Via Against Monopoly, here's a great look at where Democrats' priorities are:
We are writing you seeking immediate and effective action to promote and safeguard American intellectual property around the world. Goods and services produced by American workers, farmers and business that have a high intellectual property content are critical to restoring broad-based economic growth and job creation, yet they are widely pirated, stolen and copied.
Forget for one moment that this is part of their proposed "alternative foreign policy" to the Republicans' elitist, corporatist agenda. They're trying to protect farmers. Please, Pelosi, show me some fucking farmers that make a living off intellectual property of any sort. If anything, they're suffering because of it. And for God sakes, check out Percy Schmeiser if you still have any doubts about whether the little guy belongs voting for the Democratic Party as it now stands.
- My brother John got home from Iraq about three or four weeks ago. Obviously, that's a big relief. Finally got to see him briefly last weekend at a cookout his wife's family was having. We didn't get a chance to talk much, but he definitely wants to give me some insight into what's going on there. I'm just glad he's safe.
- Tasha's ten year high school reunion was last night. It was a lot of fun; got to hang out with some people I hadn't seen in a while. Unfortunately, I think I knew more people at her reunion than I'll know at mine...
- Jim Van Fleet's generosity has resulted in a recent intensive economic and policy education. He loaned me a Tim Hartford book a while ago that was insightful, if a little infuriating (yes, in a perfect market, price does indeed equal cost... so don't you wonder what the source of all that distortion is, Mr. World Bank?). Now I'm reading Secrets of the Temple by William Greider. I simply can't put it down - I've never read such a captivating narrative about economic policy. Of course, the kicker is that - as Ted Kennedy says on the back cover - what passes for dispassionate, expert management of the economy is in actual fact intensely political. There is a passage that deals with the transformation of American society from its rural agrarian roots to hypermanaged city life that was really touching to this decentralist. Its regular investigations of the interests at work in Fed policy make it a very even-handed book, if framed by an establishment point of view. It will certainly inform a lot of my future explorations of economics (as well as many beer-fueled discussions with Jim).
- Another friend of mine is working on doing a low budget indie zombie flick starring all his friends. It's going to be intentionally cheezy, of course, but I've been invited to do a song or two for the soundtrack. I've got a few ideas in mind... I've normally stayed away from dark, evil jungle, but this would be a good chance to tap into the dark side. I'm also gonna see if Wil wants to contribute a track, since this sounds right up his alley.
- I need advice on time management, self-discipline, and stuff like that. I'm tired of always procrastinating stuff. I've gotten to the point where I'm used to being overwhelmed, and I need to find a way to discipline myself to do things when they need to be done. And to expect myself to do them.
Via John at Freedom Democrats, Carl Milsted describes one place where the egalitarian Left went wrong:
The modern day wealth subsidies come not from an explicit desire to help the rich, but from attempts to stimulate the economy during the Great Depression. John Maynard Keynes prescribed a set of anti-savings measures in order to stimulate the economy. The Left took his ideas to heart since they provided an excuse for welfare programs -- the poor tend to spend what they get, so taking from the rich and giving to the poor leads to increased spending.
What the Left failed to realize is that the rest of Keynes' agenda consists of subsidies for the rich! If the government consumes savings, the demand for capital goes up. If you discourage workers from saving via payroll taxes and a promise of retirement income, then the supply of capital goes down. The end result is a greater return on investment for those who have money to invest.
The libertarian Democrat response by Logan Ferree illustrates the difference between minarchism and anarchism (hint: it's one I've descibed before):
Ideally, if capital is so scarce it would make sense for people to try to save more. I think the biggest problem is that we're trapped in a consumer society that discourages saving not through rational appeal but emotional appeal.
I can see his point that an egalitarian society would have high savings and the like, but I can't see how this could be sustained except through a culture that encouraged saving at a potentially irrational level.
I don't necessarily have a problem with this analysis, but I do think it begs the question: what is the "rational" outcome he'd like to see?
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I've encountered my share of right wing blowhards, but Christopher Hitchens demonstrates just how little regard neoconservatives hold for thoughtful discourse and debate (lynchpins of any democratic republic). Via majikthise, Ezra Klein relates an incident involving Hitchens at a dinner party:
Hitchens then recalls a time when Dean spoke against mandatory parental notification laws by telling of 12-year-old child who'd come to his office seeking an abortion. The baby was her father's. But Dean hadn't told the authorities of the incident, and it seemed that it may have happened to someone else, or been exaggerated, or something. Hitchens uses this to brand Dean a "pathological liar," and when some at the table protest, Hitchens turns his shotgun full of crazy on the assembled:
"Fine, now that I know that, to you, medical ethics are nothing, you've told me all I need to know. I'm not trying to persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I'm telling you why I disagree with you. That I do care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There's nothing you wouldn't make an excuse for. You know what? I wouldn't want you on my side. I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud , and you say 'That's O.K.' Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I'm telling you what I think are standards and you say, 'What standards? It's fine, he's against the Iraq War.' Fuck. Off. You're MoveOn.org. Any liar will do. He's anti-Bush. Fuck off...Save it sweetie, for someone who cares. It will not be me. You love it, you suck on it. I now know what your standards are, and now you know what mine are, and that's all the difference -- I hope -- in the world."
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Logan Ferree of Freedom Democrats deserves a medal and a lifetime's supply of Legend Brown Ale for doggedly engaging Democrats in a discussion about corporate power. He posted a challenge issued by Catallarchy blogger Trent McBride with regard to Kos's recent suggestion of a libertarian-democrat alliance. McBride's challenge had a special significance to me: he challenged liberals at Daily Kos to "Persuade [him] that corporate (coercive) power, to the extent that it exists, does not rest on governmental power at its foundation." Ever since Ferree brought the challenge to the attention of the Democrats and liberals at Daily Kos, he's been awash in responses - some more coherent or historically accurate than others.
One issue that springs to mind while perusing the discussion is how vague the typical libertarian position on corporations is. This insight is provoked by repeated liberal claims that corporations would exist and oppress independent of government support. While the claim is wrong on its face - corporations are chartered by the state, and there was indeed a time where this power was jealously rationed - it is interesting that liberals as well as many libertarians cling tenaciously to the corporation as an institution. This is curious given the corporation's statelike bureaucracy and government grants of limited liability and fake personhood, since it seems so unegalitarian and aristocratic.
Libertarians would do well to make their position more explicit instead of conflating corporations with market transactions and general business. As many liberals point out in the course of the discussion, even Democrats are against corporate welfare - so where do libertarians distinguish themselves? My answer is that many left libertarians (such as I) would like to see the corporation's legal status completely abolished wholesale. I find it difficult to reconcile the idea of privileged legal status with either the egalitarian aims of the liberals or the responsible individualism of libertarians.
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Jane Galt's recent post on the offenses to individual liberty posed by Democrats vs. those posed by Republicans is quite sobering and thoughtful. Though she's not my favorite blogger by any means (I can't stand the systematic reduction of life to dry economic calculation that seems to plague female libertarian bloggers inclined towards the dismal science) she brings up a question that needs to be asked, even if it doesn't affect your politicial position:
I think that a lot of libertarians think that the next step is a police state. And that's not necessarily, or even probably, true. Governments in Europe have quite a lot more freedom to spy on and detain their citizens, and they manage not to have police states. Democratic traditions and social constraints . . . especially ones as longstanding as ours . . . do matter a lot, even where the legal traditions do not provide as firm a check as we would like on state power. Which doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about these things. We should, because they're wrong. But the arguments against them have to stand on their own, not on the premise that if we permit the Bush administration to waterboard suspected terrorists, in a few short years the Thought Police will be knocking at our doors in the middle of the night. We could do these things, and they could be used against a tiny fraction of the population, most of whom are not citizens, and it could go no further. Britain pulled all sorts of unsavoury legal manoeuvres against the IRA, and it didn't spread to terrorising journalists.
I'm having trouble writing this because it sounds like I'm saying that warrantless wiretaps don't matter. They do matter, a lot. But they matter because they are bad in principle, not because it is at all likely that if we allow them, the Bush administration, or any successive administration, will shortly start making inconvenient persons "disappear".
To take an example I've been harping on recently, there are all sorts of appalling violations of power by local police and prosecutors, as Radley Balko has recently exposed with his superb work on the Cory Maye case. Many prisoners endure such brutalization that if I had to choose between going to a high-security prison and being interrogated by the Bush administration's favoured methods, I'd pick the waterboarding. This is a stain on our national honour, an outrage, an abomination. But does it mean that our society is not worth living in? Are we not free? Have we no liberty? Do we live in a police state because some peoples' liberties are thusly threatened? Are we close to a police state? Were we under the Democrats, when such abuses were equally likely to occur?
Two voices emerge within my head on reading this.
The first voice says not only that she's right, but that she's capturing the truth behind the public's apathetic complicity in the Bush Administration's despicable policies. Sure, we're walking close to the line, but we're just not going to go over it. The status quo will be maintained, and life will go on. The creeping fascism is targeted; the popular effects of same are miniscule. Europe really is a great example of how few of our Consitutionally-guaranteed rights are necessary to have a modern, liberal life.
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Finally, we have an organization promoting market anarchism to the masses. Announcing the Center for a Stateless Society:
The Molinari Institute, a market anarchist think tank, today launched a new media effort aiming to put their agenda to abolish government front and center in US political discourse. Dubbing their project the Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org), institute officials laid out plans to publish and distribute news commentary written by anarchists with radically free-market oriented views on economics - taking market anarchism out of the realm of academia and obscure internet blogs in order to put it in the public eye.
Molinari Institute President Roderick Long explained "For too long libertarians, and I mean anarchist libertarians, have treated market anarchism almost as an esoteric doctrine. It's time to put market anarchism front and center in our educational efforts, time to start making it a familiar and recognizable position. The Center for a Stateless Society aims to bring a market anarchist perspective to the popular press, rather than leaving it confined to scholarly studies and movement periodicals."
Brad Spangler will serve as director, and hopefully I will be able to contribue some writing at some point. Roderick's appeal for a popular, persuasive anarchist movement in this country mirrors my thoughts (as will be clear when my next post is published in a few hours).
Any suggestions on topics on which I could write? I'm especially interested in those who are still skeptical about anarchism.
I've made my first essay contribution to the Center for a Stateless Society press outreach project. I'm not too interested in the whole Foleygate scandal, but I figured anarchists should have a response. The essay is entitled Child Exploitation and the Myth of Moral Management. Here's an excerpt:
Child exploitation is an evil that has plagued humanity throughout its history. Social awareness of child welfare and consensus on its definition is relatively recent but on the riser. Following this trend, many in Congress work continuously to address this issue, creating new legislative prerogatives for the State to interdict predators and protect children.
How, then, do we reconcile these goals with the case of Mark Foley, a Congressman recently caught engaging in sexually explicit conversations with a minor? Perhaps those who seek to protect us from the nameless, faceless criminals out there have completely misunderstood the problem. The body empowered with enacting nationwide laws, creating criteria for punishing people, and directing the full power of the State contains the very corruption it seeks to root out among us.
It makes one wonder: whom can we trust?
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UPDATE: Matt Jenny hat die Artikel ins Deutsche uebersetzt und bei seiner neuer Seite, Der freie Markt, veroeffentlicht. Hier gibt es auch eine kleine Diskussion über meinen Artikel: https://www.yigg.de/10837 (the German language "Digg")
Anthony Gregory on the growing divide between the left liberal establishement and their base, as exemplified by Jon Stewart (via LewRockwell.com):
The battle over the soul of American left-liberalism has begun. Neither side is libertarian, of course. But one is clearly better from a libertarian perspective. One offers a potential return to normalcy -- to take the steroids away from the "steroidal Democrats" in the Republican Party -- to retract, at least somewhat, the U.S. empire to more tolerable and less globally dangerous levels; to demilitarize the American police at home; even to keep cleaner accounts for America's financial house and temper the tyrannical extraction of wealth from the taxpaying class for gorging by the corporate state. Yes, it is not totally libertarian. But on the other side, also fighting for the soul of left-liberalism, is the worst of all worlds in American politics: sanguine for war and the nightstick, and intent on inflating taxes on the rich so as to stabilize and better manage the total state and empire. In other words, just as Bush has been a "steroidal Democrat," Schumer offers a glimpse into a future Democratic administration of steroidal Republicans. Let the battle commence, and let us hope that if the popular left ever rises again in this country, it is more inclined toward the sensibilities of Jon Stewart than the jackbooted thuggery of Chuck Schumer.
As I've been trying to tell people, opposing this administration's foreign policy is about more than getting Republicans out of office: it's about giving the electorate a real anti-war party. Let's remember that the Democratic establishment has a lot of Republican elements of which to rid themselves. If left liberal independents can figure out that the powers they give their politicians will eventually be used by the others' politicians, maybe they'll start to see why leftism need not support the state (at least, reflexively).
It's official: RTG stands for everything I loathe about politics. Her latest is an outrage against every intelligent human being in this country - even the conservatives she holds as such uebermenschen over the depraved liberal caste. It's not that liberals are simply promoting erroneous or malicious policies - they actually lack a conscience and a soul:
The liberal ideology espouses fairness and equality. They imagine themselves to be disinterested observers, listening to every side. But such impartiality does not come without a price: a conscience and a soul. They simply have nothing inside them to tell them what is right and wrong.
I mean, how can RTG be expected to engage in an honest debate with such animals? What's the point of her, say, oh, I dunno, proving her point when the other side lacks any ability to articulate moral agency? It's an exercise in futility, right? Therefore, by virtue of the lack of any sentient audience, no proof, no defense, no explanation whatsoever of her point of view is necessary. And, as she puts it, "that's all we need to know" about terrorism and liberals. Well, at least she tried.
Even I didn't think she was capable of such blatant fascism. Still, this could yet be idle words from a person with lots of time on her hands. She could yet renounce this bigotry and return to the realm of rational debate. But the reality of these utterances is inescapable: anytime you hear the right wing in any country saying a group of people lack human qualities, bad things tend to be lie down the road. The only comfort in this is that we finally can see the endgame of the hardcore conservatives: it was never to win the argument, but rather, to expel the other side on a technicality. A monstrous one at that.
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A Caveat
A while back I declared my abstinance from reading Right Thinking Girl in the future. This was a mistake, because it misrepresented my motivations for reading it these past three years or so. It was always a blog that represented not simply an ideology I regard as pedestrian and coarse, but also showcased the sense of entitlement that the right wing mentality proclaims for itself. From that perspective it was a perfect venue to explore a critical dimension of America. I wanted to figure out the underlying psychology and motivations of this new brand of pop jingoism and corporate cheerleading.
I don't want that investigation to stop, because there's still a lot that needs to be said - not about her personally, but about the type of American she exemplifies. Her attitude towards the administration of the blog chased me away, not her politics. And like it or not she's a perfect example of the mentality that not only created the conditions for a War on Terror but proclaims fealty to its core principles without reflection or ponderance. Since she can express her thoughts with some skill, those thoughts can be more confidently deconstructed and analyzed for hidden assumptions and values. These assumptions and values not only matter - they drive the world we find ourselves in. It's crucial to expose them and investigate them mercilessly.
So like I tried to do with my short-lived Wrong Thinking Girl blog, I will make a point of drawing out her more egregious or thoughtless statements for critique - just as I've always done on her blog. What will change is the venue, since nobody can possibly accuse me of using this blog to ride on anybody's coattails (as RTG did). I would have liked to have had a venue that gave all of the participants on RTG an equal voice in standing up to her. But unfortunately - as often occurs with right wing authoritarian types - dissent is something one is free to engage in so long as it is managed and marginalized, safely tucked away on the offending party's server.
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Mephisto implementation of the CVREG.org website right now. It's slightly amusing to run into all the stupid problems you're bound to run into when you start a project but in a room full of other people doing the same thing. You hear all the usual mutterings like "why won't you work?!?!?!" and "what the fuck is going on with this?!?!?!" and "oh, jeez, I'm an idiot!!!!" But still: a lot of fun.
Hopefully, the next jam will be that much more productive.
Let's backtrack for one second, you rowdy right wing bloggers, you.
A congressman is caught red-handed engaging in explicit conversations with minors. The highest echelons of Republican leadership are implicated in a cover-up.
And the best you can come up with is that the Democrats are just as bad or worse?
Sheldon Richman points out another gem of personal responsibility:
It's official now: U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, who quit Congress after getting caught sending sexually explicit messages to teenaged male congressional pages, is an alcoholic, mentally ill, and a victim of sexual abuse by a clergyman. In other words, he's hit the psychiatric trifecta. He's now in rehab. But he's not offering any of this as an excuse for his inappropriate conduct. He just thought we'd like to know.
Good to see that there are some at my alma mater who care about peace and justice. From the fredericksburg.com story on UMW SDS:
The group of University of Mary Washington students had taped sheets of paper to the side of the fountain outside Monroe Hall. The names of 300 American soldiers--just over 10 percent of U.S. military casualties of the war in Iraq--fluttered in the autumn wind. A ring of death.
It was one of many statements made by members of Students for a Democratic Society and the Anarchist Social Theory Club--two UMW organization that hosted an anti-war protest yesterday afternoon as part of a nationwide day of protest organized by anti-war group The World Can't Wait.
The next paragraph reminded me what a preppie-infested, oblivious dump my school is:
The UMW event drew fewer than 25 students on a campus with more than 4,000. Dozens of students were at "Rocktoberfest" instead, a music and barbecue party going on at the same time.
Still, I'm glad that there are students from my old school who are speaking out about the war.
I've posted pictures from our party last weekend on my flickr account.
This picture shows me reassuring the crowd that my first attempt at grilling hamburgers was not going to blow them up. However, I was worried I would. Grease was dripping from the the grill into the grease catcher, and flames were trickling down near the propane tank. Luckily, my friend Donnie kept his cool and showed me how to work the grill.
