Recently Published

No, Newt, the U.S. Cannot Make the Moon a State. That's Illegal Under International Law.

by Daniel S. Margolies

Leaving aside the technological challenges, fiscal unreality, and sheer oddity of Newt Gingrich’s proposal to build a “permanent base on the moon” by the end of his theoretical second term, historians might wonder: would such an American moon base or colony even be legal to construct under international law? Is Gingrich’s call for “putting a marker down” on the moon merely futuristic neo-colonialism or would such an act demand novel extralegal approaches to the projection of American power?  

A History Lesson for Newt Gingrich: Andrew Jackson was a Savage Indian Killer

by William Loren Katz

"It's not that I'm a good debater. It's that I articulate the deepest-felt values of the American people," announced the victorious Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. Republican voters [only two percent were African Americans] saw his tough, angry, racial language as straight talking. He eagerly strummed racial themes—black urban pupils ought to serve as assistant janitors to learn what is really needed in school, which is how to stick to a job and make and spend money. He then suggested the urban poor need to get jobs and learn decent work habits rather than accept handouts from the “greatest food stamp president.”

A Brief History Of Debt

by Louis Hyman

If you listen to our grandparents, in the old days nobody ever borrowed. Angelic models of virtue, they bought only what they could afford. The Great Depression had instilled values in them that these young people today just do not have. On some level, older Americans consider all this borrowing to be a moral failure without precedent.

What I Told the Hedge Fund Managers in Miami

by James Livingston

[My] op-ed in the New York Times (October 25th) led to many radio interviews, and then the book came out. The response has been astonishing. Absolute silence from the Left, and curiosity from elsewhere. The extreme Right has hammered the thing as communist propaganda, of course, but the business press has been more or less respectful, notwithstanding the twit who reviewed my book alongside James Roberts in the Wall Street Journal. Did I tell you he and I “debated” the issues on Minnesota Public Radio? Never mind. It was like arguing with a clergyman about the Bible—surely you know money is the root of all evil, and, oh my god, you ought not spend more money than you got?—so that, when the radio host asked if there were some “middle ground” where me and Mr. Roberts could meet and make nice, I said no.

Former Gingrich Ally Claims Republican Leaders Blackmailed Him Over Affair

by David Austin Walsh

Gingrich and his now wife, Callista Bisek. Credit: Gage SkidmoreA former ally of Newt Gingrich contends that the Republican Revolution in the 1990s was derailed when the Speaker was blackmailed by opponents of reform in his own party who had learned of his affair with Callista Bisek, now his wife.  Scot Faulkner, the first Chief Administrative Officer of the House of Representatives, alleges in an article that will be published on the website of the History News Network next week, that Gingrich abandoned reform to keep his affair secret.  In the article Faulkner singles out Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, who at the time was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, as one of the people guilty of blackmailing Gingrich.In his 2008 memoir, Naked Emperors: The Failure of the Republican Revolution, Faulkner also implicated Californian Bill Thomas, the chairman of the House Committee on Administration under Gingrich.

How Newt Gingrich's GOP Rivals Blackmailed Him Back in the '90s

by Scot Faulkner

The centerpiece of Newt Gingrich’s claim for the GOP nomination is that “we balanced the budget during the four years I was Speaker.” This is a true crowd pleaser in an era when both the White House and Congress have sailed America over a fiscal cliff.The truth is very different from Gingrich’s account and accounting.Fiscal Year 1995 began on October 1, 1994, prior to the Republican landside in November.  Federal outlays were approximately $1.5 trillion against approximately $1.4 trillion in revenue, for a deficit of $164 billion.Fiscal Year 1999 began on October 1, 1998, the last few months of Gingrich’s Speakership. Federal outlays were $1.7 trillion against $1.8 trillion in revenue. For more information, visit OMB’s historical tables.

Did Teddy Roosevelt Write Obama's State of the Union Address?

by HNN Staff

Below is an excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt's 1906 annual message to Congress -- what we now refer to as the State of the Union Address.  Was President Obama this week channelling Roosevelt?  Roosevelt here combines an appeal to patriotism with a proposal to levy steeper taxes on the rich--just as Obama did Tuesday night.  He also comes out foursquare for education--just as Obama did. Where they parted was on the question of the central government's role in ediucation.  Sounding a bit like a modern Tea Party supporter, TR believed that under our federal system education was a function that perforce had to be left up to the states and localities.

Taking the Long View on Presidential Transcript Releases

by Leslie Kitchen

The wing-nuts want to see Barack Obama’s college transcripts. And, by definition, they won’t shut up about it.Usually, and I have to say justifiably, the wing-nuts  have just enough sense to ignore matters like being able to see their own candidate’s college transcripts. That is how they save themselves from the horror they would experience if they did see them, and how they save their candidates from nervously shifting from one foot to the other, explaining, in public, under glaring lights, how they could muster no more than a D+ in Introduction to Logic, or a C- in Early Modern Comparative Literature.

Keep Karzai in the Loop

by Matt Jacobs

The United States seems poised to begin peace talks with the Taliban, and that worries Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Recently, Karzai's chief of staff declared that his government must be involved in negotiations and would oppose any secret deal between the Taliban and the Americans.It is easy to understand Karzai's desire to be part of any negotiated settlement of the conflict in his country, but what about the U.S. interest? Might secret, backdoor negotiations with the Taliban be useful for the United States?The experience of an earlier war may shed light on this question. Forty years ago the United States was trying to end the long and unpopular war in Vietnam. Although the conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan are very different, one aspect of the Paris Peace Talks at the end of the Vietnam War is similar to the problem facing American negotiators today: how to work with a sometimes-undependable ally.

Confessions of a Recovering Weapons Addict

by William J. Astore

Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to thirty years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Don't Ignore Electoral Fraud in Egypt

by Daniel Pipes

When Egypt's Lower House convened on Jan. 23, Islamists held 360 out of its 498 seats, or 72 percent. This astounding figure, however, reflects less the country's public opinion than it does a ploy by the ruling military leadership to remain in power.In a recent article ("Egypt's Sham Election," Dec. 6) we argued that just as Anwar El-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak in the past "tactically empowered Islamists as a foil to gain Western support, arms, and money," so do Mohamed Tantawi and his Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) "still play this tired old game." Mohamed ElBaradei left the presidential race complaining about its fraudulent quality.

1876: The Year When Things Went from Bad to Worse for Indians and Blacks

by William Loren Katz

As 2011 ended the U.S. Senate voted 92 to 6 for the McCain-Levin amendments [S 1867] to the National Defense Authorization Act.  In the name of fighting terrorism, an astounding majority of Democratic and Republican leaders granted unlimited authority to the president [and future presidents] and the Army to arrest anyone, citizen or foreigner, here or abroad, and imprison them in Poland, Pennsylvania, or Guantanamo or anywhere else—indefinitely.  Ninety-two of our Senators agreed the detained could be denied access to attorneys and loved ones, and “enhanced interrogation” rather than legal procedures would determine if they are guilty of terrorist plots.  True, some rigid constitutionalists and libertarians from Senator Rand Paul on the right to the ACLU on the left have condemned S 1867 as a threat to our core beliefs and democratic system.  But S 1867 swept through on the 235th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. 

Social Conservatism Isn’t “White”

by Jim Sleeper

There they go again: Republican candidates are saying things and sending signals that show that racism remains widespread, routine, hideous—and sometimes even laughable, when it strains to deny its own existence.  And, again, some of us white leftists and liberals are compounding the lunacy.  The best way to deal with racism is to document it clearly and forcefully without shouting or sneering about the knuckle-draggers who remain gripped by it, and to refrain from encouraging it by inflating its monstrosity.  The best of the civil rights movement understood this.  So did Obama in 2008.Instead of strategizing intelligently, however, some activists and writers display a moralistic, self-indulgent, tragically American innocence of the harsh truth that groups of people have always stigmatized other groups, often lethally.  To grasp this isn’t to let [the Republican presidential candidates] off the hook.  It’s to learn how to defeat racism, of which their “white” variant is our peculiar American curse.

What’s Japanese for “Locavore?” Oh, Never Mind.

by Jonathan Dresner

That Japanese agriculture is a political issue is no surprise.  As in the United States, agriculture is the recipient of political and economic support, is seen as both an economic engine and a strategic resource, and despite decades of technological and social change, is still viewed as a repository of historical and traditional values.

Obama's Osawatamie Speech Proves He's the Anti-TR

by Ira Chernus

"President Obama:  Hold Wall Street banks accountable by fully investigating the big bank fraud that caused the housing crisis."  When I read that call recently from MoveOn.org, I could have sworn I heard the ghost of Theodore Roosevelt cry out, “Bully!”  When TR went to Osawatamie, Kansas, to proclaim his New Nationalism, he made exactly the same demand:  “Every special interest is entitled to justice ...  the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.”

Ending the Palestinian "Right of Return"

by Daniel Pipes

Between 1967 and 1993, just a few hundred Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza won the right to live in Israel by marrying Israeli Arabs (who constitute nearly one-fifth of Israel's population) and acquiring Israeli citizenship.  Then the Oslo Accords offered a little-noted family-reunification provision that turned this trickle into a river:  137,000 residents of the Palestinian Authority (PA) moved to Israel in 1994-2002, some of them engaged in either sham or polygamous marriages. The Israeli Supreme Court building in Jerusalem.

Keynes and Hayek, Obama and the Republicans

by Walter Moss

Liberal economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich tell us that British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) “was right.”  In a December 2011 New York Times column, Krugman reminded us that Keynes stated that in hard economic times like the Depression (or, for Krugman, the present) the government should be stimulating the economy.  But instead in 2011 “our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem—a depressed economy and mass unemployment—worse.”  In earlier columns, Krugman had criticized the Obama administration for being insufficiently Keynesian and believed that the Obama economic stimulus package had been much too small.  In late December, however, Krugman wrote that “the good news, such as it is, is that President Obama has finally gone back to fighting against premature austerity—and he seems to be winning the political battle.  And one of these years we might actually end up taking Keynes’s advice, which is every bit as valid now as it was seventy-five years ago,” in the midst of the Depression.

"We're on a Destabilizing Planet": Interview with Tom Engelhardt

by David Austin Walsh

Tom Engelhardt is the creator and editor of The Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, former Senior Editor at Pantheon Books, and the author of numerous works on American foreign policy, including The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's and most recently The United States of Fear. I talked with Mr. Engelhardt over the phone about a wide range of issues, foreign and domestic.Thanks for taking the time to talk with HNN.  What's your reaction to the end of the Iraq War? Was the official end truly a meaningful milestone?

Will Pakistan’s Crisis Affect the U.S. in Afghanistan?

by Juan Cole

Pakistan is an important country and a key U.S. partner, and so it is bad news that it is lurching from political crisis to political crisis.  There is a crisis between the military and the civilian government.  There is a crisis between the military and the U.S. government.  There is a crisis between the Supreme Court and the other two branches of government.  There was a big Taliban bombing in Pakistan the day before yesterday.  And, the Zardari government may fall at any time, either to clear a path to new elections or because of yet another military coup.Pakistan is the world’s sixth most populous country, just after Brazil.  It has only the 46th largest gross domestic product (in nominal terms).  But it has a stockpile of nuclear warheads, and has perhaps the seventh largest army in the world, after the U.S., Russia, China, India and the two Koreas.  It is a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid, though some of that has been put on hold by an angry U.S. Congress.

South Sudan, Israel's New (Troubled) Ally

by Daniel Pipes

It's not every day that the leader of a brand-new country makes his maiden foreign voyage to Jerusalem, capital of the most besieged country in the world, but Salva Kiir, president of South Sudan, accompanied by his foreign and defense ministers, did just that in late December.  Israel's President Shimon Peres hailed his visit as a "moving and historic moment."  The visit spurred talk of South Sudan locating its embassy in Jerusalem, making it the only government anywhere in the world to do so.This unusual development results from an unusual story.Today's Sudan took shape in the nineteenth century when the Ottoman Empire controlled its northern regions and tried to conquer the southern ones.  The British, ruling out of Cairo, established the outlines of the modern state in 1898 and for the next fifty years ruled separately the Muslim north and Christian-animist south.  In 1948, however, succumbing to northern pressure, the British merged the two administrations in Khartoum under northern control, making Muslims dominant in Sudan and Arabic its official language.