Taken from The Anarchist Library

Once upon a time, the captain and the mates of a ship grew so vain of their seamanship, so full of hubris and so impressed with themselves, that they went mad. They turned the ship north and sailed until they met with icebergs and dangerous floes, and they kept sailing north into more and more perilous waters, solely in order to give themselves opportunities to perform ever-more-brilliant feats of seamanship.

As the ship reached higher and higher latitudes, the passengers and crew became increasingly uncomfortable. They began quarreling among themselves and complaining of the conditions under which they lived.

“Shiver me timbers,” said an able seaman, “if this ain’t the worst voyage I’ve ever been on. The deck is slick with ice; when I’m on lookout the wind cuts through me jacket like a knife; every time I reef the foresail I blamed-near freeze me fingers; and all I get for it is a miserable five shillings a month!”

“You think you have it bad!” said a lady passenger. “I can’t sleep at night for the cold. Ladies on this ship don’t get as many blankets as the men. It isn’t fair!”

A Mexican sailor chimed in: “¡Chingado! I’m only getting half the wages of the Anglo seamen. We need plenty of food to keep us warm in this climate, and I’m not getting my share; the Anglos get more. And the worst of it is that the mates always give me orders in English instead of Spanish.”

“I have more reason to complain than anybody,” said an American Indian sailor. “If the palefaces hadn’t robbed me of my ancestral lands, I wouldn’t even be on this ship, here among the icebergs and arctic winds. I would just be paddling a canoe on a nice, placid lake. I deserve compensation. At the very least, the captain should let me run a crap game so that I can make some money.”

The bosun spoke up: “Yesterday the first mate called me a ‘fruit’ just because I suck cocks. I have a right to suck cocks without being called names for it!”

It’s not only humans who are mistreated on this ship,” interjected an animal-lover among the passengers, her voice quivering with indignation. “Why, last week I saw the second mate kick the ship’s dog twice!”

One of the passengers was a college professor. Wringing his hands he exclaimed,

“All this is just awful! It’s immoral! It’s racism, sexism, speciesism, homophobia, and exploitation of the working class! It’s discrimination! We must have social justice: Equal wages for the Mexican sailor, higher wages for all sailors, compensation for the Indian, equal blankets for the ladies, a guaranteed right to suck cocks, and no more kicking the dog!”

“Yes, yes!” shouted the passengers. “Aye-aye!” shouted the crew. “It’s discrimination! We have to demand our rights!”

The cabin boy cleared his throat.

“Ahem. You all have good reasons to complain. But it seems to me that what we really have to do is get this ship turned around and headed back south, because if we keep going north we’re sure to be wrecked sooner or later, and then your wages, your blankets, and your right to suck cocks won’t do you any good, because we’ll all drown.”

But no one paid any attention to him, because he was only the cabin boy.

( More … )

Barney Fife strikes again. Hat tip to Jim Duncan.

Article by Nick Robertson. Hat tip to Jim Duncan.
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Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) — The Yemeni government has lost control over five provinces, and security in the country is deteriorating, the nation’s acting president told CNN in an exclusive interview Wednesday.

In his first interview with a Western TV network, Vice President Abdu Rabu Mansoor Hadi detailed how U.S. drones are using voice recognition to target al Qaeda leaders and help the government win back control.

Hadi has been Yemen’s acting president since June 3, when President Ali Abdullah Saleh was wounded in an attack on the mosque at the presidential palace.

During Wednesday’s hour-long meeting, Hadi said Saleh’s wounds from what he described as an assassination attempt were so severe that he has no idea when the president will return from medical treatment in Saudi Arabia.

Vince
The Daily Attack

In spite of attention grabbing headlines, Bitcoin has proven its resiliency the past few days by maintaining a stable price in the $16-17 per BTC range. Many wrote off Bitcoin as doomed after it’s largest exchanger, MtGox was taken off line following a wave of abuse and hacks that caused a panic sell off. What most have failed to realize, however, is that the attacks were not on the infrastructure of Bitcoin itself, but on MtGox. Bitcoin itself remains intact and as secure as ever. The only thing that has changed is that scammers have taken note of what was an immature, innocent community that had sprung up around the crypto currency. That same community has pulled through, and is unlikely to fall for the same tricks again.

Why has Bitcoin retained value through it all? The reason is that it’s fundamentals are intact.

What are it’s fundamentals?

• It’s low transaction cost – you can send payments across the world for less than a penny. Try that with a credit card.
• It’s decentralized nature – no issuing authority can manipulate it, nor can an outside entity. Compare that to E-gold or the Liberty Dollar. Granted, Bitcoin is yet to be tested by a crackdown from the Federal Government. Still, what exactly could they seize? They’d have to shut down the internet or at least ban individual users to fully stop it.
• It’s relative anonymity – taking a few precautions, you can expect a pretty reasonable level of anonymity in spending bitcoins.
• It’s cash like nature – what’s spent is spent. There are no automatic charge-backs. Though some may count this as a fault of Bitcoin, I know there are merchants out their who would see it as an asset, compared to the nightmares that a service like paypal and credit cards can cause.
• It’s finite nature – we know the maximum number of Bitcoins that will ever exist, 21 million. The usefulness of this feature is debatable. But one thing is for sure, this feature differentiates Bitcoin in the market from fiat currencies, which tend to be inflationary.

Read the rest at The Daily Attack

Paul Gottfried on the figure from American history hated by neocons and liberals alike.

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HL Mencken celebrates the end of Prohibition.

This is the second in a series of essays in response to Matthew Lyons’ critique “Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston’s Authoritarian Anti-Statism.” And here is the transcript of a recent lecture by Lyons where yours truly gets a couple of mentions. Part One may be viewed here.

by Keith Preston

“If the individual cannot get along with the community, and the community cannot tolerate the individual, what real good will state intervention produce—wouldn’t separation be, in any world, the rational, noncoercive, nonviolent solution? Yes, it might be possible to contrive a state process that would force a Jewish Community to accept the Nazi Individual, or a White Community the despised Black, or a Fundamentalist Community the threatening Atheist. But it needs only for the principle of free travel to be observed—to the advantage of both the leavers and the stayers—and the Nazi, the Black, the Atheist can all find congenial communities of their own. The virtue of a multi-communitied world would be precisely that there would be within its multitude of varieties a home for everyone.”

-Kirkpatrick Sale

“Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany is a horror; Adolf Hitler at a town meeting would be an asshole.”

–Karl Hess

“When a previously disadvantaged group rises to power, it exploits its new position just as did the group or groups it has displaced.”

-Mark A. Schneider, American sociologist

“The ultimate aim of multiculturalism is the creation of a totalitarian state ordered as a type of caste system where individual privilege is assigned on the basis of group identity and group privilege is assigned on the basis of the position of the group in the pantheon of the oppressed.”

-Keith Preston

The core aspects of Lyons’ objections to my own outlook are fairly well summarized in the following passages from his critique, and these comments from Lyons are also fairly representative of the most common arguments against my views offered by Leftists:

Preston only acknowledges oppression along lines of race, gender, sexuality, or other factors to the extent that these are directly promoted by the state, particularly through formal, legal discrimination against specific groups of people. Arguing that “the state is a unique force for destruction,” Preston ignores or trivializes the dense network of oppressive institutions and relationships that exist outside of, and sometimes in opposition to, the state. It is these societally based systems of oppression, not state intervention, that perpetuate dramatic wealth disparities between whites and people of color, widespread domestic violence that overwhelmingly target women, and suicide rates much higher among LGBT teens than heterosexual teens, among many other examples.

Preston portrays secession as a voluntary process, in which many varied groups of people decide to go their own separate ways and coexist peaceably side by side. But what does “voluntary” mean in a context where wives are expected to submit to the authority of their husbands, workers to obey their bosses, or homosexuality is regarded as a perversion and a crime? And how long would peaceable coexistence last in the face of absolutist ideologies that are inherently expansionist? The leaders of a Christian Right statelet would believe that homosexuality and feminism are wrong not only within the statelet’s borders, but everywhere, and they would feel a religious duty to enforce this belief as widely as possible.

The bottom line is that the primary objection to anarcho-pluralism, pan-secessionism, national-anarchism, anarcho-libertarianism and overlapping perspectives raised by leftists such as Lyons is their fear that some individuals, institutions, organizations, or communities is such a meta-political framework will practice values disapproved of by leftists or engage in discrimination against groups favored by leftists. The selective and arbitrary nature of such criticism is easy enough to identify. Imagine if a right-wing critic of anarcho-pluralism were to make comments such as the following:

Preston only acknowledges oppression resulting from liberalism and the Left to the extent that these are directly promoted by the state, particularly through formal, legal discrimination against specific groups of people. Arguing that “the state is a unique force for destruction,” Preston ignores or trivializes the dense network of oppressive institutions and relationships that exist outside of, and sometimes in opposition to, the state. It is these societally based systems of oppression, not state intervention, that perpetuate dramatic disparities in  the rate of violent crimes perpetrated against whites by blacks and Hispanics, widespread dissemination of pornography that contributes to sex crimes and social decay, and the promotion of drug use, sexual promiscuity and homosexuality leading to teen pregnancy, illegitimacy, drug abuse, broken families, child neglect, venereal diseases, crime, welfare dependency and other social pathologies .

Preston portrays secession as a voluntary process, in which many varied groups of people decide to go their own separate ways and coexist peaceably side by side. But what does “voluntary” mean in a context where leftist localities have the option of banning private firearms and private property, where urban white families have to live among and send their children to schools with violent black youth, or where Christianity is regarded as a backward superstition and a dangerous threat to freedom and progress? And how long would peaceable coexistence last in the face of absolutist ideologies that are inherently expansionist? The leaders of a Marxist statelet would believe that Christianity and private property are wrong not only within the statelet’s borders, but everywhere, and they would feel an ideological duty to enforce this belief as widely as possible.

Such criticisms would correctly be dismissed as special pleading on behalf of right-wing ideological values, political interest groups and favorite causes. One of the principal ideas behind anarcho-pluralism is the recognition that irreconcilable differences between different political factions and population groups will always exist, and the need to establish societal institutions that are capable of accommodating such differences in a way that avoids both bloodshed and the subjugation of some groups by others. With regards to the “authoritarianism” question, it is necessary to point out that abstract notions like “freedom,” “liberty,” and so forth are understood in radically different ways by different kinds of people. Lyons gives no evidence that his own ideological preferences are somehow decreed by the cosmos, by some divine creator, or by natural law. The bottom line is that the political and social preferences of leftists like Lyons reflect the subjective value judgments of individuals and groups in the same manner as any other kind of assertion of ideological principles. Leftism is ultimately just another tribe like Christianity, Islam, fascism, libertarianism, Satanism, or veganism.

The selectivity of Lyons’ criticisms is further illustrated by his choice of which groups to attack from the list of potential constituents for anarcho-pluralism that I have identified. He focuses on three of these: the League of the South, Christian Exodus, and believers in Christian Identity. He chooses not offer any criticism of “Marxist-Leninists,” “Islamic rightists,” “people of color nationalist movements,” “militant environmentalists,” and so forth. It is only those tendencies that claim to speak for the interests of white Christians that he seems particularly concerned about. This raises the question of whether it is really “authoritarianism” that Lyons is worried about or whether it is merely white Christians as a general population group whom he regards as the problem with political “authoritarianism” not really being all that important if it is controlled by leftists and their allies or constituents.

( More … )

Unprovoked attack on a Native family in a Reservation border town. One of attacked is sent to prison for….. I’m not really sure? Local police appear to be an accessory to this crime.

Remember that the local police might not always be your friend. Remember John T. Williams.

More on the alleged attacker, Jacob Cassell at AI/AN ATS.

Excerpt:
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Indian Country Today
By Valerie Taliman

Meanwhile, Johnny Bonta was knocked unconscious with a bat, his nose and sinus cavities broken and bleeding, with stab wounds on his neck.

Lisa said Jacob Cassell taunted the family as the sirens approached, telling them, “You hear those cops coming? They’re not going to help you. My daddy is a cop in this town, and nothing is going to happen to me. You fucking niggers are going to jail.”

When Lyon County Sheriff’s officers arrived, they took statements and began filling out police reports with Cassell and his friends, but they did not take statements from any of the victims. When Lisa asked why they were not being questioned for a statement, no one responded. “They ignored us,” she said, before she suffered a seizure and required medical attention.

Three ambulances responded to the scene and took Lisa, Alyssa and Murray away for treatment; Murray’s injuries included a crushed elbow and broken hand.

Johnny Bonta, bleeding and barely standing after being hit in the knees with a bat, was arrested on the scene and taken to jail. He said he was not allowed medical treatment for six days while he was in the county jail, all the while uncertain about what charges had been filed against him.

This is an eye-witness account of a so called ‘flash mob’ of black teenagers from Peoria, Illinois by Paul Wilkinson, president of the Altamont Park Neighborhood Association:

Tonight, around 11 p.m., a group of at least 60-70 African American youth marched down one of the side streets (W. Thrush) to the 4 lane main drag (Sheridan). They were yelling threats to white residents. Things such as we need to kill alll the white people around here. They were physically intimidating anyone calling for help from the police. They were surrounding cars. Cars on the main drag had to slam on their brakes to either avoid the youth blocking not only all four lanes, but a large section of the side street as well. fights were breaking out among them. They were rushing residents who looked out their doors, going on to porches, yelling threats to people calling the police for help.

Cars were doing U turns on the streets just to avoid the mob, mostly male. One youth stated his grandfather was white and several assaulted him on the spot. One police officer answered the call. The youth split into two large groups, one heading north, the other south. They were also yelling racial threats to the police officer but he was outnumbered. Another police Car did not show up until after the youth finally dispersed and the patty wagon (van) also eventually showed up.

Residents are very shaken, both black and white alike. This is the fifth large mob action in about a month with smaller groups of 10-12 are out threatening children and adults a few evenings a week or later into the night. The times vary, even occuring during the day. In talking to the police officer, they are short staffed. Residents were advised to simply keep inside and to lock their doors. In other words buckle down, it’s not even safe to sit on your porch or go into your yards.

“The fifth large mob action in about a month.” Wow. This is really outrageous. Why is this neighborhood having to put up with this? “Residents were advised to simply keep inside and to lock their doors”? Seriously? That’s the best we can do for our fellow citizens’ safety?

This needs to be addressed, and quickly.

http://domasjefferson.com/news/peoria-illinois-black-flash-mob-kill-all-the-white-people

David Morris brilliantly demands Time Warner to accept the truth:

If forced to, private companies will compete, but they much prefer to spend tens of millions of dollars buying the votes of state legislators to enact laws that thwart competition rather than spend hundreds of millions to improve their networks.

Today four states have outright prohibitions on municipal networks. Fifteen others impose significant roadblocks. For example, Alabama requires each communications service (phone, Internet access, and television) offered by a public network to be self-sustaining in isolation from the others. Similarly, in Utah, if the public network wants to offer retail services it must conduct feasibility studies to show the network will cash flow in the first year and that separate services will each cash flow separately. Making a network –a hugely capital intensive investment — cash flow in the first year is all but impossible.

The Census data is now available.

The two most obvious political implications of this are that the anti-immigration movement is a failure and that the future of ethnic conflict in North American will be a scenario where everyone is a “minority.” This second point is one where both the Left and the far Right lack foresight. Both camps continue to view everything from the “people of color vs whitey” paradigm. Ethnic conflict in the future will be sharpest between those groups who are in the closest competition for scarce resources.

Let’s talk about widespread consciousness, not “concentrated forces.”

Once everyone realizes the US is in worse shape than Greece, secession
will look better and better. Of course some of the leaders may be state
bureaucrats who want to ensure their own big fat pensions by cutting off
the feds ability to tax their subjects!

Keeping representative majority rule governance in seceded entities is
not sufficient a solution, since it always leads to minority rule, with
politically motivated promises of social welfare programs inevitably
based on unsustainable grounds. Direct democracy where only say 80% of
80% of eligible voters (or better 95% of 95%) can pass a law or tax is
best way to ensure freedom and sustainability. And of course sunset or
minority repeal provisions so bad laws passed by majorities in haste can
be revoked in a timely manner also important. And of course strong
individual bills of rights.

A libertarian philosophy also helps. See http://secession.net

-Carol Moore

2 men arrested in Seattle terror plot
The Associate Press

SEATTLE — Agents arrested two men in a terror plot sting after one of them arrived in Seattle from Los Angeles intent on attacking a military recruiting station to “wake the Muslims up’’ to defending their religion from US actions abroad, authorities said yesterday.

Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, also known as Joseph Anthony Davis, of Seattle, and Walli Mujahidh, also known as Frederick Domingue Jr., of Los Angeles, were arrested Wednesday night after they arrived at a warehouse to pick up machine guns to use in the attack, an FBI agent wrote in a criminal complaint.
…….
“Our review of attempted attacks during the past two years suggests that lone offenders currently present the greatest threat,’’ said the assessment, obtained by The Associated Press.

Recently, inciters of terrorism have encouraged their followers to focus on simple attacks.

Authorities learned of the Seattle plot early this month when a third person recruited to participate alerted the Seattle Police Department, the complaint said.

Investigators immediately began monitoring the men, and the confidential informant continued to string them along, promising to obtain weapons.

This is reminiscent of the 2010 Portland car bomb plot, when the FBI egged on a young muslim US citizen to commit an act of terrorism to the point of providing him with a fake car bomb to detonate. Glenn Greenwald provided an excellent piece of commentary on the incident:

The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot

The FBI is obviously quite pleased with itself over its arrest of a 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who — with months of encouragement, support and money from the FBI’s own undercover agents — allegedly attempted to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon.
…….
But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI — as they’ve done many times in the past — found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a “Terrorist plot” which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI’s own concoction. Having stopped a plot which it itself manufactured, the FBI then publicly touts — and an uncritical media amplifies — its “success” to the world, thus proving both that domestic Terrorism from Muslims is a serious threat and the Government’s vast surveillance powers — current and future new ones — are necessary.

In the Seattle case, investigators used an informant to “to string them along, promising to obtain weapons.” In the Portland case, the FBI provided a dummy bomb, complete with a cell phone “detonator.”

Of interest is this quote: “Our review of attempted attacks during the past two years suggests that lone offenders currently present the greatest threat,.” Likely much of these attacks are coming out of the Open Source Jihad which has been called for by the English language jihadist magazine Inspire. One article in the magazine suggests jihadist use a pickup truck “as a mowing machine, not to mow down grass but to mow down the enemies of allah.” Given that both the FBI and Al Qaeda are having a hard time coming up with a terrorist plot to rival the 9/11 attacks, it appears that both organizations are scraping the bottom of the jihadist barrel in search of plots to keep Americans cowering in fear.

Article by Michel Bauwens.

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New book from Sean Gabb.

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The “War against Tobacco” is one of the central facts of modern life. In this book, Sean Gabb analyses the nature and progress of the “war”. The stated reasons for the war have varied according to time and place. According to Dr Gabb, however, all reasons have one thing in common—they rest on a base of lies and half truths. But this is not simply a book about the history of tobacco and the scientific debate on its dangers. It also examines why, given the status of the evidence against it, there is a war against tobacco. Dr Gabb shows that this war is part of a much larger project of lifestyle regulation by the ruling class, and that its function is to provide a set of plausible excuses for the extraction of resources from the people and for the exercise of power over them. This book provides a kind of “unified field” theory to bring within a single explanatory structure some of the most important attacks on free choice and government limitation that we face today.

Watch videos of this event filmed by Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance.
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Property and Freedom Society
Sixth Annual Meeting
Bodrum, Turkey, 26-30 May 2011
Karia Princess Hotel

Video shot by Sean Gabb,
Director of the Libertarian Alliance

Friday, May 27

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Welcome and Introductions
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Politics, Money and Banking. Everything You Need to Know in 30 Minutes
Mateusz Machaj, How and How Not to Criticize the Central Bank
Philipp Bagus, The FED and the ECB: Banksterism Compared
Doug French, Going Broke: The Ethics of Default
Thomas DiLorenzo, The Fallacies of “Happiness Research”
Nikolay Gertchev, Psychology Ain’t Economics. New Fads in Economics
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Mateusz Machaj, Philipp Bagus, Thomas DiLorenzo, Nikolay Gertchev, Discussion, Q & A

Saturday, May 28

Stephan Kinsella,Correcting Some Common Libertarian Misconceptions
John Derbyshire, Understanding China and the Chinese
John O’Sullivan, Understanding Europe and its Bureaucrats
Norman Stone, Understanding Turkey and the Turks
Mustafa Akyol, Drawing Borders in the Middle East: Ottoman Provinces v Western State Creations
Roman Skaskiw,“Fighting for Freedom” in the Middle East. A Combat Soldier’s Report
Derbyshire, Stone, Akyol, Skaskiw, Discussion, Q & A

Sunday, May 29

Sean Gabb,The Case Against the American War of Independence
Paul Gottfried, How the Left Conquered the Right
Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple), The Mirage of “Equal Opportunity”
Nicola Iannello, Of Producers and Parasites
Yuri Maltsev, Of Customs and Condoms. Moving from One Empire to Another
Gabb, Gottfried, Daniels, Iannello, Kinsella, Maltsev, Discussion, Q & A
Hans-Hermann Hoppe,Concluding Remarks and Announcements

Article by David D’Amato.

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Against the backdrop of anti-government protests and his regime’s brutal response, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad addressed the country on June 20. Downplaying both the demonstrations and the dissatisfaction that they represent, Assad called on “the people and the state [to] come together.”

With the death toll climbing, Assad’s assurances about “getting the military back to their barracks” hardly ring believable, but there was a faint truth to his words. Although the insight is no doubt lost on Assad himself, by appealing for the unification of the people and the state he implicitly acknowledges that the two are quite distinct.

Summarily taking to the streets following Assad’s speech, unconvinced protesters met his talk of “reform” with chants of “liar.” For market anarchists, their chants were loaded with subtext regarding the relationship between society and state. Nietzsche perhaps said it best: “The state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. And coldly it lieth; and this lie creepeth out of its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’”

Far from personifying some collective will, the state is merely the unwieldy implement of a power elite, plotters who conspire not behind a curtain, but right out in the open. The political class, the parasitic few who contrive the system of state capitalism, feel no need whatsoever to hide; they cheat and extort the public from behind protestations of the “popular will.”

We will find, though, that historically the “popular will” has been no more than an assiduously attuned cover for the will of rulers, rhetorical chicanery to hold the ruled in line. Other meanings, any formulae that advance the phrase as something beyond just the sum of individual wills, proves elusive or altogether illusional.

To market anarchists, abstract notions like the “free market,” “the popular will,” and “democracy” are, by definition, not things that can be orchestrated according to design or imposed by some governing body. To have any real significance, such expressions must be properly understood as verbal proxies for complex webs of voluntary interactions.

Popular concerns about what is now considered “the free market,” warranted as they are, are in fact worries about an economic reality in which the state has intervened for powerful business interests at every level of analysis. Distinguished by its Himalayan peaks of concentrated wealth separated by vast expanses of poverty, today’s system is a product of the state rather than of a pure free market.

Consider, by analogy, the tendencies of liquid or gas molecules, their natural drift from areas of higher density into areas of lower density. As related in a popular science text, “Unequal pressures will always equalize themselves if given a chance.” The functioning of a genuine free market — one composed of the unobstructed trades of self-ruling people — would achieve the same kind of balance.

It is the concentration of power in society, with the state falsely holding itself out as “the people,” that gathers wealth into the hands of a small coterie. The social phenomenon of the state, then, is thoroughly tied to the economic conditions we observe today. As is very apparent in countries like Syria, for the yawning breach between the “haves” and the “have-nots” to exist, the introduction of coercion is necessary.

The public outcry in Syria demonstrates that there’s distinction between political and economic problems — or between political and economic freedoms. Market anarchism is the idea that all relationships, whether of a social or commercial kind, ought to be grounded in consent and mutual respect. This is the simple idea that can unchain a true social will from the state’s ruling classes.

Article by Kevin Carson.
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Nicholas Kristoff, in a New York Times op-ed (“Our Lefty Military,” June 16), lauds the “astonishingly liberal ethos” that governs the military internally — single-payer health insurance, job security, educational opportunities, free daycare — in support of Gen. Wesley Clark’s description of it as “the purest application of socialism there is.”

For me — an avowed libertarian socialist as well as a market anarchist — at least two howlers stand out here. First, when I think of “socialism,” I think of all the liberatory things originally associated with that term back in the days of the early working class and classical socialist movement in the nineteenth century: Empowerment of the working class, worker control of production, and all the rest. Last I heard, the U.S. military isn’t set up as a worker cooperative, with enlisted men electing officers, managing their own work, or voting on whether or not to go to war. Taking orders from a boss “because I said so” isn’t my idea of socialism.

Second, the primary external mission of the U.S. military is to keep the world — or rather the corporate pigs who claim to own it — safe from anything remotely resembling worker empowerment. To me, that’s pretty unsocialistic. For the past sixty-odd years since WWII (a lot longer, actually), the primary focus of American national security policy has been to protect feudal landed oligarchs from land reform, protect Western-owned corporations from nationalization, act as collector of last resort for the company store known as the World Bank, and enforce the draconian “intellectual property” protectionism which is the central bulwark of global corporate power today. Kristoff’s “socialist” military’s primary mission is keeping the world firmly in the hands of its corporate rulers.

Aside from that, I think Kristoff has it exactly backward: The military is almost a parody of American corporate culture. It’s riddled with hierarchy, with Taylorist/Weberian bureaucratic work rules and standard operating procedures, and all the irrationality that goes with them. The only difference is, the pointy-haired bosses wear a different kind of uniform. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Brazil,” or read Dilbert on a regular basis, you get the idea.

Kristoff has one point on his side: The differentials between production workers and senior management are a lot lower in the military than in present-day Corporate America. But that just means the military is structured more along the lines of old-style bureaucratic “Organization Man” capitalism of the sixties (as described by J.K. Galbraith), in which CEO salaries were typically only fifty times that of a production worker, rather than the current pathological model of cowboy capitalism where it’s more like five hundred.

The military, like the large corporation, is plagued by enormously high overhead costs (the cost of training a soldier), and enormously wasteful capital outlays. The military, like an oligopoly corporation, can afford to be so wasteful because it doesn’t bear the full cost of its own activities.

Corporate America’s prevailing management accounting system, invented almost a century ago by Donaldson Brown of DuPont and GM, equates consumption of inputs to creation of value. You know, like the Soviet centrally planned economy. Administrative costs like management salaries, along with wasteful capital expenditures, are incorporated — through the practice known as “overhead absorption” — into the transfer price of goods “sold” to inventory. And in an oligopoly market, the corporation is able to pass those costs — plus a profit markup — on to the customer through administered pricing. The military shares that pricing system, with its incentives to maximize costs (Paul Goodman called “the great kingdom of cost-plus”). Ever hear of those $600 toilet seats? But in the case of the military, the administered pricing is called “taxation.”

In short the military, like the large corporation, is a giant, bureaucratic, irrational, and authoritarian institution which can only survive through parasitism — enabled by the state — on the working class.

Article by Jean-Guy Allard.
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22 year old Raymond Herisse, shot to death while sitting in his car, by Miami police on May 31 during Urban Beach Week. Police say they found a gun in his car after they killed him and made vague references to an unnamed witness who said that Raymond was shooting at the cops. The remaining question is why the police tried to destroy videotaped evidence.

To Protect and Serve

In the meantime, the ”big” press agencies maintain an alarming silence around this scandalous event, demonstrating that, in the country that continuously accuses the nations it attacks of violating human rights, skin color alone justifies a death sentence.

Not one word has yet been published by the international press agencies, which are so prone to broadcasting the minor incidents that happen in countries who confront the American imperial power, about the execution in Miami of a 22-year-old-Haitian man by 12 police officers who fired on him 100 times while he was unarmed in his car.

In Miami itself, the local press — characterized by its blind cooperation with calls from law enforcement — has diverted public attention with a controversy over a cellphone, whose owner was filming the savage police intervention that ended with the death of young Raymond Hérissé.

Apparently the murder of this son of a humble Haitian immigrant doesn’t interest anyone, including those holders of power in this city with their persistent traits of racial hate and segregation.

Following Shooting, Miami Cops Grab Cell Phones at Gunpoint, Destroy Them. But video survives.

Criticized for confiscating and destroying cameras and mobile phones after killing Hérissé during the hip-hop festival, Urban Beach Week, the municipal authorities of Miami Beach questioned one witness’ testimony that said a police officer had aimed a gun at his head, handcuffed him and destroyed his mobile phone by kicking it.

The testimony confirms that the police detained a witness — an African American — not because he was filming but because he was “very similar” to the description of the suspect that was supposedly seen fleeing. This is a version of the story whose racist tones don’t escape anyone.

No report of the events in the local press mentions Hérissé’s death nearly as much as they have, with the help of the police, been encouraged to describe a criminal, with an emphasis that is more than suspicious. The court file resembles those of thousands of young African Americans in this city whose segregated neighborhoods are patrolled daily by SWAT teams with horrible reputations.

A few days after Herisse’s death, the Police announced that they “found” a gun “hidden” in his car, something very suspicious in a city where cases of ”planted guns” have been cause for scandals in the past.

Hérissé was shot after crashing his Hyundai into a police barricade. He then fled into the popular event that attracts thousands of hip-hop fans annually, most of whom are African American.

Six youths from segregated neighborhoods in Miami have become victims of fatal police shootings within the last 10 months, without even one investigation report having been filed, or one police officer accused, even of criminal negligence.

In the meantime, the ”big” press agencies maintain an alarming silence around this scandalous event, demonstrating that, in the country that continuously accuses the nations it attacks of violating human rights, skin color alone justifies a death sentence.

Article by Max Read
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The trial of fashion designer John Galliano, who was fired from his own label earlier this year over charges that he made anti-Semitic comments to a woman at a French bar, starts this week in Paris—and the new details emerging aren’t pretty.

It wasn’t just the one incident in February that got Galliano fired; it’s been alleged that the designer had thrown around anti-Semitic slurs (“People like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed”) on at least two other occasions—at the same bar, no less. But on the night in question, the police were called, charges were filed (it’s illegal to make public anti-Semitic statements in France), and the allegations were extensively documented.

And according to Géraldine Bloch, the art curator who was the subject of Galliano’s alleged outburst, we’re not talking a tossed-off insult or drunkly slurred sentence, but a sustained barrage of misogynistic, racist bullshit, including:

• Calling Bloch a “dirty whore”
• Telling her she had a “dirty Jewish face”
• Mocking her “revolting” eyebrows
• Sneering at her “low-end boots and low-end thighs”
• Pulling her hair
• Calling her companion (receptionist Philippe Virgitti) a “fucking Asian bastard” and “a dirty Asian shit”

Galliano was apparently tanked: His blood-alcohol content, as measured by the police, was four times the legal driving limit. (According to Newsweek, he’s expected to invoke “dueling addictions to booze and anti-anxiety medicine” in his defense.) But apparently these outbursts were common enough that his driver and a security guard were unfazed when he unloaded on Bloch:

By the time Galliano got to La Perle that February night, his antics were so well known to the people who worked around him that when the “f—k you”s began to fly, his driver, watching from the sidelines, calmly called a lawyer and tried to put him on the phone with Bloch to calm her down or warn her off. She refused, and when she complained, a security guard told her it was Galliano and that she could just change seats, according to the dossier.

Socialite Daphne Guinness tells Newsweek that “[t]he whole thing struck me as completely out of character.” But not so out of character that it bothered the driver or the security guard, it seems.

Article by Mike Riggs. This kind of thing is an example of how fast the political climate can change. Stuff like this would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.
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Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) will introduce “bi-partisan legislation tomorrow ending the federal war on marijuana and letting states legalize, regulate, tax, and control marijuana without federal interference,” according to a press release from the Marijuana Policy Project that just hit my inbox. More from that email:

Other co-sponsors include Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA). The legislation would limit the federal government’s role in marijuana enforcement to cross-border or inter-state smuggling, allowing people to legally grow, use or sell marijuana in states where it is legal. The legislation is the first bill ever introduced in Congress to end federal marijuana prohibition.

Rep. Frank’s legislation would end state/federal conflicts over marijuana policy, reprioritize federal resources, and provide more room for states to do what is best for their own citizens.

I called Morgan Fox at MPP to ask about the chances that this bill will get any serious debate time in the House (a fair question, considering that it has only one Republican supporter at the moment). “It’s definitely going to get a serious debate, probably more in the media than on the floor of the House,” Fox told me. “But I think it needs to be debated on the floor.”

What does MPP see as obstacles?

“Someone in the prohibitionist camp could hold it up as long as they wanted, but the slew of opinion pieces that came out last week calling for the end of the failed drug war will give this momentum,” Fox said.

While Paul’s status as a declared presidential candidate should help with media pick-up, Frank is leading the press teleconference tomorrow, and Paul’s not even on the call.

Previous Frank-Paul partnerships include a 2010 op-ed to reduce military spending and a marijuana decriminalization bill introduced in the House in 2009. In the intervening two years, Arizona and Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana, and the Connecticut legislature has moved to decriminalize it. Now former U.S. Attorney John McKay and Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes are organizing to completely legalize marijuana in Washington State. The time is ripe.

That’s not the term he uses, but he describes it perfectly and offers the correct solution. Watch Sean Gabb’s video of Gottfried’s lecture at the 2011 annual conference of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey. It’s interesting how a former leftist radical like me and a former Buckleyite conservative like Gottfried eventually came to almost identical views from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

I’m just now discovering Jane Jacobs, though I suspect that, given her ideas, market anarchists of the left libertarian variety have discovered her long ago, or at least are building on her ideas without realizing it.

Jane Jacobs, in a long list of books she’s written, argues that development and innovation are the driving forces of economies, and that the correct economic unit to be concerned with is not nations as a whole, but cities and the regions of their influence. She observes that regions that depend on resource extraction, transplant technology (such as a rural region hoping for a large company to set up a factory in their area,) and transfer payments are economically stagnant and, unless they develop city like qualities, are doomed to dependence, redundancy, and eventual irrelevance as they are bypassed by the developments and advancements produced by cities.

She argues that the primary purpose of cities is to be hotbeds of development. To accomplish this, they must have a network of small firms engaged in inefficient development work. She gives early Detroit as an example of this, with its network of machinist and parts manufacturers who started producing machine parts for windmills, moved onto producing parts for steam ships, which lead to engine building and eventually to automobile manufacturing. She then argues that a city that becomes over specialized, with highly efficient, large firms, will stagnate because they gobble up smaller firms, restrict development work for the sake of efficiency, monopolize the labor market, moving otherwise innovators into repetitive non development work, and are eventually bypassed by other cities. Poetically, her example here is Detroit after auto makers consolidated into a few large firms.

To encourage development, she argues against zoning laws, urban renewal, the coddling of big business, unified currencies, monopolies, military spending (as a technological dead end that doesn’t really benefit anyone,) and over specialization. She argues for import replacement (producing goods and services within a city that were formally imported,) technological cannibalization, venture capital for small firms and import tariffs (only at the regional or city level.)

In the context of our efforts here for pan-secession, her ideas can and should be applied to prospective city-states.

For further reading, here is an excellent overview of her ideas:

It’s the Cities, Stupid!
From Zompist.com

A recent rant of mine mentioned cities, which led to a meandering discussion about cities and rural areas on my board, and led me to realize that not enough people have read Jane Jacobs.

Many have; her The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a celebration of city neighborhoods and a warning that they were being destroyed by the czars of urban renewal, has gone in forty years from iconoclasm to curriculum.

But even better are the less read The Economy of Cities (1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), twin volumes which do nothing less than demolish and rebuild macroeconomics. Economics went wrong, she explains, with the work her titles allude to, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Nations aren’t the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are.

Jacobs arrives at this conclusion by considering the stagflation of the 1970s– simultaneous high unemployment and high inflation, something that was not supposed to be possible under either left-wing (Keynesian) or right-wing (monetarist) economics. They were supposed to trade off. She points out that this condition– high prices and not enough work– is normal for backward regions; Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith’s time on as a permanent condition.

Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions. One of the great advantages of this point of view, in fact, is that we become aware of the backward regions in the First World, and realize that they follow the same dynamics as the Third World. These days they may be comfortable enough due to transfer payments from richer regions, but they are economically passive nonetheless.

And the dynamic regions are centered around cities. (The one apparent exception: supply regions, rich in natural resources. We’ll get back to them below; for now we’ll just note that they’re rich because cities want the resources and come and get them. Arabs didn’t have to travel across the oceans to find people to hawk their oil to.)

Read More

Article by Pat Buchanan. As much I have always disagreed with Buchanan’s unrepentant Nixon-Reagan Republicanism and his philistine “culture warrior” outlook, he is one of the few relatively mainstream commentators that qualifies as a competent political analyst. The analysis of prevailing trends that Buchanan offers here is basically the same as my own: A combination of neoliberal economic policies (globalization, “free trade,” mass immigration) and Cultural Marxist social policies (multiculturalism, radical egalitarianism, and the use of education merely as a means to political indoctrination) are having the effect of creating a Third World model class system in the United States and a racial/ethnic stratification and spoils system of the kind that has led to horrific bloodshed in other societies.

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“Is our children learning?” as George W. Bush so famously asked. Well, no, they is not learning, especially the history of their country, the school subject at which America’s young perform at their worst.

On history tests given to 31,000 pupils by the National Assessment of Education Progress, the “Nation’s Report Card,” most fourth-graders could not identify a picture of Abraham Lincoln or a reason why he was important.

Most eighth-graders could not identify an advantage American forces had in the Revolutionary War. Twelfth-graders did not know why America entered World War II or that China was North Korea’s ally in the Korean War.

Only 20 percent of fourth-graders attained even a “proficient” score in the test. By eighth grade, only 17 percent were judged proficient. By 12th grade, 12 percent. Only a tiny fraction was graded “advanced,” indicating a superior knowledge of American history.

Given an excerpt from the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education—“We conclude that in the field of pubic education, separate but equal has no place, separate education facilities are inherently unequal”—and asked what social problem the court was seeking to correct, 2 percent of high school seniors answered “segregation.”

As these were multiple-choice questions, notes Diane Ravitch, the education historian, the answer “was right in front of them.”

A poster put out by the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, circa 1940, was shown and the question asked, “The poster above seeks to protect America and aid Britain in the struggle against …” Four countries were listed as possible answers.

A majority did not identify Germany, though the poster contained a clue. The boot about to trample the Statue of Liberty had a huge swastika on the sole.

“We’re raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate,” historian David McCullough told The Wall Street Journal.

“History textbooks,” added McCullough, “are “badly written.” Many texts have been made “so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence”—such as inventor Thomas Edison—“are given very little space or none at all.”

Trendies and minorities have their sensibilities massaged in the new history, which is, says McCullough, “often taught in categories—women’s history, African American history, environmental history—so that many students have no sense of chronology … no idea of what followed what.”

But if the generations coming out of our schools do not know our past, do not know who we are or what we have done as a people, how will they come to love America, refute her enemies or lead her confidently?

This appalling ignorance among American young must be laid at the feet of an education industry that has consumed trillions of tax dollars in recent decades.

Comes the retort: History was neglected because Bush, with No Child Left Behind, overemphasized reading and math.

Yet the same day the NAEP history scores were reported, The New York Times reported on the academic performance of New York state high school students in math and English. The results were stunning.

Of state students who entered ninth grade in 2006, only 37 percent were ready for college by June 2010. In New York City, the figure was 21 percent, one in five, ready for college.

In Yonkers, 14.5 percent of the students who entered high school in 2006 were ready for college in June 2010. In Rochester County, the figure was 6 percent.

And the racial gap, 45 years after the federal and state governments undertook heroic exertions to close it, is wide open across the Empire State.

While 51 percent of white freshman in 2006 and 56 percent of Asian students were ready for college in June 2010, only 13 percent of New York state’s black students and 15 percent of Hispanics were deemed ready.

The implications of these tests are alarming, not only for New York but for the country we shall become in this century.

In 1960, there were 18 million black Americans and few Hispanics in a total population of 160 million. By 2050, African Americans and Hispanics combined will, at 200 million, roughly equal white Americans in number.

If the racial gap in academic achievement persists for the next 40 years, as it has for the last 40, virtually all of the superior positions in the New Economy and knowledge-based professions will be held by Asians and whites, with blacks and Hispanics largely relegated to the service sector.

America will then face both a racial and class crisis.

The only way to achieve equality of rewards and results then will be via relentless use of the redistributive power of government—steep tax rates on the successful, and annual wealth transfers to the less successful. It will be affirmative action, race preferences, ethnic quotas and contract set-asides, ad infinitum—not a prescription for racial peace or social tranquility.

Interesting report from Dollars and Sense. I found the following quote to be extremely interesting:

In the 1930s and 1940s, many employers accepted unions, grudgingly, as a way to ease labor unrest. As much as employers might dislike unions and collective bargaining, they were preferable to strikes or even factory occupations (or “sit downs”). Since the 1970s, however, employers have fought unions and unionization drives with increasing aggressiveness, as part of what labor historian Michael Goldfield calls the “employer offensive.” In the early 1970s, Goldfield notes, about 15% of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)-supervised union elections were so-called “consent elections,” in which employers had come to a prior agreement with the union(s) on the terms of the election. Historically, unions are more likely to win consent elections than elections in which the employer formally disputes the terms of the election, such as the group of workers (or “bargaining unit”) that has the right to vote and will have union representation if the union wins. By the early 1980s, only about 3% of NLRB elections were consent elections.

From Wikipedia

The Non-Conformists of the 1930s refers to a nebula of groups and individuals during the inter-war period in France which was looking for new solutions to face the political, economical and social crisis. The name was coined in 1969 by the historian Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle to describe a movement which revolved around Emmanuel Mounier‘s personalism. Locating themselves rather on the right-wing of the political spectrum, they attempted to find a “Third Way” between socialism and capitalism, and opposed liberalism, parliamentarism, democracy and fascism.

Three main currents of non-conformists may be distinguished:

• The review Esprit, founded in 1931 by Emmanuel Mounier and which was the main mouthpiece of personalism.
• The Ordre nouveau (New Order) group, created by Alexandre Marc and influenced by Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu‘s works. Charles de Gaulle would have some contacts with them between the end of 1934 and the beginning of 1935. Jean Coutrot, who became during the Popular Front vice-president of the Committee of Scientific Organisation of Labour of the Minister Charles Spinasse, participated to the technical reunions of Ordre nouveau .
• The Jeune Droite (Young Right — a term coined by Mounier) which gathered young intellectuals who had more or less broke with the monarchist Action française, including Jean de Fabrègues, Jean-Pierre Maxence, Thierry Maulnier, Maurice Blanchot, as well as the journals Les Cahiers, Réaction pour l’ordre, La Revue française or La Revue du Siècle.

These young intellectuals (most were about 25 years old) all considered that France was confronted by a “civilisation crisis” and opposed, despite their differences, what Mounier called the “established disorder” (le désordre établi). The latter was represented by capitalism, individualism, economic liberalism and materialism. Opposed both to Fascism and to Communism (qualified for the first as a “false Fascist-spiritualism ” and for the latter as plain materialism), they aimed at creating the conditions of a “spiritual revolution” which would simultaneously transform Man and things. They called for a “New Order,” beyond individualism and collectivism, oriented towards a “federalist,” “communautary and personalist” organisation of social relations.

The Non-Conformists were influenced both by French Socialism, in particular by Proudhonism (an important influence of Ordre nouveau) and by Social Catholicism, which permeated Esprit and the Jeune Droite. They inherited from both currents a form of scepticism towards politics, which explains some anti-statism stances, and renewed interest in social and economical transformations . Foreign influences were more restricted, and were limited to the discovery of the “precursors of existentialism” (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Max Scheler) and contacts between Ordre nouveau and several members of the German Conservative Revolution movement . They were in favor of decentralization, underscored the importance of intermediary bodies, and opposed finance capitalism.

The movement was close to liberalism in the attention given to civil society and in its distrust of the state; but it also criticized liberal individualism and its negligence of “intermediate bodies” (family, village, etc. — the reactionary writer Maurice Barrès also insisted on the latter). They were characterized by the will to find a “Third Way” between Socialism and Capitalism, individualism and collectivism, idealism and materialism and the left-right distinction in politics .