horrified and reacted as if the Civil War had been fought in vain. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg denounced the decision for its “hubris,” Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) condemned it as a “dagger” stab at civil rights, and Attorney General Eric Holder ...
Gabriel Kolko Revisited, Part 2: Kolko Abroad by Joseph R. Stromberg October 1, 2013 Part 1 | Part 2 Gabriel Kolko’s historical writing hinges on the interrelations of economic, political, and ideological power in American history. His later work increasingly focused on those phenomena in relation to war, peace, and empire. As his project went forward, Kolko increasingly departed from that Marxist framework in which state power becomes so utterly subordinate ...
Digging Out by Richard W. Fulmer October 1, 2013 Pundits are full of advice about how and how not to pull the country out of its financial morass. Rebuild infrastructure or cut spending, increase deficit spending or reduce the debt, raise or lower taxes, regulate or deregulate, implement a new industrial policy or get government out of the economy, open the monetary floodgates or end the Fed’s easy-money ...
Revisiting Vietnam by Laurence M. Vance October 1, 2013 Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse (Metropolitan Books, 2013), 386 pages. The Vietnam War polarized Americans in the 20th century like no other event, dividing the people as no war had since the so-called Civil War a century earlier. Even though Vietnam was thousands of miles away, had not attacked the United ...