The Road to the Permanent Warfare State Part 10 by Gregory Bresiger February 5, 2012 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 Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the ...
With Freedom and Justice for Some, Part 1 by Glenn Greenwald February 2, 2012 Part 1 | Part 2 As a litigator who practiced for more than a decade in federal and state courts across the country, I’ve long been aware of the inequities that pervade the American justice system. The rich enjoy superior legal representation and therefore much better prospects for success in court than the poor. The powerful ...
Fear, Inc. by Matthew Harwood February 1, 2012 Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest and William Arkin (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011); 320 pages. All Americans are equal, but some are more equal than others. Since the attacks of September 11, a new, powerful class of people has swarmed into the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs. Armed ...
The Greatest Threat to Our Freedom, Part 1 by Jacob G. Hornberger January 29, 2012 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Of all the dangers to the freedom of the American people, I would rank the enemy-combatant doctrine as the greatest. In my opinion, the federal government’s power to label a person a terrorist as part of its so-called war on terrorism — a power that came into ...
Economic Fallacies by Sheldon Richman January 29, 2012 In On Liberty John Stuart Mill wrote, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” This is an especially important principle for libertarians. We rely on persuasion to win adherents to the freedom philosophy. To persuade, one must use effective techniques of rhetoric. Just as important, one must know what one is arguing ...
The Long History of Entrapment Insanity by James Bovard January 26, 2012 America has seen a profusion of entrapment schemes in recent years. Many of the most high-profile domestic-terrorism cases have been ginned up by FBI agents who preyed on persons who had little competence for creating perils on their own. The explosion in entrapment operations is partly the result of a profound shift in the type of abuses that courts ...
The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 9 by Gregory Bresiger January 23, 2012 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 In 1949, Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson convinced Congress that the ...
The Permanent Injustice of Guantánamo by Andy Worthington January 12, 2012 When the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, opened on January 11, 2002, as part of the Bush administration’s global “war on terror,” in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was not immediately apparent that it was a dangerous aberration from recognized laws and treaties that would tarnish America’s name for years to come. There had been ...
What Are You Afraid Of if You Have Nothing to Hide? by Matthew Harwood January 1, 2012 The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades our Liberties by David K. shipler (New York: Knopf 2011), 384 pages. Late this past spring, two U.S. senators finally had the courage to look Big Brother in its inhuman, electronic eye and try to come clean on the USA PATRIOT Act. According to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Org.) ...
Economic Liberty and Its Abandonment, Part 2 by Jacob G. Hornberger December 31, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 While the movement towards socialism and interventionism in America had been slowly gathering steam in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was during the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s that the statist revolution was won in the United States. It was Roosevelt, more than anyone else, who brought an end to one ...
Government Can’t Stimulate an Economy by Sheldon Richman December 29, 2011 Barack Obama won’t use the “stimulus” label to describe the nearly half-trillion-dollar jobs bill he sent to Congress in September, 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. Somehow a package about half that size ...
Federal Training Flops by James Bovard December 28, 2011 Barack Obama recently proposed new programs to provide job training for youth and the long-term unemployed. For half a century, federal programs have provided trainees with little more than false hope. There is no reason to permit the feds to inflict new damage after all their previous failures. Between 1962 and 1980, the feds spent more for federal job training ...