Daily Articles

Polish Senator’s Startling New Allegations about the CIA Torture Prison in Poland

by Andy Worthington June 29, 2012

In the long quest for accountability for those who ordered, authorized, or were complicit in the Bush administration’s torture program, every avenue has been shut down within the United States by the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the courts. The only hope lies elsewhere in the world, and specifically Poland, one of three European ...

Obama’s Logic of War

by Sheldon Richman June 29, 2012

Despite the alleged difference between Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran, both embrace a position that logically commits them to war. If war is to be avoided, as Obama says he wishes, he will have to abandon his current stance. The difference between Obama and Netanyahu is more apparent than real. Both say Iran’s possession of ...

How Roosevelt’s Farm Policy Paved the Way for Obamacare

by James Bovard June 28, 2012

The Obama administration invoked a 1942 Supreme Court agricultural-policy case to justify its sweeping health- care law compelling individual Americans to purchase health insurance. The role of Wickard v. Filburn in sanctifying Obamacare is a reminder of how the New Deal continues to imperil our rights and liberties. Unfortunately, few U.S. Supreme Court justices or journalists recognized the sordid ...

The Big Health-Care CON

by Michael Tennant June 28, 2012

For decades governments have been passing laws and regulations with the stated goal of bringing down health-care costs. For just as long libertarians have been pointing out that government policies such as Medicare, Medicaid, physician licensing, pharmaceutical regulations, and insurance mandates are at the root of the problem and that every attempt to fix the problem without addressing those ...

Congressional Contempt

by Tim Kelly June 28, 2012

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has voted 23–17 in favor of holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. The resolution is expected to reach the full House for a vote this week. The party-line vote came after a 16-month investigation into the botched anti-gunrunning operation named Fast and Furious. That the committee would split along ...

Self-Defense and the Anti-Gun Mentality, Part 1

by Scott McPherson June 27, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 I recently attended a meet-up group started by a friend of mine. The goal of the group is to bring people together from across the political spectrum to discuss a variety of issues and to, as the mission statement reads, use “common sense ideas to build a healthier and happier community.” The group ...

An Unfamiliar Definition of “Voluntary”

by Wendy McElroy June 27, 2012

It is called a “voluntary safety plan.” Using the plan, Child Protective Services (CPS) can bypass the constitutional rights of parents and take children away from non-abusive homes. (Note: agencies function under different names from state to state, but they are often referred to merely as CPS.) The definition and implementation Texas guidelines offer a typical CPS definition of a safety ...

Keynesians, Austrians, and the Continuing Economic Depression, Part 1

by William L. Anderson June 27, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 During a news talk show on August 14, 2011, Princeton University economist and 2008 Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman made a startling declaration: If the United States were to mobilize for a supposed invasion of “space aliens,” the current economic downturn would be over “in 18 months.” The ...

Are Americans Not Submissive Enough?

by Sheldon Richman June 26, 2012

If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought New York Times columnist David Brooks was having a laugh at our expense. Alas, Brooks means every word of his column titled “The Follower Problem,” as anyone who reads him regularly will realize. “I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem,” Brooks laments. “Vast ...

Is It Time to Raise the Minimum Wage?

by Laurence M. Vance June 26, 2012

During World War II, the Office of Price Administration (OPA), established by one of Franklin Roosevelt’s executive orders in 1941, was given the power to ration the supply of certain goods and freeze prices on all goods except agricultural commodities. The OPA was abolished in 1946 and is generally defended today only as a wartime measure. Richard Nixon’s “temporary” imposition ...

I Was Fooled by the War-Makers

by Thomas E. Woods Jr. June 24, 2012

Twenty years ago, as I was completing my freshman year in college, I was a full-blown neoconservative. Except I didn’t know it. Having concluded that I was not a leftist, I simply decided by process of elimination that I must be a Rush Limbaughian. Like most people, I was unaware that any alternative to those two choices existed, or that ...

Book Review: Unequal Justice

by Matthew Harwood June 23, 2012

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011), 304 pages. In August, something incredible happened: a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in a split decision, allowed a lawsuit seeking monetary damages to proceed against former Defense ...