Appena tre anni dopo aver ridotto la sua presenza in Iraq, gli Stati Uniti stanno mandando nuovamente le truppe. In risposta alle conquiste fatte dal gruppo jihadista Isis nella sua ultima offensiva, il presidente americano Barack Obama sta mandando in Iraq 275 soldati per “fornire supporto e sicurezza al personale e all’ambasciata americana di Bagdad.”…

On July 7th, Molly Knefel published a great piece on jury nullification in The Nation. Knefel opens by discussing the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street protester who was convicted of “assaulting” a police officer who had assaulted her, and sentenced to a prison term that most of the jurors who convicted her…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Libertarian and Catholic Social Teachings” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Free markets don’t have to mean the particular incarnation of corporate world dominance we see all around us today. For an entire tradition, an individualist anarchism that once blossomed in the United States, free…

As far as it went, the Supreme Court generally got it right in the Hobby Lobby-Obamacare-contraception case. Unfortunately it didn’t go nearly far enough. The court ruled that “closely held corporations” whose owners have religious convictions against contraceptives cannot be forced to pay for employee coverage for those products. I wish the court could have…

The Supreme Court recently closed its term with a ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, concerning the government’s mandate for employer provided insurance to cover contraception. Voting 5-4 that closely held corporations could be exempt from the mandate if it violates the sincerely held religious beliefs of the owners, the decision has generated a lot…

(Inspired by a comment from James Tuttle) SCOTUS has been dancing its way down a “whatever it takes to keep things from collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions” tightrope with ACA. First they affirmed its dubious constitutionality, now they’re carving out exceptions for entities which claim to be acting on orders of a…

When the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision came out Monday, I had a lot of negative feelings about it, and I’ve been mulling column ideas in my head ever since. But all my attempts to organize my thoughts into a coherent statement and put them in writing — including this one — have been less…

Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again by Rich Lowry (HarperCollins 2013), 390 pages. One of the central themes in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is the ideology he calls “authoritarian high modernism”: It is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound)…

Just three years after winding down its presence in Iraq, the United States is sending troops back in. In response to the gains made by jihadist group ISIS in its recent offensive, US president Barack Obama is sending 275 troops to Iraq to “provide support and security for US personnel and the US Embassy in…

From 1898 to 1931, Smedley Darlington Butler was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps. By the time he retired he had achieved what was then the corps’s highest rank, major general, and by the time he died in 1940, at 58, he had more decorations, including two medals of honor, than any other Marine….

Dylan Matthews recently published an article at Vox titled Prisons are terrible, and there’s finally a way to get rid of them. Matthews’ article starts out strong, beginning with an explanation of the horrific costs of prisons. He describes the appalling rates of physical and sexual assault, the data on systemic racism, and the costs…

Although the recent court decision striking down tenure for public school teachers has been viewed from many angles on op-ed pages, as Mark Palko points out in the Washington Post (Vergara vs. California: Are the top 0.1% buying their version of education reform?” June 23), almost nobody’s paying attention to the fact that virtually the whole…

Salon’s Andrew Leonard worries that new business models and apps are often the brainchild of ideological libertarians pushing hard for “free-market fanatacism [sic].” Leonard sees young companies like Lyft and Airbnb as cheating, as “exploit[ing] regulatory loopholes . . . to game public goods.” In fact, Leonard even says that “safety regulations are a kind…

If you want a glimpse into the US bipartisan foreign policy establishment’s Heart of Darkness, you need look no further than Robert Kagan. He, along with his father and brother, was a signatory of the Project for a New American Century’s manifesto “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” — something normally associated with the neoconservative circles around George…

Having netted a half-billion dollars and counting for Disney, Maleficent is the latest proof of just how lucrative successively building upon established properties can be in today’s economy. The film benefited from being uniquely able to draw on all the elements of Disney’s perennially popular animated feature version of Sleeping Beauty, which in turn overtly incorporated both the melodies…

Se seguite le notizie, sentite parlare solitamente di trattati – Uruguay Round del Gatt, Nafta, Cafta, Tpp – descritti come “Accordi di Libero Scambio” che hanno l’obiettivo di “ridurre le barriere commerciali”. È una bugia. Senza alcuna eccezione, questi accordi in realtà rafforzano quella forma di protezionismo che più di ogni altra è vitale per…

Barney Frank’s statement, “Government is simply a word for the things we decide to do together,” is getting a lot of recirculation lately in goo-goo circles desperate for a glib answer to those who view government as a threat. Anyone who says a damfool thing like this and seriously means it is a gullible idiot…

The wall-to-wall coverage of the disintegration of Iraq ought to carry this credit: This bloodshed was made possible by the generosity of British and French imperialists. The stomach-wrenching violence in Iraq — not to mention the horrendous civil war in Syria, the chronic unrest in Palestine/Israel, and problems elsewhere in the Middle East — are…

C4SS Adviser and Contributor Cathy Reisenwitz is joined by Angela Keaton of antiwar.com to discuss the situation in Iraq as well antiwar.com’s lawsuit against the FBI for illegal spying.

I leader cattolici, dal Cardinale Maradiaga allo stesso Papa Francesco, quest’anno hanno fatto notizia con le loro critiche alle presunte economie di libero mercato, paragonandole ad una forma di idolatria che sfrutta i poveri e nega loro l’accesso alle ricchezze. Partendo dal fatto che la dottrina sociale cattolica enfatizza l’assistenza e l’aiuto ai meno fortunati,…