Keith Preston looks at the broader context of Obama's historic victory. What does it mean to be radical now that the activists of the 1960s have finally siezed power and achieved a fusion of state capitalism and cultural leftism?
A short write up I did on my afternoon with Richmond Food Not Bombs
Much of the mainstream progressive movement will try to reform a crumbling and unsustainable economic system.
As someone generally predisposed to the notion that states don't have any rights and international institutions are criminal cartels, it is especially annoying to me to see a country of sixty years, that owes its existence to the UN, constantly invoking its "right to exist" as a welfare dependent of American taxpayers.
I read a blog that often posts videos of criminals doing stupid shit. So in the same spirit:
Hold on a minute: if tasers are so safe, why did he need medical attention after the accidental tasing?
One of the most inaccurate essays on left libertarianism I've ever read
"Instead of being dominated by a few, giant tree-structured organizations, it's now looking like the economy of the future will be a fluid network of smaller, independent units."
"During the rise of the "speculation economy" in the early years of the 20th century, business' focus on production was replaced with business management's focus on stock prices."
Anne Applebaum's recent Slate piece on the Madoff scandal asserts that capitalism relies on trust to operate efficiently. I object to the use of the word "trust" - that implies a relationship between us lowly consumption serfs and our capitalist masters predicated on honesty, transparency, and respect against which I need not bother arguing. But she has a point: even if the system is unfair, it "works" better when everybody can rely on predictable relationships and solid institutions. Fraud - especially on the scale perpetrated by Madoff - undermines our reliance on those status quo relationships, tossing into stark relief how little basis there is for any "trust".
However, given the agent-principle problems inherent in the corporate economy, it's a wonder schemes like this don't blow up more often. Certainly the massive government regulation of the corporate form socializes the costs of maintaining what are in fact complex and opaque delegations of responsibility and liability, as I argued in Let the Free Market Eat the Rich. As participants (and especially as investors) in this general model for organizing business, we don't trust so much as we have faith - blind faith that the variety of parties involved in these firms take their fiduciary and oversight roles seriously.
Left libertarians often talk about the barriers to market entrants that regulations erect, shoring up the positions of big, established competitors. Rarely, however, do we discuss how the regulatory infrastructure makes shareholder-owned, management-directed, employee-operated firms into viable, productive enterprises in the first place. Without limited liability guarantees, laws mandating oversight for managerial decisions, provisions for creative accounting (much of which itself resembles the ponzi scheme), and other legal tools for investors, the shareholder-owned corporation would resemble a classic con job the larger and more complex it became.
A history of the early 80s San Franciscan left libertarian rag.
An interesting reformist approach to capitalism that seeks to simplify the practice of banking, credit, and money creation based on a peer-to-peer model
Here's a photo montage Tasha put together to express our wishes for the season. Enjoy your days of mirth!
Since I used to produce amateur electronic music, mostly drum and bass / jungle (you can sample some of my work here) I'm very familiar with the prevalence and importance of the Amen break. So it's cool to see a short documentary that can chronicle its adventures and tie it into free culture and the tyranny of intellectual property law.
Well, I just got an iPhone, and I gotta say it's one cool gizmo. Time will tell if the sexy creature will hold up or if the network will be sufficient (nobody has good things to say about AT&T's coverage, but so far so good). But it's definitely the most usable phone I've ever beheld, and I think it'll end up making my life easier.
So my old phone (which I detailed here) had to go - Windows Mobile was a complete bitch, and within the past week I couldn't even get buttons to work. The touch screen is a disaster, Windows Mobile takes years to respond to your input, and the battery life was abysmal. While the iPhone didn't have a high bar to clear, I did encounter some frustration: trying to get my contacts off my old phone and onto my new one.
If you're using a Windows PC with iTunes and your iPhone, importing your contacts should be a cinch: just use ActiveSync to bring them into Microsoft Outlook, then import those contacts into iTunes directly. But if you don't have a PC, it's complicated. Early on I tried using Mail2Web's free exchange server to pull stuff off the old phone. That worked well, and I simply installed a "Exchange ActiveSync Profile" on the iPhone to bring in the contacts. Trouble was, these contacts were permanently connected to the exchange account. I didn't want an exchange account on my phone indefinitely, so when I removed the profile, my contacts went with it!
An agorist brings together eyewitness anarchist accounts of what's going on.
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