One of the main functions the state serves in practice is to forcibly transfer wealth to politically connected interest groups. Prisons serve that function today, and they have served it historically. In The Enterprise of Law,  economist Bruce Benson documents the rise of state controlled law enforcement in England. Stateless customary tort law had previously prevailed, with communities facilitating restitution based justice, but gradually the king and his cronies took control in order to extract wealth through fines and other modes of punitive “justice.” The rise of prisons as a method of punishment happened somewhat late in this process, but it too served a wealth transfer function, Benson explains:

“Houses of correction” were first established under Elizabeth to punish and reform able-bodied poor who refused to work. A “widespread concern for the habits and behavior of the poor” is often cited as the reason for the poor laws regarding vagrancy and the establishment of facilities to “reform” the idle poor by confining them and forcing them to work at hard labor. But Chambliss reported that “there is little question but that these statutes were designed for one express purpose: to force laborers (whether personally free or unfree) to accept employment at a low wage in order to insure the landowner an adequate supply of labor at a price he could afford to pay.” Such laws clearly reflected the transfer function of government.

In this case, prisons were used as institutions of violent coercion meant to establish work discipline, enforce the work ethic, drive down wages, and thus transfer wealth from poor and working people to landowners.

Prisons served a similar function in the American South after the 13th Amendment was passed. The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, but it makes an exception for those convicted of a crime. This provided a loophole that Southern states quickly implemented in order to preserve slavery. They passed laws known as the Black Codes that criminalized a litany of harmless behaviors specifically for black individuals. Then they imprisoned blacks in large numbers and leased them to businesses and governments to perform slave labor, in what was known as the convict lease system. This was yet another use of prisons and the criminal law as a wealth transfer, this time from former slaves to the state and elite economic interests.

Prisons are still used for the profits of entrenched interest groups today. Sometimes that means transferring wealth from taxpayers to for-profit prison operators like Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation. Sometimes it means price gouging prisoners and their families through your state granted monopoly on phone calls to prisoners, as Global Tel*Link does. Medical contractors like Corizon profit by providing inadequate medical care after being granted a monopoly in a prison. The agribusiness industry protects their profits by sending activists to prison for calling attention to abusive conditions in their facilities, through ag-gag laws and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

But it’s not just for-profit firms that extract wealth from prisoners and the public through the prison industrial complex. Prison guards at “public” prisons are just as much of a concentrated and selfish special interest group. The California prison guards union has pushed prison expansion and draconian “tough on crime” policies in order to ensure their members’ job security. Democrats Dick Durbin and Cheri Bustos praised federal funding for the maximum security Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois on the grounds that it would create jobs. They essentially treat prisons as a make work program for their constituents.

These are just a few of the ways prisons operate as statist wealth transfers to politically connected groups. Like all such transfers, they distort the market, create unseen opportunity costs, and encourage further rent seeking by privileged interests. But prisons are a particularly brutal institution to use for wealth extraction. The costs of prisons are not merely economic. Prisons rob people of their liberty, subject them to rape, bake them to death, scald their skin off, and institutionalize psychological torture. Prisons should be understood as another form of what Bastiat called legal plunder, and a particularly brutal one at that.

Renee Parsons discusses the U.S. aiding of Syrian rebels.

Nicola Nasser discusses the fake revolutionary character of the Syrian opposition.

Uri Avnery discusses the stewing of Israelis and Palestinians in their own juices.

John Laforge discusses remembering Memorial Day.

Jim Miles reviews The Idea of Israel-A History of Power and Knowledge.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses a military coup in Thailand.

Radley Balko discusses the criminalization of poverty.

Joel Whitney reviews No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald.

Seumas Milne discusses how coups and terror are the product of NATO’S war in Libya.

Jacob Sullum discusses fake rights, but the editor would like to note that this doesn’t mean the social issues raised are not important.

Kelly Vlahos discusses a Memorial Day nightmare.

Brink Lindsey discusses what Thomas Piketty gets wrong about capitalism.

Grant Mincy discusses the abolition of slavery as a triumph for liberty.

Kevin Carson discusses class, “identity politics”, and stigmergy.

Steve Breyman discusses Anne-Marie Slaughter’s penchant for war.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses statist patriotism vs libertarian patriotism. I don’t agree with the theistic focus though.

Clancy Sigal discusses Memorial Day and wars.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses World War 2.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the coup in Libya.

Anne Applebaum discusses why there wasn’t a good war in Warsaw.

Wendy McElroy discusses the framing of the debate on World War 2.

Justice Frank Murphy discusses the Yamashita V. Styer case. He dissents from the majority.

Robert Higgs discusses World War 2 and the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Sheldon Richman discusses the consequences of World War 2.

Simon Jenkins discusses the bombing of Dresden.

Anthony Gregory discusses whether World War 2 was necessary or not.

Gregory Bresiger discusses the road to the permanent warfare state.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses the causes and consequences of World War 2.

Alexey Shirov defeats Veselin Topalov.

Alexey Shirov beats Teimour Radjabov.

Desertion is often treated as equivalent to cowardice, treason, and other such things generally considered distasteful. As any anarchist could tell you, treason only makes sense if you feel some kind of loyalty to the nation-state or government or state you’re born into or under. This left-wing market anarchist most certainly doesn’t. As for cowardice, it takes quite a bit of courage to walk away from a cause considered popular or just by the vast majority of people. You’re truly on your own or with few allies in that scenario.

Desertion is an eminently libertarian approach to dealing with an unjust war as a soldier. It would seem that many pro-war conservatives think an individual should continue fighting and killing people unjustly rather than walk away from the battlefield. This is akin to mindlessly obeying orders and committing war crimes in the process. The libertarian and especially the anarchist preferably knows better.

That still leaves the question of desertion from a just war unanswered. It may be morally reprehensible to do so, but that doesn’t mean the behavior should be criminalized. The criminalization of desertion under any circumstances amounts to involuntary servitude. Desertion is another term for quitting your job. Something that the law recognizes in cases of non-military work. No private employer could rightfully conscript you based on the enforcement of a contract alienating your will. The same is preferable in the case of government employment.

Some might object that desertion endangers the other participants in a war, because the fighting strength of the army from which a person is deserting will go down. In the case of an unjust war, this objection has little power to persuade. The soldiers engaged in an illegitimate war don’t have their rights violated by someone refusing to assist them in mass murder. In fact, it is unfortunately true that the lessening of the fighting strength of said army would be a plus. It would mean less people die unjustly. As for the case of desertion in a just conflict, it may be morally wrong, but it’s no legal duty. The notion of a legal duty to serve as part of a military force engenders indentured servitude at best and slavery at worst. No person has an unconditional acontextual legal obligation to help fellow soldiers in even the context of a just war. Let’s work towards ending imperialist wars of aggression, so no one has to decide whether to desert as a matter of justice ever again.

There are two ways of approaching analysis of the death penalty. They are the practical and the moral. It’s the latter that most concerns me, but it’s important to note that the two can and do run together. A sole focus on practical considerations can lead one to justify anything and everything as long as the consequences can be shown to be positive by standard. An example relevant to the topic at hand would be the notion that genocide or torture is justifiable as long as it reduces crime. An argument frequently employed with respect to the death sentence.

Without the practical line of attack represented by disputing whether capital punishment reduces crime or not, the ethical dimension enters in the foreground. The primary ethical objection to the death penalty, I have, is that it represents state or government sponsored blood vengeance  against a person largely rendered defenseless. It’s difficult to distinguish from murder, because the individual doesn’t have to be threatening or carrying out an aggressive attack against anyone during the process of killing them. An equivalent act in principle would be shooting a POW rendered non-threatening in the head.

Another important ethical consideration with respect to capital punishment pertains to the manner in which it energizes the warfare state. One of the awful things about the “War on Terror” is the manner in which it has normalized extrajudicial killings on presidential whim. This kind of summary execution is the absolute worst form of the death penalty. It’s conducted with zero legality or objective accountability. It has contributed to the deaths of countless people.

The final moral consideration to seriously consider is how it creates a warped entitlement to kill mentality among police forces. The numerous unjust shootings one can read about in the libertarian and left press confirm the existence of said outlook. It’s the whimsical militarist presidential worldview brought into the realm of nominally civilian policing.

Despite the big focus being on the morality of capital punishment, there is an important practical consideration that does relate to practicality. That would be the potential of killing an innocent person. There is a new study showing that 4 percent of death row inmates are innocent, so this is no idle concern. It’s better for a guilty person to escape death than for an innocent individual to die, because the proper role of the law is to protect the rights of all rather than to kill them. Let’s work to make sure the law sticks to that.

So, two 12-year-olds allegedly stab another 12-year old multiple times in an effort to call forth creepy fictional character “Slender Man.” Two things about that should be immediately obvious to sane adults: The two kids are kids, and the two kids are, in a word, crazy.

But an allegedly sane adult has chosen to charge them “as adults” and to resist attempts to treat them as what they obviously are.

Do you even have to ask why? If so, the answer is “because Waukeshau County Prosecutor Brad Schimel is running for the office of Wisconsin Attorney General.”

Yes, it’s horrifying that two 12-year-olds would stab a third 12-year-old. But it’s far more horrifying that a politician is able to sacrifice all three of those 12-year-olds on the altar of his political ambitions.

In recent weeks, I’ve seen multiple stories about deaths in prisons. These deaths were all preventable and easily attributable to prison conditions. Let’s examine a few of these incidents.

According to the Miami Herald, “Florida’s Department of Corrections is facing a third potential criminal probe in the wake of another inmate death at a state prison.” The most recent death is that of Damion Foster, a 36 year old man who “died when corrections officers were attempting a ‘cell extraction.'” In other words, he died while experiencing direct coercive violence from prison guards. This seems like a case of possible murder or manslaughter, but it is likely to be shrouded in euphemism, because the violent extraction of prisoners from their cells is considered a normal or essential part of prison operations. Perhaps even more disturbing is the death of Darren Rainey. According to the Herald:

Rainey, serving two years on a cocaine charge, was placed in the shower by prison guards and left there for more than an hour, allegedly under a spray of water heated to in excess of 160 degrees. He was placed in the shower for a prolonged period as punishment after defecating in his cell and refusing to clean it up, according to repeated written grievances filed by Harold Hempstead, a burglar who was an orderly in the mental-health unit. Hempstead said he was assigned to a cell beneath the shower and could hear Rainey screaming for mercy. … When Rainey was found, he was so badly burned that portions of his skin had slipped from his body, a witness and several former employees at the prison told the Herald.

So guards scalded Rainey’s skin off with water hotter than 160 degrees as a method of punishment. Rainey was killed in June 2012. If any ordinary citizen did this, it would be quickly recognized as murder and prosecuted as such. By contrast, the guards responsible were subjected to a criminal investigation, but as of May 22nd this year, the police had not yet concluded whether there was any inappropriate or criminal behavior to prosecute. The story is even more disturbing in light of the fact that “Rainey was not the only prisoner who got the shower treatment.”

Disturbing prison deaths are certainly not unique to Florida. On February 15th this year, homeless veteran Jerome Murdough baked to death in his 101-degree cell at New York’s Riker’s Island jail. It’s all too common for prisoners to bake to death in overheated prisons and jails. A recent report from the University of Texas School of Law Human Rights Clinic points out at least 14 inmate deaths in Texas related to overheating since 2007. The report “concludes that current conditions in TDCJ facilities constitute a violation of Texas’s duty to guarantee the rights to health, life, physical integrity, and dignity of detainees, as well as its duty to prevent inhuman or degrading treatment of its inmates.”

In 2011, the Center for a Stateless Society’s own Brad Spangler noted that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was “literally roasting prisoners alive.” Spangler explained that “Temperatures inside the tents at the prison camp the Sheriff operates are reaching 145°F. By way of comparison, a round of roast beef is said to be medium-rare when it reaches a core temperature of 130°F to 140°F.” Furthermore, he argued that such abuses “are logical consequences of the perverse economic incentives of monopoly government.” Given that similarly abusive conditions are seen in prisons and jails from New York to Florida to Texas to Arizona, I’m inclined to agree.

People often ask what we would do about murderers without prisons. But the sad truth is that prisons themselves kill. As Dean Spade puts it, “The prison is the serial killer.”

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why U.S. soldiers aren’t defending our freedoms.

Dave Lindorff discusses why the U.S. empire is in decline.

Gary M. Galles discusses how compulsion is not cooperation.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the U.S. support for military coups.

Cesar Chelala discusses the CIA and the misuse of public health.

Ian Urbina discusses the use of jailed migrants as a source of cheap labor.

Timothy P. Carney discusses how big business supported regulation during the Progressive Era.

David S. D’Amato discusses libertarianism and intellectual property.

Dan Sanchez discusses the cycle of the state.

Felicity Arbuthnot discusses how U.S. citizens are not safe worldwide.

William Norman Grigg discusses Dana Rohrabacher.

Binoy Kampmark discusses the weakening of surveillance reform.

Dan Sanchez discusses the impossibility of voluntary slavery.

Jason Brennan discusses Michael Lind’s fetish for closed borders.

David S. D’Amato discusses the export-import bank.

Renee Parsons discusses American foreign policy, the dollar, and Putin’s pivot.

Andrew O’Hehir discusses the liberal attacks on Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. Not entirely anarchist friendly but still good.

Glenn Greenwald responses to Michael Kinsley.

Bob and Barbara Dreyfuss discusses why the left should be wary of Hilary Clinton

J.D. Tuccille discusses why new laws are an ineffective response to tragic happenings.

Jacob Sullum discusses gun control.

Gene Healy discusses the faux War on Terror debate started by Obama.

Jacob Sullum discusses hash brownies and life sentences.

Nick Gillespie discusses Obama leaving roughly 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Ivan Eland discusses how U.S. alliances lead Asian allies to be more aggressive.

Sheldon Richman discusses why interventionism is no good.

Sandy Ikeda discusses libertarianism from the other side.

Cathy Young discusses Elliot Rogers.

Ulf Andersson beats Anatoly Karpov.

Ulf Andersson beats Anatoly Karpov again.

Before I go into this month’s English-language numbers, I’d like to offer my congratulations to Erick Vasconcelos, C4SS’s Portuguese-language media coordinator, who has identified a whopping 137 pickups of the Center’s material (either original in Portuguese or translated to it) this month! I haven’t seen updates from our other coordinators for this month yet, but it’s clear that C4SS is making huge global inroads with readers of languages other than English.

On the English-language side, so far this month I have logged 35,832 submissions of C4SS op-eds to 2,642 publications around the world, and identified 52 “establishment media” pickups of, and one citation/link to, C4SS material.

Two high points:

• That citation/link I mention above is from The New Yorker. Aside from its prominence as an American print institution, it’s in the top 1,000 most popular web sites in the US and in the top 2,500 worldwide (according to Alexa, the reliability of which I am aware is much disputed).
• We penetrated two new (for us) media markets this month — Fiji and Jamaica.

So, are we happy? Well, yes — but we’re not going to be resting on our laurels. Our goal is to convey the market anarchist message to every audience, via every available vehicle, worldwide, 24/7. We’re not there yet, but we’re definitely making measurable progress. Thanks, as always, for your support!

So there are at least two student newspapers on the UC Santa Barbara campus: The Daily Nexus, and The Bottom Line. One paper, the Nexus, has had nearly wall-to-wall coverage of the Isla Vista shooting that happened last Friday. By all accounts, Nexus editor-in-chief Marissa Wenzke was one of the first journalists on the scene, period – and she immediately began dispatching reporters out. The Bottom Line, on the other hand, has not. And they apparently have decided against extensively covering the shooting – which has become a national story and one of the biggest sources of debate this year – deliberately. 

On May 25, The Bottom Line published an op-ed from a former Executive Content Editor, Hannah Davey, who explained that the reason there was a paucity of stories on the shooting at her former paper was that the paper wanted to reduce harm to their reporters.

Whenever tragedy strikes, emergency responders and journalists are some of the first on scene and are, consequently, more likely to suffer from emotional trauma because of it. As stated in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, a code we at The Bottom Line strive to uphold every day in our reporting, we are to minimize harm, whether physical or emotional. Ethical “journalists should show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage.”

After extensive discussions among our Editorial Staff, advisor and alumni, we have decided to not immediately publish an article on the recent tragedy in our community of Isla Vista to minimize the emotional harm for our reporters, photographers and multimedia journalists. Before we are journalists, we are Gauchos and feel we need our time to mourn, process and recover from this senseless violence.

To put it lightly, this irked a few journalists. Erik Wemple, the media critic at The Washington Post, wrote of the original op-ed, “The op-ed from Davey notes that the decision to bag publishing on a gigantic story came after ‘extensive discussions among our Editorial Staff, advisor and alumni…’ In those extensive discussions, these folks presumably engaged in philosophical exchanges on mourning and recovery, when a better focus would have been: How fast can we generate updates on this rampage? (emphasis Wemple’s)”

As an observer to a few tragedies where the news coverage was originally botched, I can understand – from a certain perspective – wanting to hold off on writing about something like this. If only to get to the closest possible version of the truth, I am for quality and not quantity. However, The Bottom Line‘s competitor, the Nexus, has a startling amount of well-crafted and thoughtful pieces on the Isla Vista shooting.

To be perfectly blunt, the student reporters on The Bottom Line appear to have been done a disservice by their editors and their adviser. Rather than seeing this as an opportunity to learn how to report on tragedy, someone apparently decided that what their reporters needed most was a day off. 

Oh, and let’s talk about what the Society of Professional Journalists says about harm reduction:

Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should: — Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

Rather than apply this code to their reporting, Davey’s op-ed made it seem like The Bottom Line applied this to themselves and themselves alone.

The Bottom Line Editorial Board tacked on a correction to Davey’s op-ed on Wednesday. They said:

The Op-Ed that TBL published on May 25, 2014, “Op-Ed: Why We Have Not Yet Published Anything on the Isla Vista Shooting,” was written by a previous Executive Content Editor, and was approved to be posted by a few members of our current editorial board, but without consultation with our advisor and the majority of the editorial board. In a mentally and emotionally compromised state, the editors directly involved in the publication of the Op-Ed misjudged the situation. Even though said piece is an Op-Ed, we effectively allowed someone who is not currently involved with TBL to speak for us and define our coverage of the Isla Vista tragedy.

The Op-Ed states that “we have decided to not immediately publish an article on the recent tragedy in our community of Isla Vista to minimize the emotional harm for our reporters, photographers and multimedia journalists.” Although minimizing harm to our staff and community contributed to our decision, it was not the main factor. We decided it would be best to gather all the necessary facts to report on such a grave and tragic incident, rather than rush to publication and print misinformation. This does not mean that our reporters and photographers refused to or chose not to cover the events of May 23. Our staff has been reporting, interviewing, and photographing since Friday night in preparation for an online story published Monday and our regular print issue on Wednesday. Additionally, we have been covering the incident through our Twitter account, providing accurate live updates of the events.

We pride ourselves on factual and accurate reporting, not sensationalism and fear-mongering. We, as a news organization, do not want to contribute to the panic by exploiting the grief of our fellow community members. We serve our community first, and we took the steps that we thought were necessary to best serve that community. Our primary audience is UCSB and Isla Vista, who were rocked by a tragic event and have experienced a severe loss. We did not think it journalistically ethical to harass our community in its time of grief and shock, and decided to hold off premature publication of an article so that we did not hurt anyone through misinformation.

This is… better than the reasons given in the previous op-ed. Still not great, and still hinting at a disservice done to the student journalists, but better.

It should be noted that The Bottom Line is associated with UCSB’s Associated Student Body. The Daily Nexus is an independently-run paper with no adviser. Marissa Wenzke, the now-former Editor of the Nexus, posted this in the comment thread of another Washington Post article on The Bottom Line‘s coverage:

A student paper is comparable to a media outlet because, well, it is a media outlet. We have no faculty adviser and we get along just fine. Student journalists are journalists – if they want to be.

I’m thankful to be alive*, and when I was reporting, it was for my friends and classmates who were waiting on information all that night, waiting on updates to see if their loved ones were okay, and waiting to find out what exactly happened that night.

*According to an LA Times article on the Nexus’s reporting, Wenzke was in an apartment on the adjacent street to where the shooting happened.

No último mês, foram publicados 20 artigos em português no C4SS. Nove deles foram escritos por mim e por Valdenor Júnior, dialogando especificamente com o público de língua portuguesa, em particular o brasileiro.

Tivemos 137 republicações, com uma média de 6,85 republicações por texto. Nós mais que dobramos a quantidade de textos republicados por sites e jornais, comparando nosso desempenho em abril, com 57 republicações em 25 textos (média de 2,28 republicações por texto).

Digna de nota é a republicação de um dos textos escritos por mim em um grande jornal brasileiro, o Jornal do Brasil. Contando com sua republicação no Jornal do Brasil, Cercamentos modernos teve 14 citações em diversos meios.

Nossa página no Facebook cresceu bastante, saindo de suas 536 curtidas para as 875 atuais. Certamente vamos passar as 1000 curtidas em junho e já teremos uma comemoração engatilhada.

Até 25 de maio, porém, o número de textos publicados no site em português ficou aquém dos 25 planejados. Espero remediar essa situação em junho. O crescimento do Twitter também foi baixo, estacionando em 56 seguidores (ganhando apenas 8 desde abril). Será outro veículo que eu enfatizarei em junho.

Os outros projetos que assumi estão em andamento, porém um pouco mais lento: a tradução para o português de The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand, de Kevin Carson, e a resenha do livro Hierarquia, de Augusto de Franco.

Todo esse trabalho só é possível com a sua doação. Então coopere conosco para darmos um passo rumo a uma sociedade sem estado!

Erick Vasconcelos
Coordenador de Mídias
Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado

Portuguese Media Coordinator Update: May 2014

In May, we ran 20 articles in Portuguese on the C4SS website. Nine of them were written either by myself or by Valdenor Júnior, striking a dialogue specifically with the Portuguese-speaking public, in particular Brazilians.

We had 137 pickups — an average of 6.85 per article. The total pickups by newspapers and websites more than doubled compared to April, that had 57 pickups and 25 articles (an average of 2.28 per article).

It’s worth noting that we were able to plaster one of our articles on the website of a very large newspaper in Brazil, Jornal do Brasil. Counting the JB pickup, the Portuguese version of my own Modern Enclosures was cited 14 times in several outlets, having the most citations in the month.

Our Facebook page had significant growth, from the 536 likes it had in April to our current 875. We’ll definitely hit the 1,000 mark in June, and we should have a little celebration ready by then.

Until May 25, however, the number of articles we published ran a little short of the 25 mark we planned. I hope to remedy that situation in June. Our growth on Twitter was lukewarm as well, going from 48 in April to 56 now (only 8 more). It’s another area I hope to boost in the coming month.

Other projects I took upon myself are still underway, but at a slower pace: the translation to Portuguese of The Iron Fist Behind the Insibile Hand, by Kevin Carson, and the review of Hierarchy, by Augusto de Franco.

All this work is made possible with your donation. Cooperate with us to make anarchy a reality!

Erick Vasconcelos
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

Net Neutrality is dead. An unstable equilibrium that’s persisted as the default since the 90s, wherein ISPs and telcoms route all ip packets the same without regard for content, origination or destination, the potential for censorship and chilling effects in the current oligarchical environment is a serious concern. However anarchists have long seen this day coming, and that the only lasting substantive solution would be to fully embrace the decentralized promise of the internet.

Despite its aspirations and mythological treatment, the internet has never been some perfectly connected “net” capable of regenerating like Wolverine. While that goal was an underlying assumption of a variety of protocols that became popular and helped shape the development of the internet, the internet in practice is not an organic mesh of individuals, but a few thousand organizations that are loosely tied together in clusters. In theory each organization controls the connections that comprise its internal network and, again in theory, they build physical links and negotiate contracts with one another to pass packets between networks. This peering takes many forms, passing traffic at different speeds and costs, but the traffic itself has largely been treated homogeneously.

Well, okay, this isn’t entirely true. Governments around the world have installed routers and machines capable of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) wherein a packet is routed based on its content. This is one way the People’s Republic of China, for example, has blocked connections to the Tor network.

But there are good reasons for an organization to peek inside packets and adjust their prioritization accordingly. DDOS attacks or merely bandwidth intensive but not pressing traffic can flood the network slowing down transmission rates for other content. The problem isn’t a lack of neutrality; neutrality is usually artificial, only possible where there are universally shared preferences or no pressure to optimize.

If the internet survives the next twenty years it will undoubtedly look quite different. Radicals working on overlay networks to the existing infrastructure, like Tor, I2P, GnuNet, Tahoe-LAFS, and FreeNet, are fighting the more immediate battle, but so long as only a few hundred or thousand organizations control the material connections that everything travels on we will always be in danger of the state. Even a hundred thousand networks could still be beaten into collaboration with a censorship regime. Right now the future sits on a knife edge, poised to fall into new enclosures, with state access cards and comprehensive whitelisting. And even if we win, the day still might come where the state wakes up and considers technological society itself too high a risk, sabotaging and tearing apart our centralized infrastructure.

To head off such retreats, to keep the statists on the playing field, we must build a world of proactive, individual-scale connections. In the more trivial ad hoc limit this can look like peer-to-peer connections between the phones of passing strangers, but when it comes to building lasting resilient bonds there’s no replacing on the ground community organizing. The sort of projects anarchists have long taken the lead in, building one-on-one relationships of trust and strengthening the human roots upon which all other relations are built.

There are many community mesh wifi projects with radical sensibilities, some like those of Athens, Catalonia and across Germany are already quite established and supported. Hundreds of others are still just attempted sprouts. Focusing on those in the midrange we’ve chosen to invest over six hundred dollars in People’s Open Network in Oakland, California, Kansas City Freedom Network, and AlterMundi in Argentina to provide an extra push as well as highlight their radical sensibilities and work at building community.

We at the Center for a Stateless Society believe strongly in the potency and importance of persuasion in building a freed world, but we also know that world won’t be built without hands-on grappling, activist organizing and building commons. That’s why we started the Entrepreneurial Anti-capitalism project, to pay forward the good fortune we’ve received and provide a helping hand to those doing amazing, necessary, frequently thankless work with very little.

It is our hope that others will follow our lead in donating to these great projects. Each one accepts bitcoin at the following addresses:

• People’s Open Network: 12RxU4DpLpdWcmEBn7Tj325CCXBwt5i9Hc
• AlterMundi: 12mVSq3NBKTs3tCpWXyJqwdHq8p92ka6fq
• KC Freedom: 1Jmjmf2hDWsrSfnxiM27GZtNWmWGbPNEQM

J. Edward Carp has already written a fine piece on Memorial Day, but I see no reason why there isn’t room for another. One might expect an anarchist such as myself to simply trash veterans as stooges of the state, but I have a more nuanced perspective to offer.

Memorial Day is often used by pro-war forces to promote more military action, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It can be a simple remembrance of the victims of war. These said victims can be both fallen soldiers and civilians. It need not be a jingoistic holiday used to justify further militarism.

A related issue is whether one should support the troops or not and what group of troops. Charles Johnson has written the following on this issue in the context of the Iraq War:

1. The things done in the prosecution of the Iraq War are evil.
2. There are some (many) American soldiers who willingly do the things done in the prosecution of the Iraq War.
3. If soldiers willingly do things that are evil, they bear (at least some) moral responsibility for them.
4. You shouldn’t support people who bear (at least some) moral responsibility for doing things that are evil.
5. Therefore, there are some (many) American soldiers you shouldn’t support.

What about supporting the troops in other contexts, where they display different behaviors? That could be permissible, but a libertarian shouldn’t support troops when they are engaged in mass murder.

Is contempt proper in this scenario? Roderick Long writes:

If a basically decent person has been unfairly manipulated into carrying out an unjust policy, despising that person is hardly an appropriate response. But neither is support.

Short of surmising that the vast majority of human beings are psychopaths committed to aggressive violence, we can probably safely hypothesize that the vast majority of troops are basically decent people interested in only defensive force.

It may also be possible to not support all the troops but only particular ones like Chelsea Manning. Kevin Carson writes:

Let’s get something straight. Manning may be a criminal by the standards of the American state. But by all human standards of morality, the government and its functionaries that Manning exposed to the light of day are criminals. And Manning is a hero of freedom for doing it.

Another question pertains to whether we should honor or respect soldiers for defending our society or freedoms. The statement that they have done so or are doing so is merely an assumption until sufficient proof is provided. A lot of U.S. wars have been unjust wars of aggression or imperialism, so I have a hard time swallowing the idea that we owe the troops for protecting our freedoms or genuinely defending us. It can also be dangerous to honor or respect someone, because they perceive themselves as protecting the society you happen to live in. This was no doubt the view of Confederate and German soldiers during World War 2.

The final thing to consider is whether warrior-ship is a virtue or not. The perspective presented here is a bit unsure. On the one hand violence or coercion is awful, but it’s difficult to say that defensive violence is a necessary evil without unjustly indicting the moral character of those involved in using it. One can clearly say that aggressive violence or coercion is an unmitigated evil. Let’s work to put an end to this.

Este mes decidí enfocar todos mis esfuerzos en terminar la traducción de “El puño de hierro detrás de la mano invisible” de Kevin Carson. Y la decisión rindió sus frutos: ¡ayer terminé la traducción!

El puño es una de las obras seminales de Kevin Carson y una referencia fundamental del “anticapitalismo de libre mercado”. Expone de manera suscinta varios temas abordados por Kevin en mayor profundiad en su “Estudios de economía política mutualista”. Principalmente, el ensayo hace un análisis histórico de la evolución del capitalismo como una serie de “revoluciones impuestas desde arriba” por una clase dominante u otra apoyada por el poder coercitivo del estado en detrimento de la clase trabajadora. Luego analiza los cinco principales obstáculos institucionales a la libertad económica impuestos por el estado en un sistema capitalista: la hegemonía ideológica, el monopolio del dinero, las patentes, los subsidios a la infrastructura y el “keynesianismo militarista”.

Esperamos que lo disfrutes. Parece mentira que ya hayan pasado 12 años desde que Kevin publicó el puño de hierro. Desde entonces nuestro movimiento ha evolucionado enormemente.

C4SS es parte de esa evolución, que en gran medida no se podría haber dado sin tu colaboración. Por eso, como siempre, aprovechamos para invitarte a hacer una donación: tu contribución es extramadamente valiosa y nos permite seguir adelante.

¡Salud y libertad!

Carlos Clemente

Spanish Media Coordinator Report, May 2014

This month I decided to focus all my efforts on finishing the translation of Kevin Caron’s “The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand“. And the efforts paid off: I finished the translation yesterday!

Iron Fist is one of Kevin’s seminal works and an obligatory reference within the free-market anti-capitalist movement. It addresses in succinct form many of the issues that Kevin addresses in more depth in his Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. In particular, the essay presents a historical analysis of how capitalism evolved as a succession of “revolutions imposed from above” by a succession of State-sponsored dominant classes to the detriment of the working class. And then it folows with an analysis of the five key institutional obstacles engineered by the State for supressing economic liberty in a capitalist system: Ideological hegemony, the money monopoly, patents, infrastructure subsidies, and “military keynesianism”.

We hope you enjoy it! It is unbelievable that 12 years have passed since Kevin wrote Iron Fist. Since then, our movement has evolved greatly, and C4SS is part of that evolution.

That’s why, as always, we seize the opportunity to invite you to make a donation: your contribution is extremely valuable and enables us to keep on going.

¡Salud y libertad!

Carlos Clemente

Two years ago my wife and I lost a baby. We went to the 20 week ultrasound, expecting to hear if we were having a boy or a girl. Instead, we did not hear a heartbeat. The pain was sharp and immediate, though it has dulled with time. In our grief we sought comfort in friends and relatives who shared it, who had also looked forward to a new grandchild or niece or nephew.

We never got the chance to know our son, Walter Tyler Carp, and so I cannot imagine the grief the parents of my friend Nick Crombie felt when they heard their son had been killed by an IED in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on June 7th, 2006, or the anguish suffered by the parents of Marisol Heredia, a soldier from my unit I helped treat after she was horrifically burned in an accident on our base in Baghdad, as they watched their daughter die on a hospital bed in San Antonio, Texas. But I still grieve for my lost friend and I still remember Marisol pleading with me to kill her as we feebly tried to soothe her burns.

On Memorial Day, we are offered a national version of that simple sharing of grief that helped my wife and I face our loss. The President calls my dead friends heroes. Media outlets incessantly blare thanks to them and their families and sometimes even to me as a veteran, though I am still alive. We are supposed to think somber and grateful thoughts. Oh, and we are supposed to kick off the summer vacation season with a barbeque and a mattress sale.

But the mattress sales and the barbeques are not why I hate Memorial Day. When my father called me the day Walter died, he wept with me. When the President solemnly intones his “gratitude” at Arlington National Cemetery, he does so while sending more Nicks and Marisols to their deaths. He does so while turning them from the kids they were into the heroes he needs them to be so that he can dupe another generation of kids the way we were duped.

But they were not heroes. Telling the truth does the dead no dishonor, and lying does them no honor. Like most soldiers in every war from every country, my dead were just kids who believed the things a sick culture told them about duty, honor, and country. They, like me, maybe even like you, were raised saying the Pledge and standing for the Star-Spangled Banner, playing with GI Joes and being taught to be grateful to the military for their “freedom.”

We who knew the dead carry our grief with us every day, but on Memorial Day we are offered the chance to subsume our pain in a national ceremony of mourning. The rituals offer more than just communal grief; they offer the chance to assign great meaning and purpose to the senseless horror that destroyed the young lives of our dead. Nick wasn’t a kid from Winnemucca who got killed by a roadside bomb in a futile war he, like me, mistakenly thought was his affair; he was a great hero who died for our freedom.

But when we indulge in these rituals, we help animate their deeper purpose- the seduction of another group of young men and women by the mythology of the nation. I grieve for my dead, but I look at my young sons and I know that I cannot let myself be tempted into these faux rationalizations of their deaths. We cannot allow our dead to be turned into the iconography of war. We must gird up our loins and face the senseless horror that ripped their bodies apart and the central nightmare of their deaths: that their deaths were meaningless; they died for nothing. They were grist for a mill, and that mill still grinds up lives today.

The United States government took our dead from us, and now seeks to appropriate their memory and our grief as well. But no, Mr. Obama, you cannot have my dead, and you cannot have my grief. I don’t grieve for fallen heroes. I grieve for Nick. He was young, and you never knew him.

May has been an interesting month for The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS). We have added some new features and people to the roster and reached a couple of milestones in our development.

If you are a regular donor, then I would like to thank you for your continued enthusiasm and support. If you are interested in supporting our mission “to explain and defend the idea of vibrant social cooperation without aggression, oppression, or centralized authority” with a monthly $5 donation, then I would like to give you an idea of you can expect from C4SS.

Updated C4SS News Widget

NEW! Now in 100% pure javascript! One way you can support C4SS is by placing our news widget on your site. You can customize and create your own version of the C4SS News Widget. Kevin Carson and Mike Gogulski both have standard versions of the widget on their blogs, but they give you an idea of what it will look like on your sidebar.

For the month of May, C4SS published:

25 Commentaries (1 more than April),
14 original Features (4 more than April),
4 Weekly Abolitionists,
7 Life, Love and Liberty,
5 Weekly Libertarian Leftist Reviews,
3 Missing Commas,
3 Wars and Rumors of Wars,
3 Hardly Working,
1 original Book Review and
17 C4SS Media uploads to the C4SS youtube channel.

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

9 Italian translations,
2 Spanish translations and
21 Portuguese translations.

For our supporters that have been following C4SS’s extension into South America, Brazilian interest and traffic has continued to best Canada and the United Kingdom combined.

New Features

C4SS has expanded your ability to support our work by joining the GITTIP network.

We have a new blog in our line-up: Nick Ford’s Hardly Working. Ford has been aggressively cataloging classics in the field “work refusal” and criticism of the “cultural of work” or “Puritan Work Ethic” on his site Abolish Work. Now he offers, for C4SS, a weekly to bi-monthly look into this area of criticism:

The goal of this blog is to promote a future where none of us will have to work. And by “work” I don’t mean just giving effort, but labor that we give to others under systematic duress. A good example is the workers who work in retail or low-paying jobs because they have no other good options.

The Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS) has release its second issue of The New Leveller.

“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!”

New People

C4SS has maintained a Panel of Advisers since mid-2009. Most of the original advisers have departed – leaving for other projects, differences of opinion or moving into other C4SS positions reflecting more responsibility. C4SS continues to grow and expand as an organization increasing a need for more points, or contributors, of information. To handle this organizational growth, we have begun to craft nested and semi-autonomous arrangements with S4SS, the C4SS Media Coordinators, sections of the Stigmergy Blog and the C4SS Media Project. As these projects come into their own, our primary project, “the production and distribution of market anarchist media content, both scholarly and popular” will require more eyes to make our bugs shallow. Our current advisers, Stephan Kinsella and Wendy McElroy, will now be aided by voices that have been either a part of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left discussion for almost a decade or individuals that have challenged us to consider new puzzles or stressed our current solution sets. It is in this spirit, calling our attention to new opportunities and talent as well as helping C4SS craft content and make decisions regarding direction and policy, that we are happy to introduce our new advisers:

• Andrea Shepard
• Brain Nicholson
• Cathy Reisenwitz
• Grayson English
• Jeff Ricketson
• Kate Gallagher
• Logan Yershov

Grant Mincy is C4SS’s expert on Appalachian activism and market/direct action based environmentalism. We are proud to announce that Mincy’s proposal for a new C4SS Study has been approved and funded. You can expect its publication within the next six to eight months. The study’s abstract and a sketch of its table of contents have been provided:

A Study Proposal for the Center for a Stateless Society

Coal, along with other fossil fuels, are the primary sources of energy for the United States. To date, fossil fuels provide 85% of the nations energy. Coal is the primary source of energy for the United States, providing over half of the electricity consumed by Americans. On a global scale, the United States has the largest known reserves of bituminous and anthracite coal. Much of the coal that is mined in the United States comes from the Appalachian Mountains. Coal mining in the region has created systemic poverty, untold amounts of human suffering and a precipitous decline in biodiversity in one of the worlds oldest temperate rain-forests.

I propose a study for C4SS that will focus on both the natural and social history of the Appalachian coalfields, followed by a market anarchist path to liberation. The study will be broken into three different parts, laid out as follows:

Preface:

• General introduction to the study and why I am conducting it.
• A Brief Analysis of Natural History:
  • Geologic time and the rise of the Appalachians.
  • Geologic time and the formation of coal.
  • Geologic time and biodiversity.
• Exploitation of coal reserves and its impact on the environment (special regard to water quality and biodiversity).

Social History:

• Appalachian community life.
• Initial markets and way of life
• Appalachia and the British coal connection.
• Coal and capital.
• Coal and the state.
• The first coal barons.
• The rise of king coal and the community store.
• The rise of labor – United Mine Workers
• Systemic Poverty.
• From pit mining to mountaintop removal.
• Coals dominance of Appalachian landscapes and both the Appalachian and national economy.

Praxis:

• Social movements.
• “Paper wrenching”.
• Transition economics/Counter economics.
• Toward democratic energy.
• The stateless society.

Milestones In Our Development 

Erick Vasconcelos has finally gotten a market anarchist commentary into The Fiji Times Online with his “Police Have Never Guaranteed Order.”

Kevin Carson’s “With ‘Socialists’ Like Lawrence and Wishart, Who Needs Capitalists?” was cited over all other possible commentaries in Ben Mauk, “Steal This E-Book?” blog post on The New Yorker. The Lawence and Wishart controversy also warranted a follow up – and left market anarchist situation summary – with Kevin Carson’s “Lawrence & Wishart: The Stone That The Builders Refused“.

The growing challenge of Uber and Lyft on walled gardens and state dependent models of agitation and organization prompted a series of articles that ran the spectrum of praise to guarded praise to calls for better modes of analysis for the situation and players involved:

• Gina Luttrell‘s “Uber and Lyft are the Best New Thing for Poor, Urban Communities“
• William Gillis‘ Barriers to Entry and Fake Scarcities
• J. Edward Carp‘s Capital Uber Alles?
• Kevin Carson‘s One Cheer for Uber and Lyft

Clark Ruper‘s “Between Radicalism & Revolution: The Cautionary Tale of Students For a Democratic Society,” over at The Students for Liberty blog kicked off an fruitful conversation regarding movement strategies, asking for greater perspective and refined goals in order to keep the tent of libertarianism big and the movement focused. Though we are sympathetic to the underlying motivations and Erasmian warnings against “enthusiasm”, we, ultimately, part ways in favor of a stigmergic and fractal libertarianism.

• Jeff Ricketson‘s “Radicalism as Revolution: A Call for a Fractal Libertarianism“
• Kevin Carson‘s “Class, ‘Identity Politics’ and Stigmergy: Why We Don’t Need ‘One Big Movement’”

Cory Massimino and Joseph Diedrich concluded their Mutual Exchange “Private Property: How, When and Why” just in time for our newest Mutual Exchange over contested conceptions of privilege. This Mutual Exchange is, unfortunately, not in time to make Roderick T. Long‘s dead line for papers on the same topic: Libertarianism and Privilege. We hope that it will be a welcome parallel discussion with some cross-pollination. The opening article will be Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?” with responses and critique from Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson and Cathy Reisenwitz.

We still have, in the works, reviews from,

• Jonathan Carp has been working on a review of AK Press’ “Ready for Revolution“.
• Nathan Goodman is working on reviews for two of Victoria Law’s books from PM Press: “Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women” and “Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities“.
• Christiaan Elderhorst is working on a review of Michel Bauwen’s new book “De Wereld Redden“.
• Natasha Petrova is finishing a review of Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s second edition of “Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical“.
• Erick Vasconcelos has agreed to review AK Press’ new book “The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy“ and Augusto de Franco‘s “Hierarchy“.
• Joel Schlosberg wants to further explore the ideas of Jeremy Rifkin by reviewing his latest book, “The Zero Marginal Cost Society“.

We have added to our list of book reviews:

• Kevin Carson has received a review copy from PM Press of their new book, “New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism“.

Feed 44, the C4SS Media Project’s working name for our two podcast channels – itunes and sticher – has been performing better than expected. Trevor Hultner sent me this update on the projects progress:

For the month of May (one week left until bandwidth reset), C4SS Media podcasts were downloaded a grand total of 8089 times, or approximately 577 downloads per episode. For the first month of podcasting, I would say that “Feed 44,” the unofficial-official name of C4SS’s podcast channel, has been a smash success.

While the only content currently on Feed 44 are recordings of past C4SS articles, in June C4SS Media plans to introduce new, original content to the mix. We’d also like to officially welcome Max LaFave, Juliana Perciavalle, Christopher King and Jason Lee Byas to the roster of content creators and voice talents.

The C4SS Tor Node has successfully been transferred from Mike Gogulski, who is moving on to more interesting projects, to C4SS proper and paid up through July, 2014. You can check out the node’s status here: Tor Network Status — Router Detail. Expect a fundraiser soon to keep this project going, now on its third consecutive year. Find out how you can use Tor or set up your own Tor Node: “Tor: The Onion Router“.  

Another milestone of humbling significance to our diligent social media coordinators is C4SS, finally, becoming Tumblr famous.

C4SS has been a long time partner with Charles Johnson‘s Alliance of the Libertarian Left Distro and would like to highlight the Distro‘s newest additions to its Market Anarchist and Classic Anarchist zine collections. For every zine that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Another great way to support C4SS and brush up on some classic anarchism.

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 ofleft 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!

Patrick Cockburn discusses the bloody history of Baghdad.

Kent Paterson discusses the challenging of a militarized police state.

Medea Benjamin discusses the broken promises of Obama.

Martha Rosenberg interviews Michael Arria.

Jeffrey St. Clair discusses the recently passed away, Gabriel Kolko.

Justin Raimondo discusses how a CIA backed general recently launched a coup in Libya.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the awfulness of the 9-11 museum.

Jim Hightower discusses how the allegedly libertarian Koch Brothers fund a group that wants solar taxes.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the history of the First World War in 100 moments.

Jonathan Turley discusses the imperial presidency.

Wendy McElroy discusses the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s acquiring of submachine guns.

Cathy Young discusses the situation in the Ukraine.

Daniel Larison discusses Rand Paul’s opposition to the appointment of David Barron.

Human Rights Watch discusses U.S. training of an abusive Cambodian military.

Sheldon Richman discusses U.S. intervention in Libya.

Anneke E. Green discusses the drone memos.

Laurence M. Vance discusses conservative attempts to ban chocolate milk.

Joseph Stromberg discusses corporatism in theory and practice.

Predrag Rasjic discusses cartels and subsidies in Canadian agriculture.

Chris Floyd discusses the roots and fruits of the War on Terror.

John Knefel discusses the endless war.

Andrew Levine discusses stopping Hilary Clinton.

Daniel Kovalik discusses the U.S., Colombia, and the death squad state.

Sheldon Richman discusses Keynes.

Wendy McElroy discusses idealism vs gradualism.

Gary Reed discusses why Memorial Day is more aptly named Government Day.

Franklin Lamb discusses liberating Syria.

Helen Redmond discusses the diehard drug warriors.

Yifan Hou defeats the great Judit Polgar.

Viktor Korchnoi defeats the chess genius, Robert James Fischer.

In the military, we learn to leave no one behind. Whatever the cost, whatever the situation, everyone comes home: unharmed, wounded, or dead. The importance of this principle is drilled into us from the very beginning of basic training, when our PT formations loop around to pick up those who fall out and the entire platoon is late if one individual is late. We are taught this ideal because thousands of years of experience teaches that a cohesive unit, with each member trusting in and looking after the others, is more effective in combat. That lesson is only taught because it helps us serve them better, not because our masters actually believe in such a lofty ideal. We are disposable.

In Phoenix and most likely elsewhere, the VA health care system has been leaving veterans to die while awarding bonuses to those perpetrating the neglect. The VA has always been an awkward problem for the US government. Promising to care for veterans for the rest of their lives is a key recruiting point, but actually spending the money to provide that care does not pad Lockheed and Raytheon’s bottom lines as much as building ships that don’t sail and planes that don’t fly. But now, in our new age of access and transparency, keeping the dirty secrets of the VA has become nearly impossible.

But should we exert ourselves to “fix” the VA? Is it worth our time? No. The VA is a Potemkin village, a recruiting tool used to assure naïve young men and women that their damaged bodies and ravaged minds will be cared for after their time in uniform. The degree to which it can perform this function while simultaneously minimizing the amount of actual care provided is the true measure of the VA’s success, and why VA reform is doomed from the outset.

But those lessons we learned in boot camp aren’t completely worthless. While many veterans fall on hard times, others of our number do well for ourselves, and if we apply the “No One Left Behind” ethos to our civilian lives, we can perhaps someday dispense with the VA entirely while simultaneously forming a mutual aid network that could be a kernel for a future free society.

Numerous Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs) already exist, but far too many are focused on lobbying the government for more aid for veterans. Rather than follow their lead, we should look to the great work being done at the Under the Hood Café, Coffee Strong and similar GI Coffeehouses around the country and world. These institutions serve as focal points for the wider community, bringing veterans and their families together, allowing them to lean on each other and benefit from each other’s strength. Expanding on this network and looking after one another in civilian life the way we did in uniform is the real path to fixing the problems we face.

David Stockman discusses how the Vietnam War led to the war in Afghanistan and other wars today.

Justin Raimondo discusses the troubling return of nationalism.

Jayel Aheram discusses how Malala Yousafzai is being used as a puppet for imperialism.

Philip Giraldi discusses torture, the Senate, and the CIA.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses how No Place to Hide is a conservative critique of a radical NSA.

Alexander Reid Ross discusses drones over Nigeria.

Ramzy Baroud discusses what the media is not telling us about Yemen.

Peter Lee discusses local nationalism and big bullies.

Andrew Levine discusses the Cold War Obama-style.

Franklin Lamb discusses Palestinian refugees coming from Syria to Lebanon.

Alyssa Rohricht discusses the mantra of the NSA.

Medea Benjamin discusses the promotion resulting from killing a 16 year old via drone.

Jeff Ricketson discusses fractal libertarianism.

Pepe Escobar discusses the pivot to Eurasia.

Roderick Long discusses strong words and large letters.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the FBI, NSA, and reforms.

Shikha Dalmia discusses why Muslim bashing by Bill Mahr is uncool.

Matthew M. Robare discusses Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky speaking together.

J.D. Tuccille discusses the late R.J. Rummel’s work on death from government.

Brian Dohetry discusses Robert Sarvis.

Paul Hein discusses the irrelevance of government.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why conservatives are doomed.

Lawrence Samuels discusses Mussolini’s place on the left-right political spectrum.

Alex R. Knight III discusses defending the state.

Jacob G. Hornberger and Sheldon Richman present The Libertarian Angle.

Margaret Kimberly discusses the situation in Nigeria.

Wendy Call discusses how the War on Drugs destroys lives.

Eric Margolis discusses the bridge that began the Great War.

Ernst Gruenfeld beats the great Alexander Alekhine.

Ernst Gruenfeld draws with David Janowski

This week marks the 2014 National Week of Action Against Incarcerating Youth. Across the country, actions will be held to protest everything from the criminalization of queer and disabled youth to the isolation of youth in solitary confinement. Ultimately, what activists are protesting is systematic child abuse by the state.

Kids are being locked in cages by the government all across the country. The consequences are devastating. According to a report from the Justice Policy Institute:

A recent literature review of youth corrections shows that detention has a profoundly negative impact on young people’s mental and physical well-being, their education, and their employment. One psychologist found that for one-third of incarcerated youth diagnosed with depression, the onset of the depression occurred after they began their incarceration, and another suggests that poor mental health, and the conditions of confinement together conspire to make it more likely that incarcerated teens will engage in suicide and self-harm. Economists have shown that the process of incarcerating youth will reduce their future earnings and their ability to remain in the workforce, and could change formerly detained youth into less stable employees. Educational researchers have found that upwards of 40 percent of incarcerated youth have a learning disability, and they will face significant challenges returning to school after they leave detention. Most importantly, for a variety of reasons to be explored, there is credible and significant research that suggests that the experience of detention may make it more likely that youth will continue to engage in delinquent behavior, and that the detention experience may increase the odds that youth will recidivate, further compromising public safety.

So the state is engaging in violence that scars young people physically and mentally, and hurts their economic prospects; and this practice may even increase rather than decrease the chance of future crime. Moreover, according to the same report, most of these youth are not even a threat to others, as “about 70 percent are detained for nonviolent offenses.”

Once incarcerated, youth are subjected to severe abuses. For example, many youth are isolated in solitary confinement, which is widely recognized as a form of psychological torture. According to the American Civil Liberties Union:

Solitary confinement can cause extreme psychological, physical, and developmental harm. For children, who are still developing and more vulnerable to irreparable harm, the risks are magnified – particularly for kids with disabilities or histories of trauma and abuse. While confined, children are regularly deprived of the services, programming, and other tools that they need for healthy growth, education, and development.

The impacts of solitary on adults are harmful enough. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote John McCain, “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Subjecting youth to this kind of torture is monstrous.

Incarcerated youth are also all too often raped and sexually assaulted by guards. According to David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, “4.5 percent of juveniles in prison and 4.7 percent of those in jail reported such [sexual] victimization—rates that ought to be considered disastrously high.” Their risk was higher in youth detention centers, “minors held in juvenile detention suffered sexual abuse at twice the rate of their peers in adult facilities.” Most of this abuse is committed by guards employed and paid with tax dollars:

Some 2.5 percent of all boys and girls in juvenile detention reported having been the victims of inmate-on-inmate abuse. This is not dramatically higher than the corresponding combined male and female rates reported by adults or juveniles in either prison or jail. The reason why the overall rate of sexual abuse (9.5 percent) was so much higher in juvenile detention than in other facilities is the frequency of sexual misconduct by staff. About 7.7 percent of those in juvenile detention reported sexual contact with staff during the preceding year. Over 90 percent of these cases involved female staff and teenage boys in custody.

Government employees are committing child sexual abuse against caged victims. These guards are often repeat offenders. “In juvenile facilities, victims of sexual misconduct by staff members were more likely to report eleven or more instances of abuse than a single, isolated occurrence.” All of this data comes from research conducted by the government’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The impacts of the state’s systematic caging and abuse of children are not equally distributed across the population. The Center for Children’s Law and Policy documents many studies showing the racially disparate impacts of youth incarceration and juvenile justice policies. LGBTQ youth also face disproportionate impacts from the juvenile justice system. According to an article in The Nation:

The road to incarceration begins in pretrial detention, before the youth even meets a judge. Laws and professional standards state that it’s appropriate to detain a child before trial only if she might run away or harm someone. Yet for queer youth, these standards are frequently ignored. According to UC Santa Cruz researcher Dr. Angela Irvine, LGBT youth are two times more likely than straight youth to land in a prison cell before adjudication for nonviolent offenses like truancy, running away and prostitution. According to Ilona Picou, executive director of Juvenile Regional Services, Inc., in Louisiana, 50 percent of the gay youth picked up for nonviolent offenses in Louisiana in 2009 were sent to jail to await trial, while less than 10 percent of straight kids were. “Once a child is detained, the judge assumes there’s a reason you can’t go home,” says Dr. Marty Beyer, a juvenile justice specialist. “A kid coming into court wearing handcuffs and shackles versus a kid coming in with his parents—it makes a very different impression.”

Queer and transgender youth are treated differently by the justice system before they are even tried and convicted. Once incarcerated, they face brutal violence. From beatings to victim blaming to bigoted slurs from guards, queer and transgender youth are regularly abused in juvenile corrections facilities.

Some of America’s youth incarceration problem begins in the schools. “Zero-tolerance” policies in public schools criminalize violating school rules, producing what is often called the school to prison pipeline. The racially disparate impacts of this school to prison pipeline are well documented, and they often criminalize minor infractions.

Outside of school, youth are often directly targeted by police thanks to ageist laws like curfews. Laws often restrict freedom of movement and bodily autonomy for youth, and justify this coercion through condescending and paternalistic platitudes. In a particularly appalling recent case of paternalism sending youth to prison, a transgender girl was sent to an adult prison without charges or trial, because the state had power over her as her “guardian.” The desire to protect youth provides ideological cover for the state to treat them even more abusively than it treats adults.

The American state is uniquely punitive in some respects. According to Amnesty International, “The United States is believed to stand alone in sentencing children to life without parole.” Amnesty identifies “at least 2,500 people in the US serving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old.” Before turning 18, these youth were permanently separated from society, permanently sent to violent hellholes.

The essence of imprisonment as we know it is throwing away a human being, treating them as disposable. Prisoners are subjected to violence, abuse, and torture. They are held in austere and inhumane conditions. And they are kept out of the general public’s sight. They are punished rather than being made to make amends or provide restitution to victims. It’s bad enough to treat any human being this way. To treat children this way is unconscionable. Stop caging kids.

“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 second 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:
“Who Is the Government?” asks the question of its title. Rejecting the standard democratic myth that “we are the government,” it focuses its answer on the State’s exploitative nature.
“No Loyalty on May 1st” by Benjamin Blowe examines the lessons left-libertarians should take from May Day. Blowe especially takes issue with the U.S. Government’s attempted co-option of May 1^st with what is called “Law Day” (or worse, “Loyalty Day.”)
“Liberty by Design” by Andy Bratton takes a dynamic view of freedom, showing how the negative liberty that anarchy affords is also the best tool for developing a world of greater and greater positive liberty.
“The Planet vs. The State” by Zoe Little outlines both how the Earth is threatened by the governments who lay claim to it, and how it would be better protected by respecting the rights of its inhabitants.
“A General Idea of Revolution” by Gabriel Amadej is a brief manifesto for human liberation. Supporting not only freed markets and a strategy of counter-economics, but also worker autonomy and a strategy of wildcat unionism, Amadej proposes a vision of “agora-syndicalism.”
“Toward an Anarchy of Production, Part II” by Jason Lee Byas is the second part in a series of arguments for why anti-capitalists, leftists, and anarchists ought to support markets. This installment explores the interconnectedness and interdependence of commerce and community.
“The Individualist Anarchist & Work” by Nick Ford draws attention to just how soul-destroying the modern work experience is, and argues that individualist anarchists ought to want more out of life.