Preserving Freedom

Three Reasons Why Young People Can't Find Jobs

2013-05-19T11:00:00.000-05:00

From LearnLiberty:

Are you a college graduate fed up with the uncertainty and stress of the job hunt? Have you been sitting in Starbucks for days, sipping lattes and hopelessly sending out job application after job application? You're certainly not alone. There are 11.7 million unemployed people struggling to find a job in America. Prof. Carrie Kerekes presents three reasons finding a job in today's market is so difficult: a mismatch of skills, government regulations, and uncertainty in the market. These three things all have one common factor: government interference.

Jon Stewart Comments on the Obama Scandals

2013-05-17T11:30:00.000-05:00

Jon Stewart slams the President for his administration's scandals.

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Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware

2013-05-12T08:22:00.001-05:00

Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware

We'll Tell You What You Need To Know

2013-05-11T10:20:00.000-05:00

Something is flying around Quincy Massachusetts and the government refuses to tell the people what it is.

Exploiting Our Fears

2013-04-22T20:54:00.000-05:00

Former Congressman Ron Paul's latest column:

Congress Exploits Our Fears to Take Our Liberty

This week, as Americans were horrified by the attacks in Boston, both houses of Congress considered legislation undermining our liberty in the name of “safety.” Gun control continued to be the focus of the Senate, where an amendment expanding federal “background checks” to gun show sales and other private transfers dominated the debate. While the background check amendment failed to pass, proponents of gun control have made it clear they will continue their efforts to enact new restrictions on gun ownership into law.

While it did not receive nearly as much attention as the debate on gun control, the House of Representatives passed legislation with significant implications for individual liberty: the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). CISPA proponents claim that the legislation is necessary to protect Americans from foreign “cyber terrorists,” but the real effect of this bill will be to further erode Americans’ online privacy.

Under CISPA, Internet corporations are authorized to hand over the private information of American citizens to federal agents, as long as they can justify the violation of your privacy in the name of protecting “cyber security”. Among the items that may be shared are your e-mails, browsing history, and online transactions.

Like the PATRIOT Act, CISPA violates the fourth amendment by allowing federal agencies to obtain private information without first seeking a warrant from a federal judge. The law also allows federal agencies to pass your information along to other federal bureaucrats — again without obtaining a warrant. And the bill provides private companies with immunity from lawsuits regardless of the damage done to anyone whose personal information is shared with the government.

CISPA represents a troubling form of corporatism, where large companies cede their responsibility to protect their property to the federal government, at the expense of their customers’ privacy and liberty. In this respect, CISPA can be thought of as an electronic version of the Transportation Security Administration, which has usurped the authority over airline security from private airlines. However, CISPA will prove to be far more invasive than even the most robust TSA screening.

CISPA and the gun control bill are only the most recent examples of politicians manipulating fear to con the people into giving up their liberties. Of course, the people are told the legislation is for “limited purposes,” but authority granted to government is rarely, if ever, used solely for the purpose for which it is granted. For example, the American people were promised that the extraordinary powers granted the government by the PATRIOT Act would only be used against terrorism. Yet soon after the bill became law, reports surfaced that it was being used for non-terrorism purposes. In fact, according to data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union, 76 percent of the uses of the controversial “sneak-and-peak” warrants where related to the war on drugs!

Sadly, I expect this week’s tragic attacks in Boston to be used to justify new restrictions on liberty. Within 48 hours of the attack in Boston, at least one Congressman was calling for increased use of surveillance cameras to expand the government’s ability to monitor our actions, while another Senator called for a federal law mandating background checks before Americans can buy “explosive powder.”

I would not be surprised if the Transportation Security Administration uses this tragedy to claim new authority to “screen” Americans before they can attend sporting or other public events. The Boston attack may also be used as another justification for creating a National ID Card tied to a federal database with “biometric” information. The only thing that will stop them is if the American people rediscover the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin that you cannot achieve security by allowing government to take their liberties.

Worse than the Patriot Act - CISPA

2013-04-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

From Breaking the Set:

Abby Martin talks to Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel with the ACLU, about the renewed push for CISPA, and how its implications could be worse than the Patriot Act.

More Waco

2013-04-20T07:52:00.000-05:00

From the Independent Institute:

Twenty years ago, Americans witnessed the greatest law enforcement atrocity in modern U.S history. On February 28th, 1993, the ATF raided the Branch Davidian home in Waco, Texas. The stand-off finally ended 51 days later, on April 19th, after the building went up in flames, killing 70 civilians and more than 20 children.

Waco: Twenty Years Later

2013-04-19T12:00:00.000-05:00

Waco and 20 Years of State Terror

by Anthony Gregory on April 18, 2013 @ 10:57 pm

There is something about April. From Columbine to Virginia Tech, from Oklahoma City to Boston, mid-to-late April occasions some of the most infamous massacres on U.S. soil. At least, these are the ones we are told to focus on. The killers are called terrorists. Unless they wear uniforms, as they did on April 19, 1993, just outside Waco, Texas. That time, as we are urged to believe, the terrorists were the ones who died. In all these massacres, regardless of specifics, the government portrays itself as all that keeps chaos at bay.

The state claims to stand against terrorism, but killing people is its stock in trade. Slaughters come in various forms, almost all of which feed the health of the state. The state conducts much killing outright. The state officially poses against other killing, while nevertheless encouraging it through its own violence. Even the killing that the state has no hand in serves as a pretext for the state to grow.
In Boston this Monday, someone left bombs that murdered three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and injured 176 others. President Obama called the crime an “act of terrorism.” The establishment definition of “terrorism” was always flawed, in that it categorically absolved the government, but at least it specified the targeting of civilians for political goals. Yet these days, even before the motive is known, such as at Boston, or when the targets are not civilians, such as American soldiers abroad, the U.S. government calls any dramatic acts of violence of which it disapproves “terrorism.”

This February, they called ex-cop Chris Dorner a terrorist. Then the police surrounded him in a cabin to burn him alive, asking the media to cover its eyes like at Waco. Everyone who knew how the state operates had no reason to expect he would get due process. They were going to hunt him down and kill him no matter what. The media dropped the formality of calling him an “alleged” murderer. The LAPD tried and convicted and executed him all on the same day and no one batted an eye. Meanwhile, liberals say all talk of American tyranny is irresponsible and conservatives continue to worship law enforcement

Today, violent resistance to the state is called terrorism. Many of the “terrorists” rounded up and imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay were at most guilty of defending their country against an invading army. Some of these people continue to languish in that dungeon, seeing their desperate hunger strike in protest of declining conditions go unanswered, except by an administration willing to cut off their water.

From February 28 to April 19, 1993, the Branch Davidians resisted. On the morning of February 28, about one hundred ATF agents, concealed in livestock trailers, descended upon their property. The agents had planned and trained for eight months, having practiced their histrionic assault on model buildings. There was no reason for all this other than publicity. The agents could have easily arrested Koresh, whom they had befriended. The agents had conducted an investigation of weapons violations and found nothing. Koresh had cooperated with them. 60 Minutes had recently focused on an ATF sexual harassment scandal, and the agency was accused of racial discrimination during a House subcommittee meeting. The bureau wanted to improve its public image. Officials reached out to the press to make sure reporters could witness their heroics on the last February morning of 1993.

Unlike the vast majority of the hundreds of daily domestic militarized raids in America, the ATF’s surprise raid “Operation Showtime” faced resistance. When the agents ran out of ammo, the Davidians ceased fire. There were casualties on both sides, although one anonymous agent told the Dallas Morning News that he suspected some agents had fallen from friendly fire. Once the raid became a clear disaster, the ATF forced the press away.

Then came the standoff. The FBI took over and turned it into a full-blown military operation on American soil. Psychological warfare came down hard on Koresh’s followers. The FBI blared loud, obnoxious music, and sounds of animal slaughter, while shining blinding lights through the night. Agents gratuitously drove a vehicle to defile a Davidian grave. The government cut off this group’s access to family, media, and lawyers. It destroyed their water supply.

The media demonized the Davidians as a heavily armed cult that abused its children. Journalists tended to report government claims as fact. But they became increasingly critical of the ATF and FBI as well. After weeks of looking like fools in the mainstream press, particularly after a critical exposé in the New York Times on March 28 revealed the initial raid’s bad planning and recklessness, government officials became increasingly hostile to the media. On April 11, ATF intelligence chief David Troy stopped holding his regular press conferences altogether.

Attorney General Janet Reno, who took office in the middle of the standoff, finally decided to put an end to it. At about 6AM on April 19, the FBI began pumping flammable and poisonous CS gas, banned in international warfare, into the Davidian home. Officials knew that women and children were holed up in the section of the home exposed to this gas. The government continued to deploy gas for almost six hours.

Chemistry professor George F. Uhlig estimated in congressional hearings that there was a sixty percent chance that the gassing alone killed some children. “Turning loose excessive quantities of CS definitely was not in the best interests of the children,” Uhlig said. “Gas masks do not fit children very well, if at all.” He intoned that the gassing could have transformed their surroundings “into an area similar to one of the gas chambers used by the Nazis at Auschwitz.”

The FBI brought out an Abrams tank, the Army’s heaviest armored vehicle, to replace its Bradley fighting vehicles. Agents drove the tank, which Attorney General Janet Reno later obscenely compared to “a good rent-a-car,” into the building. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, who had shot and killed Vicki Weaver in August 1992 at Ruby Ridge as she held her infant in her arms, was at the scene. FBI agents launched incendiary tear gas canisters. Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin later declared, “We know of no evidence to support that any incendiary device was fired into the compound on April 19, 1993.” The FBI finally admitted six years later it had indeed used such projectiles at Waco.

The Davidian home went up in flames in the early afternoon. More than seventy people died, all of them civilian targets, many of them Americans, others hailing from other countries, more than twenty of them children and close to half of them people of color, although somehow the Davidians are often smeared, along with the so-called militia movement, as white supremacists. As the fire raged, the FBI turned back the local fire department. Special agent Jeffrey Jamar claimed that he feared for firefighters’ safety—presumably, the Davidians might shoot at the very people trying to stop the fire that was burning them to death. When it was all over, the ATF hoisted its flag atop the conquered ruins.

The trial of the survivors was a sham. Confused jurors intended to convict survivors of weapons offenses but not murder charges. The judge sided with the prosecution and defied the jurors’ intentions. By 1999, polling indicated that a strong majority of Americans blamed the FBI for setting the fire. Special counsel John Danforth, a Republican, released a report the next year whitewashing the Clinton administration of all guilt in this atrocity.

After Sandy Hook, liberals regurgitated every tired gun control argument, but one of the most interesting is that an armed populace fails as a break on tyranny because the government has the military hardware to win any confrontation. And indeed it’s true: most who resist government are swatted down like bugs. Some resist violently, like the Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee in December 1890, and are slaughtered. Others are shot for daring to resist even by throwing rocks at armed troops, like the four students murdered and the nine wounded at Kent State in May 1970. Others are targeted after a few years of relative calm, like the Philadelphia MOVE radicals in May 1985. Liberals are correct that the government has the means and the willingness to crush Americans who dare to resist. This fact never seems to convince liberals that the state is way too powerful and menacing to begin with, and maybe the last thing we should want is to give it more law enforcement powers, such as the monopolization of firearms through a war on guns.

About once a day police kill an American, but it’s often a criminal and no one cares, or at least a marginalized person like the homeless Kelly Thomas, beaten in July 2011 by five officers in Southern California, dying of complications five days later. Or they are veterans like Jose Guerena, at whom Tuscon police fired 71 rounds in the middle of the night in May 2011 – innocent of any crime, just in his own house at the wrong time. The state saves most of its killing for abroad, where killing is its very policy. And now, thanks to the war on terror, Obama calls America his battlefield and the world his jurisdiction. He has made it official doctrine that the president can order anyone’s death unilaterally.

Twenty years ago, Waco showed Americans the truth about law enforcement, the U.S. government, and the state itself. It revealed what reality was like for foreigners overseas. Yet most Americans seem totally indifferent to the mass murder the U.S. government has perpetrated and unleashed in the Middle East. On the day three were murdered in Boston, seventy-five died in Iraq. Violence in Iraq nine years ago was called terrorism, unless it was committed by U.S. troops. Today, violence in Iraq hardly makes the news. The state decides whose lives are worth caring about, and when.

Some critics of state violence dislike the very word “terrorism,” calling it meaningless, but I disagree. The state perverts most words it uses, but these words can still hold value. Terrorism refers to violence intentionally inflicted on the innocent to instill fear and advance political goals. American officials commit terrorism all the time. In the twenty years since Waco, state terrorism has escalated, from the anti-civilian sanctions on Iraq to the double-tap drone attacks on foreign first responders, all the way down to the constant domestic police raids. Even the more pedestrian police measures such as the systematic groping of New York City residents known as “stop and frisk” are there to “instill fear,” as police commissioner Raymond Kelly boasted was the intention, according to former NYPD captain Eric Adams’s testimony. From top to bottom, at home and abroad, the post-Waco American state seems intent on instilling fear in all of us.

Every April since 2003, I’ve written a piece about Waco. I think Americans should never forget what happened. LewRockwell.com published most of these articles. They each have a little bit of something different and discuss contemporary events. I also wrote my undergraduate thesis on Waco and the relationship between the media and the police state. Here are my archives for those interested:

20 Years Ago Today: Operation Showtime (Independent Institute, February 2013)
We’re All Branch Davidians Now (LRC, April 2012)
From Waco to Libya: Eighteen Years of Humanitarian Mass Murder (LRC, April 2011).
Waco and the New Brown Scare (LRC, April 2010).
The Waco Butchers Are Back (LRC, April 2009).
Why Waco Still Matters (LRC, April 2008).
Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech (LRC, April 2007).
Waco and the Bipartisan Police State (LRC, April 2006).
Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Post-9/11 Left-Right Dynamic (LRC, April 2005).
Eleven Years Since Waco and Very Little Has Changed (LRC, April 2004).
An Anniversary We Must Never Forget (Independent Institute, April 2003).
“God Help Us, We Want the Press”: The 1993 Waco Disaster and Media/Government Relations” (UC Berkeley Undergraduate thesis, 2003).

I might take a break from revisiting Waco next April, not because I’ve forgotten the victims – I never will – but simply because I feel like I’ve done enough writing about this particular atrocity for a little while, given that the state has raged on in so many directions, making Branch Davidians out of so many foreigners and Americans caught on the wrong side of the U.S. government’s never-ending siege of the world. Many Davidians died and others suffered injustice at trial, but tragically these victims are not so unusual. There are also the many thousands slaughtered abroad in the last 20 years. There are the thousands shot by law enforcement since then. There is Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the sixteen-year-old from Denver whom Obama snuffed out with a drone, whose death was justified on the grounds that he had a bad father. Before the rapid rise of the surveillance state and the post-9/11 terror war, Waco was the best opportunity to turn things around. Instead, most Americans turned their backs and now our country is becoming one big playground for the police state.

We might call the situation David Koresh’s revenge.

Con Fusion Centers

2013-04-14T11:11:00.003-05:00

Lionel looks at Fusion Centers:

Creating Jobs? Destroying Jobs? Creating Wealth

2013-04-14T10:00:00.000-05:00

From LearnLiberty:

Many people have been talking about job creation lately, especially politicians. But is government the best creator of jobs? And is job creation the best thing for the economy? Professor Steve Horwitz explains that there is a difference between creating jobs and creating wealth. Creating jobs is relatively easy, but the most economic progress is made when jobs are eliminated because they become unnecessary. This does lead to some unemployment, but the alternatives are worse. To prevent transitional unemployment would also halt innovation, growth, and the reduction of poverty. So what is the best way to create valuable, meaningful jobs? Professor Horwitz says, "The best job-creation program in human history is the free market and the entrepreneurship it generates."

You Belong to the State

2013-04-08T20:34:00.000-05:00

Tulane professor and MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry states that children belong to the "community", in other words the government:

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”

This is scary, this collective idea leads to tyranny.

Victory In Massachusetts Civil Forfeiture Case

2013-04-07T08:16:00.000-05:00

From the Institute for Justice:

In a major triumph for property rights, a federal court in Massachusetts dismissed a civil forfeiture action against the Motel Caswell, a family-run motel in Tewksbury, handing a complete victory to owners Russell and Patricia Caswell. In one of the most contentious civil forfeiture fights in the nation, Magistrate Judge Judith G. Dein of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts concluded, based on a week-long bench trial in November 2012, that the motel was not subject to forfeiture under federal law and that its owners were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.

The Institute for Justice and local counsel Schlossberg, LLC, brought the case to trial to expose the injustices of civil forfeiture laws that allow law enforcement agencies to pad their budgets by taking property from innocent owners who have never been convicted or even charged with a crime.

Download the federal court ruling (pdf).

“This is a complete victory for the Caswell family and for the protection of private property rights,” said Scott Bullock, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. “The Caswells will keep their motel, and private property rights are preserved.”

The government had sought to take the Motel Caswell from the Caswell family under the theory that the motel allegedly facilitated drug crimes. But the court found that Mr. Caswell “did not know the guests involved in the drug crimes, did not know of their anticipated criminal behavior at the time they registered as guests, and did not know of the drug crimes while they were occurring.”

“This outrageous forfeiture action should never have been filed in the first place,” said Larry Salzman, an IJ attorney. “What the government did amounted to little more than a grab for what they saw as quick cash under the guise of civil forfeiture.”

Caswell said, “I couldn’t have fought this fight without the help of the Institute for Justice. It is hard to believe anything like this goes on in our country, but the government goes after people they think can’t afford to fight. But with IJ’s help, we put up a heck of a fight and have won. The public needs to stand up against these abuses of power.”

The Problem of civil forfeiture is widespread. In 1986, the year after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund was created—the fund that holds the forfeiture proceeds from properties forfeited under federal law and available to be paid out to law enforcement agencies—it took in just $93.7 million. Today, it holds more than $1.6 billion. An Institute for Justice report, Inequitable Justice: How Federal “Equitable Sharing” Encourages Local Police and Prosecutors to Evade State Civil Forfeiture Law for Financial Gain, documents how the problem is growing worse. Between 2000 and 2008, equitable sharing payments from the U.S. Department of Justice to state and local law enforcement doubled from about $200 million to $400 million per year.

“Civil forfeiture is a draconian power that is too easily abused,” said Darpana Sheth, an IJ attorney. “This case epitomizes what an aggressive U.S. attorney wielding these laws can do to a small property owner like Russ Caswell.”

IJ President and General Counsel Chip Mellor said: “The Institute for Justice has documented time and again that civil forfeiture invites a lack of accountability, a lack of due process and a lack of restraints on government authority. Civil forfeiture needs to end. If the government wants to take someone’s property, it should first be required to convict that person of a crime. Short of that, you will end up with what the federal government tried to do in Tewksbury.”

A Wishlist For Those Who Hate The Second Amendment

2013-04-06T09:58:00.000-05:00

Judge Andrew Napolitano discusses the new Connecticut gun control laws and the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty with Lou Dobbs.

The Greatest Tool of the Surveillance State

2013-04-06T09:46:00.000-05:00

From breakingtheset:

Abby Martin takes a look at the 40th anniversary of the mobile phone, a device that once helped usher in a communications revolution, but has now transformed into the most power tool of the surveillance state.

Print a Gun

2013-04-04T20:26:00.000-05:00

Will 3D printing make gun control irrelevant? We can hope so.

The Great Cypriot Bank Robbery

2013-04-02T19:53:00.000-05:00

Ron Paul comments on the Cypriot Bank Bailout:

The Great Cyprus Bank Robbery

The dramatic recent events in Cyprus have highlighted the fundamental weakness in the European banking system and the extreme fragility of fractional reserve banking. Cypriot banks invested heavily in Greek sovereign debt, and last summer's Greek debt restructuring resulted in losses equivalent to more than 25 percent of Cyprus' GDP. These banks then took their bad investments to the government, demanding a bailout from an already beleaguered Cypriot treasury. The government of Cyprus then turned to the European Union (EU) for a bailout.

The terms insisted upon by the troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund) before funding the bailout were nothing short of highway robbery. While bank depositors have traditionally been protected in the event of bankruptcy or liquidation, the troika insisted that all bank depositors pay a tax of between 6.75 and 10 percent of their total deposits to help fund the bailout.

While one can sympathize with EU taxpayers not wanting to fund yet another bailout of a poorly-managed banking system, forcing the Cypriot people to pay for the foolish risks taken by their government and bankers is also criminal. In their desire to punish a “tax haven” catering supposedly to Russian oligarchs, the EU elites ensured that ordinary citizens would suffer just as much as foreign depositors. Imagine the reaction if in September 2008, the US government had financed its $700 billion bank bailout by directly looting American taxpayers' bank accounts!

While the Cypriot parliament rejected that first proposal, they will have no say in the final proposal delivered by the EU and IMF: deposits over 100,000 euros are likely to see losses of at least 40 percent and possibly as much as 80 percent. “Temporary” capital controls that were supposed to last for days will now last at least a month and might remain in effect for years.

Especially affected have been the elderly, who were unable to use ATMs or to transfer money electronically. Despite the fact that ATMs severely limited the size of withdrawals during the two week-long bank closure, reports indicated that account holders who had access to Cypriot bank branches in London and Athens were able to withdraw most of their funds, leading to speculation that there would be no money available when banks finally opened up again. In other words, the supposed Russian oligarch money may well be already gone.

Remember that under a fractional reserve banking system only a small percentage of deposits is kept on hand for dispersal to depositors. The rest of the money is loaned out. Not only are many of the loans made by these banks going bad, but the reserve requirement in Euro-system countries is only one percent! If just one euro out of every hundred is withdrawn from banks, the bank reserves would be completely exhausted and the whole system would collapse. Is it any wonder, then, that the EU fears a major bank run and has shipped billions of euros to Cyprus?

The elites in the EU and IMF failed to learn their lesson from the popular backlash to these tax proposals, and have openly talked about using Cyprus as a template for future bank bailouts. This raises the prospect of raids on bank accounts, pension funds, and any investments the government can get its hands on. In other words, no one's money is safe in any financial institution in Europe. Bank runs are now a certainty in future crises, as the people realize that they do not really own the money in their accounts. How long before bureaucrat and banker try that here?

Unfortunately, all of this is the predictable result of a fiat paper money system combined with fractional reserve banking. When governments and banks collude to monopolize the monetary system so that they can create money out of thin air, the result is a business cycle that wreaks havoc on the economy. Pyramiding more and more loans on top of a tiny base of money will create an economic house of cards just waiting to collapse. The situation in Cyprus should be both a lesson and a warning to the United States. We need to end the Federal Reserve, stay away from propping up the euro, and return to a sound monetary system.

Media Complicity in Cover-ups

2013-03-31T10:09:00.000-05:00

Abby Martin examines the death of Chris Dorner in a fire caused by the actions of law enforcement and the media's role in not seeking the full story. In the second video Abby Martin draws connections with the federal government's actions in causing the Waco tragedy.

Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority

2013-03-30T08:37:00.000-05:00

From ReasonTV:

"American popular culture not only celebrates freedom, it is also itself an example of American freedom at its best and most vibrant," writes Paul Cantor in his new book, The Invisible Hand and Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV.

Even before politicians and elite cultural critics decried the boob tube as a "vast wasteland," they were attacking other forms of popular entertainment - novels, movies, comic books, and more - as simultaneously soporific and dangerous, either lulling the masses into quietism or sparking bad behaviors. But Paul Cantor, a professor of English University of Virginia, argues that such criticisms get everything wrong.

Within a marketplace system, TV, film, and other forms of entertainment respond to viewer demands as much as they may create them. More important, popular culture is constantly developing new and different shows and media that allow more people consume and produce whatever they want. The same system, says Cantor, that brings us Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo also produces Deadwood and South Park, which he considers some of the most sophisticated contemporary storytelling to be found anywhere in the world.

Cantor also argues that the current vogue for zombie apocalypses - most clearly seen in AMC's hit series The Walking Dead - and other shows (such as Revolution) underscore the recurring theme of freedom from oppressive government in popular culture going back to early American novels and plays.

Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Cantor about the current state of American television and the economics that underlie it.

Death Wish of Paralyzed Iraq Vet Tomas Young

2013-03-26T20:59:00.000-05:00

From RTAmerica:

Nearly a decade ago, the Bush administration gave misleading information to the American people in an effort to draw support for the US-led invasion of Iraq. Initially, Saddam Hussein was believed to have weapons of mass destruction, but years later, billions of dollars spent, hundreds of thousands live lost, they were never found. Many US military soldiers were injured in the conflict including 33-year-old Iraq War veteran Tomas Young. Young was shot by a sniper leaving him immobile and in constant pain, and now the soldier is planning on refusing treatment in the coming weeks. Mr. Young joins us to explain why he wrote a letter to former President Bush and Dick Cheney.

The Last Letter

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some one million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all – the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans – my fellow veterans – whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to "liberate" Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called "democracy" in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq's oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level – moral, strategic, military and economic – Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn't lying a sin? Isn't murder a sin? Aren't theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Bill Kristol Knows Best - More War!!!!!

2013-03-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

Ron Paul discusses William Kristol's love of war. Of course, Kristol has never fought in a war, he just enjoys the thought of others doing his fighting.

Neo-Con War Addiction Threatens Our Future

by Ron Paul

William Kristol knows what is wrong with the United States. As he wrote recently in the flagship magazine of the neo-conservatives, the Weekly Standard, the problem with the US is that we seem to have lost our appetite for war. According to Kristol, the troubles that have befallen us in the 20th century have all been the result of these periodic bouts of war-weariness, a kind of virus that we catch from time to time.

He claims because of the US “drawdown” in Europe after World War II, Stalin subjugated Eastern Europe. Because of war weariness the United States stopped bombing Southeast Asia in the 1970s, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. War weariness through the 1990s led to Rwanda, Milosevic, and the rise of the Taliban. It was our fault for not fighting on! According to Kristol, our failure to act as the policeman of the world is why we were attacked on September 11, 2001. Of the 1990s, he wrote, “[t]hat decade of not policing the world ended with 9/11.”

That revisionism is too much even for fellow neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz to swallow. In a 2003 interview, Wolfowitz admitted that it was the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia that led to the growth of al-Qaeda:

"(W)e can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina.”

But for Kristol and his allies there is never enough war. According to a new study by Brown University, the US invasion of Iraq cost some 190,000 lives, most of them non-combatants. It has cost more than $1.7 trillion, and when all is said and done including interest the cost may well be $6 trillion. Some $212 billion was spent on Iraqi reconstruction with nothing to show for it. Total deaths from US war on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been at least 329, 000. None of this is enough for Kristol.

The neo-con ideology promotes endless war, but neo-cons fight their battles with the blood of others. From the comfortable, subsidized offices of magazines like the Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives urge the United States to engage in endless war – to be fought by the victims of the “poverty draft” from states where there are few jobs. Ironically, these young people cannot find more productive work because the Federal Reserve’s endless money printing to keep the war machine turning has destroyed our economy. The six trillion dollars that will be spent on the Iraq war are merely pieces of printed paper that further erode the dollar’s purchasing power now and well into the future. It is the inflation tax, which is the most regressive and cruel of all.

Yes, Americans are war weary, concedes Kristol. But he does not blame the average American. The real problem is that the president has dropped the ball on terrifying Americans with the lies and imaginary threats that led to the invasion of Iraq. Writes Kristol: “One can’t, for example, be surprised at the ebbing support of the American public for the war in Afghanistan years after the president stopped trying to mobilize their support, stopped heralding the successes of the troops he’d sent there, and stopped explaining the importance of their mission.”

If only we had more war propaganda from the highest levels of government we could be cured of this war-weariness. Ten years ago the US invaded Iraq under the influence of neo-conservative lies. Those lies continued to promote US military action in places like Libya, and next on their agenda is Syria and then on to Iran. It is time for the American people to shout “enough!”

America's Longest War: A Colossal Failure

2013-03-20T19:22:00.000-05:00

From ReasonTV:

AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR is a Reason Foundation film about the extraordinary costs of the US government's 40-year war on drugs. AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR will be released in 2013.

AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR website: http://www.americaslongestwar.com

ALW's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/AmericasLonge...

Drug prohibition has failed. Drug usage rates have not declined, and illegal drugs are more available—and cheaper—than ever before. At the same time, the costs of the drug war are staggering. More than $1 trillion taxpayer dollars have been spent. More than 50,000 SWAT raids occur each year. Hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug offenders are wasting their lives away in prison at our expense. And more than 60,000 people have been murdered in Mexico over the past six years.

AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR provides a brief history of drug prohibition, beginning with Nixon's declaration of war in 1971 and ending with Obama's broken promise to allow states to determine their own medical marijuana policies. AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR chronicles how, over the past 40 years, the drug war has escalated from a small domestic program mostly focused on treatment to the multi-billion dollar international war it is today.

There are many victims of the drug war, and AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR tells some of their stories.

In 2001, Cory Maye, a black man in Mississippi, shot and killed an intruder while protecting his 18-month old daughter. The intruder turned out to be a white police officer conducting a raid, and Maye was sent to prison for murder. Maye was ultimately released in the Summer of 2011.

Jose Guerena is a retired Marine who served two tours in Iraq. In the Spring of 2011, Guerena heard people breaking into his Arizona home, told his wife and son to hide in the closet, and grabbed his military weapon. Police broke in the door and fired 71 bullets, hitting Guerena 22 times. Guerena bled to death alone, inside his home. The police found nothing incriminating inside the house.

In 1991, Robert Moss and his wife had a one-year old and a baby on the way when Moss was convicted of conspiracy to violate marijuana laws. Because of federal sentencing guidelines passed in the mid-80s, Moss was sentenced to more than 20 years in federal prison. Moss returned to his family in Seattle in the Fall of 2011.

Sandra Rodriguez is a reporter at El Diario, a newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Over the past few years, Rodriguez has been a first-hand witness to an astounding escalation in drug war related violence and the executions of two of her colleagues. Neither case has been solved, but that's no surprise. Fewer than 3% of the murders in Juarez are investigated.

In 2012, Aaron Sandusky, a medical marijuana dispensary owner in California, was found guilty of conspiracy to violate federal marijuana laws. Sandusky is now serving 10 years in federal prison.

AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR features interviews with foamier New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, Huffington Post investigative reporter Radley Balko, Alice Huffman of the NAACP, Alison Holcomb of the ACLU, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, author John Gibler, El Diario de Juarez reporter Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, UTEP professor Tony Payan, El Paso city representative Suzie Byrd, federal public defender Guy Iversen, former cop Neill Franklin, Judge James P. Gray and former DEA Administrator Robert Bonner.

Eurozone Run by People Who Don't Respect the Rule of Law

2013-03-19T19:18:00.000-05:00

Under the terms of a European Union demand, Cyprus was going to tax (steal in reality) a percentage of the savings deposits in Cypriot banks in order to payoff the creditors of the Cypriot banks.

From Russia Today:

Taking the bailout model to extremes - the EU has given Cyprus an ultimatum - either force savers to save banks, or go bankrupt. United Kingdom Independence Party MEP Nigel Farage gives his perspective on the deposit levy and Cypriot parliament vote.

The Cypriot Parliament rejected the Eurozone ultimatum today.

You're Not an Important Person

2013-03-17T12:30:00.000-05:00

More on Bradley Manning from TheYoungTurks:

Bradley Manning is facing prosecution for giving military information to Wikileaks. He's plead guilty to some charges. He maintains that he did release the information and that he did it because he wanted to help the country. What will happen with the other treasonous charges against him that could net a life sentence? Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

Enemy of the State: Bradley Manning

2013-03-17T09:11:00.000-05:00

From the Rutherford Institute:

Throughout America’s history, brave individuals have opted to defy the American government in order to speak up against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and war. One such “enemy of the state” is Bradley Manning—an intelligence analyst who is being prosecuted for leaking classified government documents which expose systemic corruption within America’s military and diplomatic apparatus. Sadly, as John Whitehead argues in this week’s vodcast, the government’s war against Bradley Manning is a war against all who speak out against injustice.

Real Heroes Don't Control Other People's Lives

2013-03-16T11:17:00.000-05:00

From PJTV:

John Stossel, author of "No They Can't" joins Peter Robinson to talk about why governments fail and individuals succeed. While we love plans, central planning seems to fail over and over again. Are people programmed to take orders from government, and is it possible to resist our worst instincts? Find out. Also, Stossel discusses the disdain the media has for business and capitalism.