Today in his “On Security and Liberty” column at The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald demonstrates once again that he is one of the Left’s most tenacious and fearless voices.

In “Three Key Lessons From The Obama Administration’s Drone Lies,” Greenwald acknowledges the fact that “establishment sources” have finally begun to call out the Obama Administration for not telling the truth about who is being targeted for death-by-drone. Indeed, the word “lies” is now being employed. Greenwald cites a recent report by McClatchy as well as an article by Micah Zenko in Foreign Policy as evidence of this trend.

Greenwald believes that three lessons can be gleaned from these reports:

(1) The Obama administration often has no idea who they are killing.

(2) Whistleblowers are vital for transparency and accountability, which is precisely why the Obama administration is waging a war on them.

(3) Secrecy ensures both government lies and abuses of power.

With these lessons in mind, Greenwald closes with some strong words for the media:

In light of this evidence, any journalists that continue to rely on US government statements about its killing program are revealing themselves to be eager propagandists, willing to be lied to and help amplify those lies (the same was true of journalists who continued to rely on government statements about “militants” being killed even after they knew how Obama officials had broadened that term to the point of meaninglessness). How many times do we have to learn these same lessons before recognizing their universality?

Yesterday on his blog The Agitator, investigative journalist Radley Balko discussed the “war on cops” hysteria that has surfaced again after the recent murders of two prosecutors and a sheriff.  Balko has examined this claim before and has demonstrated that it is baseless.

Aside from being fraudulent, the theory that there is a “war on cops” in the US encourages further militarization of the police and makes it harder to hold officers accountable, according to Balko. Perhaps most dangerous, is the effect the idea has on police mindset. Balko explains:

But there’s a more pernicious effect of exaggerating the threat to police officers. In researching my forthcoming book, I interviewed lots of police officers, police administrators, criminologists and others connected to the field of law enforcement. There was a consensus among these people that constantly telling cops how dangerous their jobs are is affecting their mindset. It reinforces the soldier mentality already relentlessly drummed into cops’ heads by politicians’ habit of declaring “war” on things. Browse the online bulletin boards at sites like PoliceOne (where users must be credentialed law enforcement to comment), and you’ll see a lot of hostility toward everyone who isn’t in law enforcement, as well as various versions of the sentiment “I’ll do whatever I need to get home safe at night.” That’s a mantra that speaks more to self-preservation than public service.

Radley Balko is doing more than his share to enlighten people on this issue. He is also one of the foremost experts on police militarization in the US.  His book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, is due out in July.

I highly recommend this post by Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute. Higgs challenges one of the most pervasive myths among libertarians, the idea that liberty’s triumph is impending due to the rise of libertarian ideology. As Higgs explains:

Here [in the contemporary West] nearly everybody is held tightly in the system by countless seemly beneficial ties that few people can imagine doing without: Who’ll send grandma a monthly check to keep her in groceries? Who’ll provide medical care for the scores of millions of lower-income people whose care now comes via Medicaid? Who’ll cover the huge medical bills the elderly now expect Medicare to pay? Who’ll subsidize the college loans on which millions of students rely? And so on and on. One has only to wade through the Code of Federal Regulations and ask on each page: if this particular regulation were scrapped today, how would its corporate and union beneficiaries react? Can one really imagine that these powerful institutions would simply shrug their shoulders if liberty should break out, after having fought for more than a century to forge the fetters that now bind the populace in the service of almost innumerable special interests.

This is an incredibly important point. All too often, libertarians think that simply by spreading libertarian ideology, we will achieve a libertarian world. But in light of the incentives that structure our lives, this is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense. It’s particularly frustrating in that it contributes to many libertarians focusing just on developing propaganda and scholarly works rather than participating in concrete action. I think it’s one of the main reasons for the stereotype that “anarcho-capitalists only exist on the internet” and one of the main reasons that so many libertarians have such weak theories of strategy. If we are going to undermine the state, we need to understand its structure and act in a way that challenges this structure. My understanding of the state’s structure leads me to embrace dual power tactics. By building grassroots community organizations, radical unions, worker cooperatives, boycotts and divestment campaigns, and other alternative institutions that meet human needs outside the state or take business away from institutions that have a symbiotic relationship with statism, we do far more to undermine the state than making speeches, films, or blog posts ever will.

That said, I do disagree with some of what Higgs writes. He asserts, “the time for liberty lovers to make a stand that had a fighting chance of success was a century ago.” I disagree. The time is now. We have a real chance to strike a blow against the state and the empire. Higgs is right that libertarian optimists are naive and misguided. However, that’s because they believe we can win with ideas alone. We need to build the new society in the shell of the old, not just talk about it.

In a recent post on Linkedin, author and business consultant Tim Williams explains the “Complexity Tax,” contending that in many cases “growth actually produces diseconomies of scale.” The idea, as Williams describes it, is that growing a firm, adding more services and personnel, also necessarily adds layers of hierarchy and “significantly more overhead,” giving rise to all sorts of internal inefficiencies. These arguments are likely to sound very familiar to followers of Kevin Carson’s work, particularly as it is contained in his book Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective.

So if it is indeed true that, as Williams argues, many U.S. firms are too large, their organization models too complicated, how is it that smaller, leaner, more efficient competitors don’t overcome them from below? Put simply, to the extent that we actually had a free market in the United States (and in the world generally), smaller firms would do just that. The giants of American capitalism are less a result of competition and innovation than they are of a convoluted system of what the nineteenth century free market anarchists used to call “class laws” — consisting of subsidies and of barriers to entry that are virtually impenetrable. Today’s defenders of the free market must follow Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, to name a couple, in rejecting today’s corporate capitalism on free market grounds.

The “Cat Signal” has gone out, visible to all members of the Internet Defense League. The latest threat to internet freedom is an expanded and strengthened CFAA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

This is the same piece of legislation that the government has been using to target innovators and activists since 1984. One of those innovators, Aaron Swartz, faced 13 counts under CFAA, up to 35 years in prison, for copying too many files from the online academic resource JSTOR. This threat of overwhelming state sponsored persecution has been regarded as the reason for Swartz tragic suicide January 11th, 2013.

The collective outrage generated from Swartz’s story has brought activists together in an effort to gain support for legislation that would reform and clarify CFAA, referred to as Aaron’s Law.

It appears that the House Judiciary Committee is not interested in Aaron’s Law’s spirit of reform and clarity, instead they prefer to see CFAA expanded and strengthened. The vote on this issue is April 10th, 2013.

Participants of the Internet Defense League have been asked to asked to call attention to this issue and direct traffic to the Fix the CFAA website. C4SS, as a participant, will oblige, but not without a caveat.

We do not want to see the CFAA fixed. It was never broken. It is a success. It was used how all laws are used. It did its job. It cannot be reformed. It is damage that we must identify and route around.

We want to see the CFAA destroyed by rendering it irrelevant. An irrelevance that is the result of its unenforceability and our ungovernability.

If Aaron’s Law buys us the time we need to “route around” or makes the yoke of law rest lighter upon our backs, then we will call attention to it. But we will never regard it as anything more than a temporary paper-thin restraint against psychopaths.

Kevin Carson, Senior C4SS Fellow and Karl Hess Chair of Social Theory, was interviewed today on The Corbett Report: Open Source Intelligence News. You can listen to the podcast here.

C4SS Media presents Charles Johnson‘s “Anticopyright“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

This web project is, in spirit and in letter, at war with every aspect of Intellectual Protectionism, in its principles — of monopolizing power, entitlement, social control and economic privilege — and in its operation — through increasingly invasive government policing and legal coercion — and in the disastrous global effects of patent and copyright restrictions.

This machine kills intellectual monopolists.

There’s an interesting series of posts at Quartz about the capital-for-labor replacing effects of technology during the last three decades, but regrettably, it doesn’t even hint on the political-institutional barriers that are making the short-run impact of tech more painful for labor than it need be, or the possiblity that technical progress will empower labor only because it will destroy the enforceability of the institutional mechanisms that enclose its benefits for the elite.

It’s the kind of piece that leaves an uneasy feeling after reading it. In a way it’s like having a meal prepared with high quality fresh produce, by a great chef… who somehow forgot to add a key spice that would have enhanced the overall flavor of the dish to a whole new level.

Anyhow, rumors are that the C4SS kitchen is working already to spice the whole thing up and serve it for dinner at the op-ed section. Stay tuned!

The Mercatus Center recently released its Freedom in the 50 States report, and their analysis reaches some pretty ludicrous conclusions. North Dakota, which just banned abortion, was named the “most free” state. Reproductive liberty did not factor into the Mercatus Center’s analysis at all. Arizona also received a high ranking in spite of their abysmal civil liberties record, partially because immigration freedom was not a category in the Mercatus analysis.

But to see the true vulgar libertarianism in the Mercatus report, one should look at how they evaluate economic freedom. One significant portion of their evaluation of states was based on their “lawsuit climate.”  But litigation is an important way to hold companies accountable for damage in a free society, and has in fact been unjustly limited by the rise of the regulatory state. They also treat “right to work laws” as a boon to freedom, even though the laws are a violation of free contract.

This ranking system is an embarrassment to libertarians. As an anarchist, I am skeptical about whether we can even rank governments on how compatible they are with freedom. However, if I were to develop rankings, I would not use the criteria employed by Mercatus. Their attitude seems to be that the rights  of marginalized individuals are trivial and that “them pore ol’ bosses need all the help they can get.”

Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon:

Gun owners terrified of nonexistent plans to restrict ammo are buying it all up. The victim: Police departments

Sure, most local police departments don’t regularly rack up body counts on the scale of an Anders Behring Breivik or even an Adam Lanza. But it seems to me that reducing their available firepower might somewhat enhance their discretion in its use.

C4SS Media presents Ken MacLeod‘s “The Star Fraction – Introduction to the American Edition“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Ken MacLeod‘s introduction to the North American edition of his 1995 novel The Star Fraction appears in the omnibus volume Fractions: The First Half of The Fall Revolution by Ken MacLeod (New York: Orb, 2008), and is reprinted by permission of the author and of the publisher, Tom Doherty Associates.

*     *     *

“History is the trade secret of science fiction, and theories of history are its invisible engine. One such theory is that society evolves because people’s relationship with nature tends to change more radically and rapidly than their relationships with each other. Technology outpaces law and custom. From this mismatch, upheavals ensue. Society either moves up to a new stage with more scope for the new technology, or the technology is crushed to fit the confines of the old society. As the technology falls back, so does the society, perhaps to an earlier configuration. In the main stream of history, however, it has moved forward through a succession of stages, each of which is a stable configuration between the technology people have to work with, and their characteristic ways of working together. But this stability contains the seeds of new instabilities. Proponents of this theory argue that the succession of booms and slumps, wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, which began in August 1914 and which shows no prospect of an end, indicates that we live in just such an age of upheaval.”

In this episode of Speaking On Liberty’s Jason Lee Byas, Grayson English and Kyle Platt interview C4SS Fellow and Dissenting Leftist blogger Nathan Goodman about the the US prison system.

http://youtu.be/HinltJ-ujX0

With soaring import demand due to double-digit inflation, collapsing local production of almost everything other than the ever-flowing black gold, and increasing regime uncertainty ever since the Comandante’s passing, there seems to be no end in sight for the bizarre efforts with which the Venezuelan government is trying to sustain foreign exchange controls.

If you want to get a good grasp of the whole shenanigan, make sure to read this, this and this, by Francisco Toro and Emiliana Duarte at Caracas Chronicles.

The second issue of The Industrial Radical is on its way to the printers and in anticipation the first issue has been made available as a free PDF.

You can support C4SS and get a hard copy of The Industrial Radical for only $7.00 through our partnership with the ALL Distro. You can also makes sure not to miss out on the second issue, or the third, by subscribing!

$7.00 for one issue. $4 for every additional issue. $14.00 for six months. $28.00 for a year.

The Industrial Radical is devoted to radical libertarian political and social analysis in the tradition of Benjamin Tucker’s 1881-1908 Liberty, Emma Goldman’s 1906-1917 Mother Earth, and Murray Rothbard’s 1965-1968 Left & Right.

For too long libertarians have treated market anarchism almost the way Scientologists treat Xenu, as an “esoteric doctrine” to which one is introduced only after one has thoroughly assimilated some more moderate form of libertarianism — as though anarchism were an impediment rather than an asset in making the case for liberty.

Of course this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: potential converts find anarchism off-putting because they don’t know what it is, and they don’t know what it is because we avoid explaining it. In fact market anarchism can and should be one of libertarianism’s greatest selling-points, highlighting a radical and inspiring alternative to the present system rather than some variant of economic conservatism. It’s time to put market anarchism front and center in our educational efforts, time to start making it a familiar and recognizable position — while at the same time continuing to educate ourselves and exploring new horizons in market anarchist thought.

The Industrial Radical does not impose a party line; we welcome discussion and vigorous debate from all quarters, and in particular from other anarchists and radical libertarians from the left and from the right.

• Purchase titles at individual prices, $7.00 per issue.
• Or get our full print run: 1 Anarchist Classics zines for $7^.00 (or only $4^.00 when you order multiples).

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson‘s “Unequal Contracts, Unequal Power“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“To many libertarians on the political and cultural Right instinctively identify with employers, landlords, and service providers on this issue. They are, in my opinion, fundamentally wrong-headed to do so. The proper position for any genuine advocate of freed markets is not to defend everything that is called “property” or “contract,” but only justly acquired property and valid contracts. Contracts whose terms reflect the systematic intervention of the state in the market on behalf of privileged classes are most definitely not valid, and any self-described “free market libertarian” who defends them is unworthy of the name.

Our strategy on the free market Left should be to encourage as many people as possible to look at the man behind the curtain, and to see through the corporate state’s claims that the present system is natural and inevitable.”

C4SS Senior Fellow Kevin Carson, Karl Hess Chair of Social Theory, was interviewed March 14th on the Truthdig radio program, Pacifica Radio, on his recent column “15 Benefits of the War on Drugs.” You can listen to the podcast here.

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson‘s “Bring on the Drones!“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

In every conceivable way — agility, resilience, feedback/reaction loop — the emerging networked successor society runs circles around the old hierarchical corporate and state dinosaurs it’s replacing. As I’ve said many times, the twentieth century was the age of the large, hierarchical institution. By the end of the 21st, there won’t be enough left of them to bury.

Hat Tip: Antiwar.com

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

I believe that liberty and equality will usher in a fraternity that will annihilate commercialism and the greed of gain. With the land and opportunity free, the laborer will no longer work for others, but supply his own needs with his labor. With the wonderful facilities for manufacturing, the immense aids inventive genius has placed at our disposal, but usurped by government agents, every man could be independent, and the fear of poverty would be unknown, the incentive to accumulate wealth for any other purpose than use would be gone. –Ross Winn

—How Will a Free Society Come, and How Will It Operate? by Celia B. Whitehead and Ross Winn,