“You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag, you wouldn’t steal a television, you wouldn’t steal a movie.” Sounds familiar doesn’t it? For years the copyright industry has been telling us that piracy is a crime. However, recently another supposedly heinous copyright crime has been added to the list: exposing racism. On September…

Rightists like David Brooks and former UN ambassador John Bolton, are, predictably, going ballistic over Edward Snowden — not only over his leaks, but over everything he represents to the society they identify with. By unilaterally deciding to leak documents, Brooks writes (“The Solitary Leaker,” NYT, June 10), Snowden has betrayed the “respect for institutions…

In a recent Esquire column (“Dianne Feinstein Defines ‘Journalist,’” September 19), Charles Pierce recalled presidential historian George Reedy’s prediction years ago that so-called “shield laws,” which protect reporters against criminal prosecution for not revealing their sources, would involve de facto government licensing of the press. After all, the law would have to define who qualified…

Every once in a while a government functionary slips up and inadvertently lets out the truth about how things work, in tones so frank it leaves us shaking our heads and wondering if we really heard correctly. That’s what happened when Blake Ewing, an Austin area assistant DA, expressed his true feelings (“Breaking Bad Normalizes…

Libertarian Harry Browne famously wrote that government “knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, ‘See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’” But with deficits and recessions looming, governments have been getting stingier when it comes to handing out crutches. The U.S. House of Representatives recently…

Recently someone on an email discussion list I follow pointed out that authors or publishers of copyrighted pieces may be reliant on royalty income for their subsistence. The alternative to proprietary information might be that “only people with income from other sources (such as academic salaries) [would] be able to make their voices heard.” I…

The Constitution did not keep President Obama from attacking Syria. The people did. Think about that. Obama, his top advisers, and many of his partisans and opponents in Congress insist that the president of the United States has the constitutional authority to attack another country without a declaration of war or so-called “authorization for the…

Robert Reich (“Syria and the Reality at Home in America,” Nation of Change, September 7), noting that the share of the population either working or seeking work was at a thirty-year low, writes “A decent society would put people to work — even if this required more government spending on roads, bridges, ports, pipelines, parks…

A few days ago, US Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) recycled his familiar contention that “[w]hat enables [the United States’] war-friendly philosophy is the fact that there is no military draft to dodge.” Yoking ordinary people to the decisions of the political class, he argues, would somehow disincentivize U.S. bellicosity abroad. In tandem with Rangel’s proposal…

Forbes contributor psychiatrist Dale Archer asks whether America’s wealth gap could lead to a revolt. Highlighting recent fast food workers’ strikes and the struggle for a “living wage,” Archer observes that “disparity between the nation’s top earners and the bottom 80 percent has grown exponentially over the past three decades, and it’s been exacerbated by…

When is a war not a war? According to John Kerry, launching cruise missiles at Syria is not a war. Testifying before the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry said, “President Obama is not asking America to go to war.” Kerry’s argument seems to hinge on the idea that no American ground troops will likely…

When you take a big dose of syrup of ipecac, you get a big stream of projectile vomiting. And when someone calls for a living wage, you get a nice big vomit stream from the usual suspects on the Right, denouncing such calls on the basis of what they call “hard-headed economic rationality.” Response to…

The Obama administration has announced the formation of a panel of “outside experts” to review the NSA’s surveillance practices. And a wide-ranging, diverse collection of experts they are; when it comes to institutional backgrounds and viewpoints, they span the entire spectrum from A to B. They remind me a bit of the space shuttle crew…

Across the world, people are protesting against US intervention in Syria. Polls show widespread skepticism of the impending war. Rather than making Americans safer, intervention is likely to support forces connected to al Qaeda. Yet it still seems inevitable that the US government will launch cruise missiles at Syria, escalating the country’s bloody civil war….

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that when a garment gets so old, attempting to patch it with new cloth will just tear it up worse. The authoritarian state seems to be reaching that point, beyond which any attempt to patch it up or prolong its life just inflict new damage and hasten…

In a recent article, Allison Benedikt makes her case that, as the title says, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person” (Slate, August 29). She clarifies: “Not bad like murderer bad — but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.” The proper course of action, she argues, is to take one for…

In response to Bashir Assad’s crossing of a “red line” by allegedly using chemical weapons against his own people, Secretary of State John Kerry cites his own fatherly feelings as justification for the all-but-inevitable looming US military intervention in Syria. “As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head, of a father…

Whether or not Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, President Obama has no legitimate grounds to intervene. U.S. airstrikes, intended to punish and deter Assad and degrade his military but not overthrow his regime, would deepen the U.S. investment in the Syrian civil war and increase the chances of further intervention. Obama’s previous intervention is what…

Seems as if supplying Syrian rebels with arms just isn’t enough. The US government and its Western allies are about to unleash direct military force in the small Middle Eastern country. We have heard the drumbeat of war for a long time – now as early as Thursday bombs may start falling on Syria. Instead of regime change, we are told,…

As the US government ramps up toward war on Syria’s regime, a sense of puzzlement seems to have descended upon America. Politicians can’t seem to identify any “legitimate” US “interest” that war would serve; polls show that the public opposes the project; military leaders, when pressed to propagandize for intervention, have instead repeatedly cautioned that…