CBS News‘ Scott Pelley appears to be one of the very few American journalists bothered by, or even interested in, the fact that President Obama has asserted and exercised the power to target U.S. citizens for execution-by-CIA without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield. It was Pelley who deftly interrogated the GOP presidential candidates at a November debate about the propriety of due-pr... (more)
So many are its lies, that narrowing them down to three of the most important is a demanding task. But our current crisis has been chiefly enabled by monetary policy, fiscal policy, and the global military empire. So I have chosen to focus on lies about each: the Federal Reserve, the orchestrator of monetary policy; the U.S. budget, the accounting of government fiscal policy; and a few of the Empire’s war lies. I am sharing just a smatte... (more)
When you eat Oreo cookies, if you do eat Oreo cookies, how many do you eat? Three sounds sort of reasonable to me. Surely, after three, you have been "served." If I were a guest at someone's house and ate more than that, I would try to do it surreptitiously.
But of course, this is all subjective. Maybe you think one Oreo constitutes a serving, especially if eaten with the proper care and technique we all perfected in third grade. Or you could be like a typical teen and think that ... (more)
Unsurprisingly, President Obama’s campaign speech masquerading as the routine address to Congress, spelled out in the Constitution and known as the State of the Union, was saturated with every prevalent form of modern American statism--protectionism, corporate-liberal socialism, nationalism, and militarism. In a couple areas, however, he was particularly bold in his statist proposals.
Obama blamed “jobs and manufacturing . . . leaving our shores” for the poor economy, and promised... (more)
The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy. Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the US is maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against Iran and to convince Iran that “it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”
Robert Neuwirth is a journalist who is preoccupied with this question: What do people do when the state has made satisfaction of their wants, their natural desire to improve their lives, almost impossible?
Neuwirth would almost certainly not pose the question in quite these terms. On the one hand, he understands quite clearly that this is precisely what is going on — that it is the state that has put people in the position he describes so well. In his first book, Shadow Cities:... (more)
A horrifying aspect of modern life is how nearly daily threats to fundamental freedoms and human rights require that citizens become politically aware and active.
Here we are struggling to put food on the table, cultivate a civilized private life, support things we care about, manage our households and otherwise meet all the challenges of modern life and then some jerk politician pushes some dangerous legislation that poses an all-out attack on everything we take for granted. ... (more)
Developments in three legal cases, just from the last 24 hours, potently illuminate the Rules of American Justice. First, the Justice Department yesterday charged a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, with four felony counts for having allegedly disclosed classified information to reporters about the CIA’s interrogation program. Included among those charges are two counts under the Espionage Act of 1917, based on the allegati... (more)
On Saturday in Somalia, the U.S. fired missiles from a drone and killed the 27-year-old Lebanon-born, ex-British citizen Bilal el-Berjawi. His wife had given birth 24 hours earlier and the speculation is that the U.S. located him when his wife called to give him the news. Roughly one year ago, El-Berjawi was stripped of his British citizenship, obtained when his family moved ... (more)
Much attention has been paid to the “disappearing middle class” and the “vanishing American Dream.” While the observations are largely accurate, they are also misleading. The traditional three-tier model of the upper, middle and lower class broadly categorizes people according to income and net worth. One significant problem with this model is that membership in any particular class is very much in the eye of the beholder. One man’s “scraping by” is another man’s “opulent living.” This s... (more)
You know that anti-piracy video you sometimes see at the beginning of movies? It explains how you wouldn't steal a handbag, so neither should you steal a song or movie by an illegal download. Well, it turns out that the guy who wrote the music for that short clip, Melchoir Rietveldt, says that his music is being used illegally. It had been licensed to play at one film festival, not replayed a million times in DVDs distributed all over the world. He is demanding millions in a settlement fee from ... (more)
The current debate over income-tax rates in the GOP presidential race highlights another major difference between conservatives and libertarians. It is a debate that involves moral, philosophical, economic, and practical issues. Most important, it is a debate over the meaning of freedom.
In the recent South Carolina debate, the candidates were asked what they would like to see as the top rate for the income tax. Four of the candidates responded as follows:
I have noticed many progressives opposed to Ron Paul will say something like this:
"Ron Paul might be right on the drug war, bailouts of Wall Street, the war in Afghanistan, and civil liberties issues, but these are exceptions to an otherwise horrible program. Ninety percent of what he supports is terrible. People on the left should not support him just over a few issues."
It fascinates me that anyone thinks this way. I am a shameless libertarian. I love the free ... (more)
In college in the 1960s I was not a political person. Although I took a keen interest in politics, especially in the war that was raging in Vietnam, I concentrated on my studies, earning a living, and chasing women. After I began work as a professor, in 1968, I gravitated quickly from my collegiate New Leftism toward classical liberalism. As I learned more about Austrian economics, political economy, public choice, and history, I became increasingly libertarian (minarchist variety). My ... (more)
The idea of a society where people are free to "do their own thing" is an appealing one. It is implicit in the slogan "live and let live," which has been adopted by many libertarian groups, and it is also an idea that was central to the Marxist idea of liberation from the alienation of labor under capitalism (which is merely a natural result of the division of labor).[1]
This fuzzy notion, roughly understood, has been a central pillar of many opposing ideological visions of s... (more)
Conservatives love to accuse President Obama of being a socialist. But as the old adage goes, when they point their finger at Obama, they’ve got three fingers pointing back at themselves.
Consider, for example, three of the biggest socialist programs in America: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. How many conservatives want to repeal those three programs? Hardly any. Almost all of them say they want to save these programs and simply reform them.
In The Washington Post yesterday, Law Professor Jonathan Turley has an Op-Ed in which he identifies ten major, ongoing assaults on core civil liberties in the U.S. Many of these abuses were accelerated during the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, but all have been vigorously continued and/or expanded by President Obama. Turley points out that these powers ... (more)
The US Department of Defense recently promulgated a new “defense” guidance document: “Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense." I use scare quotes because it just doesn’t seem quite right to use “defense” to describe a document that — like its predecessors — envisions something like an American Thousand-Year Reich.
The greatest shift in emphasis is in the section "Project power despite Anti-Access/Area Denial Challenges." The “threat” to be countered i... (more)
Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.
"Thank you," said the clerk at the municipal court as she handed me back my credit card. I paid a ticket for one of the few "crimes" the police seem to exist to punish in my town: failing to come to a dead stop at a stop sign. This is, obviously, not the same as running a stop sign. No one is in endangered. No one is hurt. No one even notices except police looking for another way to collect taxes. But the charge is the same, regardless: $138.
When pundits and rival politicians call Ron Paul an “isolationist,” they mislead the American people — and they know it.
They know it? How could they not: Ron Paul is for unilateral, unconditional free trade. He believes any American should be perfectly free to buy from or sell to any person in the world. In that sense — the laissez-faire sense — he favors globalization, which, applied consistently, would require a worldwide free market. He’s such a strong advocate of free trade t... (more)
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Ron Paul campaign is the standard reaction of his opponents to Paul’s foreign-policy positions. They say that Paul's libertarian foreign-policy views are outside the Republican mainstream.
What is the Republican mainstream view on foreign policy? Here are its essential components:
1. Undeclared wars.
2. Wars of aggression — that is, wars in which the United States is the attacking nation.
3. Invasions and occ... (more)
Twelve years ago, I wrote an article entitled “Electing Our Daddy,” which pointed out that every four years Americans go to the polls not just to elect a president bur also to elect a daddy, one who will take watch over them and take care of them, send them to their room when they put bad things in their mouths, force them to share with others, and protect them from the boogeyman.
In his speech after the Iowa caucuses, Newt Gingrich warned that “an Iranian nuclear weapon is one of the most frightening things we have to confront.” He was criticizing the non-interventionist views of Ron Paul, but beyond the presidential campaign, we seem to have this bundle of assumptions overtaking the media and most political discourse: Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and only an unreasonable person would think the U.S. should not do nearly anything to prevent Iran from achieving this go... (more)
Several days ago I referenced a controversy that arose in 2007 when the law professor and right-wing blogger Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds criticized President Bush for not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program and then advocated that the U.S. respond by murdering that nation’s religious leaders and nuclear scientists. “We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and Iranian ato... (more)
U.S. officials are objecting to Iran’s criminal conviction of an American for spying on behalf of the CIA. The Iranians have sentenced the American, 28-year-old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, to death.
Unfortunately, however, the U.S. government has no moral standing to object to the conviction, given its longtime policy of foreign interventionism in Iran as well its own judicial misconduct since 9/11.
Consider the judicial proceedings in which Hekmati was convicted. His... (more)
As NATO and other Western nations are staging war games right off the shores of Iran, the mainstream media is waging an extensive propaganda campaign back home. Excuse after excuse has been handed down to us in the past few months, but is there really any justification in the world for the West to bring the same death and destruction to Iran that they have brought to Iraq? Is there any captured spy, or weapons program, or crazed dictator that is worth the creation of another human rights night... (more)
Rush Limbaugh says the NDAA is totally not like the patriot act, which is awesome and ONLY for terrorists, this NDAA is directed at indefinitely detaining AMERICANS and is more like something an authoritarian dictator would pass!
One of the unique things about the Constitution of the United States was that it guaranteed certain rights for its citizens. Those rights provided the foundation for an era of freedom and prosperity that was pretty much unprecedented in human history and dozens of other nations eventually copied many of the ideas contained in our Constitution and Bill of Rights because they worked so well. Of course our system never functioned perfectly, but when you compare it to what has gone on for most of ... (more)
