Center for a Stateless Society » democratic party

When I saw A. Barton Hinkle’s hit job on the Wobblies (“Meet the Left-Wing Extremist Running for U.S. Senate,” Reason, September 3), I had to double-check to make sure I was on the right website. Was it FrontPage Magazine? Breitbart? Nope — it was Reason!

Reason prints some fairly right-leaning stuff, but seldom anything like this that’s just Republican talking points from beginning to end, with virtually no actual libertarianism at any point in between. Hinkle spends roughly the first half of his article on by-the-numbers victimology about “liberal media bias,” whining that the media would have been all over a Republican as far to the Right as his subject — Montana Democratic Senate Candidate Susan Curtis — is to the Left. When some Tea Party troglodyte pipes up about rape or “illegal aliens,” Hinkle says, the press is all over it, howling about the “takeover of the GOP by right-wing extremists.” But the librul meejia ignores Curtis’s ties to the I.W.W. because she’s a Democrat and a woman.

Um, well. Yeah, the establishment media still tends to be “liberal,” if by that you mean upper-middle class managerial-professional types half an inch to the left of center, who are slightly friendlier than Republicans to abortion rights and welfare but agree with them on about 90% of the basic structural issues of corporate capitalism. But when it comes to most stuff they’re just pro-power — which means the same center-left talking head show types asked the same softball questions about drones, torture and NSA surveillance under both Bush and Obama, and would like to see Edward Snowden stand trial for treason. Not to mention all the #UniteBlue types geared up to support Hillary Clinton, who’s far more of a hawk and a police statist than Obama.

But if there’s an asymmetry in media coverage of the Democratic and Republican Parties’ respective extremists, it might be because there’s an asymmetry in how the two parties treat those extremists. The press pays lots of attention to “the wingnuts who’ve taken over the GOP” because, well, they’ve taken over the GOP. When the Koch Brothers fund a candidate who speaks in tongues and bites the heads off bats, GOP establishment politicians respond by grabbing a bat and chomping down. Their biggest fear is being unseated by Tea Party primary challengers. On the other hand if the center-left media ignores the Democratic Party’s left-wing fringe, that’s because the Democratic Party’s center-left establishment also ignores them. Principled left-leaning critics of the Iraq War, drones and the NSC get their funding cut off by the DNC. The Democrats remain a corporate center-left party and circle the wagons against anyone further to the left, while the Republicans shift as far right as necessary to prevent the Tea Party from undermining the loyalty of their base.

As for Hinkle’s historically illiterate nonsense about the Industrial Workers of the World, where do I even start? He denounces the Wobbly Preamble’s famous statement that “the working class and employing class have nothing in common,” and its call for the working class to “take possession of the means of production” and “abolish the wage system” as “warmed-over Lenin.” And he calls them “communists.”

Notwithstanding that Lenin took a very dim view of those in Soviet Russia who, like the Wobblies, preferred worker self-management to government-appointed factory managers (and by “dim view” I mean sending the “left deviationists” who supported direct workers’ control to the Gulag).

Sure there are commies — libertarian communists, the kind who quote Kropotkin and Luxemburg — in the Wobblies. Not many of the Leninist kind, though. There are also lots of syndicalists. Also a few Proudhonian mutualists. And even some market-friendly individualist anarchists like Joseph Labadie were Wobs in the early days.

Several of us here at Center for a Stateless Society, a market anarchist think tank, are current or past Wobblies. I have an expired Red Card myself (mainly because I’m lazy about paying my dues). We think state intervention in the market has promoted corporate managerial hierarchy and wage labor far beyond their free market levels, and we cheerfully echo libertarian Claire Wolfe’s call to destroy the job culture.

I’d also like to note just how ironic it is for a publication like Reason, which is so uniformly hostile to “union bosses” and NLRB-certified union shops, to run an article blasting a union that also hates these things. The Wobblies, by and large, prefer to bypass NLRB certification and union bureaucracy, instead functioning as self-organized unions on the shop floor, eschewing exclusive bargaining unit representation and automatic dues deductions, and returning to tactics like wildcat strikes and direct action on the job that the Wagner Act was passed precisely to prevent.

Hinkle actually compares the I.W.W., in sheer odiousness, to the Klan. Well, except there are no legitimate reasons to hate, terrorize and lynch black people — but plenty of legitimate reasons to believe corporate power and the present distribution of wealth and income result from injustice.

There is, however, one organization that really is as evil as the KKK, and was founded for the express purpose of terrorist attacks on Wobblies, directly analogous to anti-worker terrorism by Mussolini’s industrialist-funded black shirts: The American Legion. Maybe Hinkle could take them on.

The Weekly Libertarian Leftist and Chess Review 37

Natasha Petrova — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 23:00:41 +0000

Andy Piascik discusses how war is everywhere.

Anthony Papa discusses the stories of drug war prisoners.

Timothy Karr discusses crony capitalists in Congress.

Kevin Carson discusses so called “free trade” agreements.

Jesse Walker discusses why the U.S. should stay out of Iraq.

Andrew Levine discusses imperial stupidity.

Sheldon Richman discusses the effects of imperialism in the Middle East.

Justin Raimondo discusses how the U.S. government is intervening again in Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn discusses how U.S. attacks will hurt but not defeat jihadists.

The ninth part of George H. Smith’s series on Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.

Eric Alterman discusses the revisionism of neocons on Iraq.

Robert Parry discusses the surge in Iraq.

Seumas Milne discusses how more U.S. bombs and drones will only add to Iraq’s horror.

Shireen T. Hunter discusses the real culprits in Iraq.

Dahlia S. Wasfi discusses trusting Iraqis with Iraq.

Rob Urie discusses Iraq and the persistence of American hegemony.

Lawrence Davidson discusses the mess in Iraq.

David Swanson discusses the Democratic Party push to bomb Iraq again.

Pepe Escobar discusses the jihadists in Iraq.

Renee Parsons discusses the current situation in Iraq.

John Eskow discusses sending boots to Iraq.

Cory Massimino discusses why Hilary Clinton is a terrorist.

Ariel Dorfman discusses a tale of torture.

Missy Comley Beattie discusses Iraq.

David Gordon reviews Lew Rockwell’s new book on anarcho-capitalism. I am not an ancap, but I find the review interesting.

Eric Margolis discusses the coming American defeat in Iraq.

Ronald Bailey reviews Nicholas Wade’s, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.

Nebojsa Malic discusses a new forum designed to stop a new Cold War.

Alexander Alekhine defeats K. Iskaov.

Alexander Alekhine beats Fred Dewhirst Yates.

Jane Marquardt: “Progressive” Prison Profiteer

Nathan Goodman — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 23:00:49 +0000

Last Saturday, members of the Salt Lake City Prison Divestment Campaign told Utah’s Democratic Party the truth about Jane Marquardt, who sought a position as vice chair of the Utah Democratic Party’s Central Committee. You see, Jane holds another vice chair position: Vice chair of the board at Management and Training Corporation (MTC), America’s third largest operator of for-profit prisons.

While Marquardt is praised by establishment liberal organizations like Human Rights Campaign and Equality Utah for supporting LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) rights, her company profits from the disproportionate caging and abuse of LGBT people, especially transgender women.

As I’ve written previously, LGBT youth are disproportionately likely to be homeless, putting them at increased risk of criminalization. Furthermore, the poverty inflicted on members of the LGBT community through employment and housing discrimination increases their risk of incarceration. Transgender people have their risk of incarceration further exacerbated by being profiled for “prostitution” charges and sometimes even locked up for using public restrooms. There is also homophobic and transphobic discrimination in America’s immigration system, leading LGBT immigrants to be disproportionately sent to immigration detention centers, which MTC profits from.

Once locked in prison or an immigration detention center, LGBT inmates face horrific abuses. A 2007 study found that “[s]exual assault is 13 times more prevalent among transgender inmates, with 59 percent reporting being sexually assaulted.” The same study found that 67% of LGBT inmates reported being sexually assaulted. That’s 15 times the rate for their straight and cisgender counterparts.

Transgender inmates are also often placed in solitary confinement due to their gender identity. Voices across the political spectrum recognize solitary confinement as a form of torture. Yes, Jane Marquardt, a leading Democrat and “LGBT rights activist,” profits from the torture of transgender people.

There have also been abuses unique to facilities Marquardt’s company operated. An investigative report by PBS’s FRONTLINE found that MTC’s Willacy Detention Center was a site of rampant sexual abuse, and that guards were covering it up. When activists from the Prison Divestment Campaign told Jane Marquardt in a cordial meeting that this had happened in her facilities, she looked shocked and said “That would be terrible if that were happening in our facilities!” When we told her it was and handed her a copy of FRONTLINE’s report, she changed the subject.

MTC has not just been corrupt in their operation of prisons, but in their political donations. They donate money to politicians whom they expect will open new for-profit prisons. Furthermore, they donated to supporters of Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant bill SB 1070, which would send new unwilling immigrant customers to their cages.

When activists called out Marquardt for profiting from human rights abuses, Democrats were appalled not at Jane’s profiteering, but that anyone would be so rude as to shout about it. Yet the Democratic Party claims to stand for immigrants, the poor, people of color, and the LGBT community, all of which are groups that Jane Marquardt’s company cages and abuses for profit.

People who care about equality and human rights should see this as a wake up call. They should abandon the Democratic Party, and instead resist the corrupt system that enables Jane Marquardt to profit by caging human beings.