Author: Sheldon Richman

Joe Biden, who says the buck regarding Afghanistan stops with him in the White House, claims that the Taliban’s final takeover of the capital, Kabul, provoking mass panic reminiscent of Saigon, 1975, happened more quickly “than anticipated.” If that’s true – spoiler alert: it ain’t – then we taxpayers should demand the mass firings and resignations of anyone in the America intel apparatus having anything to do with Afghanistan. We should also demand our money back. Intel isn’t cheap.

The U.S. government has been in that country for nearly 20 years with a political, military, and Intel presence. The American taxpayers are forced to cough up about $85 billion a year for the lying, spying, killing, and torturing agencies benignly called the “Intel community.” I realize that not all of that targets foreigners; some of it is devoted to spying on us. But still…

So even if Biden were telling the truth, it would mean that we’ve just witnessed a colossal failure and the clearest demonstration of incompetence imaginable.

What will be the consequences? There will be none.

Of course, Biden was lying, just as Trump, Obama, and Bush 2 and their people systematically lied to the American people about Afghanistan. This has been documented over and over. About this there can be no doubt.

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute, senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies, former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest book isWhat Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

In Coming to Palestine I defended, from a libertarian perspective, the Palestinians against Israeli/Zionist oppression. I am reluctant to repeat that case in a far shorter form here, but the horrendous current events throughout Palestine/Israel, including the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, cry out for comment. I can do no better than to link to Caitlin Johnstone’s piece “Fifteen Thoughts on Palestine.” It deserves careful reading.

I will add only a few thoughts. The mainstream criticism of the Palestinians, who object to being dominated by a settler colonial state, boils down to “But Hamas….” (This is not to say, of course, that all would be well if Hamas disappeared.) My answer to that objection is this: how long will take to learn that relentless oppression of a group breeds and nourishes the most violent (“extremist”) faction of that group? If you want the violence-minded constituents not to rise to the top or to fade away, you must stop oppressing the group! Don’t make violence appear to be the only alternative because all peaceful paths have been blocked.

Yet that is what Israelis and their bipartisan American-backers have consistently done for decades with their phony “peace process” and other subterfuge.

Continue reading “Palestine/Israel Erupts Again”

Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausevitz famously said that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” I think we can reverse this: politics is war by other means. The ultimate aim of politics (in the narrow sense of the word; there’s a more elevated philosophical sense) is what Frederic Bastiat called “legal plunder.”

Other thinkers have elaborated this idea. Franz Oppenheimer’s book The State comes to mind. Oppenheimer influenced Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, and through them the modern libertarian movement. Oppenheimer distinguished work – which he called the “economic means” – from robbery – the “political means.”

A gang can raid a group of productive people, steal their stuff, and ride off to the next community to plunder anew. Or it can stay around and keep looting the same people. Now people tend not to like this and won’t be terribly productive. So to pull this off, the gang will need to convince the people that the arrangement is for their own good. The gang will promise to protect them from other gangs (which it will surely want to do) and provide other services that will tend to keep the people quiescent. The booty they will be deprived of will be relabeled taxes.

Continue reading “A Defense of the Peaceful Transfer of War-Making Power”

Here’s something constructive Trump could do before leaving office at noon on January 20: he could order – demand, insist – that all classified intel and other documents related to the origin of the Russia/election investigation be declassified and released to the public forthwith – unredacted. From what has already gotten out, we know that Russiagate was not a good-faith probe into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election, much less outright collusion with the Trump campaign. All the evidence that has actually been obtained tells the story of a partisan and otherwise self-interested campaign to undercut or constrain an elected president who upset the foreign-policy establishment (although I can’t can’t fathom why), if not drive him from office altogether.

For example, only this year we learned that in 2017 the company that originally and allegedly confirmed that “the Russians” hacked the DNC server and leaked unflattering emails about the Clinton campaign to WikiLeaks actually did not know that that was the case. As Ray McGovern wrote recently that

exactly five months ago, on May 7, 2020, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff was forced to release sworn testimony by former FBI official Shawn Henry, head of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, that there is no technical evidence [emphasis added] that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were hacked — by Russia, or by anyone else.

Adding insult to injury, Schiff was able to hide Henry’s testimony from Dec. 5, 2017, until May 7, 2020.

Why did Schiff and the former Intel officials, some of whom now have lucrative TV commentator gigs, lead the American people all those years to believe that Russia hacked the server, which the FBI never even took possession of or examined? The answer won’t suggest good faith, I suspect.

Trump’s out. (I’m not sorry about that.) He could now do something decent and leave the stage after exposing those who, to protect their political and financial status, insanely played with fire by aggravating Russian-American relations.

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute, senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies, former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest book is Coming to Palestine.

Trump has vetoed Congress’s effort to keep him from going to war against Iran unilaterally. Nothing remarkable there. We’ve come to expect such things from the fraud who posed as antiwar.

What’s interesting is that Trump has reminded of what a narcissist he is. That fact is so much a part of the landscape that it can be hard to notice these days.

In vetoing the bill passed under the War Powers Resolution, a 1970s post-Vietnam attempt to restore Congress’s exclusive power under the Constitution to make war, Trump said, “This was a very insulting resolution….”

Continue reading “L’etat C’est Moi! (I Am the State!)”

So, Trump wants to add Middle Eastern nations (so far unspecified) to NATO so that the alliance can be more involved in the region. We need another obligation to go to war there like a hole in the head. That’s very peculiar for a Putin marionette who supposedly dislikes NATO, which by the way has grown already during his tenure. One always proposes larger missions for useless organizations. Such is the incoherence we’ve come to expect for the 45th occupant of the White House.

According to Politico, Trump said to reporters while describing in a call with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:

I think that NATO should be expanded, and we should include the Middle East. Absolutely … because this is an international problem…. And we can come home, or largely come home and use NATO. It’s an international problem. We caught ISIS. We did Europe a big favor.

Continue reading “The Stable Genius Is Good at Names”