O anúncio da compra da rede de fast food canadense Tim Hortons pelo Burger King e os novos planos da empresa de se mudar para o Canadá para pagar menos impostos corporativos foram seguidos pelos previsíveis protestos dos social-democratas, ultrajados pela falta de patriotismo do Burger King. Os críticos afirmam que não é “patriótico” tirar proveito dos benefícios fornecidos pelos pagadores de impostos nos EUA e então fugir do pagamento de impostos para financiar os tais benefícios.

O que esperavam? Não existem corporações “patriotas”. Governos são ferramentas extrativas formadas por corporações em benefícios delas próprias. Governos servem para beneficiar agentes econômicos privilegiados às custas dos pagadores de impostos. A tendência central do capitalismo corporativo ao longo dos últimos 150 anos tem sido a socialização dos custos operacionais e a privatização dos lucros. Embora alguns democratas gostem de falar de “bilionários patriotas” como Warren Buffett, os bilionários são só patriotas — isto é, mantêm a fachada de lealdade ao governo — quando isso é do seu interesse. Os investimentos de Buffet, como outras empreitadas corporativas, dependem totalmente de subsídios governamentais a seus custos operacionais e da exploração dos consumidores através de monopólios que, juntos, são muito mais significativos do que qualquer imposto que ele paga ou defenda o pagamento.

Além disso, o imposto de renda corporativo — apesar de seu nome sugerir que prejudica corporações — não é tão “progressista” assim. Eu provavelmente odeio as corporações tanto quanto qualquer outra pessoa e provavelmente mais que a maioria e é por isso que eu afirmo que a função principal do imposto de renda corporativo é aumentar a concentração de poder, não reduzi-la. Deduções de impostos pontuais e créditos tributários, restituíveis ou não, significam que muitas corporações que empreendem em atividades favorecidas (como a produção com uso intensivo de capital de alta tecnologia e grandes fusões e aquisições) pagam poucos impostos ou nenhum. Como resultado de uma longa luta entre as facções Yankee e Cowboy do capital americano, a última (que concentra indústrias de serviços de baixos salários e aplicação intensiva de capital como as redes de fast food) paga o grosso dos impostos de renda corporativos e são os maiores defensores de sua diminuição. Além disso, as indústrias Yankee tendem a ser oligopólios em que as grandes empresas podem se juntar para passar os custos dos impostos aos consumidores através dos preços administrados, enquanto as indústrias Cowboy têm maior probabilidade de absorver esses custos.

Se queremos atacar o Burger King com base nos privilégios, ir para o Canadá para escapar dos impostos é um problema menor em comparação a coisas como seu uso da lei de marcas registradas, taxas de franquia e todos os acordos de fornecimento exclusivos que colocam os donos de franquias locais numa posição na qual o trabalho é literalmente a única coisa disponível para ser cortada. A maneira como as corporações tratam suas franquias é muito parecida com o jeito que o Walmart trata seus fornecedores.

Como afirmou Tom Knapp (o diretor de mídia do C4SS), os beneficiários do privilégio estatal sempre procurarão, como qualquer um, quem queira oferecer a eles os melhores privilégios. Um dos efeitos colaterais da globalização é que se torna mais fácil fazer essa busca — simplesmente coloque sua sede em um país com os melhores impostos, sabendo que todas as suas “propriedades intelectuais” e outros acordos ainda serão protegidos por outros estados, graças aos “acordos comerciais”.

A única forma de lutar contra o Burger King é sendo mais ágil que ele. Se a sede do BK pode mudar de país, os movimentos de solidariedade trabalhista também podem. Os trabalhadores da IWW podem fazer ações em restaurantes do Burger King no Canadá e também nos EUA. A nível local, podemos construir contrainstituições, como restaurantes de baixo custo caseiros e a entrega de comida preparada em casa, combatendo barreiras de entrada como regulamentações de zoneamento e licenciamento que dão aos restaurantes estabelecidos uma vantagem artificial. Assim, damos às pessoas comuns a oportunidade de transformar seu trabalho diretamente em renda para subsistência fora do sistema assalariado, reduzindo sua dependência dos baixos salários dos fast foods com suas péssimas condições de trabalho.

A raiz do problema é o privilégio — não os agentes econômicos que tiram a maior vantagem possível dele.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

Few aspects of the modern state are more irritating than the control of borders. Our movements are circumscribed by the nationalistic regimentation of migration and travel. This makes it more difficult to vote with your feet. One polity may be particularly oppressive, but the entrance requirements of another can be rather repressive too. This renders it more difficult to escape unjust conditions and reside in a more just area.

I am only here on a visit, but I could very well be migrating to another country sometime in the future. It will be a nightmare to go through this again with different immigration authorities. One of my fears relates to how they will treat my computer and other valuable items. I could be stopped for my political activites too. It would be the restriction of my liberty based upon a political disagreement.

Nation-states have other major disadvantages, but the restriction of movement is definitely one of the worst. A basic human right includes the liberty to move about without arbitrary restrictions on said movement. What could be more arbitrary than imaginary lines drawn in the sand by military and police power? Not much! All such borders are political fictions that benefit ruling classes.

Border restrictions especially hurt lower class people who need to get to a better locality. Such individuals are out to create a better life for themselves and deserve our moral support. They are the ones with the least amount of resources to fight immigration laws. The laws are thus biased against lower income people. They are the most restricted and affected by them.

Strong border controls allow rulers to pick and choose who enters a given territory. It priliveges some people at the expense of others. The individuals who have political connections are at an advantage relative to those who don’t. A base of support can thus be created and cultivated amongst the immigrant populace. Let’s work to open the borders and end nation-states.

Right now in Canada, thousands of indigenous people and their supporters are rising in protest against a long train of government abuses. The latest insult is a new federal law that many see as being designed to help crony capitalists rob the indigenous people of their remaining land.

The protest movement is called Idle No More, and it reflects longstanding aboriginal traditions of limiting centralized authority, and relying instead on voluntaryism and polycentrism as organizing principles.

Thousands of protestors are holding drum circles and round dances in the streets, a few have blockaded rail lines and highways, and one is now in her seventh week of fasting and holding political meetings.[1]

Establishment outlets like the National Post have frequently decried the protestors’ unwillingness to come up with a unified leadership who can control all this rabble and issue some unified demands to the federal government.

But the mainstream expectation that the protestors ought to coalesce into a single body with one authority making decisions for all totally misses the point. The protestors’ key demand is the right to make one’s own decisions.

Idle No More and the Refusal to Centralize

Aboriginal people are the most regulated, the most impoverished, and the most frequently imprisoned group of humans in Canada. You can see all the economic and social horrors of welfare totalitarianism playing out in aboriginal communities across the country, complete with oil companies gaming the system for fun and profit.

A great deal of the urgency and passion of Idle No More comes from these ongoing economic and social crises, and a great deal of the desultory mass-media chatter about it concerns proposals for various schemes of redistribution. But the refusal of protestors to unite around a single banner, tactic, or leader points to a much more fundamental challenge and a much more radical goal.

There are at least three important sources of Idle No More’s refusal to submit to any single vision.

The first is an important background fact that many non-aboriginal observers simply fail to comprehend: the sheer diversity of indigenous communities in Canada. There are 50-some languages [2], more than 600 legally defined reserve communities, and three quasi-racial government categories of indigenous persons (“Indians,” “Inuit,” and “Metis”), each subjected to a slightly different flavor of genocidal oppression and paternalistic welfare. Furthermore, many thousands of aboriginal persons live outside the government definitions.

It’s impossible to describe this enormous variety of cultures, regulations, and aspirations in any quick way, let alone create some simple, unified list of demands or grievances shared by all peoples.

Idle No More is not an orchestrated demonstration by a formal organization somehow representing everyone at once. It is a spontaneous uprising of many different peoples with many different visions and tactics, who nonetheless sense a shared opportunity to challenge the colonial statist quo.

Second is the influential tradition of nonviolent, distributed leadership in many indigenous communities.

Most radically, many hunter-gatherer people like the Dene and the Ojibwa simply had no tradition of coercive authority before Europeans imposed it on them. There were, of course, respected leaders and elders, but they didn’t have the power to force anyone to obey them.

Every day, each individual was free to listen to whatever person seemed to know most about that day’s challenges. And if you thought you had a better idea, nobody could stop you from setting out on your own and trying it.

These traditions of nonviolent authority extended even to child-raising. Children in such cultures learned discipline from example, hard work, and philosophical study, not from the back of a father’s hand. Of course, that all changed with the rise of compulsory Indian schools.

Now, precontact North America was not a libertarian utopia. The native peoples occasionally killed, robbed, and enslaved each other just as humans always have.

But the solutions they found to the universal challenge of how to organize society were usually a lot closer to the ideas of Western voluntaryists than they were to those of Western statists. Indeed, north of the militaristic Aztec empire, there were no states in the Americas before Columbus first planted his cross and declared the land for Spain. [3]

A few months after Idle No More began, the federal government made a great show of meeting with democratically elected native chiefs in order to find out what “the aboriginals” want. But the government fails to understand that the modern institution of the elected chief with coercive powers over his people is merely a European fantasy written into colonial law.

Indeed, my old Cree teacher once explained to me that, in her dialect, the word for an important leader is “okimaw,” and the word for a chief is “okimakan,” with that “kan” suffix meaning roughly “a thing made in imitation of.”

Politicians, in that sense, are imitations of leaders.

Now, sometimes modern chiefs have the support of their constituents, and sometimes they don’t. But as aboriginal activists call on their various traditions for inspiration, they don’t see much reason to obey any singular, permanent leadership issuing demands and negotiating with the feds on their behalf. If the chiefs go in a direction the activists don’t want to go in, the activists will feel perfectly within their rights to go on without them.

Third, regardless of what form of organization they prefer for themselves, most people in aboriginal communities believe they retain the right of self-determination vis-à-vis the colonial state. That is, they don’t think the central government has the right to decide where or if their kids go to school, how the laws will be enforced, and what people can do with their own land.

The treaties that past aboriginal leaders signed with the British crown are important to any legal discussion of their present relationship with the Canadian state. But most aboriginal persons regard these treaties as agreements between sovereign nations — not as declarations of total surrender and eternal submission to the wisdom of the colonial state.

In that sense, modern aboriginal organizations might properly wield powers analogous to the rights of nullification and secession that Tom Woods advocates for states within the USA. The smaller-level organizations aren’t perfect, but they may provide some refuge from federal tyranny.

Self-Determination and Federal Law

Among its many provisions, the new federal law, Bill C-45, makes it slightly easier for reserve politicians to lease reservation land to outside companies. [4] As laws governing indigenous people in Canada go, it’s not an especially evil one. Maybe it will make it easier for the crony capitalists to rob them, or maybe it will make it easier for indigenous people to develop real free markets for themselves. The possible economic outcomes are not the fundamental point.

The point, from the perspective of many protestors, is that the federal government wants to impose this law on all 600+ reserves “for their own good.” The point is that indigenous people, in Canada and the world at large, are sick and tired of having things done to them or done for them.

Among all the other demands in Idle No More — for the repeal of Bill C-45, for the enactment of some other law, for the return of stolen territory, or for the paying of reparations — you can hear this steady undertone: They are seeking a path back to autonomy and self-determination. They are fostering a resurgence of the principle that no authority has the right to force all people to conform to one vision of justice, economy, or culture.

Notes:

[1] There is of course no central information storehouse for this decentralized movement. You can find regular news and commentary on the leftist site Rabble.ca, but much of the discussion and organization by protestors themselves is happening on national and local Idle No More Facebook pages, and on Twitter, hashtag #IdleNoMore. Indeed, the movement name comes from the hashtag used by the original founders.

[2] Depending on where you draw the line between a language and a dialect.

[3] There may have been some states in the southern United States in the long millennia before European colonization, but those civilizations had passed away well before 1492.

[4] Bill C-45 makes it so that instead of needing a majority of all band members to lease the land, you just need a majority of all members who show up to vote.

Mike Reid teaches anthropology in Winnipeg. His libertarian anthropological perspective on current events has appeared in the Mises Daily, the Freeman, Whiskey & Gunpowder, Heartland’s FIRE Policy News, and Ontario History. He also manages, writes, edits, and creates ebooks for Invisible Order. Check out his website, SocialBulldozer.com. Follow him on Twitter. Send him mail.

What is the setting for this story? It could be any number of places, but in this case it’s Buffalo, New York in 2010.

The New York Times recently published an article about United States Border Patrol sweeps on trains and buses traveling near, but not crossing, the US-Canada border (“Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S.” August 29, 2010). Agents board trains, question people about their citizenship status, and detain those who do not produce documents that satisfy them. Those without the bureaucratically-correct papers can be placed in administrative detention, strip searched, sent to county jail, transferred to unmarked detention facilities around the country without notice to their families, and eventually see a judge weeks later.

In theory, passengers can decline to answer questions, but it is not clear how much agents will let the rules get in the way of exercising power.

Readers who are unfamiliar with immigration detention procedure should read about the secretive nature of detention centers not designed for long-term human habitation, as described in the Nation article “America’s Secret ICE Castles.” People unfortunate enough to not be able to get their government forms in order may face the pervasive abuse noted in the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee report “Voices of the Disappeared.”

The “papers, please” checkpoint image is frequently invoked to convey the idea of a police state or totalitarian regime. It’s a visible reminder of how far government will go to keep things under control, and that government considers all the people within its grasp to be its things. The lasting effects of producing documents at any time to prove to state agents that you are worthy to draw breath on their turf are real.

Social control is of course big business. Not only is there an entire offshoot of the military-industrial complex based on domestic control, but the individuals who administer government programs certainly profit when they expand their own power. The Rochester Border Patrol unit has grown tremendously as a result of its papers-please arrests on trains and buses.

There is a cost that cuts deeper than tax dollars. The costs to freedom affect everybody. Freedom of action is limited when freedom of association is usurped. Precedents are set for law enforcement and the power they come to assume over the rest of us. When targeted individuals are pressured out of the above-ground economy and avoid mass transit by pooling transportation resources, the state will counter by demanding new powers to monitor more areas of life.

The long-term solution requires raising the demand for freedom and the capability to meet that demand. The extent to which liberty is valued is the extent to which society operates for the benefit of all individuals who don’t value power above all else.