Charles V. Peña

"The truth is that unless you live in Israel, Iraq, or Afghanistan, a terrorist attack is a rare event. More importantly, terrorism is not an existential threat. Yet policymakers and the media lead us to believe that a terrorist attack – any terrorist attack – would be an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it event."

Chicago’s O’Hare Airport – the nation’s second largest airport and one of the busiest, if not the busiest – is one of several U.S. airports (including Boston’s Logan Airport) that is putting the newest body scanner technology into use. One hundred and fifty new scanners are scheduled to be deployed along with the 40 already being used at 19 airports. In large part, the body scanners are in response to the aborted Christmas underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who smuggled explosives onto Delta Flight 253 from Nigeria via Amsterdam to Detroit. Thankfully, Abdulmutallab didn’t injure anyone except himself – managing to light his pants on fire. If this is the extent of the terrorist threat to America, we should be so lucky.

Not unexpectedly, the hue and cry went up for more and improved security. And body scanners were touted as being able to have prevented Abdulmutallab’s attempted attack by virtue of seeing through his clothing to detect what he was carrying in his underwear.

According to the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause." Admittedly, we gave up our Fourth Amendment rights for airline travel a long time ago by submitting ourselves to metal detectors and carry-on bags to X-ray searches – all done without any probable cause (and something we wouldn’t tolerate as part of our everyday lives).

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Laurence M. Vance

The civil war in Korea from 1950 to 1953 that the United States foolishly intervened in, and, for the first time for a major conflict, without a congressional declaration of war, is known as the Forgotten War. The number of American soldiers killed in this senseless war is over 36,000. Yet, Korea remains divided at the 38th parallel to this day just like it was before the war began. Talk about dying in vain. None of these soldiers died in defense of the United States; all of them died for the United Nations, for the foolish policies of Harry Truman, and for the failed diplomacy of World War II.

Most Americans have no idea that there are still over 24,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea (some no doubt the grandchildren of the soldiers who fought in the Korean War). Fewer still probably know anything about the war that put them there in the first place.

There is another war that, incredibly, is fast becoming a forgotten war: the war in Iraq. I lamented last year at this time that we didn’t hear much about the war in Iraq anymore. Even though candidate Barack Obama pledged in 2007 that the first thing he would do if elected was bring the troops home and end the war, the war wasn’t an issue in the 2008 election. And before the electoral vote was even counted, Democratic opposition to the war had evaporated.

Now, on the seventh anniversary of the unconstitutional, immoral, aggressive, unjust, unnecessary, manufactured, manipulated, and senseless war that is the war in Iraq, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan has eclipsed any mention of the ongoing war in Iraq. And this in spite of the fact that there are still 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

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Rodrigue Tremblay

"It is well enough that people ... do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." ~ Henry Ford, American industrialist

"It seems to me that Europe, especially with the addition of more countries, is becoming ever-more susceptible to any asymmetric shock. Sooner or later, when the global economy hits a real bump, Europe's internal contradictions will tear it apart." ~ Milton Friedman, American economist

"The normal functioning of our economy leads to financial trauma and crises, inflation, currency depreciations, unemployment and poverty in the middle of what could be virtually universal affluence-in short ... financially complex capitalism is inherently flawed." ~ Hyman Minsky, American economist

I have spent some fifty years studying economic cycles and teaching international finance, but I had never seen the likes of what we witnessed and experienced over the last three years. That's because such financial crises seem to happen 60 to 75 years apart.

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