Daily Articles

U.S. Honors Deal to Release Convicted Bin Laden Cook from Guantanamo to Sudan

by Andy Worthington July 13, 2012

Getting out of Guantánamo is such a feat these days (with only three men released in the last 18 months) that it is remarkable that Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner who agreed to a plea deal at his war-crimes trial in Guantánamo in July 2010 guaranteeing that he would be freed after two years, has been repatriated as ...

The Two Little Cities Who Can’t

by Wendy McElroy July 12, 2012

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is stomping its jackboot down on two little towns that straddle the Arizona-Utah border. The Civil Rights Division has brought an unprecedented and vague federal religious discrimination lawsuit against the cities and their utility companies (PDF). In its June 21 announcement, the DOJ stated, “This is the first lawsuit by the ...

Government Shows Itself Impotent on Economy

by Sheldon Richman July 11, 2012

It should finally have dawned on the American people that the politicians who presume to guide the economy have no bloody idea what they’re doing. We’re long past the time when knowledge of economics was required to see that the government is impotent when it comes to creating economic recovery. If you want evidence of that impotence, just look ...

Why the War on Drugs Should Be Ended

by Laurence M. Vance July 10, 2012

The War on Drugs is a monstrous evil that has ruined more lives than drugs themselves. Taking drugs harms the person who partakes, but not those who abstain; the War on Drugs harms everyone, even those who abstain from taking drugs. Yet the Drug War enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, is supported by the majority of Americans, is cheered by ...

Big Pharma and Crony Capitalism

by Wendy McElroy July 9, 2012

A friend just experienced a terrible drug problem. Not with illegal drugs, but with a prescription from her doctor. Her eighty-year-old memory sometimes stumbles, and so, without diagnostic tests, the doctor prescribed a potent Alzheimer medication. Within a week, I received phone calls from her about two men and a woman who were breaking into her house repeatedly despite carefully ...

The United States in Talks to Return the 17 Afghan Prisoners in Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington July 6, 2012

Earlier this year, there was much discussion in the U.S. media about the possibility that, as part of negotiations aimed at securing peace in Afghanistan, the United States would release five high-level Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo to Qatar, where they would be held under a form of house arrest. Those plans came to nothing, but last week the

Socialized Medicine Is Here to Stay

by Laurence M. Vance July 3, 2012

The Supreme Court heard 65 cases this term, but waited until the very end of the term to issue its ruling in the case regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare. The main issue was the constitutionality of the “individual mandate” that every American not covered by Medicaid, Medicare, or health insurance must purchase ...

Supreme Court’s Word Game Saves Obamacare

by Sheldon Richman July 2, 2012

The Supreme Court decision upholding the health-insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has an Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it. As Lewis Carroll wrote in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Chief Justice ...

What Part of “Illegal” Really Matters?

by Scott McPherson July 2, 2012

The mantra of some in the anti-immigration movement in this country can be found in the following question: What part of “illegal” do you not understand? It is regularly featured on protest placards; it’s in their widely circulated emails. Most anti-immigration types will not say they are anti-immigration, of course — they’re just anti–illegal immigration, they ...

An Echo, Not a Choice

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 2012

Last November, Barack Obama stood before an audience and said government needs to be “responsive to the needs of people, not the needs of special interests.” He added, “That is probably the biggest piece of business that remains unfinished.” He made those remarks, the New York Times reports, before a $17,900-a-plate fundraising dinner at the home of Dwight and Antoinette ...

The Federal Wetlands War, Part 1

by James Bovard July 1, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Since the 1980s, federal wetlands crackdowns have been one of the most brazen violations of American property rights. Federal agents have continually sought to play trump cards that effectively turned owners into serfs of federal bureaucracies. And despite a recent Supreme Court ruling vindicating landowners, the ...

Keynesians, Austrians, and the Continuing Economic Depression, Part 2

by William L. Anderson July 1, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The existence of business cycles — the boom-and-bust patterns — has puzzled economists. While Marx might have created a theory of why depressions occur, nonetheless there was nothing in Marxism to explain the boom period that preceded the bust. Furthermore, there was nothing in Marxism that could ...