GENDER APARTHEID

Plight Of Afghans Going ‘From Bad To Worse’


A family collects water from a river in a village in Kunar province, Afghanistan.

 Photo Credit: UNICEF/Muzamel Azizi

September 10, 2026
By UN News


Key Takeaways:

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk says life in Afghanistan has worsened since the Taliban returned in 2021, with poverty rising and daily rights abuses while global attention fades.

Restrictions hit education, work, movement, and public life; the UN cites arrests over dress, beards, and music, plus media crackdowns, punishment of former opponents and minorities, and at least 449 corporal punishments in the first half of the year.

Women face what Türk called “gender apartheid,” including more than two million barred from secondary and higher education and exclusion from UN premises; more than 400,000 Afghans have been forcibly returned as humanitarian need remains huge and aid shrinks.

Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the plight of Afghans has only deteriorated, with millions impoverished while authorities violate basic human rights daily.

“Today, the plight of many in Afghanistan is going from bad to worse,” stressed the UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk.

“Yet, it seems the world has forgotten and abandoned the people of Afghanistan to a plight deepening by the day,” he told journalists in Geneva. “The silence is deafening.”

Scaling up the oppression

Mr. Türk deplored the ongoing restrictions cutting severely into education, employment, freedom of movement, and access to public life.

Notably, both women and men are being arrested by the Taliban’s Office for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, primarily for alleged violations of strict dress codes, beard length, and the playing of, or listening to, music.

Human rights violations against former adversaries of the Taliban during the long war that followed the allied invasion of 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks on the US and restrictions against religious minorities – including Shi’a and Ismaili communities – continue to be documented.

Censorship of the media, temporary closures of media outlets and arrests of journalists also continue.

At least 449 men and women were subjected to corporal punishment by the de facto authorities in the first half of the year, according to the UN.

‘Gender apartheid’

Women, in particular, are facing the brunt of the Taliban rule.

Since 2021, over two million Afghan girls and women have been denied access to secondary and higher education.

Fresh decrees issued by the de facto authorities this year also make it more difficult for a woman to separate from a spouse and implicitly authorise child marriage and violence against women and children.

Women are also being excluded from politics. Mr. Türk condemned the “absolute absence of women in any public decision-making fora.”

A year ago, Taliban leaders restricted Afghan women – including UN staff, contractors and visitors – from entering the United Nations’ own premises across the country.

“Such restrictions imposed on women and girls – which amount to gender apartheid – have no place in any society,” the OHCHR chief underscored.
Forced return

At the same time, Afghans who had fled to neighbouring countries are facing growing hostility from their hosts abroad while forced returns continue.

According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) more than 400,000 Afghans have been forcibly returned, mainly from Iran and Pakistan, but also from Türkiye, Tajikistan, and EU Member States.

“Many are forced to enter a country where they have never even stepped foot, and where they will face deep poverty, and inadequate food, clean water, and access to healthcare, education and employment,” Mr. Türk said.


He pointed to the estimated 21.9 million people, or about 45 per cent of the population, who require humanitarian aid, while foreign aid inflows are “[trickling] dry”.

“I implore all States to reconsider their actions, and to put the lives of the suffering population first,” he stressed.

25 Years of War Was the Exact Wrong Response to 9/11

Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy and start rebuilding our country.


Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers walk toward reporters after conferring together at the President’s ranch August 23, 2004 in Crawford Texas.

(Photo by Duane A. Laverty-Pool/Getty Images)



Medea Benjamin

Nicolas J.S. Davies
Sep 09, 2026

Common Dreams

The lesson of 9/11 should be that war is not the answer to any of the problems facing the United States. After inflicting violence and chaos on country after country for twenty-five years in a “global war on terror” that has evolved into a Zionist genocide and a revived Cold War against Russia and China, the widespread public opposition to Trump’s war on Iran suggests that most Americans have finally learned that lesson.

Unfortunately, powerful sections of our corrupt business and political elites have not.

Most Americans old enough to remember September 11, 2001, can still recall the horrifying images played endlessly on our TV screens as the scale of the mass murder became clear. But we also remember something else: the sinking feeling that the hopes and dreams of billions of people, in the US and around the world, would be pushed to the back-burner for the foreseeable future, as our leaders and corporate media all too predictably embraced a new agenda of revenge, fear-mongering, jingoism and military violence.

As Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks...

We found out later that only hours after the attacks—less than six hours after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and barely five hours after the Pentagon was hit—the planning for America’s military response to the 9/11 massacre was already under way.

At 2:40 pm, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld convened a meeting at the Pentagon. Notes taken by Undersecretary Stephen Cambone, later obtained by CBS News, recorded Rumsfeld demanding the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.”—meaning Saddam Hussein—“at the same time” as Osama bin Laden. Then came the chilling instruction: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

Twenty-five years later, we can look back and see how the US government used September 11 to unleash a crusade of violence, war crimes and chaos across the world. Experts like Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz and military historian Michael Howard warned from the beginning that declaring a “war on terror” made no sense and would make matters worse.

They were right, of course. But when the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report for 2004 showed an unprecedented increase in global terrorism following the US invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice simply cancelled and discontinued the report, replacing it with a new one with different criteria to prevent comparison with previous years.

But, as Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks, and for the remilitarization of the United States after the small reduction in its military spending after the end of the Cold War.

Total US military spending for the past 25 years has exceeded $21 trillion (in 2024 dollars), surpassing the combined spending of the other 18 largest military powers in the world. During that time, China has built a whole new civilization and infrastructure, and leapfrogged the US economy to become the world leader in clean energy, high-speed rail and technological sectors in which the US was once preeminent.

Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for these counter-productive choices, and the appalling human costs of these wars on the countries the United States has attacked, bombed or invaded make this an especially atrocious way to squander our nation’s wealth.

The history of the United States during this period calls to mind an old Greek myth. Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia, asked the Oracle at Delphi what would happen if he invaded Persia. The Oracle told him, “If you cross the Halys river, a great empire will fall.” Encouraged, Croesus launched the invasion. But he lost the war, and the empire that fell was his own.

In pursuing their global imperial ambitions, our leaders and ruling classes have discounted and betrayed the real sources of America’s prosperity and security: the well-being of the American people and peaceful relations with our neighbors around the world.

They have led us into war, poverty and extreme inequality, and hollowed out a system of government that was slowly becoming more democratic. At home, decades of political struggle by labor, civil rights and other social movements produced enormous advances, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, major investments in public infrastructure and education, and a highly progressive tax system—with the top income tax rate at 91% until 1963—that helped finance those public goods and narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Contrary to the “End of History” theory embraced by many policymakers after the Cold War, and Margaret Thatcher’s famous insistence that “there is no alternative” to the extreme neoliberal capitalism that she and Ronald Reagan ushered in, societies always have political and economic alternatives. It is only a transparently self-serving choice by America’s corrupt ruling classes that saddles us with a system that keeps all decision-making power in their own hands in order to build their own wealth to the detriment of the country we all share.

We can see one alternative today in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing a different set of priorities: expanding free childcare, making major investments in affordable housing, improving public transportation, and freezing rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. Electoral politics can be part of the solution, but only if it reflects what ordinary people really want, instead of limited choices between oligarchic “lesser evils.”

Americans are demanding a renewal of social progress, with universal healthcare, quality public education, and all the things we need but can’t afford as long as this bloated, destructive war machine remains our government’s top priority. As Martin Luther King lamented in 1967, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

Twenty-five years is a long time to keep moving in the wrong direction, especially when that direction involves endless war and the destruction of other countries. We are a long way from where most Americans would like our country to be. But we have a pretty good idea of what is wrong and what we need to do:

Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy. Start rebuilding our country, and replace war and militarism with cooperation and problem solving. Take public ownership and responsibility for things we all need and use, like education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and utilities. Abolish ICE, and other militarized institutions that waste our national resources and do not serve the public good. Insist that the military be scaled back to its legitimate role of defending the United States against a possible, but very unlikely, foreign military attack.

If we have truly learned the lesson of the past twenty-five years, then we must translate it into policies that reflect that. The real test is not whether we can finally see what went wrong after 9/11. It is whether we are able to change course.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Medea Benjamin
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas J.S. Davies, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022. Other books include, "Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran" (2018); "Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection" (2016); "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control" (2013); "Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart" (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) "Stop the Next War Now" (2005).

Full Bio >

Nicolas J.S. Davies
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist and a researcher with CODEPINK. He is the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Full Bio >

Revealed: The shocking reason Trump is dismantling America’s spy agencies

U.S. President Donald Trump and John Ratcliffe, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), speak as they depart after a Cabinet meeting at Camp David in Thurmont, Maryland, U.S., July 31, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard/Pool

Sarah K. Burris

September 09, 2026

ALTERNET

As the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches, President Donald Trump has decided to overhaul the post-9/11 overhaul of the intelligence community, which he has seen as his enemy for so long.

Trump has held a notable hostility toward the intel community since his first term, when he learned that he was included in investigations around 2016 Russian meddling in the election. Trump has a belief that officials investigated him, specifically, and leaked damaging information about him. That paranoia that the "deep state" is quietly leaking things about him and his Cabinet has only deepened in his second term.

National Public Radio reported on Wednesday that Trump's attitudes toward the intelligence community are now leading to changes that don't make the U.S. safer; rather, they make Trump feel better personally.

Ex-CIA officer John Sipher told NPR that when he was working at the agency, he spent much of his time focusing on Russia, but after the U.S. was attacked in 2001, the community shifted to crafting new technologies, expanding data collection, improving communications and using drones and other tools to track terrorist networks.

He explained that all of those things helped in locating Osama bin Laden and bringing down al-Qaeda and ISIL.

"Frankly, tracking and hunting terrorists, finding people, finding a needle in a haystack was not something that we trained for," said Sipher.

When the Department of Homeland Security was created, it became one of the largest departments in the U.S. government, second only to the Pentagon.

Trump appears readying to dismantle that. He portrays national security and intelligence officials as corrupt actors working against him. Critics say that after decades of work, Trump is tearing it down without any plan to replace it. He's now installing loyalists with little experience into key positions, including Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, Kash Patel at the FBI and John Ratcliffe at the CIA. They are all more likely to tell Trump what he wants to hear rather than provide an independent assessment.

John Feeley, the former US ambassador to Panama, told The Guardian last month about an incident in which he first entered Trump's office, where the president demanded to know what Panama did for the United States. Feeley walked through all the ways that the East Coast is able to purchase affordable goods because the Panama Canal has ships that can shuttle goods from one hemisphere to the other more easily.

He recalled Trump's response was "Huh... Who knew?"

"I kid you not, man," said Feeley. "And that's one of the things that contributed to my — I mean, all joking aside, that contributed to my unease about continuing to be his personal representative. This is a man who is so fundamentally ignorant, who is surrounded by people who are not ignorant, who in their presentation toward a region that I dedicated about 30 years of my life to have such a fundamentally superficial view."

The report mentioned Steven Cash, who abandoned government employment after he said Trump turned work of career officials against Americans.

One issue is that Trump has essentially eliminated the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While someone is there, the one who briefs Trump is the CIA director. So, instead of using the person who coordinates 18 separate intelligence agencies, Trump wants his CIA guy.

"Counterterrorism is getting second fiddle to the threats from China and Russia, and the current administration's focus on the border and narco-trafficking means a shift of resources to the Americas," said former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos. "I am afraid that counter-terrorism will not be a priority until a mass casualty event, and then it very much will be once again," Sipher says one of the most damaging ideas that's taken root is that career intelligence officials actively take sides in partisan politics.

"We have allowed our partisan anger, and specifically the Trump administration, to create this narrative that there's a deep state and that the intelligence services work for one party or another. I think it's a real danger," he said.

But the damage has already been inflicted after Trump alienated the world with his trade war, tough talk and bombastic rants online.

"The CIA in particular relies or depends on intelligence sharing with friendly and not so friendly foreign intelligence services," Weiner said. "It it is still only 20,000 people, and they cannot cover the entire world. They need the British. They need the Dutch. They need the Saudis. They need help."

After Sept. 11, help was easy to come by, he said. That has changed, however.

After 9/11, the ‘War on Terror’ Was a War of Terror

The crusade that George W. Bush launched 25 years ago to “rid the world of evil” only compounded it.

A fiery blasts rocks the World Trade Center after being hit by two planes September 11, 2001 in New York City.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

LONG READ

Norman Solomon
Sep 09, 2026

Common Dreams

Three days after terrorists killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush stood behind a pulpit at the Washington National Cathedral and spoke to a nation in shock. “Our responsibility to history is already clear,” he proclaimed, “to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” The vow was, of course, preposterous. Yet the “war on terror” that followed was scarcely more realistic.

“Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic,” retired US Army General William Odom told C-SPAN viewers in 2002. “It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.” But the American military crusade became more about persisting than winning. The ultraviolent momentum became its own reason. The destructive search for enemies created more. As years went by and the “war on terror” label faded, US warfare was so normal in so many places that it no longer needed a name or much of a rationale.

But 25 years ago, the impulse to avenge the horrors of 9/11 was instant. Fear and rage blended into high octane for war machinery. Suddenly, overwhelming public emotions were fully in sync with the psychology of a military-industrial complex set for large-scale killing.

Even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date.

None of the 19 hijackers were Afghan, and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s ties were much tighter with Saudi Arabia, but his presence in Afghanistan put that country in the Pentagon’s gunsights. The question in US media was not about whether, but when, to attack. The answer came on October 7 when American missiles began to explode in Afghanistan. Hours later, a Gallup poll found that “90 percent of Americans approve of the United States taking such military action, while just 5 percent are opposed, and another 5 percent are unsure.”

The air war remained quite popular in the United States. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held daily live televised briefings that catapulted him to national adulation. A pattern set in, taking for granted that American warfare was beneficent in intent and benign in meaningful impact. People dying under American bombs and less directly didn’t count for much. “The targeting capabilities, and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck, and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see,” Rumsfeld asserted. And he added, “The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of.”

Rumsfeld’s style went over big. “Everyone is genuflecting before the Pentagon powerhouse,” exclaimed the Washington Post’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, who called Rumsfeld “America’s new rock star.” That winter, after the Taliban government fell, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press program congratulated Rumsfeld on the air: “Sixty-nine years old and you’re America’s stud.”

The war in Iraq, launched with a March 2003 invasion, relied on massive air power and more than 150,000 US ground troops. The Saddam Hussein dictatorship fell quickly, but the promised “cakewalk” turned into year after year of combat and slaughter. Mainstream US media outlets were more than comfortable with above-it-all bombing that signified American air prowess. But the toll of American deaths and severe injuries gradually depleted enthusiasm as soldiers were called back for two, three or even more tours of duty. For many, the images of glory days turned into real-life nightmares.

The ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t.

President Bush could not accept defeat in Iraq, and later Barack Obama could not countenance defeat in Afghanistan. Early in his presidency, Obama—in deed and word—made the “war on terror” expressly bipartisan. Less than a year after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in late 2009, the American troop level in Afghanistan reached 100,000, triple the number when he had entered the White House. During a visit to Bagram Air Base near Kabul, Obama provided the service members with star-spangled oratory that could be heard as uplifting or perhaps macabre: “I’ve been humbled by your sacrifice in the solemn homecoming of flag-draped coffins at Dover, to the headstones in section 60 at Arlington, where the fallen from this war rest in peace alongside the fellow heroes of America’s story.”

In effect, even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date. Through it all, the ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t.

* * *

Faraway uses of Pentagon air power had human consequences that hardly registered on political scales back home. For officialdom, tech innovations like drones were unalloyed marvels. The people who experienced terror had no voices, no faces, no names. On the rare occasions when that wasn’t the case, general interest was scant. After seven months in Taliban captivity, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from rugged terrain in Pakistan and later recounted what it was like to have US drones constantly hovering overhead: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”

The proclaimed war on terror had also become a war of terror.

A few days into his presidency, Obama sent Predator drones into Pakistan, killing three children and a dozen adults. A week later, a former “whiz kid” at the Pentagon during escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Pierre Sprey, appeared on the PBS program hosted by Bill Moyers. Sprey saw where US officials were headed with their air war. “I’d be astonished if one in five people they kill or wound is in fact a militant,” he said. “You can’t tell with a camera or an infrared sensor or something whether somebody’s a Taliban…. Most likely, you’re relying on some Afghani of unknown veracity and unknown motivation and who may, may very well be trying to settle a blood feud rather than give you good information.” But, Sprey added, “bombing is always politically popular, relative to sending infantry and killing our boys.”

Obama officials were enamored with the American air war, in spite of evidence that it was routinely killing many bystanders. In 2022, Phyllis Bennis at the Institute for Policy Studies offered this assessment: “The so-called ‘global war on terror’ has, from its origins, been characterized by attacks by US Special Forces, by airstrikes, by armed drones, and more, that routinely kill far more civilians than the targets identified on the ‘kill lists’ prepared by presidents and top White House officials. The routine recitation of ‘there is no military solution to terrorism’ has always been an anodyne rhetorical ploy, never an actual guide to what actions might actually work to change the conditions that give rise to terrorism.”

Ironically and tragically, the conditions giving rise to terrorism included the US war waged in the name of ending it. The process was foreseeable. In 1998, the Pakistani-American political scientist Eqbal Ahmad wrote: “A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.”

Killing from the skies fueled desires for retribution. “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” Pakistani photographer Noor Behram said in 2011. For three years, he had been documenting the immediate aftermath of drone attacks in the mountainous Waziristan region near the Afghan border. “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.” As a result, Behram said, “The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack.”

Many thousands of miles away, military personnel in the US were peering at blurry images on computer screens and firing the drone missiles. “The truth is that we could not differentiate between armed fighters and farmers, women or children,” former tech sergeant Lisa Ling recalled. For several years, she had trained Air National Guard members on how to operate Air Force drones. Ling was among the drone whistleblowers who went public during the terror war’s second decade. One of them, the young intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, spent nearly three years in prison because he disclosed facts about the drone program’s human toll. “With drone warfare, sometimes nine out of ten people killed are innocent,” he said. “You have to kill part of your conscience to do your job. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated? The thing I feared most was the temptation not to question it. So I contacted an investigative reporter… and told him I had something the American people needed to know.”

Hale provided The Intercept with classified documents that led to a landmark expose in October 2015. It reported, “Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the US has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.”

Early in his second term, at the National Defense University, Obama gave a much-ballyhooed speech that addressed downsides of the terror war, then in its twelfth year. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he said. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” Unlike the men who immediately preceded and followed him in the Oval Office, Obama seemed aware that perpetual war had negative effects on US society. Yet he didn’t proceed to do much about it. During the 44 months that followed his speech, through his last year in office, Obama maintained bombing of Afghanistan at about half the rate of his first term while drastically escalating the attacks in Iraq and Syria, with 30,743 bombs and missiles dropped on those two countries in 2016 alone.

* * *

Like Obama, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden ordered air strikes on Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. In his second term, Trump has widened US bombing missions to also include Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela along with targeting nonmilitary boats and killing more than 225 civilians during the last year in international waters.

The withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan in the late summer of 2021 seemed to mark a turn away from nonstop warfare. “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war,” President Biden declared weeks later at the United Nations. He added, “We’ve turned the page.” But actually, America was bound into a high volume of war. The “war on terror” was morphing and continuing on several continents. In fact, during the same month as Biden’s UN speech, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released a new report documenting that “counterterrorism operations have become more widespread in recent years.” The project’s co-director, Catherine Lutz, said: “The war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful… and the war continues in over 80 countries.”

Throughout the last 25 years, since the first missiles struck Afghanistan, a racial aspect of the terror war has been hidden in plain sight.

The day after the Hamas-led attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations stood outside the Security Council chambers and said, “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” During the next six weeks, the New York Times later revealed, Israel “routinely” used 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza “in areas it designated safe for civilians.” Within nine months, Reuters reported, the large quantities of munitions supplied to Israel by the Biden administration included “more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs.” Speaking to the UN General Assembly as the war in Gaza neared the end of its second year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We’re wiping out the terror regime of Hamas and ensuring that its savagery will never threaten Israel again.” By then, the US government had provided more than $21 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organizations Physicians for Human Rights—Israel and B’Tselem unequivocally concluded that what has happened in Gaza is genocide. It was enabled by the United States.

Throughout the last 25 years, since the first missiles struck Afghanistan, a racial aspect of the terror war has been hidden in plain sight. While institutional racism is widely understood to exist inside the United States, an unexamined assumption is that its pernicious aspects stop at the water’s edge. But public discourse about the “war on terror” has eluded a fact well worth pondering: virtually every man, woman and child killed by Pentagon firepower in this century has been a person of color. This is not to say that they were attacked because of their racial identity. But racial biases in the US, unconscious and otherwise, have made it politically easier to launch and sustain wars bringing horrors to their lives.

Current findings from the Costs of War Project include: “An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died ‘indirectly,’ as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.”

In foreign countries, the overall “reverberating effects” have crushed countless lives. However, the only casualties of the “war on terror” that have really resonated in US politics are American losses. Yet many of the casualties are far from obvious. While “over 7,053 US service members died in the post-9/11 wars,” the Costs of War Project notes, “at least four times as many US service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars died by suicide than in combat.” In addition, “An estimated 8,189 contractors for the US military died during the post-9/11 wars. Foreign workers for US contracting firms often do not have their deaths recorded or compensated.”

Such figures don’t include the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The Veterans Administration now says that 15 percent of those wars’ veterans were suffering from PTSD “in the last year” and 29 percent “at some point in life.” Meanwhile, traumatic brain injury (TBI) from the two wars often afflicts veterans who were violently jolted by explosions and other wartime events. Analyzing Pentagon data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that “more than 450,000 US service members were diagnosed with a TBI from 2000 to 2021.” Four years ago, the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA published an in-depth study of TBI among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. “Our study suggests that post-9/11 military veterans face a higher mortality burden across multiple causes of death than the total US population,” the study said. “We also found that exposure to moderate to severe TBI was associated with even higher mortality rates and excess mortality from accident, suicide, cancer, CVD [cardiovascular disease], homicide, and other causes.”

* * *

One day in mid-December 2002, three months before the “shock and awe” bombardment of the city began, I sat at a picnic table in a Baghdad park with the middle-aged Iraqi man who was my driver. There was no one around, no walls or fixtures that might conceal listening devices. He said that he wished Iraq had no oil, because then there would be no reason to fear an invasion.

Whatever people’s beliefs about the goals behind US warfare during the last quarter-century, there can be no doubt of its immense profitability.

During the last 25 years, while plenty of public discourse has faulted policymakers for tactical mistakes and dubious judgment in war policies, more nefarious motives have received little attention. The rallying cry “No blood for oil” was common among those actively opposing war in Iraq but a nonstarter in mainstream media and politics. “The slogan is neither intelligent nor honorable,” Washington Post columnist George Will said in a commentary for ABC News shortly before the Iraq invasion began. “Intelligent people can honorably differ about the wisdom and morality of war against Iraq. But we should be able to agree that oil, an economic motive, is not driving US policy.”

Four years later, General John Abizaid, former head of US Central Command and military operations in Iraq, said: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.”

In his memoir, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrote: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Before becoming Defense secretary, Senator Chuck Hagel said in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

Whatever people’s beliefs about the goals behind US warfare during the last quarter-century, there can be no doubt of its immense profitability. The start of the Afghanistan War in October 2001 began supercharged bonanzas for Pentagon contractors. The 20 years of that war overlapped with upward of $2 trillion in government funds going to the biggest contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman—an increase of 188 percent. “Those five firms spent over $1.1 billion on lobbying between 2001 and 2021,” Quincy Institute senior advisor Eli Clifton wrote. “That number seems like a staggering sum to spend on influencing policymakers but it may have been the most financially prudent decision these companies have made in the past 20 years.”

Investing in war stocks was likewise prudent for stock-market players. As the war in Afghanistan came to a close, journalist Jon Schwarz did the math: “If you purchased $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001—the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295. This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613. That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.”

* * *

The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact. Midway through Trump’s first term, the Democratic Party’s leaders in the House and Senate saluted when the commander in chief proposed an 11 percent Pentagon budget increase over two years. “In our negotiations, Congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense,” Representative Nancy Pelosi boasted. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” Senator Chuck Schumer proclaimed. “US taxpayers spend far more on the military and war than most people realize,” says a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight, which documents that “there are several ways to calculate the true cost of our military” and “all add up to at least $1.5 trillion.” A two-year 11 percent military spending increase now looks almost dovish in comparison to the outlays on the near horizon. Even without enactment of Trump’s proposed half-a-trillion-dollar increase for the 2027 fiscal year military budget, the status quo is deeply mired in what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” If budgets are moral documents, America has been plunging into one moral abyss after another.

The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact.

With a very different style, Donald Trump’s basic lawless approach to international conflict is akin to Bush’s “war on terror” approach. Rhetoric aside, the actions have been clear: if the USA wants to attack another country, it will. This year’s unprovoked bombings of Iran signify how America’s foreign policy comes full spiral.

The crusade that George W. Bush launched to “rid the world of evil” only compounded it. Now, as the nation’s military juggernaut advances, the mindsets that propel it are in dire need of direct challenge.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
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Nuclear generation hits fresh record as Asia drives expansion

By Mark Buckton in Taipei September 8, 2026

Global nuclear power generation reached a new record in 2025, with Asia accounting for much of the increase as China, India, South Korea and Japan expand or revive their nuclear programmes.

Nuclear reactors worldwide generated 2,702 TWh of electricity in 2025, up 35 TWh from 2,667 TWh in 2024, according to the World Nuclear Association’s World Nuclear Outlook Report 2026. Nuclear supplied about 9% of global electricity.

The report, published on September 7, says nuclear generation has recovered steadily since the declines that followed the Fukushima Daiichi accident in March, 2011. The strongest growth has come from Asia, where nuclear output was about two-and-a-half times higher in 2025 than in 2012, according to WNA.

The figures underline the increasingly important role of Asian markets in the global nuclear industry. China alone generated 448.4 TWh of nuclear electricity in 2025, equivalent to 5% of its electricity generation, according to WNA data. China had 64 operable reactors with 64GW of net capacity and a further 37 reactors, representing about 42GW, under construction. Another 44 reactors were classified as planned.

China was also the main source of new construction activity in 2025. Eleven reactors started construction worldwide, nine of them in China and two in Russia, according to the World Nuclear Outlook Report. Three reactors were connected to the grid during the year, including one in China and one in India. Seven reactors were permanently shut down.

The pace has continued into 2026. Four Chinese reactors had been connected to the grid by August 1, including Taipingling 1, San'ao 1, Taipingling 2 and Changjiang-3, according to the WNA reactor database. Construction has also started on several additional Chinese units, including Xuwei 1, Jinqimen 2, Taipingling 4 and Zhaoyuan 2.

The Zhaoyuan development is part of a six-unit project in Shandong province. The first safety-related concrete for the second unit was poured on September 5, according to World Nuclear News.

China's position contrasts with many mature nuclear markets, where ageing fleets and plant closures have limited growth. WNA identifies China, Russia and South Korea as the world's nuclear "pacesetters", reflecting their continuing programmes of serial reactor construction.

South Korea remains another major Asian nuclear market. Its 26 operating reactors generated 175.5 TWh in 2025, supplying 31% of national electricity generation, according to WNA. Four reactors with a combined gross capacity of 5.7GW were under construction.

South Korea has also retained support for new nuclear construction. President Lee Jae-myung confirmed in January that the government would proceed with two new reactors under the country's 11th Basic Plan.

Japan is also rebuilding its nuclear generation after the post-Fukushima retreat. Its reactors generated 94.7 TWh in 2025, supplying 9.4% of electricity generation, according to WNA data. Japan had 33 operable reactors at the latest count, with two reactors classified as under construction.

India is another important source of growth. Its reactors generated 49.1 TWh in 2025, equivalent to 3.2% of electricity generation. The country has 24 operable reactors and eight under construction, with a further 14 classified as planned.

The Asian expansion extends beyond the region's largest economies. Pakistan generated 23.7 TWh from nuclear power in 2025, supplying 16.5% of electricity generation, according to WNA data. It had one reactor under construction and six operational. Bangladesh, meanwhile, had two reactors classified as under construction, although it did not yet have nuclear generation in 2025.

The broader regional pipeline is substantial. WNA says about three-quarters of reactors under construction worldwide are in Asia. It currently counts about 150 operable reactors in the region, around 55 under construction and firm plans for another 60-70, with many more projects proposed.

The expansion is increasingly concentrated in countries with established nuclear supply chains. China, South Korea and India are developing domestic engineering and manufacturing capabilities alongside their reactor fleets. WNA says this can help the region move from individual projects towards repeated construction programmes.

WNA says serial construction of standardised reactor designs can make project delivery more predictable and allow utilities, manufacturers and contractors to retain expertise between projects. China is cited as an example of this approach, with Zhangzhou 2 taking 62 months to build, compared with 163 months for India's Rajasthan 7.

The existing global fleet is also performing strongly. The average nuclear capacity factor rose to 83.7% in 2025, according to WNA. The association found no general deterioration in performance among reactors operating for more than 40 years.

That strengthens the case for extending the operating lives of existing plants while new reactors are built. WNA says maintaining and extending the existing fleet is among the fastest and most cost-effective ways to secure additional low-carbon generation.

For its forward-looking projection, the new report uses global operating nuclear capacity of 423GWe on a gross basis. It projects that capacity could reach 1,457GWe by 2050 if national targets are achieved, existing reactors continue operating within the assumptions of the report, and reactors currently under construction, planned or proposed are delivered.

That would exceed the tripling goal endorsed by 38 countries since the COP28 climate summit by more than 200GWe, according to WNA.

The project pipeline has strengthened since the previous outlook. Capacity under construction increased from 76GWe to 82GWe, while planned capacity rose from 107GWe to 114GWe. Proposed capacity declined from 294GWe to 289GWe and potential capacity from 24GWe to 13GWe.

The shift is significant because it suggests some nuclear ambitions are moving closer to identifiable projects. But the WNA warns that more than 550GWe of capacity needed to meet national targets has yet to be associated with projects classified as under construction, planned or proposed.

The challenge is therefore less about stated ambition than delivery. Financing, regulation, manufacturing capacity, skilled labour, fuel supplies and project management will determine how much of the proposed expansion actually reaches the grid.

Asia is likely to remain central to that process. China is already the world's largest nuclear construction market, while India, South Korea and Japan are maintaining or expanding their programmes. Pakistan and Bangladesh are adding further projects to a regional market that has become the principal centre of global nuclear construction.

For the industry, the 2025 generation record therefore represents more than a rebound in output. It reflects a structural shift towards Asia in both nuclear generation and new-build activity.

WNA's forecast remains conditional. Achieving 1,457GWe by 2050 would require governments and industry to turn national targets into sustained construction programmes. The report says construction start rates would ultimately need to rise to around six times current levels to deliver the tripling ambition.

For now, the evidence is clearest in Asia. The region is producing more nuclear electricity, commissioning more reactors and starting more construction than most other parts of the world. China remains the dominant market, but the expansion also encompasses South Korea, India, Japan and emerging programmes in countries including Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The record set in 2025 is therefore closely linked to the region's longer-term build-out. The WNA's projections point to China and India among the major sources of future capacity growth, alongside France, Russia and the US.

Eiffel Tower reopens following staff strike after female employees 'made invisible' for Hindu group visit

Copyright Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

By Gavin Blackburn

Published on 08/09/2026 - 

The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) Hindu temple in Paris released a statement apologising for "any pain or inconvenience caused."

The Eiffel Tower reopened on Tuesday after staff staged a walk-out the day before over the removal of women colleagues during a visit by a Hindu religious group which later apologised.

The operating company that runs the Paris landmark, SETE, acknowledged that the Hindu delegation had requested the visit be organised so as to limit "interactions with women" and said that "these conditions should not have been accepted."

It said the landmark would open its doors again following a meeting between staff and management.

The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) spiritual movement apologised for "any pain or inconvenience caused" by the incident.

"To the best of our knowledge, at no point was anyone prevented access to the Eiffel Tower," the organisation wrote on X.

"Due to the size of our delegation, the visit was arranged in conjunction with the Eiffel Tower team at the start of normal operating hours to avoid disrupting or inconveniencing others."

Fireworks and drones illuminate the Eiffel Tower in Paris on the eve of Bastille Day celebrations, 13 July, 2026 AP Photo

Eiffel Tower staff said in a statement that it condemned "professional instructions that led to female employees being sidelined, replaced and made invisible because of their sex" during the visit by the delegation.

"Instructions were given to female employees of the Eiffel Tower and to female employees of contractors to make themselves invisible in order to welcome this delegation," the staff said in their statement, adding they were shocked to have been put in such a situation.

"Some were asked to leave their posts and withdraw to other areas. In some posts they were replaced by men. And all female employees were instructed not to go through or cross certain areas while the delegation was present."

Paris' Mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, promised an investigation "as soon as possible."

Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of the National Assembly, condemned the incident on Monday.

Related

"I refuse to accept that women should be told to step aside to meet the demands of foreign visitors," she said.

"Welcoming others never means giving up our values. In France, women are fully present in public life. No one tells them to become invisible there."

The Eiffel Tower's website said the landmark was closed on Monday due to "exceptional circumstances."

It advised visitors with tickets to check their emails and apologised for the inconvenience.

Eiffel Tower closes as staff strike after female employees 'made invisible' for Hindu group visit

By Nathan Rennolds

Published on 07/09/2026 - EURONEWS

The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) Hindu temple in Paris has released a statement apologising for "any pain or inconvenience caused."

Staff at the Eiffel Tower staged a walkout on Monday, forcing the closure of the iconic Parisian landmark after female employees were said to have been moved out of sight during the visit of a Hindu religious group.

The row began after the visit of around 100 people linked to the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) Hindu movement, which inaugurated a new temple in France over the weekend.

Diane Davoine, a union representative, told French TV that female workers had been "moved away from their workstations as the delegation passed by" during a visit on Saturday.

Eiffel Tower employees have condemned in a statement what they described as "professional instructions that led to female employees being sidelined, replaced and made invisible because of their sex."

SETE, the company that runs the tower, has acknowledged that the Hindu delegation requested the trip be organised so as to limit "interactions with women," adding that "these conditions should not have been accepted."

In a statement released on Monday evening, the BAPS Hindu temple in Paris said it took the concerns raised "very seriously" and apologised for "any pain or inconvenience caused."

"Due to the size of our delegation, the visit was arranged in conjunction with the Eiffel Tower team at the start of normal opening hours to avoid disrupting or inconveniencing others," it said.

"To the best of our knowledge, at no point was anyone prevented access to the Eiffel Tower," it continued, adding that it believed in the "universal values of mutual respect and service."

In a post on X, Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said he was "aware of the outcry among the employees of the Eiffel Tower" and that it was "unacceptable" that such conditions were agreed to.

"These are not my values, nor are they the values that the Eiffel Tower should uphold, where everyone must be able to move about and act freely, without distinction between women and men," he wrote, adding that an investigation into the incident would be launched.

Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of the National Assembly, has also condemned the incident.

"I refuse to accept that women should be told to step aside to meet the demands of foreign visitors," she said. "Welcoming others never means giving up our values. In France, women are fully present in public life. No one tells them to become invisible there."

The Eiffel Tower's website says the landmark is closed on Monday due to "exceptional circumstances."

It advises visitors with tickets to check their emails and apologised for the inconvenience.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Hinduism Is Fascism

The Real Elites Vs. The Ruling Elites – OpEd

September 6, 2026
 MISES
By Ryan McMaken

Key Takeaways:

The essay’s core claim: every state is run by elites who control coercion—“rule by the people” is a myth. Following Pareto, “elite” here means skill at organizing power, not virtue. Monarchs inherit violence that worked; democratic politicians excel at voters, coalitions, and using the state against rivals.

It splits economic elites by regime. In a mostly free market they rise by serving customers. Under heavy intervention they rise by partnering with the state—bailouts, monopolies, easy money. 2008 is the exhibit: Citicorp, AIG, JPMorgan, and Fed mortgage-bond buys, plus contractors such as Musk and Thiel, are cast as politically sheltered, not market-proven.

The conclusion: intervention fuses money and politics. Both sides tell stories (mandate of heaven, “will of the people,” “the market loves us”). Real elites, the author says, earn voluntary support in markets, families, and churches; those who rise by force and tax-and-spend are “counterfeit.”

Always and everywhere, political institutions are controlled by elites. It doesn’t matter if the regime type is democratic or monarchical. It doesn’t matter if there is a written constitution or not. All political institutions—and certainly every sovereign state—are run by a group of elites who control the means of coercion.The myth of “rule by the people” is precisely that: a myth.

But this leaves a big question open: who are the elites? Wilfredo Pareto, that pioneer of Italian elite theory, convincingly suggests that elites are simply those people who are most skilled in their respective fields. Being skilled does not suggest any sort of virtue or beauty, of course, and we cannot assume that any member of the elite will be more moral or refined than any, say, middle-class mechanic.

In the case of political elites, to be “elite” simply means to be the most effective at organizing and commanding political action. This can be done toward both virtuous ends or evil ends. The political elites excel at the gaining and wielding of political power. Nothing more. In hereditary monarchies, for example, the monarch is a monarch because his ancestors were more effective at using violence—and at stealing and killing—than were their competitors. Their descendants are able to remain in the elite through effective political scheming to maintain their positions. In democracies, those who gain and maintain power are effective at deceiving the voting public and at currying favor with the ruling coalitions of various interest groups. They’re not “the elite” because they are especially virtuous or well educated. They simply excel at cultivating the knowledge necessary to wield the power of the state against their enemies and against potential rivals.

Economic Elites vs. Political Elites

There is, however, often confusion as to the difference between economic elites and political elites. One could say that economic elites are those who are most skilled at the management of property. Yet, the nature of the economic elites depends largely on what type of regime exists within society. In a society that has a mostly market system, the economic elites are those who are most productive in the free marketplace. These are the people who are skilled at entrepreneurship, sales, logistics, investing, and all other aspects of a freely functioning market. In a mostly free society, the economic elites are free to spend most of their time on their activities in the marketplace, and they are thus rewarded for spending their efforts in improving their own productivity. Moreover, all of society benefits from these sorts of economic elites. This is because rewards in the marketplace stem from delivering more goods and services to more people at a price that a growing number of people can afford.


Things are different in a society where the economy is dominated by the state—and thus by the political elite. In such a society, the economic elites are those who are most skilled at using the power of the state to achieve success in the state-regulated marketplace. In this case, the economic elites are those who are able to partner with the regime to obtain policies that benefit the elites through the manipulation and regulation of the market. These policies include bailouts, state-backed monopolies, and an easy-money-fueled financial system. In this system, the economic elites are able to maintain and enhance their positions and their wealth through effective political action, and by serving the political elites instead of customers in the marketplace.

When this happens, we cannot assume that the economic elites are there because they add value to society. Rather, the economic elites in this latter system are parasitical. They rely on the exploitation of others to maintain their positions and to expand their market share. One of the most dramatic examples of this can be seen in the response to the financial crisis that began in 2008.

Had the marketplace been allowed to function, many large banks and other firms would have been bankrupted, and their property repurposed by other, more efficient owners and managers. Those new owners could have become a new economic elite. But thanks to the intervention of the incumbent political elites, failing firms were saved through the redistribution of wealth from the productive classes to hand-picked, politically connected incumbent firms and owners. Thus, firms like Citicorp and AIG were bailed out, new regulations imposed, and firms like JP Morgan greatly expanded their market share. The Federal Reserve’s mass purchasing of mortgage-backed securities rescued a large portion of the financial sector from insolvency. As a result, most of the economic “elite” we find in the financial sector owe their positions to political action rather than any actual skill in the marketplace. Sure, these people are fond of telling themselves that they are rich because “the market” values them so highly. In reality, they are successful because lobbyists have succeeded in propping up their firms and ensuring, through constant monetary inflation, growth in their portfolios.


But this is just one example. In any society where the political elites are prolific spenders, or engage in widespread regulation of the economy, the economy is continually distorted in a way as to favor the politically well connected at the expense of everyone else. For example, the economic “elites” who rely heavily on government contracts—e.g., Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the founder of Flock Safety, et al—are not in the elite because they are especially productive in a free market. They are in the elite because they are adept at seizing the property of taxpayers through the tax-and-spend mechanism.

Note that in this interventionist system, the real economic elites—the people who would have risen to the top of an actually free economy—are crowded out and kept down by government action that favors certain firms. Who are these would-be elites? We’ll never know, and instead we are left with our counterfeit billionaire class which is “elite” only in their skill at exploiting people who do real work in the private sector.

Conclusion

Thus we have a merging of the economic and the political elite. Both types of elites generally rely on some sort of deception to buttress their claims.

The political elite, for example, claim their positions by virtue of some sort of mandate from heaven, or moral virtue, or because they allegedly reflect the “will of the people.” These are all lies, of course, but have nonetheless worked to fool and pacify the public for many centuries.

Under a regime of economic interventionism, the economic elites rely on lies as well. They claim they are elites because they are efficient or hard-working, or “serve the customer.” These are lies as well since, in the absence of a free—or even mostly free—market, the elites are, in fact, in their positions due to political maneuvering. They are, in effect, merely an extension of the political elite. The more interventionist the regime is, the more this is true.

The real elites have always been those who receive the voluntary and free support of others through the private sector, or through other non-violent means of interaction: through families, religious institutions, and other institutions of the private sector. On the other hand, those who become “elites” through the initiation of violence, and through the looting of others, have always been frauds and imposters. 

About the author: Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is editor in chief at the Mises Institute, a former economist for the State of Colorado, and the author of two books: Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. He is also the editor of The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought. Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in public policy, finance, and international relations from the University of Colorado. 

Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute


About MISES
The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, the Mises Institute seeks a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. The Mises Institute encourages critical historical research, and stands against political correctness.
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