CIA Director John Brennan paid a visit to the University of Oklahoma Wednesday night, and a contingent of Students for a Stateless Society, Young Americans for Liberty and local Young Socialists met him on their home turf. Protesters chanted, “No more drone war,” handed out fliers describing their opposition to the appearance of the so-called “patriot” on their campus, and sang Les Miserables’ “Do You Hear The People Sing” as Brennan exited the building.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzBp8NIZ4LY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ4gzkFeTOc

The Libertarian Alliance blog posted my piece on why libertarians are not conservatives. It wasn’t received very well. The poster of the article argued thusly:

Note: In my view, this is a silly article. The author does to conservatism just what the more brain dead conservatives do to libertarianism – that is, to pick out one strand from a cluster of movements, and to take that as representative of the whole. There are conservative objections to war and to moral regulation. Indeed, the moral regulation of the Victorian Age was mostly brought in by “liberals” against Tory opposition. And the most prominent calls for a negotiated end to the Great War came from within the Tory aristocracy. As for point 3), there are conservative defenses of tradition that are not at all incompatible with libertarianism. I give this one out of five on the grounds that the author got her spelling right. SIG

I admit to lumping all conservatives together, but what I described has gone under the label of conservative. As for defenses of tradition being compatible with libertarianism; I disagree with this. The essence of libertarianism is individualism and individual rights. This conflicts with obedience to inherited collectivist traditional social norms. Independent judgment and reason tend to undermine traditionalism.

The conservative’s tendency to favor the preservation of established institutions will also come into conflict with the libertarian. All institutions are subject to rational examination and change in a free society. This can’t be reconciled with a conservative defense of tradition or inherited institutions. Tradition also tends to require coercion or ostracism to maintain. Both of which are tools for controlling people. This is not to say that coercion and ostracism are always unjustified, but they are preferably used for something other than the continuation of existing social norms.

Another way in which tradition and libertarianism are at odds is historical. History is replete with examples of tyranny and unfree societies. There is a dearth of relative freedom throughout history, so it’s strange to look to what has come before for inspiration.

Tradition is not favorable to liberty. It cannot substitute for a rational delineation of rights. The social norms that most human beings have embraced are simply not conducive to liberty. We error in relying on them. Murray Rothbard provides a fine conclusion to this post below:

“Come join us, come realize that to break once and for all with statism is to break once and for all with the Right-wing. We stand ready to welcome you.” ~ Murray Rothbard

Initial thoughts on “Informing the News”

I recently picked up a copy of Harvard journalism professor Thomas E. Patterson’s latest book, “Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism.” One of the things that immediately interested me about the work was its thesis, that the cure for journalism’s current “crisis of confidence,” as Patterson refers to it, lies not in the hands of independent and citizen journalists, but in the currently-existing journalist class reinventing itself in the image of “knowledge-based journalism.”

The other thing that spurred me to buy the book was that Patterson devoted an entire chapter of this book to what he refers to as the knowledge problem. By name alone, this should be immediately familiar to anyone who reads C4SS or Austrian economics. Patterson isn’t referring to Hayek’s main thesis in his 1945 essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” but that thesis does shine through in areas.

“Journalists are asked to make too many judgments under conditions of too little time and too much uncertainty for the news to be the last word,” Patterson writes, preceding a quote by early-20th century journalist Thomas Lippmann. “’When we expect [the press] to supply a body of truth, we employ a misleading standard of judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news [and] the illimitable complexity of society.’”

Compare to Hayek in “The Use of Knowledge In Society”:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

Patterson goes on to explain how, in his view, journalists are nearly the only professionals whose field does not sit on a substantive knowledge base, which he defines as “established patterns and regularities organized around conceptual frameworks or theories.”

He writes, “Knowledge is more than mere information or conventional understandings. It is systematic information.”

Journalists’ knowledge deficit does not appear to be a major concern within their profession. […] Yet the public has a sense of it. In a Freedom Forum study, journalist Robert Haiman found that although the public ‘respects the professional and technical skills [of] journalists,’ it feels that journalists ‘don’t have an authoritative understanding of the complicated world they have to explain to the public.’ […] ‘When it comes to a subject of more than average complexity, the truth in news often comes from outside of journalism. The news media, Lippmann argued, ‘can normally record only what has been recorded for it by the working of institutions. Everything else is argument and opinion.’

Again, from Hayek:

All economic activity is in this sense planning; and in any society in which many people collaborate, this planning, whoever does it, will in some measure have to be based on knowledge which, in the first instance, is not given to the planner but to somebody else, which somehow will have to be convayed to the planner. The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process. […] The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning.

In my initial skimming-through of Patterson’s book, I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with his overarching thesis. He’s right, insofar as there is a need for a journalism that can more succinctly serve the public with news that is more accurate and less prone to misinformation. But where he and we seem to disagree is that his answer to this problem lies in maintaining the current centralized structure of news media (despite the knowledge problems it inherently creates), rather than exploring the possibilities of a journalist class that includes as many people as possible sharing information in a stigmergic fashion.

The natural question that emerges when one brings up prison abolition is: what would we do about violent crime and similar rights violations? I have several answers to this question.

The first is that I don’t fully know. A free society would involve a diversity of institutions emerging and a market discovery process going on along with various decentralized democratic community experiments, so there’s not going to be one philosopher or economist that predicts in full what’s likely to happen.

That said, I have a pretty strong preference towards moving from criminal law towards civil or tort law, and away from punishment towards restitution.The advantage of civil law over criminal law is that the goal is compensating the victims of crimes and abuses and having that payment serve as a way of holding perpetrators of abuse accountable. This means that addressing harm is the key issue, rather than simply punishing those who violate the commands of the state. Economist and legal scholar David Friedman has done lots of great work on what a society based on purely civil law might look like. For example, I highly recommend this video, where he discusses abolishing criminal law.

The next point is that we see some examples of what prison abolitionist approaches to crime might look like already, because marginalized communities are actively oppressed by and underserved by the criminal justice system. People of color, transgender people, sex workers, immigrants, and sexual assault survivors are all often poorly served or actively oppressed by the criminal justice system. As such, many of them have built up alternatives to the system for dealing with the abuse and violence they suffer. One good example of this is the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe OUTside the System Collective in New York. Victoria Law discusses a few more such examples in her video Resisting Gender Violence Without Cops or Prisons. Still more examples are discussed in Rose City Copwatch’s zine Alternatives to the Police.

The state’s prisons and police do not effectively deal with violence and abuse – they perpetrate violence and abuse. As Dean Spade puts it, “The prison is the serial killer, the prison is the serial rapist.” Recent reports of rampant sexual violence against inmates in prisons like Alabama’s Tutwiler Prison for Women highlight this horrible truth. We must seek to abolish this systemic aggression. But those of us who seek to abolish the state’s systemic violence should also consider how to craft better institutions to defend from the violence the state purports to protect us from.

Charles R. Larson discusses the grotesqueries of Iraq.

David Swanson discusses the use of Nazi scientists by the U.S.

Franklin Lamb discusses getting aid into Homs.

Laurence M. Vance discusses ending the American empire.

Matt Welch discusses the drug war.

Shihka Dalmia discusses closed border policies.

William D. Hartung discusses arm sales.

Robert Fisk discusses drone strikes.

Alexander Reid Ross discusses state repression.

Winslow Myers discusses the overwhelmed peace movement.

Kevin Carson discusses why he hates government.

David Swanson discusses repression in Bahrain.

William A. Cook discusses the do nothing peace machine in Israel.

Jay Janson discusses the atrocities of the U.S. empire.

Peter Van Buren discusses the presidential killing powers of Obama.

Sheldon Richman discusses the congruence of the moral with the practical.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the retirement of Sadr.

Nick Turse discusses the Vietnam War.

Chris Hedges discusses the dual character of the American state.

W.T. Whitney discusses the blockade of Cuba.

Tom Engelhardt discusses the thuggish character of the American state.

Jacob Hornberger discusses the military coup in Egypt and implications for the U.S.

Thomas L. Knapp discusses the drone strikes.

Ramzy Baroud discusses a CIA connected general in Libya.

Uri Avnery discusses his challenging of the boycott law.

Franklin Lamb discusses the potential for no fly zones over Syria.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the civil war in Syria.

Kevin Carson discusses anti-unionism and right to work laws.

A famous game between Steinitz and Bardeleben.

A famous game between Alekhine and Yates.

My blog post on the differences between conservatives and libertarians has caused some controversy. These criticisms and comments deserve to be answered. Let’s start with a comment made on this page by N8chz:

Libertarian and conservative are practically opposites, but America is a special place. American libertarianism is a different breed of libertarianism and American conservatism is a different breed of conservatism. Both are much more enamored of classical liberalism than their international counterparts (and their traditional forms).

Much truth above, but the contemporary conservative right in the U.S. pays more lip service to classical liberal ideals than actively embracing them. Observe the attitude of the GOP establishment towards war, civil liberties, immigration, public secularism, corporatism, and so on.

In terms of your five points:

1) Grass roots small-government conservatives (“tea party” types) seem to be rediscovering their party’s isolationist traditions. No doubt much of this is because there’s a Democrat in the White House.

Not sure of the Republician Party’s isolationist roots, but I acknowledge that some conservatives are anti-war. Not all Tea Party types are anti-war though, and it remains to be seen whether what anti-war sentiment exists is due to a Democratic being in office.

2) There has been -some- movement on drug policy on the part of such conservatives.

This may be true, but the GOP establishment remains pretty firmly favorable to the War on Drugs.

The preservation of the state has left and right minarchists on one side and left and right anarchists on the other. It’s an anarchist-minarchist rivalry, not a conservative-libertarian one.

It’s true that there is an anarchist-minarchist divide on the issue, but the conservative also wants to preserve the state. I fail to see how it can’t also be an anarchist-conservative divide.

Populist conservatives have also been kvetching about airport security, since there’s a Democratic administration. And of course the American far-right “patriot” types have always had their slogan “love my country, fear my government.”

It still couches things in nationalistic or patriotic terms, but it’s true that conservatives seem more insistent on civil liberties under a Democratic administration.

I think it’s significant that the fifth item on the list contrasts not conservatives and libertarians, but conservatives and left-libertarians. Left libertarians are on the opposite side from conservatives on bosses and corporate overlords–although even tea party types have adopted the phrase, when addressing libertarian and other leftists, “it’s really ‘corporatism’ you’re against.” Left libertarians are on the same side as conservatives on seeing competition as a positive thing, believing market equilibrium represents the best (most efficient) of all possible worlds, and having generally positive attitudes toward Mises, Hayek, etc.

I am not of necessity an uber fan of Mises and Hayek. My conception of markets is considerably different from the conservative one too. I also don’t believe markets are the best in all cases. It’s one part of a unified theory. The type of markets I embrace dilute plutocratic or oligarchic power, rather than reinforce it.

The identification of libertarians with conservatives seems never ending. At the recent International Students for Liberty conference Justin Amash equated the two. Many leftists make similar equations with the intent of demonizing libertarians as right-wingers. What is the truth of the matter? We’re most definitely not conservatives. Liberty is a radical and revolutionary idea. One whose promise has yet to be fully realized.

Let’s do a point by point comparison of conservatism and libertarianism.

1) The warfare state is an issue where there is a major divide between libertarians and conservatives. We seek to eliminate war and abolish the nation-state. Conservatives often seek to preserve both as the record of Republican presidents on war demonstrates. The loyalty to traditional notions of family, god and country trump individual rights for many conservatives. We libertarians are not handicapped by such a perspective.

2) The War on Drugs and morality police is another area where conservatives and libertarians diverge. We libertarians seek to end the persecution of cultural dissidents, while many conservatives seek to uphold it in the name of the traditional values. Liberty demands variety and experimentation. Conservatives demand uniformity and conformity.

3) The preservation of the state itself is one area where conservatives and radical libertarians often take different sides. Conservatives are hidebound by their respect for authority and traditional order. The state represents the keeper of law and order to many conservatives. We libertarians see it as destructive of freedom in all its expressions. It is not a necessary instrument for the realization of beneficent order or law.

4) The question of civil liberties often, also, sees libertarians and conservatives on different sides. The conservatives are more likely to surrender civil liberties when patriotism or nationalism is invoked. Libertarians believe in no such nonsense and do not readily surrender their individual rights upon the altar of statism. The record of the Bush administration is enough to prove this point.

5) A final area of discrepancy between left-libertarians and conservatives is on the character of their economic proposals. Left-libertarians seek a world without bosses or corporatist overlords. Conservatives fetishize traditional hierarchies and can therefore demand no such thing. Conservatives are more predisposed to celebrate the existing economic actors on top while left-libertarians champion the underdog.

I hope the reader has been persuaded of the clear difference between left-libertarianism and conservatism. They are two different ideologies with mutually incompatible goals.

Previous columns in this series explored briefly the hows and whats of studioless podcasting. This final installment hopes to explain the “why”. Why is studioless podcasting important?

Podcasting represents a radical decentralization of the airwaves that can’t actually take place on the airwaves, for a few reasons.

Most people conceive of FM radio as being one giant mass of differently-formatted radio stations and content providers. In actuality, there are three tiers:

1. FM Commercial Radio Broadcast Stations
2. FM Noncommercial Educational Radio Broadcast Stations
3. Low Power FM (LPFM) Noncommercial Educational Radio Broadcast Stations

The first tier, commercial radio, is your average music, talk and sports programming; the FCC allows commercial radio to potentially take up every slot from 92.1 MHz to 107.9 MHz. The second tier is where “public radio” can be found, and the FCC generally allots 88.1 MHz to 91.9 MHz to public radio stations. This is the realm of NPR and its competitor-partners. The third tier, LPFM stations, are generally smaller community outfits that can cover neighborhoods with their broadcasting power, but little else. They have a smaller budget and don’t operate through NPR; they also tend to hire more amateur and independent producers on a volunteer basis. Due to the low transmission power, it’s rare that these producers can get their work heard by more than a few hundred people at any given moment.

Podcasting does for these producers what national syndication does for Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition and All Things Considered: it gets their work out there to potentially anyone. Of course, the latter shows aren’t exactly done by independent producers, which brings me to the second barrier to entry for radio decentralization: just about every production company operates in the realm of old media.

With one notable exception, the companies that operate and compete in public radio hire much in the same way that a newspaper or television station does; only producers that are credentialed (usually in the form of a college degree followed by so many years interning or working at low-power FM stations) can get even entry-level jobs at National Public Radio, Public Radio International, or American Public Media. This is not a good or bad thing – this is just something that they do. Unfortunately, there’s a side-effect: not everyone currently producing audio has a college degree, and not everyone who wants to be in radio can actually afford to go to college for it; therefore, the demographic of people who are actually working at one of the major content providers tends to be very… monochromatic.

That notable exception? The Public Radio Exchange, or PRX. Its slogan is “Making Public Radio More Public,” and its entire infrastructure is set up for exactly that task. Anyone can sign up as a producer for free, and the entry cost to actually make money with PRX is only $50 a year. Unfortunately, the free producer account has a data upload limit of two hours – not exactly conducive to doing a long-run podcast. Also, there are some technical barriers to using PRX as your main distribution tool – barriers that, if you’re not familiar with the inner workings of public radio, might be very difficult to overcome. Studioless podcasting comes with very few of those barriers; plus, it’s all-online.

This is really the crux of what makes podcasting special: its ability to open up new spaces for more voices in almost infinite capacity. You can podcast for fun or for a living; your success isn’t tied to which market you’re doing the best in and you don’t have to worry about broadcast clocks. You don’t have to worry about your show being canceled because the station lost money or didn’t raise enough in the periodic fundraiser to keep it going. Podcasting is made for everyone.

Trigger warning: Rape and sexual assault

A recent investigation by the US Department of Justice found rampant sexual assault and abuse by male guards at the Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama. As the New York Post reported, “The lengthy list of indignities includes, officers forcing women into sexual acts in exchange for basic sanitary supplies, male guards openly watching women shower and use the bathroom, a staff-organized strip show, and a constant barrage of sexually offensive language, according to investigators.” Such offenses were rampant, with at least a third of guards having sexually assaulted inmates.

Such sexual abuse is not new at Tutwiler. Indeed, this kind of rampant violence against women was among the catalysts that lead activists with Amnesty International to push to pass a law prohibiting custodial sexual misconduct, also known as sexual assault by guards, in Alabama prisons in the early 2000’s. C4SS Senior Fellow Charles W. Johnson spoke at a rally for this bill in 2002, and the bill eventually passed in 2004. While the law has enabled some terminations and prosecutions of abusive guards, the Justice Department’s recent findings at Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama show that it has not even come close to solving the problem of prison rape.  Only 18 cases of sexual misconduct by guards were sent by the Alabama Department of Corrections to the Elmore County District Attorney’s office between 2009 and 2013, while the DoJ’s report shows that sexual abuse continues to run rampant. And those are all the cases even sent to the District Attorney, not all of them necessarily resulted in any prosecution.

Abusive violence is a natural consequence of the structure of the prison, and thus simply attempting to regulate it will rarely make a dent. As Charles Johnson told me, “the first basic obstacle is no matter how unambiguously written and strongly worded the law is, it is always nearly impossible ever to safely try to get a hack prosecuted from inside your cell. There is just no way. The same overwhelming, full-spectrum life-and-death domination that facilitates the endemic, repeated rape also makes it impossible to defend yourself from them through legal processes.” Prisons entail a dynamic of brutal hierarchy, in which guards are given total power over prisoners. This is not unique to Alabama, and it always creates a dynamic in which guards can abuse prisoners and wield their power to shield themselves from accountability. In her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Victoria Law documents cases from across the country in which women are punished and brutalized by prison guards for reporting sexual abuse.

These power dynamics are precisely why hard won legal reforms in Alabama have not changed the rampant rape culture within Tutwiler Prison. And they are also why, over a decade after the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, we still keep seeing new reports that reveal rampant rape in prisons across America. As Charles Johnson puts it, “The problem was, and remains, a problem of power, and a problem with the prison, not with the regulation of the prison.” This is why we must abolish prisons.

Max Borders discusses the rise of the libertarians.

Sheldon Richman discusses the sacralization of voting.

Ramzy Baroud discusses the implosion of Iraq.

Pratap Chatterjee and Tom Engelhardt discuss the surveillance state.

Marjorie Cohn discusses the NSA scandal.

Wendy McElroy discusses the immorality of government education.

Michael S. Rozeff discusses the nation-state.

Carlos Clemente discusses Chomsky’s view of Chavez.

Jonathan Carp discusses resistance to state violence.

David Swanson discusses preventing war.

Jacob Hornberger discusses the national security state.

Sheldon Richman discuses the failures of U.S.interventionism.

Nicola Nasser discusses the uprising in Iraq.

Ramzy Baroud discusses the culture of Abu Ghraib

Norman Solomon discusses Amazon’s involvement with the CIA.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the war in Syria.

Clancy Sigal discusses WW1.

Alison Weir discusses the Munich massacre and the Israeli response.

Kevin Carson discusses the labeling of activists as terrorists.

David R. Dow discusses extrajudicial killings and presidential power.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the charges that openness helps terrorists

Thomas L. Knapp discusses the history of state repression of journalists.

Jacob Hornberger discusses the power of the military to imprison Americans.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the civil war in Syria.

Medea Benjamin discusses the evil of drones.

Daniel J. Smith and Laura Grube discusses disaster relief without the state.

Jason Hirthler discusses the killing of American citizens.

John Pilger discusses the warfare state.

A nice game from Yury Shulman.

One of Bobby Fischer’s earliest and finest efforts.

Norman Solomon recently published a piece about Amazon.com’s connection to the CIA. The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, claims to be a libertarian, but what kind of libertarian contracts with the CIA? A faux one. It’s not possible to be a libertarian and support one of the most odious agencies of the American state. An agency tasked with assassination and other nefarious practices. Jeff Bezos needs to check his premises.

Let us quote from Solomon’s piece:

As the largest Web retailer in the world, Amazon has built its business model on the secure accumulation and analysis of massive personal data. The firm’s Amazon Web Services division gained the CIA contract amid fervent hopes that the collaboration will open up vast new vistas for the further melding of surveillance and warfare.

We can see that corporations can suck up our data in a manner analogous to the government. It’s no surprise that the CIA has found an affinity with Amazon. There is clearly an interwining of state and corporate power here. One that needs to be opposed for the sake of liberty. It isn’t a choice between corporate or state domination. We can and should reject them both.

To quote Solomon again:

A free and independent press is crucial for confronting such dire trends. But structural factors of corporate power continue to undermine the potential of journalism. The Washington Post is a grim case in point.

Six months ago, Jeff Bezos — the CEO and main stakeholder of Amazon — bought the Post. But the newspaper’s ongoing CIA-related coverage does not inform readers that the CIA’s big contract with Amazon is adding to the personal wealth of the Post’s sole owner.

This refusal to make such conflict-of-interest disclosures is much more than journalistic evasion for the sake of appearances. It’s a marker for more consolidation of corporate mega-media power with government power. The leverage from such convergence is becoming ever-less acknowledged or conspicuous as it becomes ever-more routine and dominant.

A free society is harmed by this convergence of state and corporate power. If people are not free to publish damaging things about either institution, both are left off the hook for bad behavior. The punitive potential of both of these institutions is vast and needs to be opposed. People should be free of the power of either. This is a necessary aspect of total freedom. Let us work at making it a reality.

One of the books I’ve been reading is titled The KGB Plays Chess: The Soviet Secret Police and the Fight for the World Chess Crown. It’s a fascinating read that provides copious detail on the inner workings of the KGB with respect to not only chessplayers but Soviet athletes in general. I’ve just finished the first part of the book. It’s a lengthy historical essay by Vladimir Popov and Yuri Felshtinsky. The former is an ex-KGB agent while the latter is a well known author. Let me quote some choice bits:

Spassky’s departure and Kortschnoi’s defection were not the KGB’s only defeat in the sports arena in 1976. The Summer Olympics in Montreal also caused the KGB a great deal of trouble. It was an established rule that Soviet sports delegations and tourist groups for sports experts and journalists should include undcover state security officers. These state security officers would constitute an “operational group” from the KGB. Major General Abramov, the then-deputy head of the Fifth Directorate, was placed in charge of such a delegation during the Summer Olympics.The operational group headed by Abramov consisted of thirteen people. It was assisted by agents from the KGB’s local rezidentura, operating undercover in the USSR’s consulate in Montreal.

And another choice bit:

Karpov’s main opponent in his fight for the world championship would be Kortschnoi, who had four times been a champion of the USSR. In order to put psychological pressure on the “contender” — as Soviet propaganda referred to Kortschnoi in those years, without mentioning his first or last name — his son Igor was immediately drafted into the army. The term of service in the army was two to three years. But after serving his term, a member of the armed forces was automatically classifed as having had access to state secrets and, by Soviet law, forbidden to leave the USSR for at least another five years. In this way, by drafting Igor Kortschnoi, the Soviet government was making it impossible for him to join his father for the next seven years, if not more. The level of a person’s exposure to state secrets, and its term of expiration, was determined by the KGB. It was perfectly obvious that for the soon of Kortschnoi, “the enemy of the people,” that term would not be brief.

The book has much more, such as a plot to have Kortschnoi killed should he win the world championship match against Karpov. The interested reader is encouraged to pick up a copy. This book sheds light on what happens when sports are taken over by the state. Left-libertarians have a useful history to point to as evidence for this contention.

After reading last week’s column, you went out (or stayed in, depending on the weather) and bought/downloaded/rigged up your own podcast studio, and now you’re… stuck. You’re staring at your phone, the app you’re recording with is running, and no words are coming out. You might feel the urge to panic; I’ve spent more time recording and deleting things out of fear than I have recording and keeping pieces, but it’s okay. Take a breath. Let’s talk about technique.

Pick Your Niche

Unlike public radio, or anything produced professionally, by the book, in a studio, podcasting is limitless in terms of both creativity and coverage. This is a double-edged sword, and it is the primary reason you need to take some time to think about what you want to say with your show. Interested in news and politics? As a quick glance at iTunes shows, so do 500 other producers. Narrow things down to a specific topic, and run with it – especially if you believe that topic isn’t covered well in the rest of the media.

KISS – Keep It Short and Simple

The very best advice I ever got was from a podcaster I interviewed, Abby Wendle. She told me that the best idea for a show was one you could implement in a few minutes, as that’s generally what radio stations look for. While I’m not so worried about radio stations, this concept applies to your listener as well. (Note: I said listener, singular, for a reason.) Your casual listener has an attention span that will feel stretched if you go longer on a topic, story or episode than five to ten minutes. Obviously, if you go over that time frame, no one is going to, like, sue you, but your listener might not stick around for the whole thing — at least, not when you just start out.

Learn to write like you speak

This is actually a professional technique. I didn’t learn that until recently, when I was flipping through Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide To Audio Journalism And Production while bored the other day. Here’s what Jonathan Kern, the author of that book, has to say:

First, and foremost, say your sentences before you write them down; or at the very least, say them out loud after you’ve written them. […] As you write, ask yourself: Would I ever say this sentence in my regular life, when I am not writing a news story? If the answer is no, change it. […] Remember, expressing your thoughts in short declarative sentences doesn’t require you to eliminate any of your ideas — just to ration them out. You aren’t sacrificing anything by writing less convoluted prose.

I’ve tried podcast writing a number of ways, including: reading from the Associated Press wire; writing whole essays on a topic, the way I would if I were still in school; going scriptless. None of them have worked nearly half as well as when I’m writing the entire episode of a show like I’d speak the show naturally, without any pauses in thought. If you do this alone, the quality of your podcast will improve regardless of what equipment you’re rocking.

Next week: the significance of studioless podcasting.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of ALL Distro’s “CAPITALISM” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with ALL Distro’s “CAPITALISM“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.

Three provocative libertarian perspectives on the liberation, corporation, and the Big C.Charles Davis writes that libertarians are very confused about capitalism, and that a radical re-appraisal of the debate shows that libertarian principles should go a lot further than mainstream libertarians have been willing to take them. David S. D’Amato argues, against business reformists, that inclusive capitalism is a contradiction in terms. And while many more libertarians are beginning to wake up to the structural problems in the corporate economy, Kevin Carson points out it’s the capitalism, not the cronyism that’s at the root of the problem.

“Let’s start over. The wealthy elite are too tainted by the current system of state capitalism for us to rely on a “good” and “bad” distinction when it comes enormous wealth. No one worth more than $10 million is able to get that much money without systemic state violence. There is no reason they should get a head start in Liberty Land. . . . no matter what one replaces it with, dismantling an unjust system requires addressing the injustices that system created. If you don’t, then your idea of “freedom” will be attacked as the freedom to be exploited by the same people running the world today. And with good reason.” — Charles Davis.

“The political-economic reality in this country, confirmed by recent studies as well as well-nigh everything we can observe about the political process, is that big capital keeps American policy­makers comfortably and securely in its pockets. And, sad to say, an ‘in­clusive’ kind of capitalism — oxymoron that it is — is not and never has been the order of the day. . . . In conditions of economic freedom — mean­ing circumstances in which land and opportunities are no co­erc­iv­e­ly monopolized — labor would simply enjoy far more bar­gain­ing pow­er, able to maintain self-sufficiency apart from the Big Business economy. In­deed, the way to fabricate a system wherein the vast majority of indiv­id­u­als are inclined to work for a pittance of a wage at huge, face­less org­an­iz­a­t­ion is to use the power of legal and regulatory authority to fore­close other options. . . .” — David S. D’Amato.

“Conservatives & rightwing libertarians drastically under­est­i­mate the extent to which state intervention has been struct­ur­al­ly central to capit­al­ism as a historical system since its very beginnings. The en­clos­ure of open fields for sheep pasture in late medieval and early modern times, the Parliamentary Enclosures of common woods, waste and past­ure in the 18th century, the colonial enclosure of land in the Third World and eviction of native cultivators, the engrossment of Third World mines and mineral resources, the enslavement of nonwhite populations – no­thing remotely resembling the contemporary concentration of economic pow­er and wealth, or the model of corporate capitalism most people think of as ‘normal’ . . .” — Kevin Carson.

“Libertarians Are Very Confused About Capitalism” was written by Charles Davis and published in November 2013 by the online magazine Salon.com. Charles Davis is a radical columnist, producer and researcher in Los Angeles, California. His work regularly appears in publications such as VICE, Salon, AlterNet, and Al Jazeera English. He keeps a website at charliedavis.blogspot.com.

Last Friday was an exciting day for me as a prison abolitionist. On Friday afternoon, I listened to an absolutely stellar discussion with Reina Gossett and Dean Spade of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project on prison abolition. The highlights were too numerous to discuss them all here, but I’ll mention a few.

One really excellent point Dean Spade made essentially concerned a knowledge problem that impacts attempts at broad prison policy reform. Spade has worked as an attorney for many prisoners, particularly queer and transgender prisoners, and he pointed out that for many of them the particular prison conditions that would make their stay more survivable varied substantially. This means that seeking top down prison reforms is not likely to benefit the human rights of all oppressed and brutalized prisoners, and that therefore we should advocate for the needs expressed by individual prisoners while also seeking to abolish the system that cages and brutalizes them. At another point in the discussion Reina Gossett mentioned the important work that a group called Creative Interventions does as one example of how we intervene to stop violence without the state. The full discussion, as well as four great videos with Gossett and Spade that preceded it, is available here. I highly recommend watching the entire thing.

Towards the end of the conversation, Dean mentioned some resources for those who want to learn more about prison abolition. He recommended Angela Davis’s excellent book Are Prisons Obsolete, as well as Towards Transformative Justice [pdf], which was developed by activists with the group Generation Five. He also mentioned the organizations Black and Pink, the Audre Lorde Project and their Safe OUTside the System Collective, FIERCE, No One Is Illegal, and the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, all of which do work around prison abolition.

So that was Friday afternoon for me. On Friday evening I attended a presentation by Amanda Lickers, a Haudenosaunee woman who has been active in fighting against corporations that attempt to engage in fossil fuel extraction on indigenous land. Her website, Reclaim Turtle Island, documents the indigenous movements that are resisting this ongoing land theft and colonialism. Amanda has worked with submedia.tv to produce a variety of videos on these grassroots movements and the police repression directed against them. She is also a prison abolitionist who has done some excellent prisoner support work, and throughout her talk she made many important points that should be relevant to prison abolitionists. For example, the colonialist roots of many governments’ policing and prison systems. She showed footage documenting the Royal Colonial Mounted Police’s brutal attack on indigenous activists who were protecting their land from companies seeking to engage in fracking. She further noted that the RCMP is an institution founded to repress natives and secure colonial outposts. She also pointed out that the Canadian state’s laws criminalizing sex workers, some of which were recently struck down in court, were rooted in the Indian Act. These moralist assaults on bodily autonomy and free association are rooted in colonialism. Moreover, Amanda pointed us to the cases of multiple indigenous activists who have been held in Canadian prisons, often in solitary confinement, for standing against land theft. This belies the common claims that prisons are necessary to protect us from theft. To the contrary, they often are used to repress those who seek to defend their lands from theft by powerful corporations and governments. This post at Reclaim Turtle Island provides one example of political prisoners being abused by the Canadian state for defending their land. Reclaim Turtle Island is currently doing a fundraiser on Indiegogo to support their ongoing work against colonialist land theft by extractive industries.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the great news we had this week about Hank Magee. Police violently raided Magee’s home on suspicion that he was growing marijuana. Understandably, Hank Magee defended his home, and in the process a police officer was killed. Prosecutors attempted to charge Magee with capital murder, but last week a grand jury refused to indict. While Hank Magee still faces marijuana charges, he is free from the state’s cages for now. He’s with his family. My friend Jesse Fruhwirth reported on this story at his excellent blog Utah 4Ps. Radley Balko has a blog up on the case at the Washington Post. And Jonathan Carp wrote up an op-ed related to the case here at the Center for a Stateless Society.

I’m overjoyed that Hank’s free from prison walls. And I’m even happier to know that so many great people are acting to abolish the prison state itself.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Mikhail Bakunin’s “What is Authority?” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Mikhail Bakunin’s “What is Authority?”

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

The short fragment reprinted in this booklet, one of the most famous passages from Bakunin’s pen, is a widely quoted excerpt from his best-known essay, God and the State, which was itself an excerpt, written as Part II of a much longer planned book, to be entitled The Knouto-Germanic Empire. The incomplete manuscript was dis­covered in Bakun­in’s papers after his death, by his close friends and fellow anarchists Carlo Cafiero and Élisée Reclus, who translated the text into French and published what they could in 1882. English translations were later circulated by Anarchist publishers in the U.S. and England, including Benjamin Tucker, Henry Seymour and Emma Goldman.

“It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privi­leg­ed position to kill the mind and heart of men. The privi­leg­ed man, whether practically or economically, is a man de­prav­ed in mind and heart. That is a social law which admits of no exception, and is as applicable to entire nations as to clas­s­es, corporations and individuals. It is the law of equality, the supreme condition of liberty and humanity. . . . Con­sequ­ent­ly, no external legislation and no author­ity — one, for that matter, being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the de­grad­at­ion of the legislators themselves. . . .”

“Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the author­ity of the bootmakers; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their know­ledge, re­ser­v­ing always my in­con­test­able right of criticism and censure. But I recognise no infall­ible authority; I have no absolute faith in any per­son. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my under­takings; it would im­med­iately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others. . . .”

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814–1876) was a Russian-born anarchist revolutionary, speaker, traveler and phi­l­o­sopher. Born into a noble family in Prya­mukh­ino, he was later stripped of his titles, imprisoned, condemned at differ­ent times to death, to life imprisonment, to hard labor, and exiled from France, Prussia, Saxony, Austria, Russia, and the First International for his radical speeches and rev­ol­ut­ion­ary activities. One of the founders of collect­iv­ist anarchism, a leading theorist of liber­tarian social­ism, a friend and student of Proudhon, an enemy of Marx and a fierce critic of auth­or­i­tar­ian social­ism, Bakunin was in­volved in revolution­ary up­ris­ings in Paris, Prague, Leipzig, Dresden, and Lyon. An enor­m­ous influence on radicals throughout Russia, Eur­ope, and the Americas, he and his comrades in the anarchist faction of the Inter­nat­ion­al Working Men’s Association (1868–1872) are often credited as the principle founders of the social anarchist move­ment. Although constantly writing fiery pam­ph­lets, letters, short works and radical jour­nals, Bakunin never completed his ambitious plans for longer works on Anarchist philosophy, often re­mark­ing to his friends, “My life is but a fragment.”

Ahmad Barqawi discusses American imperialism.

William Sheppard discusses state violence and rape.

Sheldon Richman discusses how Obama and Kerry are jeopardizing peace with Iran.

Max Border discusses the rise of the new libertarians.

Murray Dobbin discusses Stephen Harper’s loyalty to Israel.

Michael Munger discusses what positive vision libertarians can offer.

Laurence M. Vance discusses hard questions about the drug war.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers discuss the Syrian peace conference’s laying of a foundation for war.

Franklin C. Spinney discusses the price of starting another Cold War.

Charles W. Johnson discusses freed market labor wins by the CIW.

Adam Federman discusses how U.S. evangelicals fueled the rise of pro-family sentiment in Russia.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Syrian civil war.

Chris Hedges discusss the menace of the military mindset.

Lucy Sterigwald discusses the legalization of heroin.

John Glaser discusses why libertarians shouldn’t get to comfortable with GOP love.

Conn Hallinan discusses Canada’s complicity in Washington’s aggression.

H.H. Bhojani discusses the trauma and anxiety caused by drones.

H.H. Bhojani discusses 6 unanswered questions about Obama’s drones.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses how Dianne Feinstein exaggerates the threat of global terrorism.

Kathy Kelly discusses hunger in Afghanistan.

Sheldon Richman discusses the minimum wage.

Oliver Stone and Peter Kunzick discuss the right-wing Japanese prime minister’s plans.

Brian Terrell discusses the turning of Iowa into a war zone.

William Blum discusses how to end suicide bombings.

Carl L. Hart discusses the racist origins of laws against cocaine and crack.

Sheldon Richman discusses whether Edward Snowden is a lawbreaker or not.

Scott Stenholm interviews Jeremy Scahill.

Robert Scheer discusses the war in Afghanistan.

One of the finest rook endgames ever played.

A famous game between Capablanca and Botvinnik.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson’s “‘Privatization’ or Privateering?” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “‘Privatization’ or Privateering?”

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.

“A free market is not a society in which all of soc­i­ety’s functions are performed by private, for-profit business corporations. It’s a society where all fun­c­t­ions are performed by free, voluntary assoc­iat­ions. That means people get whatever services they need by organiz­ing them cooperatively with other willing partici­p­ants, or persuading someone to volunt­ar­ily supply them. And nobody is forced to pay for services they don’t want. . . .

“Capitalists don’t get rich by actually making things or providing services. They get rich by controlling – with the help of the state – the circumstances under which people are allowed to make things or provide services. If they do actually make things or provide services, they do so under carefully con­trolled circumstances where they get their money from involuntary customers who are conscripted into pay­ing by the state, or the state limits the ability of other firms to compete with them. You know, like Halli­b­urton and those military con­tractors. Or the private health insurance people have to buy under Obama­care. Under cap­i­tal­ism, privileged businesses make mon­ey by doing stuff on other people’s nickel. Big busi­ness gets its profits by external­iz­ing its operating expenses on the taxpayer. . . .

“Who cares if a corporation like Halliburton is nominally ‘private’ or ‘public?’ If it makes its money through force, it’s really just a part of the state. . . .”

This article was originally published as “‘Privatization’ or Cor­poratism?” in December 2013, as a syndicated column for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).

Kevin A. Carson is a mutualist writer living and working in northwest Arkansas, and the author of several incredibly influential works on contemporary mutualist anarchism, including “The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand,” Studies in Mutualist Political Economy,Organization Theory: A Libertarian Per­spect­ive, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, and numerous articles and research reports for the Center for a Stateless Society.

C4SS Media presents Natasha Petrova‘s “Walter Block’s Wrong Headed Anti-Unionism,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

The final aspect to be discussed is whether unionism is compatible with the normative philosophical principles of libertarianism. An emphatic yes is the answer. Left-libertarian market anarchist unionism involves a voluntary association of free and equal workers working together for their freedom from arbitrary employer power. Voluntary association and freedom are core libertarian principles. They most emphatically apply to the working class.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of S. E. Parker’s “My Anarchism” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with S. E. Parker’s “My Anarchism“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.

Originally published as an article in Free Life, the journal of the Libertarian Alliance (U.K.), in Vol. II, No. 2 (Spring 1981), “My Anarchism” defends a bracing individualism, and opens up a challenge to communist theories of ownership: if access to the means of production is mediated entirely through social relationships and communal connections, does this mean social liberation? Or does it just mean a new social capitalism, with the individual finding herself at the mercy of new monopolies, administered “horizontally” by the majority?

“The common ownership of the means of production would confront me with the choice: integrate or perish. Any group, or federation of groups, can be as powerful as any state if it monopolises in any given area the potentialities of action and realisation. The result would be social totalitarianism. . . .”

“What power could I exercise for example if I were stuck at the base of the pyramid of workers’ councils proposed as the administrative structure for indus­tries in the communist society? At best, and in its purest form, such a system might produce an ‘anarchism’ of groups. It would not produce an anarchism of individuals…”

“There is no vertical authority exercised by a State, but there is horizontal authority exercised by ‘soc­iety’ in the form of customs that are often more ubi­quit­ous and despotic than modern governments. . . . All col­lec­t­i­v­ities need norms to which their members must conform if they are to function. And these norms need sanctions to ensure that they are obeyed. Anarchism has never existed as a form of society, nor is it ever likely to. Indeed, I consider it a grave mistake to conceive of anarchism as asocial theory. Anarchism is not a form of society. It is the cutting edge of individualism. . . .”

Sidney Parker was a prolific individualist anarchist writer and editor best known for his long-running egoist journal Minus One, later retitled The Egoist and Ego, which ran from 1963–1993.