Daily Articles

U.S. Injustice Laid Bare, As Afghan in Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Appeal

by Andy Worthington September 23, 2011

Ten years after the “War on Terror” began, the distressing misconceptions and exaggerations on which it was founded continue to plague its victims — and also to corrode America’s belief that it is a nation founded on justice and the law. Ten years ago, Congress launched this “war,” approving the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a ...

Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme

by Laurence M. Vance September 21, 2011

It is good to see that the Republican presidential candidates are battling it out over the nature of the Social Security system. It is something that few politicians have been willing to talk about, lest they antagonize the largest class of voters in the country — senior citizens. At the Republican candidate debate at the Reagan Library in ...

The Myth of Withdrawal from Afghanistan

by Sheldon Richman September 21, 2011

Despite Barack Obama's trumpeted force draw-down in Afghanistan, by the end of next summer more than twice as many U.S. troops will be fighting in that country's civil war as there were when he became president in 2009. His soothing words notwithstanding, a force of about 70,000 will remain there at least until the end of 2014. We can ...

Peace Prize-Winner Obama Savages Somalia

by Sheldon Richman September 20, 2011

A human catastrophe is taking place in Somalia, the result of drought, famine — and the savage war conducted by the Obama administration, complete with a CIA training facility and prison. According to the Guardian, 150,000 desperate Somalis, mostly women and children, have walked more than 60 miles to a crowded refugee camp in Kenya in the past three ...

Dying to Corrupt Afghanistan

by James Bovard September 19, 2011

American soldiers are dying so that Afghan politicians can continue looting U.S. tax dollars. Foreign aid has long been notorious for creating kleptocracies governments of thieves. The $50+ billion foreign aid that the United States has dumped on Afghanistan over the past decade is a textbook case of how foreign handouts drag a nation down. Corruption has been a huge ...

9/11 and the Cost of Empire

by Tim Kelly September 19, 2011

According to the American media and politicians commemorating the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were a diabolical surprise attack perpetrated by Islamist terrorists against a peaceful and unsuspecting country. While many of the victims of those attacks were no doubt peaceful and unsuspecting, the same cannot be said of the ...

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 5

by Gregory Bresiger September 17, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 I deplore the hysterical sort of anti-Communism which, it seems to me, is gaining ...

After Ten Years of the War on Terror, Its Time to Scrap the Authorization for Use of Military Force

by Andy Worthington September 16, 2011

Many Americans probably think that the “War on Terror” began on September 11, 2001, when the terrible terrorist attacks took place, whose tenth anniversary has recently been marked. However, the “War on Terror” actually began on September 14, 2001, when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which authorized the president “to use all necessary and ...

Rube Goldberg Economics

by Rich Schwartzman September 16, 2011

“Since ‘economic growth’ is today’s great problem, and our present Administration is promising to ‘stimulate’ it — to achieve general prosperity by ever wider government controls, while spending an unproduced wealth ...” Any contemporary libertarian or Austrian-school economist could have written those words. The quotation, however, is from Ayn Rand’s opening paragraph to the essay “Let Us Alone,” published in ...

Stimulus II Won’t Work, Either

by Sheldon Richman September 16, 2011

President Obama won’t use the “stimulus” label to describe his nearly half-trillion-dollar jobs bill, but that refusal can’t hide the fact that he has no idea how economies recover from recessions. “Stimulus” is a tainted label because his $800 billion bill in 2009 was a failure. His economic team promised that passing that bill would keep unemployment from exceeding ...

Endless Evil: The Drug Wars Continuing Collateral Damage, Part 2

by Radley Balko September 15, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 “The Fourth Amendment has been virtually repealed by court decisions,” Yale law professor Steven Duke told Wired magazine in 2000, “most of which involve drug searches.” The rise of no-knock raids and SWAT teams is one example (discussed in part one of this series), but there are others. James Bovard once wrote, for example, of the almost comically ...

Give Me Doubleplusgood or Give Me Death!

by Wendy McElroy September 15, 2011

George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, got a few things wrong — for example, the date. But he was dead-on in depicting the cause-and-effect relationship between language and politics, between language and our ability to think clearly; the process of using words as social control was called Newspeak. What cannot be expressed cannot be effectively understood or opposed. Neutralizing language ...