Listen to the interview.

Keith Preston interviews Russell Longcore. Topics include:

• How Russell’s political thinking shifted from the Republican Party to the Libertarians to anarchism.
• His experiences with the Republican Party of Cobb County, Georgia and his up-close observations of Newt Gingrich.
• The prospects and limitations of the Ron Paul campaign.
• Why he is now a non-voter who rejects electoral politics.
• The role of Thomas Paine and Lysander Spooner in the shaping of his political outlook.
• How he came to advocate secession as the solution to the American empire’s failure.
• How the BRIC axis is planning to challenge the dollar as the world reserve currency.
• The likelihood of hyperinflation and the collapse of the U.S. economy in the future.
• Why the breakup of the United States will more closely resemble the collapse of the Soviet empire rather than the colonial or Confederate secessions of 1776 and 1861.
• How the principal tasks of new secessionist communities will be the creation of a stable monetary system, the enactment of a viable political charter, and the formation of a defensive militia.
• His own conversion from evangelical Christianity to Deism.

Russell Longcore has an insurance claims practice in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He is the author of the book Insurance Claim Secrets Revealed.

Article by David D’Amato.

Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, once in headlines over a prostitution scandal, is in the news again. President Obama, Spitzer says, talks tough on Wall Street, yet shrinks from attempts at real reform. Spitzer adds that, with this president, “you have to distinguish between the rhetoric and the reality.”

Parsing the rhetorical guile of political Newspeak turns up helpful hints, especially when it comes to talk of reining in the likes of Bank of America and Citigroup. The truth is that the president is far from unique among the political class in his coziness with the banking elite. Historically, the largest and most influential banks have benefited enormously at the growth of the central state, including naturally the growth of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve System.

But there is an alternative to cursory talk of reform, one that actually would limit the dominion of plutocratic central decision-makers — both in business and in government — over the economic system, and in turn over our lives.

Stateless, free banking, the height of free association and voluntary trade, does not rely on the myth that the state and the economic ruling class are at odds. Rather free banking proceeds from and accepts, as economist Lawrence H. White writes, “the less question-begging assumption that government acts in its own pecuniary interest,” an interest that in practice has been closely aligned with that of a “central bank’s private constituency — presumably the large commercial banks.”

As usual, the effect of state intervention is not and never has been to place limitations on the growth and power of big business. It has instead been to structure, through a medley of entry barriers, an environment in which the economic ruling class is exempt from the hassles of legitimate competition.

All of the theoretical palavering, even where well-intentioned, regarding the best way to tinker with interest rates or the monetary base is completely empty, at least as an attempt at resolving the current state of affairs in finance. Even assuming that some single regulation — considered in the context of the existing oligopoly system — could indeed promote its purported goal of consumer protection, the overall product of the regulatory regime does not and cannot square with that goal.

And of course we couldn’t expect it to. Only free and open competition, with neither arbitrary constraints nor special privileges, can safeguard consumers against the abuses associated with monopoly. The common analytical mistake is to look upon the banking system of the present as relatively free from government interference, and to therefore impute its characteristic faults to laissez faire.

It shouldn’t be taken as coincidence, though, that the Wall Street giants and the Federal Reserve System are towering, dominant features in a banking system constantly lurching toward crisis. Market anarchists have long understood that the problems created by monetary centralization cannot be combated with yet more centralization.

Competition among banks as well as currencies would lead to stabilization of a type impossible for economies commanded by central banks (even assuming they had the necessary angelic motivations so often credited to them). Just the information necessary to arrive at, for instance, the ideal supply of circulating money at a given time is neither available to, nor susceptible to analysis by, a group of central bankers.

Only the unimpeded ebbs and flows of a genuine freed market, defined by billions of seemingly trivial consumer decisions, are competent to provide such coordination. Accordingly, the stability and efficiency functions of free banking harmonize seamlessly with its consumer protection functions.

It’s time to start treating the state and Wall Street like a single enemy. And in doing so, free banking is the natural solution.

C4SS News Analyst David S. D’Amato is a market anarchist and an attorney with an LL.M. in International Law and Business. His aversion to superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself atfirsttruths.org.

Article by Thomas Sowell.

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Apparently the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not enough to occupy the government’s time, because the Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government’s preconceptions.

Behind all this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of evenness or randomness – whether in employment, housing or innumerable other situations – shows a “problem” that has to be “corrected.”

No speck of evidence is considered necessary for this assumption to prevail at any level of government, including the Supreme Court of the United States. No one has to show the existence, much less the prevalence, of an even or random distribution of different segments of the population – in any country, anywhere in the world, or at any period of history.

Nothing is more common than for people to sort themselves out when it comes to residential housing, whether by class, race or other factors.

More…

Article by Kevin Carson.

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Multitude, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, adds enormous clarity to the libertarian worldview.

The Westphalian nation-state’s sovereignty rested on its sole right to define the legitimacy of both use of violence within its boundaries and the exercise of violence against other nation-states. Under the Westphalian system, whatever their differences in actual military power, states regarded each other as equal sovereigns, with equal claims to territorial integrity and equal rights to conduct war, subject to common standards of legitimacy under international law.

This has been superseded by Empire. The Hegemon has the sole right to define legitimate state violence within the world system. It becomes, in effect, a super-state, excercising the same sovereign rights in the world-system as a whole that ordinary nation-states exercise internally. Hence the American national security establishment defining as a “threat” the credible ability to successfully resist American attack, and “aggression” as refusal to obey the Hegemon’s orders.

The Hegemon, as sovereign of the world-system, upholds a global system of power in exactly the same way national governments uphold their domestic systems of power.

War, for the Hegemon, is a police activity. Wars in the Westphalian system were limited to specific theaters of operations and specific timespans, directed against defined nation-states, and ended by treaty when their finite objectives were met. But the Hegemon’s military action is no extraordinary state of affairs that punctuates periods of peace; it is the normal, “peacetime” state of activity. Like the operation of police forces within the nation-state, the Empire’s military actions are continuous and omnipresent acts by which the system is constituted and maintained. War is the normal global state of affairs, just as “law enforcement” is the domestic norm.

The blurring between military and police action is exemplified by several things: Militarization of domestic police forces through SWAT teams; erosion of constraints on the use of the regular military for domestic law enforcement; and the use of drone warfare for constant police action in which foreign nationals are killed in large numbers on the territories of formerly sovereign nation-states, with which the U.S. is formally at peace, with or without their governments’ permission.

The passage of the National Defense Authorization Act is especially troubling in this regard. It formalizes the redefinition of U.S. territory as a permanent theater — the “Homeland” Command — in a global war, with American citizens subject to indefinite detention without charge just like foreign nationals in a foreign theater of operations. Like Italy in the Roman Empire, America is becoming just another province among many of a global Empire. Martial law, is implemented retail as an ordinary instrument of policy under bureaucratic caesarism rather than as an abrupt and dramatic act

File-sharers and hackers are increasingly classified as “terrorists” — the likely next shoe to drop being their assassination as “enemies” without due process — as the state imports military crowd control technologies for police repression of domestic protestors.

The sovereignty of foreign states is increasingly conditional, with the Hegemon revoking “failed states’” sovereignty and conferring it again after a process of “nation-building.” Like the American federal system in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the global system is reconstituting from one of equal sovereigns into one in which sovereignty is conferred by a central Hegemon. We’ve seen this in Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya — Syria’s probably next. If Iceland becomes an information haven for Wikileaks’ servers, or Spain and Greece fall to M15 and Syntagma, we may see American drones and special forces enforcing an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine (no state, once having embraced neoliberalism, may secede from the Empire).

War is no longer an extraordinary use of force between states, but (in Hardt and Negri’s words) “the basis of the internal politics of the global order.” As Emmanuel Goldstein put it, “War is Peace.”

If there’s a single takeaway from all this, it’s the nature of the system of power the imperial Hegemon enforces. However much the Hegemon differs from ordinary states, like them it monopolizes power on behalf of an economic ruling class. The Hegemon, like the Westphalian nation-state, is the executive committee of the ruling class. The state is an instrument of organized violence for enforcing political means to wealth: Political appropriation of vacant land, enforcement of artificial scarcities and artificial property rights, and restraint of competition in the interest of concentrated economic power.

The Hegemon enforces a world economic order associated with the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, GATT, and the G-8. And it does so in order that a few hundred global corporations can strip-mine the planet’s resources and turn its population into sweatshop workers. Whatever the high-minded talk of Peace and Freedom coming from the Hegemon’s imperial functionaries, the reality is slavery.

C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

From the Los Angeles Times.

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Patrick Burke with his wife, Elise, and their son, Jackson. In a drunk driving and auto theft case last year, the Air Force pilot was found not guilty “by reason of lack of mental responsibility” — a result of the prescription drugs he’d taken. (Burke Family Photo, Burke Family Photo. / January 21, 2012)