In just 12 hours, North Carolina’s state legislature passed a “special” session bill superseding local anti-discrimination laws which protect the rights of LBTQA+ folk. The anti-discrimination laws superseded regard matters ranging from private matters like housing to public restrooms. No session of this nature had occurred in North Carolina in 35 years. This upheaval reinforces that if marginalized communities are…

In a new article at Harper’s (“Legalize It All,” April 2016), Dan Baum recalls a 1994 confession by former Nixon domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichmann, about Nixon’s motives in first launching the War on Drugs. Baum, interviewing Ehrlichman for a book on drug prohibition, asked a “series of earnest, wonky questions, that he impatiently waved…

At Reason, Steve Chapman (“Bernie Sanders’ Free Trade Mythology,” March 19) faults Bernie Sanders for saying: “Do you know that in 1960, Detroit, Michigan, was one of the wealthiest cities in America? Flint, Michigan, was a prosperous city. But then what happened is corporate America said, ‘Why do I want to pay somebody in Michigan…

(Content Warning: Brief mentions of rape) The Legal Aid Society is a private, not-for-profit legal service in New York whose motto is, “No New Yorker should be denied access to justice because of poverty.” In keeping with this philosophy, Legal Aid Society announced in late February that they’d brought a class action lawsuit against the New…

Ever since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the question of whom President Obama would choose to replace him has been — along with the possibility of Republican Congressional obstruction of a confirmation vote — a central issue in national politics. Liberal and Progressive activist groups have organized pressure campaigns to make the GOP-majority Congress…

Each year, March 16 marks an important date for those who cherish peace and harmony between human beings: Open Borders Day. The website openborders.info, founded by Vipul Naik, is in its fourth year of existence. It aims at starting conversations around immigration and freedom of movement across political borders. Its goal is a world where…

According to a recent interview with White House advisor Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama “has not had a second thought about drones.” Yet the president’s drone strikes have more often killed civilians than intended targets.  Drones have struck weddings, funerals, and rescuers. One drone strike even killed a 16-year old American citizen, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. How can…

The key to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — the feature that explains nearly everything else about that toxic dump — is his aggrieved-nation shtick. Just about everything Trump says (when he’s not adoring himself or belittling others) is about how the once-great American nation has been humbled by the rest of the world. To hear…

The presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders share a uniting theme of protecting American workers from foreign competition. Trump favors a 45% tariff on Chinese goods, while Sanders vocally opposes NAFTA-style trade agreements and the Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) designation (which prevents the US from imposing tariffs, on Chinese goods which other countries would not…

At the March 9 Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton had this to say about competitor Bernie Sanders’s favorable comments on Castro’s Cuba and the Sandinista regime in the ’80s:  “if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions…, that is not the kind of…

Americans can sleep easier now that the US military has wiped out 150 more “terrorists.” US airstrikes over Somalia targeted al-Shabab militants, who were, according to Pentagon spokesperson Captain Jeff Davis, planning “offensive operations.” Davis neglected to elaborate on what “offensive operations” were planned by the group. He did say that they had been monitoring…

Neither Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, nor Donald Trump, the self-described terrific businessman, knows squat about economics. If their polices were enacted, regular working people would be harmed. This is most clear with trade. Sanders and Trump are flaming protectionists, which means they peddle perhaps the oldest, most-thoroughly discredited economics doctrine ever spoken. (An…

On Facebook, Doug Henwood — author of Wall Street and editor of the Left Business Observer — recently pointed to the U.S. Arpa-E agency’s development of an advanced storage battery as an example of the “public sector” outperforming the “private sector” (March 3 at 10:48AM).  “While VC is funding the world’s first stabilized action camera,”…

Nancy Reagan died on March 6, 2016 at the age of ninety four. She leaves behind a destructive legacy that will likely be with us for some time — Just Say No. Her unfortunate contribution to the War on Drugs seldom gets the negative treatment it deserves. The Just Say No campaign is often looked at as…

The Donald Trump phenomenon is indeed the creature of the Republican establishment, but there’s more to it than that. For decades the Republican leadership (committed to corporate privilege and costly empire) encouraged a base of jingoists, protectionists, nativists, and other “politically incorrect” types, whom it then largely took for granted. The leadership wanted their votes,…

There are many ways to handle the epidemic of over-crowding in prisons. We could start by ending the war on drugs — one of the major culprits. As part of drug war reform, non-violent drug offenders should cease being imprisoned. We could also address racial discrimination and its many contributions to the problem. From there, we…

This week, Lyn Ulbricht attended the International Students For Liberty Conference and graced attendees with a presentation on the appeal of her son Ross Ulbricht’s sentencing in the Silk Road trial. Lyn’s presence and tireless advocacy for her son and for the preservation of our rights is a blessing in the face of our unaccountable…

For centuries there’s been a myth at the heart of English political culture: Before the Norman Conquest and the imposition of feudalism, Anglo-Saxon England was an idyllic land governed by “the good laws of King Edward the Confessor,” where free juries protected the ancient rights of Englishmen, and everyone was as good as anyone else…

In most American political discourse, freedom and equality are treated as inversely related:  that is, economic freedom can only be increased at the expense of raising inequality, and economic equality can only be increased at the expense of reducing economic freedom. But at Stumbling and Mumbling blog, Chris Dillow (“Inequality against freedom,” Feb. 23) shows…

Supervised injection sites (SIS) are not a new phenomenon. State-designated locations at which recreational intravenous drug users may legally shoot up, while under the supervision of medical professionals, have been prevalent throughout Europe for over two decades. The concept of SIS first garnered widespread public attention in the United States in 2003 when North America’s…