C4SS Senior Fellow and Chair Sheldon Richman “explores the critical distinction between capitalism and free markets; discusses corporation socialism, the challenges facing publicly funded schools, and much more.“

I am now prepared to state without reservation that the ongoing NSA/surveillance story ranks among the more momentous and nauseating charades perpetrated on a frighteningly gullible public. Any remaining doubt I had on this question — and, in truth, no substantial doubt remained in my own mind — has been obliterated by this story concerning the remarks…

United States Secretary of State John Kerry has been politicking through Southeast Asia the past few days. Kerry visited the Vietnam Mekong Delta, a place he knows well from his wartime adventures. US military interventionism in the region nominally passe, but there is another aspect of state violence still making headlines in the east: Environmental degradation. Kerry traveled…

Review 8 time is here! Let’s get started. James Bovard discusses the glut of police shootings. Sheldon Richman explains why government is the problem. Pepe Escobar discusses Erik Prince’s new book. Binoy Kampark discusses the creeping fascism in Europe. Uri Avnery discusses land theft in the Jordan Valley. Patrick Cockburn discusses the complicity of Saudi…

In our attempts to stop the monsters terrorizing our children, we have ourselves become monsters. We never notice when the transformation occurs. We don’t even fully realize it until years into our rampage. But one day, we wake up and look into the mirror, and the face peering back at us is unrecognizable. On Friday,…

Let’s briefly review several critical facts. If there is a single general theme to Glenn Greenwald’s career as a journalist, it is that he constantly confronts and challenges power and those who exercise power, primarily in the political sphere. Greenwald himself has often proclaimed this to be his major concern, and he repeated this conviction in…

The most revolutionary and significant aspect of the promise that WikiLeaks offered the world was its radical method of disseminating information. Beginning in very early childhood, all of us are taught to rely on authority figures for everything: for personal and professional advancement and fulfillment, for opportunities of all kinds, for survival itself. Most damningly,…

Glenn Greenwald opens his latest column for The Guardian with this: “Like many people, I’ve spent years writing and speaking about the lethal power-subservient pathologies plaguing establishment journalism in the west.” He goes on to discuss an article by Chris Blackhurst, a career journalist who had been the editor of The Independent until a few months ago. Greenwald sets forth the…

I suppose we will forever be subjected to incomplete accounts of the life of Nelson Mandela and the evil he struggled against. Both the Right and the Left (as conventionally defined in America) are too busy pushing agendas to provide the full story. On the establishment Right (with some honorable exceptions) apartheid was deemed unimportant…

After the meaningless theater of the March 2013 “sequester” and October’s anti-climactic two-week “shutdown,” you knew the third act was coming. US congressional leaders of both parties have announced a two-year budget deal which “would avoid tax increases, shrink the sequester by $63 billion over the next two years and modestly lower the long-term deficit”…

I had not intended to write anything on the death of Nelson Mandela. Partly because I am exhausted, but mainly because I wish to demonstrate my right not to mark his passing in any way — notwithstanding any affection I might bear the man. I feel that it is a right that needs to be…

Stephen Moss discusses Jeremy Scahil’s, Dirty Wars. Karam Filfian reviews Dirty Wars. Anthony Papa asks for a pardon of both drug war prisoners and the turkey. Deepak Tripathi discusses Obama’s Middle Eastern policy. David Macray discusses the plight of ex-convicts. Ahmad Barqawi discusses Bandar’s reign of terror. David Rosen discusses the private security threat to…

The end of apartheid in South Africa was neither the first nor the last people’s revolution to be betrayed by its own victorious leadership. Perhaps the premier example was Russia’s Bolshevik victory in 1917. Compare the party’s policies after the October Revolution to its rhetoric before. Lenin’s book “State and Revolution,” written to appeal to…

They don’t create oppression; they just make it possible What I’m about to say may surprise you, but I assure you it’s the honest truth: in my personal experience, cops are overwhelmingly decent folks. They almost always conduct themselves “professionally” and have generally treated me with respect. I’m not saying stories of law enforcement abuse haven’t…

In Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe that, because of network communications and radically cheapening production technology, capital accumulation is becoming “increasingly external to the production process.” But rather than working with this trend and exploiting the opportunities it offers, they argue, the Social Democratic approach is “to reintegrate the working class within capital.”…

I declare myself to be a capitalist and anti-capitalist, a socialist and anti-socialist, all at once. No, this is not my resignation of all use of politically descriptive terminology, and I am not declaring myself a moderate between two polar opposite camps. So how may I hold to each of these positions simultaneously? It is…

As the White House struggles to rouse itself from its self-induced ObamaCare public relations nightmare, the primary excuse — at least regarding the canceled health insurance portion of the fiasco — has been to claim that the relevant policies were “substandard” and, therefore, harmful to individual consumers. Ergo, the “substandard” plans needed to be abolished…

On the popular anarchist facebook page Anarchist Memes, an admin decided to exercise his private property rights in vocalizing his opinion that in a stateless society, unpopular opinions will not be dealt with peacefully. Status: “You think anarchism means we should all have some sort of right to say whatever you feel like? So let…

On the November 10 episode of the Stossel Show, libertarian commentator John Stossel had an exchange with anarcho-capitalist writer David Friedman on the possibility of “privatizing everything” (i.e. all government functions). When they got to military functions, their discussion shed considerable light on what “privatization” means to a lot of the libertarian Right. “Much of…

Welcome to my 6th review! Time to begin. Graham Peebles discusses the oppression of Ethiopian migrants in Saudi Arabia. Alexander Cockburn discusses the parallels between JFK and Obama. Ivan Eland examines JFK’s actual record. Jonathan Carp proposes a revolutionary alternative to raising the minimum wage. Jacob Hornberger discusses the post-911 dilution of civil liberties. Sarah…