Daily Articles

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 ...

A Tilting Domino

by Rich Schwartzman June 22, 2012

In the 1960s and ‘70s, the war hawks screeched that there was a domino effect in Southeast Asia, that if Vietnam fell to the communists, so too would Thailand, the Philippines, and other countries in the region. North Vietnam won — despite the 58,000 American lives and the untold Vietnamese lives lost in that fiasco — but South Vietnam ...

Still No Accountability for Torture

by Andy Worthington June 22, 2012

Last week, the bad news from the Supreme Court was not manifested only in the Court’s decision to abdicate its responsibilities towards the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by turning down appeals submitted by 7 of the 169 men still held. That dreadful decision established that the D.C. Circuit Court could continue in its mission to

Will Supreme Court’s Ignorance Torpedo Americans’ Freedom?

by James Bovard June 21, 2012

Americans have never had reliable protection against the ignorance of the Supreme Court. During the past 80 years, Supreme Court justices have routinely rubber-stamped government policies that they grossly failed to understand. Black-robed economic illiteracy is perhaps the Obama administration’s best hope in the Court’s pending decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare. At the oral arguments in late March, neither ...

The Continuing Economic Crisis

by Tim Kelly June 20, 2012

President Obama has been rightfully criticized for his observation that “the private sector is doing fine.” The statement was a glaring indication that the president has no understanding of the country’s economic problems and therefore has no idea how to solve them.   The Romney campaign was quick to make use of the president’s gaffe, running ads accusing ...

Twelve Victims of the Drug War

by Laurence M. Vance June 18, 2012

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 37,792 people died from drug overdoses in 2010. That exceeds the number of Americans killed in car accidents (35,080). It was the second year in a row that drug deaths outnumbered traffic fatalities. The majority of those deaths were caused, not by heroin or cocaine, but by prescription opioid painkillers such ...

The Supreme Court Abandons the Guantánamo Prisoners

by Andy Worthington June 15, 2012

On Monday June 11, when the Supreme Court decided to turn down seven appeals submitted by prisoners held at Guantánamo without providing any explanation, a particularly low point was reached in the prison’s history. The decision came just one day before the fourth anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, the hugely significant 2008 ruling recognizing the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed ...

Slow, Predictable Hearing on Fast and Furious

by Wendy McElroy June 14, 2012

The show trial of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on a citation of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena is scheduled to climax on June 20. That's when the investigating Oversight Committee has called for a vote on whether to move forward with a criminal contempt citation. Holder may be guilty, but the hearing is ...