Category: News

In policy terms, the Trump administration has approached North Korea largely the same way the Obama administration has – with a heavy reliance on sanctions, appeals to China, and occasional threats.

As John Feffer explains in this short video, the primary difference is that Trump’s threats have been far more alarming, raising concerns in South Korea and beyond that war is a real possibility, despite the fact that experts universally regard it as the worst possible option. These threats are especially dangerous on a peninsula where U.S. wartime actions left an indelible impression on both sides of the DMZ.

There remains, however, a diplomatic alternative, which the Obama administration never seriously pursued. Can Trump change course?

Video by Victoria Borneman and Peter Certo.

John Feffer is director of Foreign Policy In Focusand the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands..Reprinted with permission from Foreign Policy In Focus. Originally published in Inside Sources.

Both firms used to push the story that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s emails were in the pay of the DNC. The FBI was blocked from examining the DNC servers that the Democrats claimed were hacked. The Russia-Gate story hinges on some very sketchy and highly compromised objective facts that a little mainstream media scrutiny would likely demolish in short order. But the MSM has no interest in looking for truth. Fortunately international correspondent Joe Lauria is not afraid of where his inquiries into Russia-Gate take him. He shares some astonishing information with us in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report…

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

The reckless threats of nuclear war flung back and forth between the North Korean and U.S. governments remind me of an event in which I participated back in the fall of 1961, when I was a senior at Columbia College.

At the end of August 1961, the Soviet government had announced that it was withdrawing from the U.S.-Soviet-British moratorium on nuclear weapons testing that had halted such tests for the previous three years while the three governments tried to agree on a test ban treaty. The resumption of the Soviet government’s nuclear weapons testing that followed was topped off that October by its explosion in the atmosphere of a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration, determined not to be outdone in a display of national “strength,” quickly resumed US nuclear testing underground and began to discuss the US resumption of nuclear testing in the atmosphere.

From the standpoint of many people in the two countries?indeed, in the world?this renewed plunge into the nuclear arms race was quite alarming. At Columbia my college roommate Mike Weinberg and I considered the whole business quite crazy. Nuclear testing in the atmosphere sent huge clouds of radioactive nuclear debris (“fallout”) into the air, bringing with them cancer and birth defects for vast numbers of people around the world. In addition, these tests of hydrogen bombs?weapons that could be produced with a thousand times the destructive power of the atomic bomb that had annihilated Hiroshima?were in preparation for their use in nuclear war. This nuclear arms race seemed to be a race to disaster.

Continue reading “So Picketing the White House Doesn’t Work?”

Why has President Trump’s son-in-law/top advisor Jared Kushner been spending so much time with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman? Last month was his third trip this year? The visit occurred right before Bin Salman purged his political rivals, claimed that Lebanon had declared war on his country, and cited a Yemeni missile strike as a pretext to ramp up tensions with Iran. Are the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel preparing for a major war with Iran, Lebanon, and Hezbollah? We look at the troubling trends in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Your correspondent attended the November 4 Harvard University colloquium on the topic: Is Nuclear First Strike Legal or Just? The intellectual firepower contained in the panels convened by Elaine Scarry and Jonathon King was impressive: William Perry, former US Secretary of War; Zia Mian, Princeton physicist and a leading expert on the nuclear conundrum of Pakistan and India; Bruce Blair former US Missile launch officer, Princeton Professor and co-founder of Global Zero among others.

The facts adduced justified the convening by the appropriately named Professor Scarry: if one was not scared witless within the first hour (the colloquium ran 9 to 5) then one was simply beyond scar(r)y.

Continue reading “Nuclear First Strike: Is It Constitutional, Is It Lawful, Is It Just?”

Place: Knight Auditorium
Date: Thursday, November 9
Time: 6:00 p.m.

I will be giving my speech “How Economists Helped End the Draft” at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan this Thursday at 6:00 p.m.

Earlier in the day I’m giving a guest lecture in a class on globalization, but I’m pretty sure that attendance is restricted to students in the class.

If you attend, please come up and say hi afterwards.

David R. Hendersonis a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and a professor of economics in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is author of The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey and co-author, with Charles L. Hooper, of Making Great Decisions in Business and Life (Chicago Park Press). His latest book is The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Liberty Fund, 2008).

He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, the Jim Lehrer Newshour, CNN, and C-SPAN. He has had over 100 articles published in Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Red Herring, Barron’s, National Review, Reason, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has also testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Visit his Web site.