JFK and the Cuban Embargo by Jacob G. Hornberger December 30, 2014 It will be fascinating to watch the unfolding debate over the lifting of the decades-old Cold War U.S. embargo against Cuba because it will enable Americans today to get a sense of what the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the military and the CIA – felt about President Kennedy when he was in office. Already, we’re hearing that President Obama is a traitor, that he is surrendering America to Fidel Castro and the communists, and betraying the Cuban people and the cause of freedom and democracy for wanting to lift the 54-year-old Cold War-era U.S. embargo against Cuba. That is precisely the way that the national-security establishment felt about Kennedy and actually much worse. It began with the CIA’s plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, an invasion that would be carried out by Cuban exiles but secretly funded and directed by the CIA in order to provide U.S. officials with “plausible deniability” with respect to their role ...
Last Chance for an End-of-Year Donation to FFF by Jacob G. Hornberger December 31, 2014 If you haven’t yet made an end-of-year (tax-deductible) donation to The Future of Freedom Foundation, you still have today to drop a check in the mail, call us, or use our online donation form. Another great way to support our work is to purchase a subscription to our monthly journal of ideas on liberty, Future of Freedom, and also to give gift subscriptions to your friends. Why has FFF continued to maintain an uncompromising approach to freedom during our 25 years of existence? Because we believe that it’s the best way — if not the only way — to achieve the genuinely free society. Debates over proposals that call for reform of the welfare-warfare state inevitably revolve around the legitimacy of the reform. While reforms might improve life under the welfare-warfare state, they are not the genuinely free society for which all of us libertarians are striving. By making the principled case for individual liberty and free markets, The Future of Freedom ...
FFF’s JFK Books Hit Amazon Best-Seller List by Jacob G. Hornberger January 5, 2015 Last September, The Future of Freedom Foundation launched a special 6 ½-hour video presentation on the JFK autopsy entitled “Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK Medical Evidence” by Douglas P. Horne, who served on the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. The video presentation was based on Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Evidence in the Assassination of JFK. Here is the link to my September article announcing the launch of this project. Here is the link to Horne’s video presentation, which is posted on YouTube. As of January 5, 2015, Horne’s video presentation (part 1) has received 10,458 visits on YouTube. At the same time we launched Horne’s video presentation, we announced the publication of the following two e-books on Amazon.com at a price of 99 cents each: The JFK Autopsy by Jacob G. Hornberger JFK’s War with the National-Security Establishment: ...
TGIF: In Memory of the Charlie Hebdo Victims by Sheldon Richman January 9, 2015 Words can hardly convey the grief and disgust felt at Wednesday’s executions of the editor, cartoonists, and others — 10 people in all — at France’s satirical weekly magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Two policemen also were killed, and 11 other people were wounded by the three fanatics who reportedly declared they were avenging the prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam. Nothing can justify ...
Rein In the Police, Not Protesters by Scott McPherson January 9, 2015 My brother once quipped, “The great thing about being a Leftist is never having to say you’re sorry.” He was talking about the propensity of those who erroneously describe themselves as “liberals” to endlessly pat themselves on the back for their allegedly grand intentions, while conveniently ignoring the actual consequences of their failed policies. As P.J. O’Rourke observed, ...
L’affaire Charlie Hebdo and Western Colonialism by John V. Walsh January 14, 2015 To understand the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week, we need only invert George W. Bush’s 2005 mantra*, thus: “They will continue to attack us over here so long as we slaughter them by the millions over there.” In a word, this is one more instance of blowback, as Ron Paul tells us in his perceptive essay, “
Paris, Iraq, and Abu Ghraib by Jacob G. Hornberger January 19, 2015 Consider the following lead paragraph from a front-page article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “From Amateur to Ruthless Jihadist in France”: In the year after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, a 22-year-old pizza delivery man here couldn’t take it anymore. Sickened by images of American soldiers humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison, he made plans to ...
States, United States: America’s James Bond Complex by Sheldon Richman February 4, 2015 Today, American politicians of both major parties — conservatives, “moderates,” and so-called liberals alike — insist that the United States is an “exceptional,” even “indispensable” nation. In practice, this means that for the United States alone the rules are different. Particularly in international affairs, it — the government and its personnel — can do whatever deemed necessary to carry ...
Smedley Butler and the Racket That Is War by Sheldon Richman October 1, 2014 From 1898 to 1931, Smedley Darlington Butler was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps. By the time he retired he had achieved what was then the Corps’s highest rank, major general, and by the time he died in 1940, at 58, he had more decorations, including two medals of honor, than any other Marine. During his years in ...
Why Did Our Ancestors Approve the Constitution? by Jacob G. Hornberger February 11, 2015 Suppose our American ancestors in 1787 had been told that the proposed Constitution, which they were being asked to approve, was going to bring into existence a federal government that would have the following powers: The power to tax people’s incomes in any amount government officials deemed appropriate. The power to regulate people’s economic activities. The power to incarcerate and fine people ...
Imaging Patterns by David S. D'Amato October 1, 2014 The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker (Harper 2013), 448 pages. What is the substance of American paranoia? From where does it emanate, and why is its study important? These are some of the questions that, without preaching or bludgeoning us with elitist pretensions, Jesse Walker, books editor at Reason magazine, addresses in The United ...
Foreign Policy Failure Everywhere by Sheldon Richman February 17, 2015 If one tried to design a foreign policy to embroil Americans in endless conflicts that would otherwise be quite remote, one could hardly do better than recent presidents of the United States. What could you do that these men have not done to keep Americans mired in distant turmoil? Signs of apparent failure abound while the ruling elite feigns ignorance of the connection between U.S. ...
