We are floored, dismayed and horrified by this post. If it is genuine, we utterly condemn Spangler’s actions.

We are in the process of confirming facts and composing a more detailed statement.

Mincy holds a chair on the Energy & Environment Advisory Council for the Our America Initiative and an Associate editor of the Molinari Review. He earned his Masters degree in Earth and Planetary Science from the University of Tennessee in the summer of 2012. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee where he teaches both Biology and Geology at area colleges.

Mincy is a fellow of C4SS and has been writing with C4SS for almost two years. He has had commentaries published in many countries and in several languages. He has already published one academic study, Power and Property: A Corollary, with C4SS and is currently working on his second. His work has focused on issues of environment, ecology, commons governance, power of place, climate change, education, communication technology, resilient communities and the importance of anarchism to any social theory claiming justice, peace and prosperity as its values.

This chair is named in honor of the brilliant, prolific and passionate economist and political scientist Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom’s life, work, Workshop (research databases and libraries) and “a 50 year legacy of nurturing young scholars focused on solutions oriented research” demonstrates a powerful commitment to describing a a world beyond states and capitalism. A world where people are not at the mercy of the scarcity facts of the universe or the monocentric institutions desperately presumed as our only means of salvation. A world where people, communities, environments and resources are all important parts of governance problems and their quick-fix “Faustian Bargain” solutions are kept in view, in check, impossible and irrelevant.

We look forward to seeing how Mincy’s research and writing develops and enriches our understanding of Environmental Studies and Commons Governance for a stateless society.

The Elinor Ostrom Chair in Environmental Studies and Commons Governance is the fourth academic position created by the Trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society. Each chair is designed and charged with advancing our understanding of what constitutes a flourishing stateless society. The Elinor Ostrom Chair in Environmental Studies and Commons Governance has a special focus on environmental-ecological concerns, common-pool resources, horizontal-collaborative governance and the polycentric structures that promise their viability and endurance.

It is named in honor of the brilliant, prolific and passionate economist and political scientist Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom’s life, work, Workshop (research databases and libraries) and “a 50 year legacy of nurturing young scholars focused on solutions oriented research” demonstrates a powerful commitment to describing a a world beyond states and capitalism. A world where people are not at the mercy of the scarcity facts of the universe or the monocentric institutions desperately presumed as our only means of salvation. A world where people, communities, environments and resources are all important parts of governance problems and their quick-fix “Faustian Bargain” solutions are kept in view, in check, impossible and irrelevant.

Kevin Carson described Elinor Ostrom as “characterized above all by a faith in human creativity and agency, and an unwillingness to let a priori theoretical formulations either preempt [her] perceptions of the particularity and “is-ness” of history, or to interfere with the ability of ordinary, face-to-face groupings of people on the spot to develop workable arrangements — whatever they may be — among themselves.”

This is the charge of The Elinor Ostrom Chair in Environmental Studies and Commons Governance, to communicate, in detail, not only the importance and benefits of a stateless society to environmental concerns and issues of common-pool resource governance, but its advantages.

To be awarded The Elinor Ostrom Chair in Environmental Studies and Commons Governance position signals a scholar’s energy and capacity to contribute, in outstanding ways, to that interdisciplinary field of social theory — drawing on resources in ecology, economics, philosophy, sociology, history, among other fields — known as Environmental Studies and Commons Governance.

The results are never pretty and picking out something objectionable is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. But if I had to pick one of the most egregious quotes from Obama it’s this: “[W]e defend free speech, and advocate for political prisoners, and condemn the persecution of women, or religious minorities, or people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”

Mr. President, do you know who Chelsea Manning is?

I mean, you seem to know who she is. You’ve said in the past that Manning is guilty of  “breaking the law,”  thus implying that she deserves her sentence of up to 35 years in prison. And you’ve also commented that the Pentagon assures you that her conditions are “appropriate and are meeting our basic standards” when she was put in solitary confinement.

This, despite the fact that, at the time, she was being “… confined for 23 hours a day to a single cell, measuring around 72 square feet, equipped only with a bed, toilet and sink.” And the fact that it was an illegally lengthy pretrial detention didn’t seem to matter much to Obama either, despite there being pretty good grounds for it being a human rights violation.

As the Center for a Stateless Society’s Nathan Goodman wrote, “UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez investigated the conditions under which Manning was held and concluded ‘that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement … constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.'”

Given this history of knowing ignorance, how could Obama not know about Chelsea Manning? Obama’s history of protecting other big political dissidents is also abysmal. Just ask Edward Snowden, who had to flee the country to make sure he wasn’t detained like Chelsea Manning, before he released information to the public that the government found embarrassing. Is that a sign of a free society?

I suspect Obama does know who Chelsea Manning is, but for some reason she doesn’t count as someone who has been persecuted for her struggles as someone who is transgender — despite the fact that during her pre-trial hearing Marine Corps Master Sgt. Craig Blenis defended the pretrial detention on the basis of Manning’s gender dysphoria because “that’s not normal, sir.”

So does persecution of transgender people only count when governments aren’t the persecutors? Is Chelsea Manning not a victim of persecution much like the inordinate number of other trans people locked in prison? And what is Manning if not a political prisoner who has been locked away for up to 35 years because she helped an undefined enemy in some nebulous and apparently impossible to argue for way?

At the heart of this is Obama’s ability to both recognize and obfuscate. Sure he knows about Chelsea Manning, but the question is whether or not he cares. With statements like the one he made in his address, we can see the answer before us quite clearly.

Sometimes the capitalist state’s internal rules and procedures, created to serve an economic ruling class, in specific cases wind up sabotaging the very interests they were created to serve. Much like the Catholic doctrine of concupiscence (the “war within my members” St. Paul wrote about), the legal framework and administrative machinery created to maintain capitalism takes on a life and internal logic of their own. Or if you’re more familiar with Ghostbusters, when the destructor assumes a form it’s limited by all the weaknesses the laws of its own nature impose on that form.

Authoritarian hierarchies will die because they’re built on conflict of interest. They can’t trust their subordinates with discretion to use their own judgment or situational knowledge, so they create standard operating procedures, “best practices” and Weberian work rules that degrade everybody’s effectiveness. In order to limit the discretion of subordinates to harm the system, they must limit their discretion to use their own knowledge most effectively. The system doesn’t know what the system knows; the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

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The FBI investigator became aware of Cornell’s pro-ISIS comments on Twitter thanks to a tip-off from an unnamed informant who “began cooperating with the FBI in order to obtain favorable treatment with respect to his criminal exposure on an unrelated case.” The informant, on FBI orders, arranged two meetings with Cornell where they discussed attacks on the capital, after which the FBI arrested him to “prevent” the attacks. In other words, it identified Cornell as a suspect entirely on the basis of his expression of radical political opinions, with the help of a jailhouse snitch who rolled over in response to prosecutorial blackmail. And the actual “plot” was worked out only in subsequently arranged meetings in which one party — working for the FBI — may well have been leading Cornell. It wasn’t for nothing that ecological activist Judi Bari said “the first person to mention bringing dynamite is probably a fed.”

In this the Cornell case has a lot in common with a great many other so-called “domestic terrorism plots” federal law enforcement has “disrupted,” going back to the Lackawanna Six. A good example is the so-called “plot” of the Newburgh Four, who supposedly plotted to blow up synagogues and attack a military base. The judge commented that the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” in the process making a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope” (“US: Terrorism Prosecutions Often An Illusion,” Human Rights Watch, July 21, 2014).

This reminds me of a story I read — from Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, I think — about a software company that offered programmers a bonus for every bug they detected in code. Predictably, creating bugs to “detect” became a major source of revenue for employees. H.L. Mencken once remarked on government’s tendency “to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

We see this in the dismaying, Starship Troopers-like media narrative involving any and all armed government personnel in uniform. Last weekend’s highest U.S. box office receipts came not from Selma (the story of oppressed people organizing to fight for their freedom) but from American Sniper. The latter movie glorifies a vile wretch who gloated over all the “savages” (his word for any male age 16 to 60) he murdered in Iraq, on the grounds that he was saving American troops from being shot at. Never mind that the people in Iraq were shooting back at an invading army in their own country. Domestically, we see the same phenomenon with shows like COPS, and local news coverage of police in paramilitary gear (breathlessly referred to as “the authorities” by nitwit reporters) storming alleged “meth labs.”

And remember, the very concept of a “sting operation” (also known as “entrapment”) invokes the principle that some human beings are superior to the law. The first professional police forces were justified on the grounds that they were simply being paid to exercise the same posse comitatus powers of “citizen’s arrest” possessed by any other member of society. By that standard, if it’s illegal for an ordinary citizen to solicit or instigate illegal activity, it should be illegal for anyone — including uniformed state officials.

But most importantly, this is an example of how the state mostly “solves” problems of its own making — and has an incentive to keep creating more problems to justify giving it the power and resources to “solve” them.

Translations of this article:

• Spanish, El FBI es excelente para frustrar (sus propios) “complots terroristas”

Não é apenas a Indonésia que aplica pena de morte para a compra e venda de drogas proibidas. De acordo com relatório da Harm Reduction International, organização que defende políticas de redução de danos para as drogas, 33 países e territórios preveem pena de morte por crimes de drogas — em 13 deles a sentença é obrigatória.

A situação desses países é anômala até mesmo para os parâmetros internacionais da guerra às drogas, como definidos pelo Escritório de Drogas e Crimes da ONU. Em uma nota de 2010, o diretor executivo do órgão afirma que a política de drogas deve estar sujeita ao direito internacional dos direitos humanos: a pena de morte, se existir, deve estar restrita a crimes que atentam contra a vida.

O princípio do direito internacional é radical: o estado não pode ter a última palavra quanto a nossos direitos. Contudo, contraditoriamente, ele reconhece a legitimidade do estado para criminalizar as drogas e acaba autorizando sua brutalidade, tanto explícita como no caso da Indonésia como as mais sutis que encontramos em países do Ocidente.

Um relatório da ACLU (União Americana pelas Liberdades Civis), de 2013, mostrou que, no sistema penitenciário norte-americano, mais de 3.000 detentos estavam presos condenados à prisão perpétua sem direito à liberdade condicional por crimes não violentos, abrangendo desde delitos de drogas até contra a propriedade.

Casos como o de Dale Wayne Green são frequentes: condenado à prisão perpétua sem direito à liberdade condicional por seu papel como um intermediário na venda de maconha no valor de R$ 20. Isso porque essa seria sua “terceira falta”.

Em 2009, incrivelmente, a sentença média em casos de estupro era de 6 anos de prisão, enquanto a lei americana determina penas mínimas pela posse de determinadas quantidades de drogas em 10 anos de prisão, dobrando para 20 em caso de condenação anterior.

No Brasil, a situação é parecida.  Tramita no congresso proposta de lei, que contava com o apoio do candidato de oposição nas últimas eleições, de redução da maioridade penal para “crimes hediondos”, dentre os quais a legislação brasileira inclui o “tráfico ilícito de entorpecentes e drogas afins”.

A tendência para o endurecimento das leis de drogas brasileiras é clara após as eleições de 2014, que elegeu vários congressistas com palanques estridentes antidrogas. Enquanto isso, a presidente reeleita Dilma Rousseff também prometia fortalecer “segurança pública” com mais concentração de poder no governo federal, como durante a Copa do Mundo, defendendo uma integração entre polícias e forças armadas.

As consequências do combate às drogas no país são visíveis: várias cidades brasileiras entraram na lista de cidades com maior número de homicídios do planeta e o país tem uma extensa lista de execuções ligadas ao tráfico – embora extrajudicialmente, claro.

A criminalização das drogas cria o ciclo de violência relacionado à droga atualmente no Brasil. Precisamos lutar pela redução do papel do direito criminal justamente para reduzir a violência. O preço da liberdade é a eterna vigilância, e, em nosso próprio país, temos de ter consciência de que Marco Archer não foi a primeira nem será a última vítima brasileira da guerra às drogas.

A Indonésia é cruel, mas o Brasil não fica tão atrás. Marco Archer provavelmente não sobreviveria nem mesmo aqui.

“Labor” should be paid! Horrible, isn’t it?

Why, I thought that the fact that it is not paid was the whole grievance.

Unpaid labor has been the chief complaint of all Socialists, and that labor should get its reward has been their chief contention. Suppose I had said to Kropotkine that the real question is whether Communism will permit individuals to exchange their labor or products on their own terms. Would Herr Most have been so shocked? Would he have printed that in black type?

Yet in another form I said precisely that.

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Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by societies based on domination.

But obviously Hoppe does not, since he makes little effort to hide his salivation at the prospect that his avowedly principled belief in self-ownership, non-aggression and rules of initial acquisition will have the effect — just coincidentally, of course — of perpetuating the domination of these same white heterosexual males. So the primary beneficiaries of the ideas of liberty that straight white men invented will be those same straight white men.

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Na verdade, a trajetória de crescimento do movimento pelos direitos dos gays foi antecipada pelas palavras iniciais do livro The Greening of America (“O esverdeamento dos Estados Unidos”, em português), de Charles A. Reich: “Uma revolução está chegando. Ela não será como as revoluções passadas. Ela será individual e terá origem na cultura, mudando a estrutura política apenas em sua etapa final”. Como o editor da revista Reason Jesse Walker explica: “Ao contrário da retórica de alguns oponentes da ideia, o casamento gay não foi inventado em um laboratório em Washington e imposto ao país por engenheiros sociais. Foi uma ideia que cresceu de baixo para cima e estava viva numa época em que os engenheiros sociais mais típicos achavam que a homossexualidade era uma doença”.

De fato, a resposta política à crescente aceitação social de gays e lésbicas tem sido tão lenta, atrasada e prejudicada pela realpolitik que é difícil para os democratas tomarem crédito por ela. O escritor democrata S.T. Joshi, que assevera que o progresso social-democrata “fará com que a noção de um governo pequeno se torne não mais que uma excentricidade curiosa do passado”, afirma que “é uma ironia singular que, mesmo com administrações republicanas em 16 dos 24 anos entre 1981 e 2005, os direitos dos gays fizeram avanços quase tão revolucionários quanto o movimento pelos direitos das mulheres”. O que ele não menciona é a “ironia” que nesse mesmo período o presidente democrata Bill Clinton foi quem sancionou a Lei de Defesa do Casamento, que permitia que os estados banissem o casamento homossexual.

De acordo com Perkins, a defesa de um casamento somente entre homem e mulher é uma necessidade se o “autogoverno é algo que ainda importa num país que afirma que quem governa é o povo”. Os pioneiros da liberação dos gays, porém, ofereceram alguns ensinamentos a respeito não só desse majoritarismo tacanho, mas também sobre a necessidade social do “governo”. O escritor Oscar Wilde, preso quando vigoravam as leis de decência vitorianas, insistia que “autoridade e compulsão estão fora de questão; todas as associações devem ser voluntárias”. O crítico social Paul Goodman, despedido por sua aberta bissexualidade em 1940, era também não-conformista em sua identificação política, descrita por Casey Nelson Black como “não-marxista, não social-democrata, não ‘realista’ liberal — mas um anarquista” para quem, em suas próprias palavras, “uma sociedade livre não pode ser a substituição da antiga pela nova ordem, mas é a extensão das esferas de ação livre até que elas componham a maior parte da vida social”.

Charles A. Reich errou. O ato final da próxima revolução não será uma mudança da estrutura política, mas a sua destruição.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.