If you’ve ever doubted that journalism is a powerful tool for undermining the state, first off, you’ve probably not been following the NSA leaks and second, this week US government officials shook in their boots so hard over some new leaks that they spoiled the Associated Press’s scoop on them. This is hardly a new practice, but I think they’re really starting to lose some steam.

While I was away at the “Life is Improv” FEE seminar and YALCon, Jeremy Scahill was sniffing around for some new federal documents on counterterrorism, particularly the Terrorist Screening Database. His revelations, which were posted to The Intercept yesterday included:

• 16,000 people, including 1,200 Americans, have been classified as “selectees” who are targeted for enhanced screenings at airports and border crossings.

• There are 611,000 men on the main terrorist watchlist and 39,000 women.

• The top “nominating agencies” responsible for placing people on the government’s watchlists are: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

• The top five U.S. cities represented on the main watchlist for “known or suspected terrorists” are New York; Dearborn, Mich.; Houston; San Diego; and Chicago. At 96,000 residents, Dearborn is much smaller than the other cities in the top five, suggesting that its significant Muslim population—40 percent of its population is of Arab descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—has been disproportionately targeted for watchlisting. Residents and civil liberties advocates havefrequently argued the Muslim, Arab and Sikh communities in and around Dearborn are unfairly targeted by invasive law enforcement probes, unlawful profiling, and racism.

Real nice, right?

Pretty much all of the key information on the leaks is included in the document, but my favorite part of this was Scahill’s tweet:

US government, pissed we were publishing our story, tried to undermine us by leaking it to other news organization right before we published

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) August 5, 2014

With publications like the Intercept popping up with such talented journalists, I honestly don’t know why the general public has any faith in the US government anymore. The AP has a watered-down version of the same story, but they really took a hit to their credibility. Looks like we may need a new stylebook in the future.

Additionally, Steven Sutton’s talk at Yalcon about campaign strategy had a large component on how to weasel your way around press questions. Unfortunately my notes on this talk weren’t the best, but my takeaway was that yeah, the government is afraid of us on every scale. So, take a cue from Jeremy Scahill and don’t underestimate your power as a journalist.

Last Friday, August 1st, President Barack Obama commented on the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11. At first glance, his comments look like an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. After all, Obama acknowledged that “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques – techniques that I believe, and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture – we crossed a line.”

However, the way the president talked about CIA agents engaging in war crimes seemed downright flippant at times. Saying “we tortured some folks” is a remarkably casual way of acknowledging that employees of an organization you lead committed war crimes.

“We have to as a country take responsibility for that so hopefully we don’t do it again in the future,” Obama said. But his attitude towards individual responsibility for the torturers flies in the face of taking responsibility to ensure this never happens again. Obama directly deflected blame from the individuals responsible for torture, saying, “It is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had.” Obama not only made excuses for the torturers, he directly praised them, saying  “A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.” This is consistent with the pattern we’ve seen from this administration. Obama’s mantra has been that, when it comes to torture, “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As such, his administration has consistently protected torturers from legal accountability.

If intelligence agents and guards in detention centers are “working hard under enormous pressure” that can motivate them to torture detainees, and if they know that they will face no consequences for torturing, then they have every incentive to torture.  We’re often told that the state is necessary to protect us from predatory criminals, but it’s clear in this case that the state empowers its agents to act as predatory criminals.

There’s another issue with Obama’s torture speech that has been much less widely discussed. Jeff Kaye points out that Obama explicitly said “one of the first things I did was to ban some of the extraordinary interrogation techniques that are the subject of that report.” That is to say, Obama only prohibited some of the torture techniques that CIA agents used.

Kaye explains some specifics on how the administration continues to permit particular torture techniques:

Obama’s admission that he had only banned “some” of the previous administration’s torture techniques was not the first time the government has made such an admission, however obliquely.

Last April, I wrote how the Department of Defense’s main directive on interrogations (3115.09), which supposedly had banned SERE-derived torture techniques (like waterboarding, hooding, etc.) used by the government after 9/11, in fact made a note that only some of the SERE techniques were banned. The ones that were not banned resided in — the Army Field Manual on interrogation, the same manual Obama had endorsed in his Jan. 2009 executive order on “lawful interrogations.”

SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, and is the name given to DoD’s program to prepare military and CIA and other specific government personnel for capture and imprisonment by a brutal enemy. Its participants take part in a mock-prison camp exercise, and it was the kinds of torture practiced during that exercise that were utilized in full-blown operational mode by CIA and Defense Department interrogators in the so-called War on Terror.

The SERE-derived model, which is what the “extraordinary interrogation techniques” really were, was superimposed on an earlier torture program based on isolation and sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, fear and drugs, developed by the CIA and codified in a 1963 interrogation program that is referred to today as KUBARK. Earlier this year, I obtained a version of the previously declassified KUBARK manual with new portions now unredacted.

But oddly, besides myself, only Obama seems to have noticed that not all the torture techniques were rescinded by him. The press and certainly the Senate and the House of Representatives have ignored entirely the use of torture in the Army Field Manual. While some bloggers and human rights groups have noted the anomaly of having the nation’s primary instructions on interrogation include torture techniques, and some have even called for a repeal of Appendix M or a rewriting of the field manual itself, none of these groups or individuals have made this a primary issue. Nor, when the controversy over the Senate report on the CIA torture program is discussed, is the ongoing presence of torture in the Army Field Manual ever mentioned.

This is a key point that is all too often ignored: torture is still happening. Kaye also notes that Jeremy Scahill uncovered the use of torture by the current administration at a black site in Somalia.

Last week, Obama tried to make a speech that showed the US government coming to terms with how wrong it was to use torture. Instead, the president illuminated how his administration’s actions, and the state’s very structure, enable torture.

Kevin Carson discusses why distrust in government is a good thing.

Kevin Carson discusses how the makers and takers aren’t who you think.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the War on Drugs, intervention, and immigrant children.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Saudi complicity in the rise of ISIS.

Gina Luttrell discusses bootleggers, baptists, and birth control.

Justin Raimondo discusses how neocons are going undercover.

Ivan Eland discusses resolving conflict in artificial states.

Bionic Mosquito discusses the criteria for a just war.

Eric Peters discusses the non-aggression principle.

Patrick Cockburn discusses ISIS in Syria.

Norman Solomon discusses the god complex of Uncle Sam.

Wendy McElroy discusses voluntaryist anthropology.

Sheldon Richman discusses the smear of isolationism.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses how government power is about having power rather than catching terrorists.

Nick Gillespie discusses a libertarian foreign policy.

Jeffrey Miron discusses libertarianism.

Andrew Bacevich discusses the lessons from America’s war for the Greater Middle East.

Justin Raimondo discusses the new meaning of isolationism.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Christians in Iraq.

Sheldon Richman discusses Jane Cobden.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the practicality of libertarianism.

Sheldon Richman discusses the politics of the border.

Sheldon Richman discusses why he can’t help being a libertarian.

John LaForge discusses censorship and myth-making surrounding the atomic bomb.

Ron Jacobs discusses Tonkin and Watergate.

Patrick Cockburn discusses how ISIS is winning on two fronts.

James Rothenberg discusses the American flags and its followers.

Empty Wheel discusses whether civil libertarians are falling for faux NSA reform.

Alexey Shirov beats Boris Gelfand.

Yifan Hou beats Li Chao.

Some people in the city of Detroit recently had their water shut off due to 90 million dollars of past unpaid water dues. Much of the discussion that will probably emerge or has already emerged will revolve around whether to privatize the water supply there. This would probably involve contracting out services to a for profit corporation. Many libertarians will no doubt cheer this on as the “non-governmentalist” solution to the crisis. There is another solution far more consistent with libertarian principle than turning a government monopoly into a corporate one. The solution of mutualization or cooperatization.

Mutualization and cooperatization involves turning control of the service over to the people who produce it and receive it. In the case of water; this would entail handing it over to engineers, plumbers, electricians, rate-payers, and so forth. It would be a consumer’s-producer’s cooperative. This would make it neither governmental nor corporate. A transcendence of both forms of social organization. A showing of the fact that there are ways to organize services beyond the usual dualism of corporate and government control.

To further this goal, water workers should non-violently occupy the water department’s space and turn back on the water to those denied. They should invite elected representatives of consumers to a public meeting conducted under their auspices and invite them to form a cooperative. There should be pressure put on the city government to not interfere with this. In the current context of governmentalism, they could also use the state’s existing legal framework to form a legally recognized cooperative and shield it from attack that way. They could also make use of Federal Reserve notes to further its legitimacy and protect it from assault. An eventual move to a local or national alternative currency would be advisable though.

The above is based on the premise that marketization is not always the ideal choice nor is government the only alternative capable of providing services. Mutalization avoids the pitfalls of both corporate and government control. Neither of which truly empowers the people most affected by the decisions taken with respect to a given service. Both rest on top-down command and control hierarchy rather than bottom-up voluntary cooperation. This makes them more similar than either of their partisans would like you to believe. The revolutionary solution is to transcend these similar structures and construct relatively new ones. We can build on and learn from existing cooperative arrangements, but we can also improve on them. I look forward to seeing more of them take off!

In July, I made a total of 36,470 submission of C4SS English-language op-eds to more than 2,600 publications around the globe.  So far I have identified 54 reprints of that content as well as one prominent institutional citation of a Center writer (Kevin Carson, mentioned and quoted in a Pew Research Internet Center piece on “Net Threats”).

A few pickup highlights:

• We had our first pickup in Barbados — Kevin Carson’s “Israel’s War in Gaza: Don’t Look Behind the Curtain” appeared in the Barbados Advocate on July 30.
• Kevin’s “ISIS: Yes, Mr. Blair, You Did Build This” was picked up by the Byron Shire Echo — not our first appearance in Australian media, but an encouraging development as we haven’t fully penetrated that media market yet.
• Taiwan’s China Post ran two of our pieces (William Gillis’s “Jaron Lanier, ‘Intellectual Property’ and Parasitism on the System of Violence” and Kevin’s “ISIS: Yes, Mr. Blair, You Did Build This”). With a circulation of more than 400,000, the Post is not only a prestigious venue for our work, it ranks highly in terms of reaching large numbers of readers with the market anarchist message. We’re sincerely flattered that the Post  continues to find our content worthy of its readership.

To date, we’ve identified 1,688 pickups of Center content in “establishment” or “popular” media. Onward to 2,000 (with your continued support)!

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Senior News Analyst and English-Language Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

Julho foi um mês atípico para as atividades do C4SS em português porque combinou a histeria paralisante da Copa do Mundo com alguns problemas pessoais que impediram que tivéssemos uma atuação mais incisiva.

Mesmo assim, conseguimos publicar 11 traduções para o português. Não pude pegar o número de republicações neste mês, mas garanto que terei as estatísticas deste mês e do seguinte no próximo relatório. Nossa página do Facebook ganhou 33 curtidas (saltando de 1186 para 1219) e nosso Twitter ganhou mais 5 seguidores (de 61 para 66). Ainda temos encomendadas as resenhas do livro The New Brazil de Raúl Zibechi (lançado em português com o nome Brasil potência — spoiler: é fantástico) e Hierarquia de Augusto de Franco. A tradução de Iron Fist de Kevin Carson continua em andamento, apesar de todos os atrasos.

Em agosto, vamos voltar à atuação que você já veio a esperar de nossa embaixada em português. Novos projetos estão sendo tocados e mais gente está se juntando ao C4SS no Brasil.

Ajude você também nessa luta! Por liberdade e anarquia!

Erick Vasconcelos
Coordenador de Mídias
Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado

Portuguese Media Coordinator Update: July 2014

July was atypical for C4SS in Portuguese because it combined the paralyzing hysteria of the World Cup with some of my own personal problems which prevented us from having more incisive activities.

Still, we managed to publish 11 translations to Portuguese. I wasn’t able to ascertain how many pickups we’ve had this month, but I guarantee I’ll have both this and next month’s numbers for my next report. Our Portuguese fanpage got 33 new likes (going from 1186 to 1219) and our Twitter profile got 5 new followers (61 to 66). We still have Raúl Zibechi’s The New Brazil review (spoiler alert: it’s fantastic) and Augusto de Franco’s Hierarchy forthcoming. Kevin Carson’s Iron Fist is still making it’s way to Portuguese, despite all delays.

In August we’ll revert back to the activities you’ve come to expect from our Portuguese embassy. New projects are going forward and more people are joining us in Brazil.

You can help us in this fight! For freedom and anarchy!

Erick Vasconcelos
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

A week ago, we put a call out on Twitter and Facebook, as well as here at the blog, to gauge reactions to a prospective comment policy change that included “safe spaces” language. A couple of prominent figures, as well as ordinary readers, took the time to respond.

On Facebook, Sharon Presley from the Association of Libertarian Feminists said, “IMO Hell no. You would waste your time and mine with trolls and asshats. You have no obligation to give them spit. They are like vampires–sucking the life out of you for their own kicks.”

Angela Keaton, on Twitter, offered to “make fun of racists[…] for free.”

Another Twitter user, TaylorSwiftForeva, thought that the potential policy was simply about “protecing your feelz,” as they put it, and was intellectually dishonest.

Brendan Long, in the article’s comment thread, said:

It seems like a good idea to create a policy before you need it, since you’re more likely to come up with a reasonable general-purpose policy when you’re not looking at a particular comment you want to remove. Of course, you should update the policy as needed too.

I followed the link you gave to a safe spaces policy, and I’d argue the one in the link would be unhelpful on a political website like this one. Particularly, I think having an explicit policy that everyone in the comments needs to agree with us is dangerous.

It seems like a good start would just be to ban obvious trolling: Anything that contains racial slurs, rape threats, ad hominem attacks, etc. That would still leave plenty of room for people to criticize you in a respectful way, but won’t force you to leave the trash of the internet in your comments.

Ashley McCray, a doctoral student of History of Science, had this to say on Facebook:

I think it’s useful to reserve a space wherein individuals who suffer from oppression feel comfortable offering their perspectives and providing their input. I know as an individual who chills at the intersections of all sorts of oppression and stereotypes, I often have difficulty finding places like that. Of course, I’ve grown to become pretty brazen because that’s just my personality, but I have had to go to extra lengths so many times in order to carve out a space to accommodate my many identities and there have been times that I have been silenced because I know that I don’t have allies in certain settings. So I’d say yes, watching out for hateful comments that might turn away folks like me who are eager to share their experiences as an oppressed individual is extremely useful. First it ensures that more folks like me are willing and comfortable engaging with the topics you present AND second, hate speech doesn’t really do much to move any conversation forward (and is obvs offensive to the oppressed/silenced ind and their allies). This is my two cents!

A lot of the same concerns on both sides of the debate we here at C4SS have been having managed to come out in the wash during this public survey, but let’s keep the debate going! Let us know what you think of a potential comment policy change. Once again, you can tweet us @missingcomma or @c4ssdotorg, or let us know what you think with the hashtag #c4sscomments.

This week is remarkable in at least one rather important sense; it marks one of the most hideous and deeply frightening statements I’ve heard in all of my twenty-nine years, a viscerally unnerving remark made so casually and offhandedly that I nearly became ill on the spot. In the course of an otherwise pleasant conversation on the countless differences between cultures and the importance of patience and tolerance, I was told that female genital mutilation (from here on “FGM”) was not necessarily barbaric in and of itself — that its barbarism or lack thereof depended critically upon the cultural context within which it takes place. No act, I was told, is per se barbaric, but rather all cultures must be regarded as equal, and thus nothing is to be deprecated in itself. Here I offer, for the edification of the reader, a primer on the subject, which comes to us courtesy of a BBC article entitled “Anatomy of female genital mutilation” (the description that follows is explicit and extremely disturbing):

Female genital mutilation (FGM) includes any procedure that alters or injures the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

In its most severe form, after removing the sensitive clitoris, the genitals are cut and stitched closed so that the woman cannot have or enjoy sex.

A tiny piece of wood or reed is inserted to leave a small opening for the necessary flow of urine, and monthly blood when she comes of age (most FGM is carried out on infants or young girls before they reach puberty).

When she is ready to have sex and a baby, she is “unstitched” – and then sewn back up again after to keep her what is described by proponents as “hygienic, chaste and faithful”.

At this exoneration of FGM’s perpetrators, I was quite taken aback, practically thunderstruck by the enormity of the error, of its practical implications and an amazement that seemingly reasonable people could believe this. I had not imagined that my partners in conversation would cleave so closely to their cultural relativism as to embark on an apology for a practice so cruel and inhuman. But then this is among the fundamental philosophical problems with such extreme cultural relativism; it puts one in the uncomfortable position of having to accept any kind of brutal rights violation insofar as it is consistent with some arbitrary cultural value or tradition. My compeers at least were consistent in their barbarousness.

It occurred to me then, as it has before, that the anarchist as such cannot also be a cultural relativist in any meaningful or principled way, for the opposition to authority simply will not brook even longstanding cultural practices such as FGM. Anarchists oppose authority not randomly or haphazardly, not in any piecemeal way that happens to make us feel comfortable in a given case. The opposition operates always, at all times.

It must not be overlooked, moreover, that all such barbarities — supposedly legitimate, “not barbaric” practices like FGM — are of course bound to be vaunted pieces of the cultural and customary inheritance. Were this not the case, were these vile practices simply aberrant and treated as such, they would hardly be worth opining on. It becomes necessary to vociferously condemn crimes like FGM precisely to extent that they are considered time-honored cultural traditions. Indeed, it must escape relativists such as my conversation partners that the lowest, most odious forms of bigotry — racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. — are all age-old cultural practices in their own right. We are apparently meant to defer to crimes like FGM just to the extent that they are at their most vicious, inhumane and ingrained. This is the juncture at which open-mindedness becomes mere mindless folly, an exercise in preposterous infinite regress.

Individuals are the social elements which actually exist. Culture, religion, politics — all of these we as individuals have invented, exalting them to such a degree that we now make of them much more than the human lives they are there to preside over. Cultural relativists give all manner of potential genocidal maniacs and human rights violators a carte blanche, a cultural pretext to which they can point while devastating human lives. Doubtless we ought to respect other cultures, even to actively look for the unique contributions they make to overall human flourishing. We must not, however, pretend that the imprimatur of culture is capable by itself of redeeming savage acts such as FGM. One needn’t be an anarchist or a proselyte of the nonaggression principle to understand that such acts are wrong wherever they are found, regardless of religion or culture.

One paradox of empire is that it brings people from different origins into contact with each other while elevating one group above the rest. It’s at once international and provincial. It amounts to a provincial internationalism. One in which the central focus is still on a particular nation-state, but one that interacts with the rest of the world in the manner of an empire. The “exceptional” nation remains the “superior” colonial power while the occupied nations are considered the “inferior” ones. The latter are expected to obey and conform to the dictates of the government of the colonial nation-state.

This sense of the “inferiority” of the other is a crucial part of empire. It’s what makes it so provincial. One is basically insular in adopting this attitude towards the colonially dominated. This contradicts the outward seeking internationalism of empire – albeit one marked by conquest and domination. The practitioners of empire are outward looking in the sense of seeing people external to themselves to be conquered. This is hardly a humane internationalism, but a perverse form of it nonetheless.

It’s important for friends of liberty to not be sucked into support for this type of internationalism. One should avoid falling for the imperialist canard about bringing human rights and democracy to the people of the world. Something that masks the exploitative interests of the imperial government in question. It’s unfortunate that even some libertarians and anarchists have fallen for the promises of the imperial state.

Some have even fallen for the liberatory promises of the American state. The American provincial imperial state has been rampaging throughout the world for some time now. It’s thus no surprise that it has developed defenders over time. It’s disheartening that some libertarians and anarchists have made excuses for the most imperialist and nationalistic state in the world. One can only hope they eventually renounce their apologia for it.

People residing in the territory controlled by the U.S. government should focus some of their efforts on opposing the provincial empire of the U.S. This involves doing away with the contradictions of provincial internationalism and embracing anarchistic internationalism. The kind that seeks equal relations among the individuals populating the world. An internationalism that doesn’t embrace conquest or aggressive violence as the way to interact with others in the world. This is the ideal that internationalism aims at. One can start making it a reality by conversing with other people and encouraging them to join in opposition.

An excellent article published last week by Radley Balko in The Washington Post explores the racially discriminatory consequences of gun control laws in the United States, as illustrated through the lens of several recent news stories.

Balko begins by discussing the arrest of Shaneen Allen:

Last October, Shaneen Allen, 27, was pulled over in Atlantic County, N.J. The officer who pulled her over says she made an unsafe lane change. During the stop, Allen informed the officer that she was a resident of Pennsylvania and had a conceal carry permit in her home state. She also had a handgun in her car. Had she been in Pennsylvania, having the gun in the car would have been perfectly legal. But Allen was pulled over in New Jersey, home to some of the strictest gun control laws in the United States.

Allen is a black single mother. She has two kids. She has no prior criminal record. Before her arrest, she worked as a phlebobotomist. After she was robbed two times in the span of about a year, she purchased the gun to protect herself and her family. There is zero evidence that Allen intended to use the gun for any other purpose. Yet Allen was arrested. She spent 40 days in jail before she was released on bail. She’s now facing a felony charge that, if convicted, would bring a three-year mandatory minimum prison term.

In other words, a woman of color was arrested for a completely victimless crime and now faces a clearly disproportionate mandatory minimum sentence. This incident challenges the way most Americans think about gun control, which is often framed in terms of a conflict between pro-gun reactionary conservatives and anti-gun anti-racist liberals. Yet here a woman of color is facing outrageously disproportionate punishment for a victimless crime precisely because of the gun control laws that are typically associated with progressive liberalism.

This is not an isolated incident. Racially disparate impacts have been a disturbing reality of gun control for years now. Balko explains the disparity as follows:

Last year, 47.3 percent of those convicted for federal gun crimes were black — a racial disparity larger than any other class of federal crimes, including drug crimes. In a 2011 report on mandatory minimum sentencing for gun crimes, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that blacks were far more likely to be charged and convicted of federal gun crimes that carry mandatory minimum sentences. They were also more likely to be hit with “enhancement” penalties that added to their sentences. In fact, the racial discrepancy for mandatory minimums was even higher than the aforementioned disparity for federal gun crimes in general.

Many liberals and progressives are aware of the racial disparities that plague our criminal justice system and are exacerbated by mandatory minimum sentences. But it’s important for them to recognize that these same dynamics are at play in gun control laws. As Anthony Gregory explains,

When it comes to restricting firearms, liberals have an amazing ability to ignore the hard truth of what they are advocating—putting more people in cages. That is what gun control is.

Why are those incarcerated for gun crimes so disproportionately people of color? Largely because gun control laws, like all victimless crime laws, give police enormous discretion. As Balko explains:

When someone robs a bank with a gun or kills someone with a gun, there’s no debate about who needs to be investigated and prosecuted. When a police agency is charged to seek out and prosecute people who are illegally possessing or transferring guns, they’re required to use their own discretion when it comes to what communities to target and what methods they’ll use to target them.

Inevitably, this will manifest as sting operations against communities with little political clout. (Or, just as troubling, deliberately targeting people for political reasons.)

Expanding the scope of criminal law beyond crimes with clear victims towards victimless crimes that police need to seek out expands the role of discretion in a manner that makes the already marginalized even more vulnerable. This is evident when trans women of color are profiled as sex workers. It’s evident when police searching for drugs stop pull over people for “driving while black.”  And it’s evident in how gun control laws are enforced in practice.

Balko quotes a particularly appalling recent example of racially biased sting operations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). According to an investigative report by Brad Heath in USA Today:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has more than quadrupled its use of those stings during the past decade, quietly making them a central part of its attempts to combat gun crime. The operations are designed to produce long prison sentences for suspects enticed by the promise of pocketing as much as $100,000 for robbing a drug stash house that does not actually exist.

At least 91% of the people agents have locked up using those stings were racial or ethnic minorities, USA TODAY found after reviewing court files and prison records from across the United States. Nearly all were either black or Hispanic. That rate is far higher than among people arrested for big-city violent crimes, or for other federal robbery, drug and gun offenses.

The ATF operations raise particular concerns because they seek to enlist suspected criminals in new crimes rather than merely solving old ones, giving agents and their underworld informants unusually wide latitude to select who will be targeted. In some cases, informants said they identified targets for the stings after simply meeting them on the street.

The ATF had very wide discretion in these sting operations, and that discretion resulted in large numbers of people being enticed into committing crimes and then locked up. Upwards of 91% of those caged are minorities. This is outrageous. And it should cause liberals who support the ATF as an essential part of gun control enforcement to seriously reconsider their views. Rachel Maddow has condemned the NRA for calling the ATF “jack booted thugs” and blocking the appointment of ATF leadership officials. Given the ATF’s role in actively perpetuating systemic racism, I think liberals like Maddow should strongly reconsider their support for the ATF.

Prison abolitionists should lead the charge against gun control laws, and prevent the prison state from growing as part of a knee jerk response to tragedies like mass shootings. Dean Spade of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project provided a good example of what a leftist resistance to gun control laws might look like after the Newtown shooting, writing:

In the wake of the Newtown shooting, the issue of gun control is being framed in very selective ways that ignore the realities of violence in our communities. The truth is that the most deadly, in terms of numbers, gun owners are police forces and the US military. When we have a conversation about gun violence that ignores the realities of state violence, it often produces proposals that further marginalize and criminalize people of color, poor people, people with disabilities, immigrants and youth. In Washington State, we’re fighting against a new bill that would create mandatory jail time for youth caught possessing a gun. We know that mandatory jail and prison sentences are part of what has created the massive boom in US imprisonment in recent decades that have devastated communities of color. We know that jailing youth does not make our communities safer, it just damages the lives, health outcomes, and educational opportunities of young people.

Any discussion of violence in society needs to recognize that the state and its criminal law enforcement apparatus are violent. Anyone who cares about equality or social justice should recognize when laws, even those supported by people they like, have grossly unequal consequences. Understanding these points should help us recognize gun control laws as part of a grotesque prison state that exacerbates inequality and injustice.

Musa al-Gharbi discusses Obama’s foreign policy.

Alice Slater discusses how drone assassinations violate the rule of law.

Bert Sacks discusses sectarian violence in Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the appeal of ISIS.

Shamus Cooke discusses regional war in the Middle East.

Kevin Carson reviews a new book by Rich Lowry.

William Rivers Pitt discusses the long arc of history.

Noam Chomsky discusses America’s real foreign policy.

Patrick Cockburn discusses government paralysis in Iraq.

Justin Raimondo discusses Japan’s constitutional revisionism.

Mahmoud Abu Rahma discusses the Israeli treatment of people in Palestine.

Pepe Escobar discusses ISIS.

Grant Mincy discusses American anarchism.

Uri Avnery discusses the watch on the Jordan.

Serge Halimi discusses when Obama got it right.

Richard Gamble reviews The Great and Holy War: How World War 1 Became a Religious Crusade

Karen Kwiatkowski discusses Lew Rockwell’s new book. I am not an ancap, but it has some good stuff relevant to libertarian leftists.

Thomas Dilorenzo discusses the American religion of violence. I am not in full agreement with it.

Binoy Kampmark discusses writing the imperial script.

Noam Chomsky discusses the sledgehammer worldview.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson discusses Dick Cheney.

Bill Quigley discusses the short shafting of veterans by the government.

Joe Boehem discusses the source and nature of rights.

Ivan Eland discusses World War 1 as key for today’s foreign policy.

Bonnie Kristian discusses how war is just one more big government program.

Sheldon Richman says let the immigrants stay.

Xavier Best discusses the U.S. role in child migration to the country.

Nozomi Hayase discusses Wikileaks and free speech.

Ludek Pachman loses to David Bronstein.

Alexander Petrov defeats F. Alexander Hoffmann.

American libertaranism has a reputation for being another species of that genus known as American conservatism. This is influenced by the American Libertarian’s penchant for lower taxation and less government spending. A position often described as fiscal conservatism. Fiscal conservatism must be understood contextually like any other term or issue. To what extent does the American Libertarian’s affinity for the notion of fiscal conservatism reflect a government centric view of politics? To a great extent.

The term can indeed be narrowly viewed within the context of statecraft. In that specific context, the idea of fiscal conservatism denotes a government’s tendency to make intensive and not extensive use of resources garnered from the general populace through the practice of taxation. In a personalized anarchistic context, it would refer to the practice of an individual choosing to conserve rather than expend their wealth. In a systemic context, radical libertarianism is actually a form of fiscal liberalism. The key to understanding this lies in the radical libertarian view of class analysis and class structure dating back to early 18th-19th century level liberals.

In adopting a dialectical methodology described by Chris Sciabarra, we will discover that a shifting of vantage points allows us to understand that the notion of fiscal conservatism usually adopted by less radical libertarians reflects what organizations, considered parasitical, should do with funds. The libertarian radical wishes to return monies to autonomous individuals and has a theory of class structure that can identify double standards in statist fiscally conservative or austere proposals. An exploitative entity or individual tends to propose conservation, self-discipline, and fiscal sacrifice for others, but not for itself. A testimony to this is the existing state of multi-billion dollar bailouts for major financial entities like Goldman Sachs and cutbacks on welfare programs that the less politically connected are more likely to rely on. What we’re ultimately proposing is that the exploited people in the existing social order retain the product of their labor. In that sense, it’s a form of fiscal liberalism in which people are liberally gaining wealth from the end of an exploitative system.

A genuinely liberal institution of mutual aid makes no collective distinctions, but a conservative program of welfare must reflect an attempt to preserve the structural status quo. As such, it must be congruent with the existing class or social structure. This means it must exclude individuals on an aristocratic basis of not conforming to existing social standards. A radical Promethean break from such structures would signify the end of the status quo. The radical Libertarian proposes a new order in which an aggregate of people achieve a higher standard of living. It inspires rebellion and acquisition rather than conservative self-discipline. This said rebellion and acquisition culminating in the return of monies from corporate or state power structures to free individuals and cooperative organizations.

July has been a busy month for a lot of our writers: there was the World Cup coverage, AltExpo, Freedom Fest and the Students for Liberty Campus Coordinator’s Retreat all vying for their attention. Yet, even with all that, we were still able to publish twenty-four commentaries and ten original features.

C4SS pays the writers that work with us, we pay our interns and we pay our bloggers. From what I hear, around the blogoshpere, this is on the unique side. But we wouldn’t have it any other way. Our site, also, only features one relevant advertisement, Markets Not Capitalism, which supports the site and our message. In other words we are funded by supporters. Our supporters donate small amounts, the average being $5 to $10 a month, and this is perfect. C4SS wants small donations from lots of people; we want the swarm and all the information is contains. If C4SS, as an organization and an idea, is something you like having around or you would like to see it do more things (like funding more studies, publishing more books, helping with travel expenses for writers to speak at events, updating the youtube graphics, etc), then please donate $5 today.

What will $5 a month get you from C4SS? Well let’s see,

For the month of July, C4SS published:

24 Commentaries,
10 original Features,
4 Weekly Abolitionists,
6 Life, Love and Liberty,
4 Weekly Libertarian Leftist Reviews,
5 Missing Commas (2 more than June),
1 Entrepreneurial Anti-Capitalism,
1 original Review, and
12 C4SS Media uploads to the C4SS youtube channel.

Thanks to the dedication of our Media Coordinators, C4SS translated and published:

8 Italian translations,
2 Spanish translations,
11 Portuguese translations.

Tor Success

For over three years, C4SS has maintained a dedicated Tor relay node. This node operates 24 hours a day. This node is one of the ways that we contribute to the various technologies devoted to identifying the damage of state and routing around it. The state will never relent or be sated with anything less then total awareness for total control. Maintaining your own Tor node is encouraged, but for whatever reason this is not possible for you, you can help us maintain ours.

On that note, we are happy to declare another successful fundraiser for another four months of continuous operation. Thank you to everyone that donated through the site and bitcoin. We haven’t started next quarter’s fundraiser, but, if you would like to start early, feel free to donate today (just leave the note: For Tor), bitcoin is, as always, welcome too: 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

Entrepreneurial Anti-capitalism

Entrepreneurial Anti-capitalism has been a C4SS project since November 2013. Its primary goal, to seek out and support the those anarchist projects that desperately need or can make full immediate use of a $200 to $400 donation. One of these projects that we have recently donated to is the Anarchist Black Cross. The prison state and its prison economy are two interlocking threats that Nathan Goodman’s The Weekly Abolitionist is devoted to abolishing. Nathan Goodman summarizes the situation and our enemy,

Prisons are the antithesis of all we stand for as anarchists. While we seek a society built around peace and bodily autonomy, prisons are violent institutions that trap inmates at gunpoint and make them vulnerable to rape and murder. Where we seek justice through restitution, reconciliation, and self-defense, prisons are based on punitive vengeance. While we seek a society free from oppression based on race, gender, class, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation, prisons systematically brutalize the most marginalized among us.

As anarchists, we admire those who resist oppression.

One of the crucial parts of a prison abolitionist strategy is supporting those that have been captured in its black iron jaws. The Anarchist Black Cross has been doing this for over a hundred years. We implore everyone to find (or start) a local chapter of the Anarchist Black Cross and help out however you can.

The New Leveller Volume 1, Issue 3 online now!

The New Leveller is the publishing side of the Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS). If you are a student and desire a stateless society, S4SS just might be a perfect fit for you.

Then The New Leveller is for you!”

The third issue of the Students for a Stateless Society‘s newsletter, The New Leveller is now online.

For a link to a PDF of the entire issue (recommended!), click here.
For links to an HTML version of each individual article, click here.

New Book(s)

C4SS’s first book, a collection of articles discussing the notion, possibility and necessity of common pool resources and “public” property spaces for a flourishing stateless society, The Anatomy of Escape: A Defense of the Commons, is near completion. We have finished the cover, beautifully designed by Benjamin Godwin, for both English and Portuguese. Work on the next book in our collection series, The Iron Fist: Capitalism, the Economy of the State, has already begun. We hope to complete three more books covering the topics: the psychopathology of hierarchy, ecology and environment, and strategy and tactics. After that we will begin the massive task of creating full author collections – Kevin Carson’s will, most likely, need multiple volumes.

New Book Review

Missing Comma‘s Juliana Perciavalle has agreed to review Matt Hern’s Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn’t Always Better for C4SS.

Karl Hess

Of all the individuals that have contributed to the development and presence of Left Libertarian thought, Karl Hess is easily one of the most important. All are essential, but Karl Hess set the temperament and tone – radical, active, experimental and kind. Hess gave us our conception of the left/right spectrum, helped solidify our appreciation for the weird, gave us an example of heartfelt patience for old friends (that will probably never get us), and reaffirmed our commitment that concentrated economic and cultural power is just as dangerous and worthy of open vigilant opposition as concentrated political power.

Kevin Carson currently holds our first academic position, The Karl Hess Scholar in Social Theory and Markets Not Capitalism is dedicated to the memory of Karl Hess. Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson wrote, in Markets Not Capitalism, about Karl Hess,

We’ve dedicated Markets Not Capitalism to Karl Hess – a gentle, insightful, graceful, articulate, and passionate believer in freedom, decentralization, and peaceful, voluntary cooperation. Karl bridged the gap between the Old Right and the New Left, powerfully indicted the political status quo, and provided a compelling and unsettling model of life outside the state’s clutches. Flawed like everyone else, he was nonetheless good and decent, embodying the commitment to human liberation we seek to foster with this book.

In March, 1969, Karl Hess had an article published with Playboy magazine; that article would be called The Death of Politics. Joel Schlosberg has published a wonderful and detailed review of Hess’ other appearance in Playboy an interview of his life and politics for C4SS. Schlosberg opens with,

At first glance, a no-holds-barred conversation with an anarchist might seem the most inappropriate centerpiece imaginable for a magazine issue marking the bicentennial of the United States of America. But then again, Karl Hess was no ordinary “anarchist.”

Hobby Lobby

The ability or power to opt-out is one of the Thoreauvian aspects crucial to any meaningful theory of liberty. And many commentators lauded just this spirit in the Hobby Lobby ruling. But this power to opt-out, we must never forget, has been granted to billionaires and corporations, it was never considered or expected to trickle down to us –  the individuals. They will not cite it or stand by it when you decide to opt-out. They will zealously stand against opting-out when it comes to the intellectual property provisions of the DMCA or the provisions against secondary solidarity strikes and boycotts in the Wagner Act. The primary interventions are kept firmly and lovingly in place while the rest of us fight each other for corporate and political scraps. As Brain Nicholson summarizes, “with thought, the ‘culture war’ reveals itself as a prison fight — forced by the guards.” And Kevin Carson concludes,

But we’re never going to get Hobby Lobby, and big corporations and wage employers in general, out of control of our lives by using the state as a weapon. They usually work together, and always will. Ultimately, the only way out is what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “exodus” — building our own horizontal institutions outside of both corporation and state, and abandoning the corporate-state nexus to rot.

C4SS has written a lot on this subject for July,

• Dissecting Hobby Lobby
• Hobby Lobby — A Question of Agency
• A Quick Thought on SCOTUS, Hobby Lobby and the Affordable Care Act
• Culture War as State Hobby
• Hobby Lobby Ruling Falls Short

Eric Garner

For those of us that follow and worry about the growing militarization and militancy of the police in the Untied States and around the world, the tragic, needless and unwarranted murder of Eric Garner – live on camera – was not unexpected yet still shocking. There is something strange and terrifying, besides summary executions for loose cigarette entrepreneurship, about the default use of violent arrest when one could just as easily, and with discretion, issue a citation. The question to be asked, “Is this motivated by the desire to set an example for an occupied population or simple bloodlust?” I fear a case can be made for both. Ryan Calhoun‘s “Where’s Eric Garner’s Amargosa?” compares the popular reaction to Garner’s murder with the small Brazilian town of Amargosa,

His crime? Garner was a known holder of contraband, which you might know as loose cigarettes. Despite no evidence that he was selling or even had said contraband on his person, after a brief verbal quarrel between Garner and the police, he was put into a chokehold, held on the ground and pounced on by several more NYPD gang members. His last words, the words of an innocent family man to these “peace officers?” “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” …

In the city of Amargosa in Brazil, citizens took to the streets after a stray bullet fire by a local police officer struck and killed a one-year-old girl. But they didn’t stay in the streets. They quickly took the police station, freeing prisoners, jacking state-owned weaponry and burning the station and police vehicles to the ground.

Millennials

As twilight sets on the Boomers and GenXers begin to find themselves in positions of civic responsibility (whatever that means), all number-crunching and trend-analysis eyes have turned to the Millennials. What makes them tick? What do they want? What will they do to the status quo? Kevin Carson has penned two pieces on the Millennial question: one suggestive of reforms Millennials should be pushing for and a trend-analysis of the Millennial based upon the historical and cultural novelties that have converged during their development. Carson writes,

So based on all this, it stands to reason this generation would be heavily involved in building all the major components of the successor society that’s emerging from the decaying ruins of the corporate-state nexus. There are 20-somethings in the hackerspace, open hardware and micromanufacturing movements, in Permaculture and community gardens, organizing squats into coherent, cooperative communities, developing encrypted counter-currencies and mutual credit systems, creating scholarly communities around open courseware and academic journals liberated from behind paywalls, and developing open meshworks the state can’t shut down and anonymizing darknets the state can’t penetrate.

I have gathered together the all the articles published with C4SS discussing the Millennial question,

• Five Libertarian Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For
• How Libertarians Should — And Should Not — Approach Millennials
• A Left-Libertarianism I Don’t Recognize
• Speaking to Nonlibertarians

We Haven’t Forgotten

We still have our David Graeber Symposium on the horizon, along with our Carson-Ward-Bookchin edition of Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow”.

Please Support Today!

Needless to say, all of this work is only sustainable through your support. If you think the various political and economic debates around the world are enhanced by the addition of left libertarian market anarchist, freed market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist solutions, challenges, provocations or participation, please donate $5, today. Keep C4SS going and growing.

ALL the best!

Hi, everyone! I’m back from vacation about two weeks later than I expected, but I’m ready to start writing again. Juliana’s at a FEE seminar this week, but she’s still going to be writing regularly here at Missing Comma.

This week, we’re taking a break from our 24/7 coverage of Anthony Cumia (kidding) to ask a short question: Should C4SS adopt a “safe spaces” comment policy?

For the past several months, we here at the Center have debated the addition of some kind of a “safe spaces” comment policy, but recently, we’ve entered into a deadlock. Some of us are absolutely for such a comment policy, and some of us are for a comment policy that promotes complete freedom of speech, even at the risk of constantly having to fend off hordes of Nazis. We have not decided anything on a concrete level yet; this is all still in the discussion phase.

It’s worth pointing out, of course, that the C4SS comment section has, at least in the two years I’ve written here, been relatively tame in the inflammatory, racist or bigoted comment department, and that’s part of the reason for our deadlock: would the addition of a safe spaces policy be addressing an existing problem, or is it tilting at windmills, so to speak?

It occurred to me recently, during one of the internal discussions regarding this topic, that while we’ve spent months and months debating among ourselves, we’ve never asked what the group of people this is going to effect the most – you – thought about it. Missing Comma is the unofficial-official “ombudsman” blog of C4SS, and as its co-writer, I saw this lack of contact with you, the reader, as a potentially disastrous oversight that needs to be corrected immediately.

So, what do you think? Should the Center for a Stateless Society adopt some form of a “Safe Spaces” policy? If yes, why? If no, why not? What would such a thing look like? What would be the best way to implement it? Leave a comment with your answers below. Alternately, you can tweet your responses to @c4ssdotorg or the Missing Comma Twitter account, @missingcomma; you can also post to the hashtag, #c4sscomments. We’ll talk about some of your best answers next week!

Among the most enduring and pressing of questions for social scientists has been the nature of the public and private spheres. A great many political battles have been fought over control or delineation of these respective spaces. Some of these battles have been fought by the Civil Rights Movement and labor movement. Both of which sought to make claims of control or access to contested public/private spaces. These conflicts cannot be resolved without a nuanced contextual understanding of the issue. This requires dialectically transcending a strict public-private dualism.

This dualism shows up linguistically when discussing government vs non-government ownership/control. The common usage of the terms private ownership and public ownership are to identify government and non-government ownership. In this parlance, public refers to government ownership while private refers to non-government ownership.

The underlying assumption here is that the government and the public sphere are the same. Dictionary.com defines public as follows:

1. of, pertaining to, or affecting a population or a community as a whole: public funds; a public nuisance.
2. done, made, acting, etc., for the community as a whole: public prosecution.
3. open to all persons: a public meeting.
4. of, pertaining to, or being in the service of a community or nation, especially as a government officer: a public official.
5. maintained at the public expense and under public control: a public library; a public road.

It’s certainly possible for a non-government controlled space or institution to meet the criteria above. An example is a privately owned local library called Linda Hall Library that is nonetheless open to the public. This example also shows the problematic nature of the dualism between private and public. You have an entity that is privately owned in the sense of non-government owned and yet accessible to the general public. This shows the importance of contextual analysis in deciphering what is private and public under what definitions. It depends on the context. In one context, public may be a reference to government ownership, but that’s not what it means in the context of anarchy.

Anarchistic public space is an important part of a free society. It would involve a public right of way and accessibility through some kind of cooperative control. A sense of solidarity could ensure access to people not living in the local community or cooperatively controlled area. One way to go about creating anarchistic public space is to homestead government controlled areas and engage in management of the newly created anarchistic commons. I look forward to seeing people try this out!

“Are you interested in individualist anarchism, or at least so frightened by it that you want to keep an eye on its progress? Are you frustrated by capitalism’s love for central planning and communism’s conservative view of human potential? Do you suspect that abolishing the institution responsible for war, police brutality, and mass incarceration might not be so dangerous after all?

Then The New Leveller is for you!”

The third issue of the Students for a Stateless Society‘s newsletter, The New Leveller is now online.

For a link to a PDF of the entire issue (recommended!), click here.
For links to an HTML version of each individual article, click here.

In this issue:
“A Matter of Life & Death” by Jason Lee Byas frames the vision of individualist anarchism as a battle of life against death. This is not only because governments murder, but also because both aggression and domination are at odds with the principle behind life itself.
“Anarchists United” by Uriel Alexis explores ways in which anarchists with divergent views about how a stateless society would (and should) look can still cooperate toward those goals that they share.
“Identity & Individuals” by Elizabeth Tate explains that libertarians and anarchists should embrace, not shun, identity politics.
“Prisons: The Case for Abolition” by Nathan Goodman details reasons that prisons are both an unnecessary and unjust institution, and also shows how attempts at piecemeal reform can actually make things worse. The solution, then, is abolition.
“All Wars Are Unjust” by Jason Lee Byas argues for the conclusion in its title. To support any war is to support murder, dehumanization, regimentation, and theft, all on a massive scale. Because of this, we must reject all war.

Any discussion of Israel’s war on Gaza that does not focus on 1) the Zionist military’s and Israel’s systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through roughly 1948 (that’s how Palestinian refugees ended up in the Gaza Strip); 2) the military conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967; 3) the Israeli/Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2007, following the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 (yes, the occupation ended, but Gaza remains a prison camp — as though guards left a prison but maintained strict control over who and what — food, medicine, infrastructure supplies, etc. — could enter and leave); and 4) the exploitation of the kidnapping and murders of three young Israeli residents of an illegal West Bank settlement (one a 19-year-old soldier) to rout Hamas (which denied responsibility; it normally claims credit for his acts) in the West Bank (Israeli forces rearrested several hundred West Bank Palestinians, including some who had been released in an earlier prisoner exchange; political leaders stirred up revenge fever and one Palestinian youth was burned to death, while another was severely beaten by police) — any discussion that fails to take all these things into account is worse than worthless. It is crudely dishonest. (Compare the reaction to the murder of the three Israelis with the murder by Israeli soldiers of two Palestinian youth on May 15 while peacefully commemorating the 1948 destruction of Palestine, known as the Nakba.)

Hamas is wrong to fire rockets at civilians (though few hit their targets), even considering that the villages those civilians live in were once Palestinian villages that Zionist/Israeli forces seized during the 1947-48 ethnic cleansing. The rocketing, however, is a sign of weakness versus Israel, not strength, and must not permit us to overlook this background of brutality against Palestinians. This year Hamas agreed to join the Palestinian Authority’s coalition government (after the Israeli government, again, made a mockery of “peace talks”) signaling an endorsement of the PA’s agenda — including recognition of Israel. Was this a welcome step for the Israeli government? No. It immediately set out to punish the Palestinians for this new unity — it prefers a divided Palestinian community and a Hamas it can demonize. (Years ago, the Israeli government nurtured the emergence of Hamas precisely because it could serve as a religious rival to the popular secular Fatah.)

Hamas, it is true, maintains a charter that calls for the destruction of Israel, but that has not kept it from issuing statements over the years — joining the coalition is only the most recent — indicating a willingness to accept Israel as part of a two-state solution. It is Israel that has broken truces with Hamas. Its soldiers have often killed and injured Gazans minding their own business on their own side of the fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel, while Hamas leaders have been assassinated by the Israeli government following offers of a truce. It is clear that Israeli leaders do not want a Hamas they can make peace with, just as they don’t want an Iran with which they can have normal relations. They need the specter of an “existential threat” to maintain their iron rule. In particular, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must push this intransigent line especially hard to keep the members of his coalition government who are further to the right than he is (yes, further) on the reservation.

Israeli leaders and spokesmen continually say that their only goal in this war is “peace and quiet” for the people if Israel. Maybe a decent goal would include justice for the long-suffering Palestinians. This is not about Hamas, an organization that endangers the innocent people it claims to champion with futile yet criminal activities like the rocket fire. This does not let the Israelis and their brutal response — underwritten by American taxpayers and supporter by their rulers — off the hook, however. Ont the contrary, since Israel created and maintains the open-air prison, it is responsible for all the evils that go on inside. Its hard-line policies embolden the most extreme elements and undercut the moderate voices. Has the “peace process” even slowed the building of illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank?

No, it’s not about Hamas; it’s about the Palestinians, who do not deserve this punishment at the hands of the Israelis.

For further discussion of the larger context, see Ramzy Baroud’s “Ravaging Gaza: The War Netanyahu Cannot Possibly Win.” Also worthwhile are Nathan Thrall’s “How the West Chose War in Gaza” and Neve Gordon’s “On ‘Human Shielding’ in Gaza.”

Prisons are the antithesis of all we stand for as anarchists. While we seek a society built around peace and bodily autonomy, prisons are violent institutions that trap inmates at gunpoint and make them vulnerable to rape and murder. Where we seek justice through restitution, reconciliation, and self-defense, prisons are based on punitive vengeance. While we seek a society free from oppression based on race, gender, class, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation, prisons systematically brutalize the most marginalized among us.

As anarchists, we admire those who resist oppression. The state, on the other hand, uses prisons to confine and brutalize those who resist. Heroic whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and John Kiriakou are locked up, while the war criminals and corrupt rulers they exposed keep their positions of power and privilege. The state locked up CeCe McDonald, the New Jersey 4, and other queer and trans people in a notoriously transphobic and homophobic prison system, simply as punishment for defending themselves from aggressors. Black liberation revolutionaries are confined in cages and often tortured in solitary confinement, while cops who murder people of color keep their jobs and their power.

One way to mitigate the violence and harm inflicted by the prison state is to support its most immediate victims: prisoners themselves. Since the early 20th century, the Anarchist Black Cross has been doing just that. Their members write letters to political prisoners and prisoners of war. This builds social relationships and community across the divides the state seeks to maintain, it lets prisoners know they’re not alone, and it helps undermine the dehumanization that is core to imprisonment. Anarchist Black Cross groups also raise money for political prisoners and their legal defense funds.

Rather than requesting reforms from the state, Anarchist Black Cross members directly make the world a better place for those the state has brutalized. Their approach is fundamentally entrepreneurial, as it involves using the resources at one’s disposal to directly serve people’s needs. Yet it is fundamentally revolutionary, using this entrepreneurship to support those who have lost their liberty in the struggle against capitalist domination. It’s thus quite fitting that the Center for a Stateless Society’s Entrepreneurial Anti-Capitalism Project has sent funds to two active chapters of the Anarchist Black Cross: the Denver Anarchist Black Cross and the Mexico City Anarchist Black Cross.

We urge you to support their work too. You can donate to the Denver ABC here and you can contact the Mexico City ABC here to find out how to help. You can also help support prisoners by writing to some of the various prisoners these organizations support. Around the world, the Anarchist Black Cross is engaging in vital work to support prisoners, resist violent repression of social movements, and build up mutual aid. Until all are free from the state’s brutal prison system, the work of these Anarchist Black Cross groups and others like them will remain a vital part of the anarchist movement.

“Joseph Miller” discusses the drone memos.

James Bovard discusses Custer’s massacre.

Ramzy Baroud discusses the Muslim Ummah.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the ACLU report on police militarization.

Kelly Vlahos discusses how the Iraq crisis is bringing a swift rebuke to Iraq war architects.

Laurence M. Vance discusses how Republicans don’t really support limited government.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

David S. D’Amato discusses how the regulatory state or government helps corporate power.

Daniel J. Bier discusses the use of curious logic to argue in favor of the drug war.

Andrew Levine discusses how Israel thrives on existential threat.

The Mises institute interviews Walter Block.

Alexandra Early discusses the desperation of choices behind child migration.

David McDonald discusses the anti-war movement.

Sheldon Richman discusses the view that war is a racket.

Steve Chapman discusses ‘the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq.

Renee Parsons discusses the quagmire of U.S. foreign policy.

Cesar Chelala discusses the force feeding of Palestinian prisoners.

Joe Scarry discusses the recently released memo on targeted killing.

Robert Parry discusses Obama’s true weakness.

Robert Parry discusses the blaming of Obama for Iraq’s current chaos.

David Stockman discusses the newly proposed aid to the Syrian opposition to Assad.

Joshua Holland discusses the lies that sold the first Gulf War.

Benjmain H. Friedman discusses how drones will put the U.S. on a perpetual war footing.

Jonathan Blank discusses liberty, black people, and the state.

Joseph Grosso discusses the drug war in Honduras.

Eric Margolis discusses the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905.

William Norman Grigg discusses the plunder of the War on Drugs.

Robert Parry discusses the changing of the New York Time’s tune on the Ukraine.

Joel Benjamin beats H. Carter.

Joel Benjamin beats Nelson Gamboa.

A past New York Times editorial by Thomas Ricks shamelessly advocates involuntary servitude. In the article he states:

A revived draft, including both males and females, should include three options for new conscripts coming out of high school. Some could choose 18 months of military service with low pay but excellent post-service benefits, including free college tuition. These conscripts would not be deployed but could perform tasks currently outsourced at great cost to the Pentagon: paperwork, painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, and generally doing lower-skills tasks so professional soldiers don’t have to. If they want to stay, they could move into the professional force and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.

This is the blatant promotion of mandatory, menial and poorly paid labor for youth. This is a fiscally conservative proposal to exploit cheap labor to save the government money. No well paid workers! Just cheap conscripts who have no exit and ergo no ability to contest crappy wages and tasks through voting with their feet – will Ricks allow conscripts to unionize? One has to wonder. Unionization would mean the effective ability to challenge exploitative wages.

He goes on to say:

And libertarians who object to a draft could opt out. Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.

What about libertarians or people generally who can’t afford to lose government aid in our present corporatist system? No answer from Thomas Ricks. They would presumably still be compelled to serve the aims of government. A good example of how government aid can come with awful strings attached.

Aside from the above, there is an additional ethical issue with Rick’s proposal. The fact that it relies on the initiation of force to even attempt to enact it – it may not end up working even then. The use of aggressive force is a major evil. Thomas Ricks shows no sign of understanding nor even recognizing this truth.

This absence of a concern with the aggressive use of force required leads him to make another dubious argument. Near the end, he says:

But most of all, having a draft might, as General McChrystal said, make Americans think more carefully before going to war. Imagine the savings — in blood, tears and national treasure — if we had thought twice about whether we really wanted to invade Iraq.

Whether or not he is correct in his argument; he ignores some salient points. Conscription makes it difficult for people to vote against the war by declining to volunteer to for it. Anthony Gregory points out that a better solution to dealing with the problem of unjust wars is to allow soldiers to quit their jobs. The more moral choice is to work to make this a reality. One way to go about attempting to do that is by encouraging mass non-violent revolt within the military. One could also take a more legalistic route by bringing a lawsuit against the Defense Department. One could invoke the no involuntary servitude part of the Constitution. Both of these options deserve further consideration!