These are heady days for the free culture movement; the atmosphere of expectancy reminds me a bit of the time before the Berlin Wall came down.

iTunes has abandoned DRM under market pressure, and the RIAA admits that DRM is effectively dead.  The entire iTunes library, some ten million tracks, is now DRM-free, and they’ve dropped all tracks which were unavailable without DRM.

The Pirate Bay conviction was followed by the Swedish Pirate Party getting seats in the European Parliament.  The Pirate Party controls the single largest block of support among Swedes in their twenties, and my guess is that pirate parties will gain comparable strength throughout the EU countries.

Steve Ballmer seems to be caving on cooperation with the open source community, offering Microsoft driver source code for the Linux kernel so the Penguin-heads can more effectively design Microsoft-compatible desktop accessories.  Quite a change from the days when Gates was ranting about “communism” and Microsoft was threatening Linux with infringement lawsuits.  The phrase “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” comes to mind.

Google’s free Chrome operating system, coupled with browser-based applications, offers to destroy the proprietary operating system where Linux couldn’t.  As my fellow C4SS commentator Tom Knapp puts it, the era of paying for operating systems is now officially over.

And Jeff Bezos, in the face of the backlash over Kindle’s remote deletion, aka theft, of books (by Orwell no less!) that customers had paid for, has apologized for the “stupid” and “thoughtless” move and promised that it will never happen again.

The latest gambit by the Copyright Nazis, Associated Press’s attempt to make web aggregators pay for “content” on pain of being sued (even when such “content” consists only of a hyperlinked headline) is almost certainly doomed to fail in a spectacular manner.  The specifics amount to a kind of DRM:

“The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational ‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.”

Yeah, THAT should work really well.

AP Chairman William Dean Singleton is defending the policy in decidedly belligerent and combative language.  First he warned “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories” (i.e., the theory that providing a snippet and a hyperlink is covered by the Fair Use doctrine), and then he announced that  he’s “done talking about it.”

But I suspect he’ll be adopting a much meeker tone before long.  A business model based on suing online news sources (not to mention search engines!) for linking to your stories makes New Coke look like a work of genius.  It’s about like a record company threatening to sue if you mention the name of an album when you recommend it to your friends (as an article at Dvorak Uncensored put it, AP is “ready to be the new RIAA”).  Some newspapers are already threatening to cancel their AP membership in response to the controversy.  My guess is that within a year, even the AP will admit that the strategy backfired catastrophically, and they’ll just about curl up in a fetal position at the thought of ever trying it again.

It’s like the proprietary culture people are TRYING to relegate themselves to the ash heap of history as quickly as possible.

What’s the next step–helicopters airlifting refugees from the roof of Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, or CNN crews filming a statue of Bill Gates being pulled down?

Like 9/11 “Truthers” a few years ago, Obama “Birthers” suddenly seem to be everywhere, spreading a bizarre gospel of alien invasion at the highest levels of government.

Their curious belief system is a dog’s breakfast of dueling bureaucratic paperwork types (one kind of birth certificate makes you good to go, the other just won’t do at all), misinterpretations of mistranslations of excerpts of interviews with grandmothers who aren’t actual grandmothers, citations of foreign law from as far back as the 1750s, and whatever else they can dig up — or make up — to convince themselves and those around them that Barack Obama is certainly ineligible to serve as President of the United States, probably an illegal immigrant, and maybe even a Communist plant from birth.

All of which is almost certainly nonsense, of course, but it’s part of a promising trend.

Over the course of the last ten years or so, the American political establishment has begun to break back down into its component parts, and each of those parts has dragged its larger constituencies ever closer to the outside edge of the de facto consensus that makes politics possible.

The state of detente between the two major political parties, built over the course of more than a century of collusion to exclude alternatives, has been in a process of collapse since at least 2000: The Florida electoral dispute, the nature of and response to 9/11, the war on Iraq, alleged voting irregularities in Ohio in 2004, dueling narratives of vote fraud (Diebold, ACORN) through 2008, and now the “Birther” allegations, you name it … the two wings of the uniparty have long since abandoned issues, policy, etc. as focal points and are now focused almost entirely on issues of each others’ “legitimacy.”

To question the legitimacy of the governors is to question the legitimacy of the government — and to question the legitimacy of the government is to invite reconsideration of the legitimacy of government itself.

Our would-be rulers are playing around with fire, oblivious to the risk they run of getting burnt. “Al Gore won that election” and “Barack Obama isn’t eligible to serve as POTUS” and “maybe 9/11 was an inside job” aren’t indicators of revolutionary consciousness, nor are they memes which have a firm grip on especially large segments of the populace, but they’re the equivalent of dry kindling. If the same two sticks keep rubbing against each other in the same way above these kinds of ideas, sooner or later there’s going to be a spark, and then a fire … and who knows how far that fire might spread or how hot it might burn?

As an anarchist, I consider it my task to entertain these feuds over “legitimacy” with an eye toward constantly expanding the question beyond the instant issue.

When the question of Obama’s eligibility is raised, my counter-questions are simple:

Under what possible circumstances could his actions possess “legitimacy?”

If he was born in Honolulu as he claims, does this in some way legitimize the powers he exercises?

Do the circumstances of his birth legitimize or delegitimize the claims he makes on your wealth and income?

When he issues an order which results in the deaths of innocents at home or abroad, should those innocents care where he first drew breath?

Is there some place he could have been born, or some ancestral trait he could display, which would magically make him good enough to rule others without their consent?

These are the questions which need to be asked. And answered.

They’re at it again. Scarcely two months after warning Craigslist.com to censor personal ads government bureaucrats say are actually solicitations for prostitution, the same morality police are threatening tougher action. What has Craigslist done so far in response?

The online advertising site has changed its “erotic services” category to “adult services,” and has further reputedly banned some of the more graphic photos. However, this won’t satisfy Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who earlier this year filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco-based company, citing it as being, in his estimation, America’s largest source of prostitution. Dart’s attorney, Dan Gallagher, says that some of the Craigslist ads offer escort services for as little as 15 minutes. “They go to great lengths to say this is just a site so that people can meet one another to fulfill their romantic aspirations,” Gallagher said. “I don’t think having an escort for 15 minutes is a fulfillment of romantic aspirations.”

Therein lies the problem. If Gallagher and Dart don’t find anything romantic or appealing about a short tryst with a consenting adult, that’s strictly their business, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with holding that opinion. However, they are obviously not content with keeping their feelings to themselves. They are attempting to use coercive violence – the power of the “law” – to prevent others from pursuing peaceful desires. What’s the difference between a simple date that ends in a sexual encounter, and one in which some money or other form of compensation changes hands? Whose business is that other than those directly involved? What incursion upon life, liberty, or property is being initiated by capitalistic acts taking place between two or more consenting adults?

Perhaps the questions go beyond any supposedly moral arguments (and I would argue that there is nothing moral to begin with in using violence to alter peaceful behavior), and have to do more with government’s inability to profit from such activities. In the War on Drugs, since anyone can grow marijuana, it is too difficult logistically to license, regulate, and tax growers – unlike with liquor and tobacco, which both require more complicated and expensive processing in order to produce products of marketable quality. So it is with the War on Sex – even in jurisdictions of legalized prostitution, such as Nevada, countless unlicensed sex workers ply their trade without paying taxes or following other governmental regulations. This is perhaps the greater part of the reason why, in addition to Dart and Gallagher’s lawsuit, no fewer than 40 state attorney generals are currently examining further and more aggressive actions against Craigslist.

One of the axioms among anarchists is that governments are little more than organized theft and violence. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in government’s war on human sexual activity. Not ever content in the scope of their power, government bureaucrats are even so brazen as to intervene in this most private and personal realm of human affairs. Such egregious invasions upon liberty, on top of all other ways in which governments involve themselves in our affairs, ought to prompt us not to look for ways in which such an institution might be best limited – as with constitutions that have done nothing of the sort in practice – but how to most expediently, and without compromise, affect its summary dissolution.

Courtesy of one of New Jersey’s periodic “corruption” busts — in which politicians who don’t pass a sufficient percentage of their bribe revenues up the ladder are made examples of — the public received a rare peek into the underground market in human organs.

Writing in the New York Post, Brian Kates and William Sherman build on a Brooklyn rabbi’s arrest on “organ trafficking” charges to bemoan the fact that American patients wait three years for a kidney, “driv[ing] many to the underground market,” where they may pay in excess of $100,000 to a “broker” to procure the organ for them. This procurement process may involve bringing a poor donor from the Third World to the US, or require the patient to travel in the other direction.

What the authors don’t mention is why it takes three years for a transplant patient to get a kidney in the United States. And that reason is? If you guessed “government,” you guessed right. US law forbids compensating living organ donors, or the families of deceased donors, for the organs or for the time, trouble and pain involved in saving a life. The organ donation “establishment” even opposes giving those who agree to donate their organs “first call” at need (as proposed by the excellent organization LifeSharers.

First things first: It’s of vital importance that we understand that the state’s prohibition on organ-selling isn’t a result of logic poorly applied pursuant to some harebrained scheme that would theoretically increase the availability of organs and save lives. It’s not a good idea poorly applied — it’s just a plain bad idea.

The prohibition is a plain, bald, unapologetic application of the “ethical” holding which constitutes the root of modern statism — Kant’s “categorical imperative,” under which duty and sacrifice represent the good, and under which any benefit to the person making the sacrifice is “unethical” and taints that sacrifice.

Interestingly, this ethical constraint is applied in practice only to the person providing the organ which makes the transplant operation possible in the first place. The doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, other hospital workers, couriers — everyone involved in the chain of events which brings an organ from donor to transplant patient — can be, and usually are, well-paid. Ditto the politicians who make the laws applying that ethical constraint to patient and donor. And, of course, the “ethicists” (be they university academics or those in hospital “lawsuit vaccination” sinecures) who demand that they be consulted on the matter.

The fact that this “ethical” prohibition costs lives apparently carries no great weight with “ethicists” or politicians. Not that that’s surprising. From their perspective, it’s not about saving lives — it’s about imposing their theories on reality and on those who inhabit reality. They consider you — your time, your money, your property, your life — expendable in that pursuit. The purpose of reality and its inhabitants, you see, is to serve their theories rather than the other way around.

Curiously, patients awaiting a transplantable organ tend to get uncooperative on this point. For some reason, they place a higher priority on remaining alive than on affirming the unearthly theories of Immanuel Kant. Thus a “black market” in organs flourishes, the best efforts of the state to suppress it notwithstanding.

The state is eager to have you regard “organ broker” Levy Rosenbaum as a “criminal.” The facts say otherwise. From the perspective of a transplant patient, who’s the crook: The entrepreneur who gets you an organ from a willing donor at an agreed-upon price, or the bureaucrat who tells you that it’s your “duty” to shut up, lie down and die for his “principles?”

Last week, we examined the Republican Party’s claims to be the party of small government, personal responsibility, free markets, and strict constitutionalism–and found it wanting.

But the same is true of the Democratic Party’s claims to be the “party of compassion” or to have a special regard for the welfare of “America’s working families.”

The Democratic Party, historically, has represented one faction of the corporate ruling elite.  As described by sociologist G. William Domhoff and historian Thomas Ferguson, its primary constituency is large-scale, capital-intensive, high-tech, and export-oriented business.  Far from being a “constraint” or “countervailing power” against Big Business, the twentieth century regulatory-welfare state was created primarily to serve corporate capital.  As Murray Rothbard put it, “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.”  Or in the equally apropos words of Roy Childs, “liberal intellectuals” have been “the ‘running dogs’ of big businessmen.”

That FDR was hardly the “traitor to his class” of official mythology is suggested by the role of General Electric CEO Gerard Swope in the New Deal economic agenda, and by the army of corporate lawyers and investment bankers in the Roosevelt “brain trust.”

Take, for example, the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act.  The sectors of the corporate economy that supported FDR were capital-intensive, with long planning horizons that required stability and predictability, and hence extremely vulnerable to disruption.  But labor costs were a modest part of the total cost structure of such capital-intensive industry.  So the leaders of heavy industry were willing to offer workers significantly improved wages and benefits, in return for coopting the leadership of the labor movement and creating a class of union bureaucrats that would stamp out wildcat strikes and enforce contracts against the rank and file.

If the Republicans were originally the party of protectionism, the Democrats were historically the party of what William Appleman Williams called “Open Door Empire.”  That policy led to the creation of a de facto corporate world government under the Bretton Woods institutions, after WWII, with the U.S. military as enforcer.  Open Door Empire was the basis for the system of global corporate-state collusion popularly (and wrongly) known today as “free trade,” and more accurately as neoliberalism.  The only thing it has in common with genuine free trade is the removal of tariff barriers.   But in its reliance on “intellectual property” and other statist measures, it is if anything more genuinely protectionist than anything the GOP was doing a century ago.

The National Security State and permanent war economy were created by good liberal Democrats:  FDR and Truman.  The archipelago of military bases and garrisons around the world, and the grand tradition of CIA-engineered coups (who was President when Diem and Sukarno were overthrown, I wonder?) , are very much a bipartisan creation.

Much of the legal framework for neoliberalism was constructed in Bill Clinton’s watch (y0u know, that “peace and prosperity” Carville is so partial to).  NAFTA, the Uruguay Round of GATT, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act–you’d almost get the idea global corporate rule didn’t start with Bush.

And if that’s not enough to get your head around, the Bush police state didn’t start with Bush, either.  Some of Bush’s most objectional dictatorial powers resulted, not from the USA PATRIOT Act, but from “counter-terror” legislation passed under Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing.  A good example is the power to declare organizations “terrorist” by executive fiat and seize their assets without due  process–thank Clinton for that.  And some of the worst stuff in USA PATRIOT was originally proposed–unsuccessfully–in the Clinton legislation.  That Chuck Schumer played a major role in crafting both pieces of legislation bears more than passing significance as well, I think.

Today, despite all the soccer mom rhetoric about “working families,” the leopard hasn’t changed its spots.  The role of Robert Rubin (he of Goldman-Sachs and Citigroup) in Democratic policy circles should tell you as much.  Nancy Pelosi, whose family net worth is $18 million thanks to her marriage to an investment banker, is only the 17th richest member of Congress; that should tell you something.

The Obama-Geithner TARP policy, despite some symbolic tinkering with executive compensation, is in its essentials a direct continuation of the Bush-Paulson version. It’s the ultimate in neo-Hamiltonianism, saddling taxpayers with interest-bearing debt in order to buy up the banks’ bad assets and reinflate them to something approximating their pre-collapse face value, so that just maybe the banks will use some of the resulting liquidity to start lending money back to the public at interest.

The Democrats, if anything, are more in collusion with the Copyright Nazis of the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft than are the Republicans–and that’s saying a lot.

It was amusing to see the the dumbshow in Washington on July 20, when Barack Obama, in condemning Republican opposition to his health care reform proposals, vowed to “fight the politics of the moment.” One was perhaps left wondering what made this political moment so different from any others in history. The lives, liberties, and property of the population at large were, as always, under assault by government. Obama’s plan would, among other onerous things, create a governmental health insurance program modelled after Medicaid that would compete against private health firms, raise income tax rates on individuals and families making over $350,000 annually, and worst of all, make carrying a health insurance policy mandatory for all but the poorest Americans. The alternative would be to pay roughly 2.5% higher income taxes, on average, in the form of fines for non-compliance. I partially recant my earlier statement. None of this seems to be very amusing at all.

What was were the responses Republicans had to Obama’s grandstanding. GOP chairman Michael Steele flat-out called Obama’s plan “socialism.” Let us assume for this discussion that “socialism” can be defined as state policy deviating from the ideal of a free market. Then while Steele’s statement is true, it is also a classic exclusionary case of selective perception. For I ask: What does government do that is not socialism? How, by its very intrinsic nature can government operate or long survive without steeping itself in socialism?

Observe that everything government does, it finances via taxation. That is to say, money taken from the public at large by the threat of physical force – or by actual use of that very force itself. It does not politely ask. It does not attempt to bring the best goods and services it can into the marketplace at the lowest possible price so as to accrue to itself hordes of satisfied, paying customers who patronize it at will instead of going to its competitors, or instead of simply buying nothing at all. No, governments do not conduct themselves on such an advanced, productive, and civil basis. They instead steal. They intimidate. They threaten. They kidnap and imprison. They kill.

Whether the topic at hand is health care, military defense (more often offense against innocents, these days), police, postal service, courts, roads and bridges – you name it – government represents a series of socialist monopolies wherein there is no consumer choice. You and I must accept the “service” government gives us, and we must pay for it at the barrel of many guns – or else. Even if we move to another locale or jurisdiction (i.e., a geographical region over which one, or several governments simultaneously, arrogate dominion over the lives, liberty, and property of those who live or work there), we’re still left with no real choices – though the faces and names may have changed, the essence of the con-game has not.

If Republicans really wanted to abandon socialism, they would resign their posts and seek the abolition of all government in favor of laissez-faire free markets and individual choice. Likewise, if Obama and the Democrats really wanted to increase choice and lower the costs of health care for all Americans, they would not be contemplating creating yet another government-funded Ponzi scheme like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. Further, they would be working feverishly to repeal forthwith all of the taxes, bureaucracy, red tape, licensing, and other government-imposed measures that hamper everyone involved in health care – from physicians, to hospitals, to insurance firms, to the pharmaceutical industry.

Just as in all other areas of endeavor, when it comes to health care, government does and can “help” precisely no one. Except the politicians and their insider cronies, wallowing in all the special interest soft money, perks, and kickbacks courtesy of the public trough. Democrat, Republican, or whomever, when it comes to government, socialism is a bipartisan disease. And like any disease, anytime is time to stomp it out for good.

As it becomes clear that the current economic downturn was substantially created (intentionally or otherwise) by, and has been managed for the benefit of (intentionally), Goldman-Sachs and other big corporate players, it’s worthwhile to look at the nature of “bubbles” and how they are created.

Modern society is characterized by two conflicting attitudes on the subject of economic growth. The “capitalist” right holds it up as an unmitigated good which improves the lives of all it touches, the “socialist” left as an unmitigated bad which threatens the health of the planet and accelerates alienation of the worker from that which he produces.

The market anarchist, it seems, is the moderate in the mix. We who aim for the stateless society recognize that “economic growth” comes in two varieties — natural and artificial — and that the variety matters.

The “growth” which the right touts and the left decries is artificial: Driven by the admixture of state power and corporate influence, it continually skews the operations of the market away from their natural balance, and uses the resulting problems as fuel for further skewing.

For example, take the artifice of “limited liability” — a privilege bestowed upon corporations by state fiat. In a free market, the owners of an enterprise would shoulder 100% of any liability that enterprise might incur. In the state-regulated market, the owners’ liability is limited to only those assets actually invested in the enterprise itself.

One obvious effect of this state-bestowed privilege is that it reduces incentives for corporations to act responsibly, by artificially reducing the possible penalties for not doing so.

A secondary, less often noticed, effect is that it frees up capital — capital which, absent the privilege, might have been set aside by by its owners in a “rainy day liability” fund or used to purchase insurance against possible liabilities — for growth. Or, to put a finer point on it, this state-bestowed privilege subsidies growth which would not have occurred in a free market.

The response of the political “right” to this phenomenon is that growth is inherently good and that the privilege is therefore a good thing. The response of the political “left” is that growth is inherently bad … but that the solution to it is for the state to somehow magically shake itself free of the influence of privileged elites while continuing to dispose of the powers which those elites crave control of.

The anarchist response is that “natural” growth — growth which takes place as an honest side effect of the free exchange of goods and services — is a good thing which carries with it the solutions to any problems it may cause. In other words, the problem is not growth per se, but growth as a distortion of the market created by state/corporate collusion; and the solution to that problem is to remove the state from the equation entirely.

As we look back at the factors which led to the current recession (or possibly depression — some smart people say it’s already the latter), it should become obvious that the things which have happened couldn’t have happened without state intervention extending far beyond “limited liability” and into the notion that the state has everyone’s back and is ready to “bail out” any and every boat which might capsize on the rising tide engineered to lift it.

Until it became clear that a collapse was imminent, we never heard about a “housing bubble.” What we heard about was “growth” which the “right” loved and which the “left” bemoaned but in some aspects (housing for “the poor”) tolerated and promoted.

The “housing bubble” was created by government, from end to end and in its entirety. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would never have survived, let alone become major players, in a free market. The basis of their credibility was their status as government-connected firms. Nor would banks and mortgage companies have extended themselves into the risky sub-prime market in the way that they did had they not expected the state to rescue them if their fortunes went south. Finally, big investors would never have bought into shady debt-as-asset “derivatives” had those securities not carried government regulatory seals of approval.

For that matter, the individual home buyer would have generally been more careful and less inclined to commit himself to a 20- to 30-year payment regime had his purchase not been subsidized with mortgage interest deduction from his taxes, guaranteed by FHA, or otherwise “talked up” by government as the thing to do.

State-subsidized “growth” really is growth — of the cancerous variety.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Crecimiento benigno, crecimiento canceroso

There are few certainties in life, but one of those certainties is this:

Unless Sonia Sotomayor pulls out an Uzi and sprays the US Senate’s chamber with it, or gets run over by a bus outside that chamber, she will be confirmed as the US Supreme Court’s newest Associate Justice.

The “hearings” on her confirmation to that appointment have nothing whatsoever to do with the appointment or the confirmation, really. They’re just a demagoguery opp, a mating ritual as vivid and bizarre as anything you’ll ever see on The Discovery Channel. The Senators are peacocks strutting their plumes, apes beating their chests. The object of their visible affection isn’t Sonia Sotomayor — it’s you, in your role as prospective campaign donor or voter.

Like all such rituals, this one includes pro forma elements: The Senators invoke buzz phrases (“strict construction;” “original intent;” “judicial activism;” “living document”), then posture for the public in certain ways depending on how Sotomayor responds to those phrases.

Over and over, in so many ways, she must be induced to state that her dearest wish, her goal in life, is to “apply the law to the facts.” When she so announces, Democratic Senators respond with self-satisfied smiles, Republicans with raised eyebrows signifying disbelief, each the better to arouse the constituencies with which they hope to mate (or, more cynically, which they hope to screw).

In truth, given the size of the Democratic majority, only one question ever stood between Judge Sotomayor and confirmation. Her answer to that question — “will you at all times and in every respect proclaim and uphold the legitimacy of our power?” — was known long before the hearings began, else she’d have never been appointed in the first place.

But back to that mating ritual. I’m less interested in its participants than in its shibboleths:

“Original intent” and “strict construction” are fine, high-sounding concepts, and often useful ones even to anarchists, if only for the purpose of invoking adherence to rules which are allegedly binding on the state. I’ve yet to see the judge who pays them much heed in practice, however.

Even the most famous living advocate of “original intent,” Robert Bork (you saw him in a previous season of the show; he withdrew in the face of a less friendly panel) discards the whole concept without a second thought whenever it threatens to impose what he accurately describes as a “libertarian theory of jurisprudence.”

As for “strict construction” … well, let’s just say that anyone alive the last time the interstate commerce clause (to offer one major example) was “strictly constructed” by the US Supreme Court is now dead or at least very, very long in the tooth. As of the last time I looked (Gonzales v. Raich), even the most “conservative” justices agreed that Congress’s power to “regulate interstate commerce” extends to matters which are neither interstate nor commercial.

“Judicial activism?” A meaningless phrase, general used as a pejorative. Of course judges “act.” They judge. Their judgment is generally only construed as “activist” by politicians whose own “activism” has been impeded by it.

From the foregoing, it should be obvious that the Constitution is, in fact, a “living document,” reinterpreted at will for more than 200 years now whenever such reinterpretation has been required to support the desire of politicians to maintain a firm grip on, or extend the scope of, their power.

Could it really be any other way?The Constitution was written to provide minimal central governance for an agrarian and pre-capitalist mercantile society of 3 million, spread over 13 sub-polities clinging to the eastern seaboard of a continent.

As the population grew toward 300 million, scattered in 50 sub-polities over that continent and then some, “central” continually gained on and then surpassed “minimal,” in no small part due to the power of interpretation of the Constitution becoming vested in a Supreme Court located at, and appointed by those in charge of, the “center.”

Whether or not the game was intentionally fixed is debatable; that its outcome was fore-ordained should be obvious. The Constitution is indeed a “living document,” kept in a cage, fed a high-fat diet and occasionally trotted out for ostentatious public display. As a guarantee of your rights, it has become less than meaningless — its sole function these days is to legitimize your subjection.

Put not your trust in princes? Sure thing. Neither put your trust in constitutions, nor in the political appointees hired (by those in power) to “interpret” those constitutions.

People who vote Republican in the belief that the GOP is the party of small government need to get out of their codependent relationship.

Republicans claim to be the party of the head rather than the heart, the party that never lets wishful thinking trump the law of unintended consequences — unless, of course, proper reverence for the Flag or Fatherland is involved.  And recognizing that actions have consequences, in the realm of foreign policy, is just a fancy way of saying “defeatism.”

Come to think of it, there really seems to be a lot of messy Freudian stuff lurking beneath that Republican facade of stern common sense, doesn’t there?  Just consider how prominently accusations of being “soft” on this or that, or “getting tough” on something or other, or “showing them” or “teaching them a lesson,” figure in their rhetoric.  The Republicans:  party of penis envy?

Republican claims to be the party of small government are equally nonsensical.

First of all, it’s a rather odd conception of “small government” that doesn’t count the military and police as part of “the government.”  It’s hard to believe that conservatism in this country was once identified with an opposition to foreign entanglements and large military establishments, or that the perpetual warfare state was originally created by liberals.  In fact, the legal precedents and constitutional arguments that the neocons appeal to in order to justify their wet dream National Security State all come from paragons of conservatism like Lincoln, Wilson and FDR.

Today, we’re constantly reminded by self-described “conservatives” that loyal Americans rally around their “Commander-in-Chief” in wartime, and “politics stops at the water’s edge.”  Sean Hannity got his knickers in a twist because some Democratic senator accused “our Commander-in-Chief” of lying–in (gasp) WARTIME!  Not only does “politics stop at the water’s edge” for Republicans, but apparently Acton’s Law stops there as well.  Seems to me that if patriotic Americans are required to suspend their normal distrust of government in wartime “for the duration,” that’s a mighty powerful incentive for the “Commander-in-Chief” to STAY at war as much as possible.  As Dubya said some time or other, it’s a lot easier when you’re a dictator.

(Ever notice, by the way, that the same people so outraged that Pelosi would accuse the “heroes” in the CIA of lying were themselves making the same accusation back when it involved Valerie Plame and Doug Feith?)

It’s also an odd conception of “small government” that tasks it with making sure no two people with the same kinds of pee-pee get married, that nobody sees Janet Jackson’s tit or hears one of George Carlin’s “seven words,” and that everybody “Just Says No” to drugs (other than Ritalin and Gardasil).

But even stipulating that “small government” principles only refer to domestic economic and regulatory policies that don’t involve drugs or genitalia, the Republicans’ “free market” rhetoric is a bunch of buncombe.   The Reaganite agenda of fake “deregulation” and “privatization” usually involves, in actual practice, the same kind of kleptocratic insider dealing that characterized Yeltsin’s Russia.   The GOP’s “small government” economic policy, when you get right down to it, is even more corporatist than that of the Democrats–and you’ve got to go a ways to beat them.

What about the Republicans as the party of “strict constitutionalism” and “original understanding”?  What that translates into in plain English, Jeffrey Toobin says, is “a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society.”   Chief Justice Roberts, in every major case, “has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.”  And come to think of it, I don’t recall Madison and Jefferson advocating a set of Executive “national security” prerogatives as unbounded as those of Charles I.

(Did you notice, by the way, that these enemies of “judicial activism” were pressuring Sotomayor to discover a new fundamental right–the right to keep and bear arms–among those incorporated in the Fourteenth Amendment?)

You folks out there with “Democrats Care” bumper stickers shouldn’t be enjoying this overmuch.  Behind all the crap about “America’s working families,” the Democrats are really just the other corporatist party.  Democrats need to get over their own codependent relationship.  But that’s another column.

“Their conduct has no place in a civil society.” So said acting U.S. District Attorney Michael Gunnison of Ed and Elaine Brown, a couple from Plainfield, New Hampshire, who after being convicted in absentia – they refused to attend the court proceedings — in early 2007 for refusal to file or pay federal income tax, barricaded themselves in their home and vowed to defend themselves to the death if necessary, against any attempts by government agents to arrest them. They were subsequently arrested in October, 2007, by U.S. marshals posing as supporters. Gunnison made the above comment after the Browns were recently convicted on a wide range of further charges, ranging from possession of illegal explosives and firearms, to plotting the murders of federal agents. Before making that statement however, Gunnison said this: “By rejecting the rule of the law and substituting a personal code involving weapons, explosives, and threats, the defendants committed increasingly serious crimes.”

The basis of the Browns’ resistance all along was that they were committing no crimes. Their contention was that there exists no government law that makes Americans liable for income taxes. While there is an impressive preponderance of evidence to suggest that this in fact so, ultimately it is irrelevant – except perhaps top demonstrate the utterly corrupt and brutal nature of government itself.

A government law is merely the opinion of a group of politicians. It certainly is not an innate property of the universe, such as gravity, say. These opinions are then backed by whatever level of force is necessary to make everyone within a certain arbitrary geographical boundary comply. So “rejecting the rule of the law” – which the Browns maintained they did not do by refusing to pay income tax in any case – is merely rejecting the opinions of those who arrogate dominion over the lives, liberty, and property of others without having first gained express consent to do so. In other words, to reject a government law is to merely reject thievery, extortion, and blackmail. It’s hard to see anything ignoble about such rejection.

Further, the Browns’ initial actions violated no one’s life, liberty, or property. Their refusal to pay taxes – for whatever reason – was a mere peaceful withdrawal of support for government. Their subsequent acquisition of weapons to defend their lives, liberty, and property from further government aggression was only a natural and fundamental human response to the escalation of violence initiated against them by the government agents. After all, if government is so good and necessary, and if income taxation is so vital to the financing of it, why must government use force and violence to coerce people into paying? Why not simply ask people to voluntarily give part of their earnings to government for all of the wonderful things it allegedly provides? In fact, the IRS themselves claim that the income tax system is based on “voluntary compliance.” If this is so, why were U.S. marshals, BATFE agents, FBI, New Hampshire State Police SWAT teams, county sheriff’s deputies, local police, and even New Hampshire national guardsmen dispatched to either arrest or kill Ed and Elaine Brown?

I think the message is rather clear when it’s thought through using rationalism and logic: “Their conduct has no place in a civil society.” Michael Gunnison had no business saying this about the Browns. It was a statement that more aptly applies to himself, and anyone and everyone else in government.

It is telling to see the kind of resistance Congressman Ron Paul’s H.R. 1207, Federal Reserve Transparency Act is getting in the U.S. Senate. To quote Congressman Paul directly, in part:

“Claims are made that auditing the Fed would compromise its independence. However, by independence, they really mean secrecy. The Fed clearly cherishes its vast power to create and spend trillions of dollars, diluting the value of every other dollar in circulation, making deals with other central banks, and bailing out cronies, all to the detriment of the taxpayer, and to the enrichment of themselves. I am happy to challenge this type of ‘independence’.

“They claim the Fed is endowed with special intellectual abilities with which to control the market and that central bankers magically know what the market needs. We should just trust them. This is patently ridiculous. The market is a complex and intricate thing. No one knows what the market needs other than the market itself. It sends signals, such as prices, that should be reacted to and respected, not thwarted and controlled. Bankers are not all-knowing and cannot ignore the rules of supply and demand. They might act as if they are, but their manipulation of the market just ends up throwing it wildly off balance, which gives us the boom and bust cycles.

“They claim the Fed must remain apolitical. No organization is apolitical that relies on the President to appoint the Chairman. In fact, it is subject to the worst sort of politics – power to create trillions of dollars and affect the value of every dollar in the country without the accountability of direct elections or meaningful oversight! The Fed typically enacts monetary policy that is favorable to particular administrations close to elections, to the detriment of long term considerations.”

The disincentive to those in government to allow the Federal Reserve’s activities to be laid bare should, just based on Ron Paul’s statements, be obvious. How though, specifically, does the Federal Reserve – not a government agency, mind you, but a private, run-for-profit monopoly – actually function?

Let’s say the U.S. government needs to borrow $300 billion. That’s a small amount based on present government spending, but let’s use that figure hypothetically. The Federal Reserve simply makes a log entry for that amount. They then write a check for $300 billion, and send it to a securities dealer. The securities dealer then issues the Federal Reserve a government security bond for the equivalent amount in U.S. government assets, in turn allegedly backed by the hollow “good faith” promises of the U.S. Congress, supposedly on behalf of all Americans, i.e., taxpayers. The securities dealer then deposits this check in his bank – a bank which is of course a member of the Federal Reserve System, as every one of them in America is. The bank then sends this check back to the Federal Reserve for payment. The Federal Reserve then credits the securities dealer’s account(s) $300 billion. The monies are then dispersed to the U.S. government.

The actual printing and shipment of Federal Reserve Notes, however, is not entirely without cost to the Federal Reserve. As of 1994, William H. Ferkler, Manager of Public Affairs for the U.S. Bureau of Engraving & Printing said: “As we have advised, the Federal Reserve is currently paying the Bureau approximately $23 for each 1,000 notes printed. This does include the cost of printing, paper, ink, labor, etc. Therefore, 10,000 notes of any denomination, including the $100 note would cost the Federal Reserve $230. In addition, the Federal Reserve must secure a pledge of collateral equal to the face value of the notes.”

Not a bad return on $230 created out of thin air in the first place! And what is, pray tell, the “collateral equal to the face value of the notes”? Why it’s the land, labor, and overall assets ostensibly owned by you and I. In other words, the members of the U.S. Congress, in supposedly “representing” us all, have arrogated the sum total of our live’s work and property, and handed it over to the Federal Reserve. Without the express consent of even one of us.

It is monetarily impossible to pay off the kind of debt that the U.S. government has created at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The level of taxation required coupled with the economic growth necessary to accomodate this is purely a lunatic’s fantasy. How did this get so out of control?

The Creature from Jekyll Island is a good place to start. Though the title sounds like a horror novel, and the book reads like one, G. Edward Griffin’s volume is non-fiction. It details how the way was paved by bankers for the creation of the Federal Reserve and passage of the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913 – just before the holiday recess when most members of Congress were out of Washington, D.C. Prior to 1913, the U.S. Treasury was exclusively responsible for printing and issuance of U.S. gold and silver certificates. The constitutional precedent for this was that tying a unit of currency to a specific weight of numismatic metal limited the amount of money in circulation. Consequently, those in government could only tax and spend on a very limited basis, and government would be then constrained in size and scope commensurately. When viewed in this light, it’s not hard to see why politicians were so eager to abdicate their constitutional responsibility by forming such an unholy alliance with the bankers. It also demonstrates just how ineffective things like constitutions are at keeping governments within specified “boundaries.” Moreover, giving any government authority and oversight of a standardized monetary system to begin with is very dangerous and ill-advised, to say the least. You’ve seen what has resulted from the advent of the Federal Reserve – runaway taxation and spending, massive government growth, corporate and bank bailouts to the tune of trillions, and future generations stuck paying the bill at the point of government’s guns.

No doubt, Ron Paul’s bill in the House of Representatives is shaking some people in the Federal Reserve up, and we’ve seen just how resistant those in the Senate are to it. They’re not about to bite the hands that feed them without a fight. The real issue though, is not about auditing the Federal Reserve, or holding its members accountable, or even returning the U.S. dollar to a gold standard overseen once again by the U.S. Treasury. What truly needs to be done is to eliminate altogether the elements that have allowed this situation to arise in the first place once and for all. Yes, that means outright abolishing the Federal Reserve – or at least, the U.S. government dissolving its bonds with the Federal Reserve to let it sink or swim on its own in a free market – which would of course mean its effective death sentence. However, as stated, what is needed is not any form of government-sanctioned currency, but a truly free market in money. This can only be a reality in the absence, not only of a Federal Reserve, but of the very institution of government itself.

In a free currency market, money – a mutually agreed upon form of exchange for goods and services among two or more parties – would be dictated only by what the market would bear. My personal guess is that gold – with a solid history of over 5,000 years of human history as an indicator – is poised quite nicely to assume that role, as is silver. All the more so now with e-technologies which allow for the transfer of minute grains of precious metals, in order to more effectively facilitate common everyday sales and purchases, as opposed to larger transactions. However, that’s just my opinion. Undoubtedly, the market would deal with the issue of money in numerous ways of which we can only speculate.

Speculate, that is, until both the Federal Reserve and government itself, are history.

Every time a “major league” politician comes to St. Louis, I cringe. It usually means that some significant portion of the metro area will be shut down to accommodate “security,” by which is meant a moving bubble of lawlessness from within which said “public figure” will grace us with his or her presence.

The ultimate manifestation of this phenomenon is the presidential motorcade: A procession of vehicles protected, rather than pursued, by police as they careen at speeds well in excess of the posted limits down streets blocked off from use by the general public for the purpose.

This week, as will often be the case for the next 3 1/2 to 7 1/2 years, the “rock star” in question is President Barack Obama, who — fresh off his most recent world tour, including arms negotiations in Moscow and a speech to the parliament of Ghana — will throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Major League Baseball’s 2009 All-Star game on Tuesday.

The president’s nominal salary of “only” $400,000 per year — about eight times the median income in the United States — doesn’t come close to capturing the real chasm between people and politicians.

Obama will leave the mansion in which he lives at public expense (private chef included) by helicopter. He will fly to St. Louis aboard what amounts to a private jet. No auto company executive ever had a jet this luxurious: 4,000 square feet of floor space on three levels, an office suite, a medical suite with operating theatre and doctor on constant standby, and two kitchens capable of serving up to 100 guests at a time. On the ground, he will travel by limousine. Should he engage in some facsimile of “mingling,” he will do so while surrounded by the most expensive security detail in history.

He will throw that ceremonial pitch to St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols in front of thousands of people who’ve paid hundreds of dollars each for the privilege of watching … and then he’ll return to Washington and to the job of lecturing the rest of us on issues such as unemployment and economic malaise.

Even if political solutions to these issues were possible, it seems counter-intuitive to believe that those solutions can be arrived at from inside the bubble which surrounds America’s political class.

“The rich are not like us,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Yes,” replied Ernest Hemingway, “they have more money.” It’s not just money which separates the political class (which includes a good many of the “rich”) from the rest of us, though. It’s an experiential gulf which effectively creates two entirely different worlds.

As unemployment grows in the private sector, it shrinks among the political classes as government expands. As the incomes of regular Americans shrink from under-employment and inflation, the portion of those incomes demanded by the political class for their projects grows. And make no mistake about it: The political class measures “success” according to the metric of how much wealth it can get away with confiscating and disposing of, not how much wealth it “allows” the productive class to actually create.

It isn’t only, or even primarily, “the rich” who pay the price of this massive ongoing transfer of wealth from the real world of industry and production to the fairy tale world of politics. The owners of retail chains are not giving up their yachts. Rather, it is the cashiers and stockers and baggers who are giving up their jobs.

While the election of Obama is widely regarded as a watershed moment in advancing racial equality, the economic statistics tell a different story: In the last six quarters, unemployment among whites in New York City has grown from 3% to 5.7%; among blacks, it has jumped from 3.7% to 14.7%. The alleged benefits of identity politics apparently stop at the Beltway’s edge.

There is an up side to the increasingly obvious separation between the productive class and the political class. As the demands of the latter upon the former become more onerous, resistance to those demands is likely to stiffen.

The first manifestation of this will be huge growth in the “counter-economy” as the productive class moves more and more of its activity “off the books” and out of the political class’s systems of taxation, tribute and regulation.

The second manifestation — a more difficult one to achieve, as it’s an intentional, rather than “invisible hand,” process — is the creation of revolutionary consciousness among the productive class. The final break between the classes cannot occur until the productive class realizes that it doesn’t need the political class.

The US and Russian governments have arrived at a deal to reduce their military inventories by about 1000 nuclear weapons each. While I suspect that nearly everyone thinks this a good thing, it should also serve as an object lesson:

Nearly 65 years into the Nuclear Age, and after 40 years of disarmament initiatives beginning with the SALT talks, the world’s two “super-states” still have so many big, expensive, dangerous nuclear weapons that they can talk about cutting their inventories by 1,000.

Those weapons cost untold billions of dollars to develop and build. None of them have ever been useful to anyone except a) politicians who brandished them against each other and b) “defense” industry parasites who cashed in on their construction.

The very existence of those weapons was made possible only through the machinations of authoritarian welfare-warfare states, and while they’ve thus far been used only twice, in both cases they were used by one of those welfare-warfare states (FDR/Truman’s New Deal regime), and against another (Tojo’s Japan).

And yet, one of the premier counter-arguments trotted out against the notion of a stateless society, time and time again, is the spectre of “private nukes.”

Let’s take this from the top:

The costs of constructing a nuclear weapon are huge. Not only is research and development expensive, but the actual assembly of the weapons requires acquisition of huge amounts of raw material (uranium), processing of that material by large numbers of expensive machines (gas centrifuges), and the attention of skilled technicians who don’t work cheaply.

In other words, only two types of organizations could reasonably be expected to create a nuclear weapon: A state, which can take the cost out of its subjects’ hides whether they like it or not; or a large corporation of the kind which generally only exists under the auspices of the state and which has no profit motive to build such a weapon unless it’s doing so for the state.

Of course, the nuclear genie is unfortunately already out of the bottle. There are already a lot of weapons out there. It’s reasonable to be concerned that if the state disappeared tomorrow, those weapons might fall into the hands of individuals or groups who could never have built them, and who might be inclined to actually use them rather than merely use them as a “Mutually Assured Destruction” threat to keep cold wars cold.

I have two counter-arguments to offer to that reasonable concern.

The first is that the danger it alludes to already exists because the weapons already exist. Maintaining the state does not guarantee that these weapons will never be stolen by force, or illicitly sold by those appointed to guard them. Both possibilities became major concerns during the disintegration of the Soviet Union. For all we know, “private nukes” may already be in play.

The second is that, to the extent that nuclear weapons may fall into non-state hands and be used, the state is the most likely target for their use. Even if the physical target is a civilian population, the justification for their use would be to put pressure on a state to act or react in a given way. To this extent, permitting the continued existence of the state — any state, anywhere — represents an increased risk.

Not only does the existence of nuclear weapons not constitute an argument against the stateless society, precisely the opposite is true: Only states or state-privileged organizations are likely to command the resources to build nukes, or to have any motive to do so. Only states or those attacking states have any incentive to use nukes as instruments of warfare.

“Private nukes” are not, and never have been, a serious threat except to the extent that the existence of the state makes them one. However, I can envision a scenario in which “private nukes” might contribute to the peaceful establishment of stateless societies:

If Earth’s states are serious about divesting themselves of their nuclear weapons, they should offer those weapons, gratis, to private organizations which demonstrate the ability to build “Project Orion” style spacecraft — spacecraft propelled by the detonation of nuclear weapons behind a “pusher plate.”

Such an offer would do Earth the service of getting rid of its states’ most dangerous toys, and open new frontiers where stateless societies could form and demonstrate their own efficacy. The fact that this will never happen should serve as proof that Earth’s states aren’t serious about nuclear disarmament — or about proving their value versus competing visions of society.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Anarquía y armamento nuclear.

When everyone at your job is forced to attend an unexpected sexual harassment workshop, you can figure one of the Vice Presidents was hiking the Appalachian Trail.  And when there’s an unannounced class on ethics, it’s a safe bet the CFO got caught with his hand in the till.

Similarly, when Uncle Sam’s global adventures result in some terrorist blowback to the “Homeland,” we all wind up suffering for it.  Jerry Garcia’s phrase, “doing time for some other f*cker’s crime,” seems appropriate.

Consider the extent to which our movements are regulated and we’re spied upon for the sake of “fighting terrorism.”  Our residual status as “Land of the Free” has been replaced by a lockdown, “papers please” culture.

Your bank snoops your account for the feds, looking for any suspicious movement of money that might be associated with the financing of terrorism.  The NSA snoops your emails and long-distance phone conversations.

The TSA Gestapo running the internal passport checkpoints strip you down to your socks and toss your shampoo bottles–and that’s if you’re lucky.  If they don’t like your facial expression or choice of airplane reading matter, or your membership in the Wobblies or Free State Project puts you on their no-fly list, you may feel a rubber glove tickling the back of your tonsils.

Federal and state police staffers are constantly publishing helpful tips for the local Red Squads, regarding what bumper stickers or organizational memberships may indicate terrorist sympathies.

And if that’s not enough, we’re encouraged to spy on each other; the feds periodically try recruiting the plumber , the electrician, and the guy from the gas or power company to keep an eye open for contraband or signs of impermissible opinions inside your house.

But it’s all for our own safety, don’t you know.  As Cool Hand Luke would say, you shouldn’t be so good to me, Cap’n.

Never mind that all these measures are likely to be ineffective.  Asymmetric warfare is about agility, developing new tactics faster than bureaucrtic national security establishments can react.  After months of methodical committee meetings and grinding of organizational wheels, the plodding bureaucrats at Homeland Security spit out a policy brilliantly designed to thwart tactics Al Qaeda used a year ago and were probably smart enough to know would only work once.  The national security bureaucrats are always busy developing foolproof methods for winning the last war, like the French spending billions on the Maginot Line.

And never mind the question of their real agenda.  Never mind the possibility that the threat of “terrorism,” like that of “drugs,” is just used as an excuse for feeding their power lust.  Never mind the likelihood that the state tracks our every movement for the simple reason that, like the rest of us, it wants to know where it’s stuff is–and we’re its stuff.

Let’s just take the justifications at face value, and stipulate that the genuine aim of the policy is a good faith effort to “keep us safe,” to prevent another terrorist attack on the American public.

The fact remains that the primary reason for terrorism isn’t that “they hate our freedoms”–that (even Pat Buchanan gets off a good one now and then) Osama stumbled across the Bill of Rights and went ballistic.  The primary reason for terrorism is that word we used earlier–blowback.   This is where Krauthammer and Kirkpatrick usually start squealing about “Blame America First.”  But the United States has the closest thing to uncontested hegemony in human history; it has military bases and garrisons in half the countries of the world, at least rivals the greatest empires in the number of governments it has overthrown and installed, and has adopted as an explicit national security policy the prevention of any rival to its hegemony.  As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, an observer from Mars would probably assume that such a hegemonic global power just MIGHT have something to do with the state of world political and economic affairs.

In virtually every national civil war and insurgency, every ethnically-based territorial dispute, there’s a pretty good chance that United States arm sales, military advisers and CIA shenanigans hold the balance of  power.  From the standpoint of those engaged in such local conflicts, therefore, influencing American public opinion in a dramatic way is the key to victory.

And that just removes the question of real motivation back a step.  The military bases and garrisons, the carrier groups, the military budget that dwarfs those of the rest of the world combined, are there for a purpose.  And that purpose is to prop up a global economic and political  order.  In the immortal words of Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC,

““I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism….  Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.  The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.  I operated on three continents.”

Lest one dismiss that as the raving of an “America-hater,” consider the commendable frankness of corporate globalization’s number one defender, Tom Friedman:

“‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.  McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas….  And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”

(Of course that’s nonsense; the market would work just fine without the national  security state.  It’s the market that the global corporations really want protection from.)

So every time some goon in uniform demands your papers, take comfort in the fact that we’re all doing our little part to keep the world safe for Bill Gates.

The latest scheme by those in government to attempt to prevent the American population from peacefully subverting their kleptocracy via the use of twenty-first century technology is the taxation – currently at the state level – of online sales and downloads.

Currently, from the governmental perspective, the practice is less than perfect: An early 1990s ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court held that a retailer must have an actual physical presence in a jurisdiction in order to be subject to its sales tax. That is, unless the government of the state where it is located is one of the 22 currently comprising the Streamlined Sales Tax Project – a coalition of state governments who seek to do what federal politicians are also working on – the creation of a uniform and universal means of taxing sales on the Internet.

Amazon.com, to their credit, have just withdrawn their Associates Program – an incentive deal whereby private entrepreneurs may place Amazon ads on their own websites, and profit from any business this generates for the multimedia retailer – in Hawaii, North Carolina, and Rhode Island, and has promised it will do so in California as well if similar legislation there is not halted. What the governments of the aforementioned states have proposed is that a mere electronic banner ad posted on a server in that jurisdiction constitutes an actual physical presence there. They have ascribed brick and mortar status to groups of electronic pixels. The net result, as a hypothetical example, would be that a customer in Virginia, who clicks on an affiliate’s ad in California, in order to buy a hammer from a hardware store in Vermont, would then owe California sales tax.

It’s not difficult to see that Internet technology frightens politicians. Without an ability to intrude upon and invade private commerce, they see that most people choose to “do business” with those other than them. They see also that many people feel their money is best spent elsewhere than on more and more government programs replete with waste and corruption – most of which are not even crucial to the continuation of society in the first place. Indeed, many of them are overtly destructive of this end.

Amazon.com, thus far, however, has chosen to approach this matter as a “constitutional” issue, and is openly calling for a streamlined federal Internet taxation scheme. It seems all too many members of Congress are happy to accomodate, citing almost unanimously the “need” for the poor underfed state governments not to “lose” revenue. If the public perception were that government programs and policies are so wonderful and necessary, why is taxation by coercive force ever necessary? Why do governments not seek voluntary contributions and consensual customers – like the Amazon Associates? Moreover, by enacting such schemes, the net result may well be the total stymie of such business, creating an even less vibrant economy in an atmosphere of sour markets and high unemployment already. Further, governments may well be cutting off their noses to spite their faces in that such a downturn will also reduce income tax and other revenues.

Clearly, no equitable answers are to be found in the grasping, domineering thievery of government. People are perfectly capable of purchasing the goods and services they need or want without being bullied. The needy, in a stateless society, would be far more well taken care of by a far more prosperous general public. Taxation is nothing but straight-up unmitigated theft. Ultimately, the only rationale for governments to exist is their own insatiable need to control others in order to continue to eke out a parasitic life at the expense of the unwilling. And all this has ever produced, history shows, is destitution, tyranny, death, and misery.

A typical first reaction to the anarchist proposal — society without the state — goes something like this: “You can’t be serious! That couldn’t possibly work!”

A lot of ink’s been spilled explaining how it could work, has worked and even how it works every day for most people, but I’d like to take a run at this from the opposite direction:

You there! Yeah, you, the one who just told me I’m not serious and that a stateless society couldn’t possibly work — turn on your television and take note of the next few political stories you see. For the sake of argument, I’m going to throw out some examples of what’s likely coming through the tube at the moment:

• In New York, the State Senate is deadlocked into two bodies of 31 senators each. Each body claims to be the real Senate and refuses to acknowledge the other. Each body is one short of a quorum to legally pass bills. Last week, a Senator from one faction wandered across the other faction’s floor territory looking for a soda machine. The other faction declared the existence of a quorum and hurriedly passed 100 bills while he tried to hunt up his cold beverage. No dice — the lower house of the legislature declined to recognize bills passed by the Cola Quorum.
• In California, the state is issuing IOUs instead of checks to cover tax refunds, payments to vendors, etc. After the electorate rejected several tax increase proposals, the legislature deadlocked on a budget. The main activity on the floor of the legislature seems, at this point, to be referring to the public as “terrorists” for refusing to hand more of their earnings over to the politicians so that said politicians don’t have to make “tough decisions,” i.e. spend only within their extremely substantial means.
• In South Carolina, the biggest political issue of the moment seems to be whether or not the governor should resign because he has a mistress in Argentina.
• In Alaska, the governor has resigned. Why? Who knows? It appears to have something to do with dead fish and basketball and Jesus, but until her speech is re-released with English subtitles it’s anybody’s guess.

Now, two things:

First, get “serious.” Go back over those stories above and then try to tell me, with a straight face, that the state “works.” Admit it: 90% of what the state does looks like a deleted early pilot of “Different Strokes” — same cast, only with Joan Crawford as the adoptive mother.

Second, look around you. Despite the state — despite its complete dysfunction, despite its inability to get much of anything right, despite the huge percentage of your time and money that it steals and throws down the rathole of its own collective incompetence …

… things aren’t so bad, are they?

The crops still get grown and the cows still get milked, even with the huge overhead burden of the state.

You can still go to the grocery store and get everything you need to grill out for the 4th of July, even with Barack Obama in the White House and Sarah Palin running off to go fishing or join the WNBA or handle snakes or whatever the hell it is she’s doing.

In most places, at least in America, you can still walk down the street without getting mugged — and the places where you can do so with the least fear of that happening are the places with the fewest police officers per capita.

What I’m getting at here is this: Anarchy works. If you look around you, the best parts of your life are probably the parts where it has the most room to work, and the worst parts of your life are the places where it’s been partially or completely displaced by the incompetence of the state.

The burden of proof as to what “works” isn’t on the anarchists. It’s on those who claim that the state is necessary — because every last crumb of available evidence says that it’s not only unnecessary, but an abject failure by any pragmatic standard.

I’m shocked — shocked — to learn that the White House plants questions at press conferences, that the Washington Post flirts with openly selling “access” to lobbyists, and that the ABC television network shills for President Barack Obama’s health care scheme.

Now that I’ve got the fake shock out of the way, let’s get to the real shock: I’m shocked that anyone finds any of this (other than perhaps the fact that the most visible recent planted question was planted with an Internet-based publication, the Huffington Post) shocking.

There are reasons the “mainstream media” are called the “mainstream media,” and those reasons shouldn’t be difficult to figure out.

First of all, in the age of the superstate, access — access to state actors and to places under the control of those state actors — is a tightly controlled commodity.

How tightly controlled? Well, in 2003, the US Department of Defense openly threatened to murder journalists who sought access to the battlefields of Iraq through non-DoD-approved channels. That’s the marginal case, of course, but it’s only a particularly harsh example of a well-established rule.

Not every journalist gets White House press credentials. Not every reporter can score an interview with this week’s prominent politician. Whether or not you get a seat on the bus, on the plane or at the press conference may very well depend on how “mainstream” you are.

And let’s face it: “Mainstream” is defined very narrowly. Reporters who parrot the verbiage they’re given to parrot are “mainstream.” Reporters who don’t aren’t.

A reporter can take on a particular politician and possibly remain “mainstream” (unless he really, really pisses of the politician he’s trying to cover). A reporter who takes on politics itself is off the reservation and can expect to find himself covering the International Horse Radish Festival or the latest celebrity DUI rather than kicking it with the Prez on his next trip to stare down the Russians or browbeat those European Union fellows.

Secondly, the “mainstream media” are, at this point, a group of corporate organizations with a heavy investment of their own in maintenance of the status quo. They’ve got their established beats, they’ve got their own set of perks, they’ve even got politicians proposing to bail them out should they fail. From a business standpoint, the only worthwhile controversies are those which can be carefully managed to maximize circulation. Anything which threatens to really and truly rock the boat is “not newsworthy,” see?

Yes, the “alternative media” has always been there, and the Internet has given it a bullier pulpit over the last 15 years or so. It’s even given the “MSM” a few scares and produced a number of scoops which forced “mainstream” journalists to cover controversies they’d have otherwise happily ignored. There’s just an outside chance that the ‘zines and blogs and other Internet samizdat may become a genuinely revolutionary force both in and out of journalism. But they can’t expect any help on that from the political establishment or the “mainstream media.”

“[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” What he could not foresee was the extent to which, even in a democracy, the interests of the two might become identical and to which the choice might actually come down to one or the other.

The late Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3), in the New Libertarian Manifesto, coined the term “counter-economics” to describe the building of an economy outside the corporate-state nexus, and operating below its radar.   The counter-economy would evade both state regulations and state taxation, starve the state of the revenues it needed to operate, and eventually supplant the corporate-state economy.

Unfortunately, SEK3 took too narrow a view of the counter-economy:  rather than viewing illegality as a means to an end, he viewed it as an end in itself, and as the defining characteric of counter-economics.  That approach is unsatisfactory, since it means we define our efforts in terms of the state rather than in terms of our own self-derived goals.

Indeed, the state’s own statism is a means to an end, and defined largely in relation to our own self-determined goals:  to prevent us from supporting ourselves in comfort, independently of the corporate-state nexus and wage employment, and from receiving the full product of our labor.

If counter-economics is the means, we should also remember that the means is the end in progress.  Evading the state is not an end in itself; it is, rather, a means of accomplishing what we would want to accomplish for its own sake, even if the state never existed.  Counter-economics is the building of the kind of society and economy we want right now.  And if we define it that way, it dovetails nicely with many similar concepts prevalent on the libertarian, decentralist Left:  counter-institutions, dual power, and (that wonderful Wobbly slogan) “building the foundation of the new society within the shell of the old.”

In that context, I’d like to welcome a new member to the world family of local currency and barter systems, right here in Northwest Arkansas:  the Ozark Hours, or “Hill Bills” system, which was established following Ithaca Hours founder Paul Glover’s visit to Fayetteville.

LETS systems and barter networks are an invaluable counter-economic tool, by which producers can exchange their goods and services directly to one another outside the corporate-state nexus and outside the wage system.

In periods when money dries up in the larger, official corporate economy, they enable under- or unemployed workers with underused tools to put themselves to work producing directly for other members of the barter network.  For that reason, barter systems have tended to proliferate in periods of economic depression or stagnation.  Labour Notes were used by unemployed Owenite trade unionists to coordinate production for barter.  The Worgl local currency system, adopted in an Austrian town at the depth of the Great Depression, enabled unemployed workers to support themselves producing for each other.  The Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization and the Unemployed Exchange Operation were both formed in California during the Depression, when unemployed workers realized that they still had the skills and the tools, and the demand for each other’s services, even when there was “no money.”

Ted Trainer, a writer on relocalized economies, has pointed out that local currency systems are not enough by themselves.  Too often, most of the people spending local currency simply earn conventional money in the wage system, and then exchange official money for LETS notes at a local bank or other business.  The majority of people in the community have no way of actually producing directly for the network and earning local currency units within the barter system.  At the same time, the LETS system turns into a glorified Green Stamps system for buying stuff at a discount from already-established, conventional local businesses; a handful of local businesses operating within the system may accumulate a large number of LETS dollars, and find they have nothing to spend them on because of the limited range of local businesses participating in the system.

As Trainer argues, the local currency system by itself is the next thing to useless, if new ways aren’t found for underemployed and unemployed workers to put themselves to work producing for barter, and for those presently employed at wage labor to begin meeting a larger portion of their needs by producing directly for the barter network outside the wage system.   The local currency system, rather than an end in itself, must be seen primarily as a tool of self-empowerment for working people who want the option of producing outside the wage system.

Trainer raises an important question:  where is the capital to be found to support self-employment and employment in worker cooperatives?  One largely overlooked source of such capital is the ordinary household capital goods most people already own.  For example, a home-based microbakery using only an ordinary kitchen oven.  Or an unlicensed cab using a family car and cell phone.  Or a neighborhood childcare or elder care facility, operated out of someone’s home for the other neighbors.  Or a home-sewing business, repairing clothing or producing new clothes to independent designs.

One benefit of such household microenterprises is their low overhead.  Because they produce using the spare capacity of ordinary household appliances that most people already own, there is no initial capital outlay and no overhead from servicing it.  With no overhead cost, all income over and above current expenses is free and clear.  The microentrepreneur can therefore afford to engage in small batch production, with no pressure to “get big or get out.”  He can use the microenterprise as a means to shift a portion of his subsistence needs from wage employment to self-employment, on an incremental basis, with no risk, and ride out periods of slow business or none with no loss.

One of the central functions of business and occupational licensing, and “health” and “safety” regulations, is to mandate minimum levels of overhead and make such small-batch production effectively illegal.  “Health” and “safety” codes, for instance, typically require our would-be microbaker to purchase an industrial-sized oven, refrigerator and dishwasher:  an enormous debt which can only be serviced by large batch production on a full-time basis, in a separate building with permanent hired staff.

Under such circumstances, the only people who can afford self-employment and entrepreneurship are those who can raise the artificially high, state-mandated capital outlays;  everyone else must offer himself for hire to an employer who can afford such outlays.  And since the entry barriers artificially reduce the number  of employers and inflate the number of people seeking wage employment, obviously, the dynamic tends to be one of workers competing for jobs, and the terms of employment being artificially set by the employer.

Such microenterprise is low-overhead in another sense.  Consider the case of an electrician who works for wages, and earns the money to hire plumbing done (or vice versa).  As Scott Burns pointed out in “The Household Economy,” assuming for the moment that the plumber and electrician make similar wages, the electrician generally must pay the plumber’s employer an hourly rate about 250% the plumber’s actual hourly wage–and vice versa.  That means the plumber must work two and a half hours to hire the labor of an electrician (and again, vice versa).   But if the two exchange services directly through a barter network, each need only work an hour to obtain an hour of the other’s services (plus materials, of  course).  What’s more, they evade similar overhead costs from such forms of tribute as the sales tax–a consideration which should be pleasing to the shade of SEK3.

Networked, crowdsourced, distributed credit also makes it possible to aggregate large sums of capital from many small individual contributions (the funding of Center for a Stateless Society is an example of this).  Such methods are another way of raising capital to organize production within a barter network.  Crowdsourced capital could be used, for instance, for the kind of counter-institutions suggested by Dougald Hine in “Social Media vs. the Recession,” and built on by Nathan Cravens (of Appropedia and Open-Source Ecology).  Hine suggested, in general terms, that self-organization through social media might be used by the unemployed and underemployed to find self-organized ways to support themselves.  This might include, he said, organizing common access to tools of various kinds, the use of Freecycle to reduce the cost of living, and the use of social networking to put people with various skills in direct contact with each other.  Cravens called for a three-legged countereconomic stool of Fabrication Labs (workshops), Internet Cafes, and Community Supported Agriculture, financed by local P2P networks.  I’ve suggested that some sort of open-source housing be added to the mix, as a “fourth leg”:  some sort of bare-bones cohousing project, perhaps in a cheap refurbished warehouse building with cots and access to water taps and hotplates on something like the YMCA model; or perhaps as some sort of organized squat movement refurbishing abandoned buildings.

Another benefit of self-employed production for a barter network, besides the low overhead cost, is the level of security it permits.  Participation in the money economy and its wage system involve a lengthy circuit of transactions which is vulnerable to disruption, no matter how many people need each other’s actual services, if someone currently lacks ready money to hire them.   Consider, on the other hand, a market gardener living next door to a home seamstress.  The seamstress and her family cannot consume the farmer’s whole output of vegetables, nor can his family keep her fully employed sewing.  But the two families, together, have a secure source for all their vegetable and clothing needs, and each has a secure outlet for the portion of its output consumed by the other.   The more skills and trades are brought into the system, the larger the portion of the membership’s consumption needs can be securely and reliably met by transforming their labor into use-value, without the vagaries and uncertainties of wage employment in the larger money economy.

As  corporate bankruptcies, Peak Oil, and the deterioration of the national transportation system lead to the collapse of corporate logistic chains, a considerable portion of industrial activity is likely to shift from the manufacture of new appliances and machinery to the repair and recycling of existing machinery in backyard and neighborhood workshops.  And the custom production of replacement parts in small machine shops may lead to networked manufacturing of new, open-source product designs.

As the old money economy and wage employment dry up, and idle industrial capacity turns to rust, a growing portion of our economic life may become organized through local barter networks.  I think it’s quite likely, in twenty years time, that we will meet a majority of our consumption needs through production mediated by the barter network.  Most of our food will come from our own backyard or neighborhood gardens, or from local market gardeners selling to the barter network.  Our bread will come from our own ovens or from the neighborhood microbaker, our milk and cheese from someone whose cow makes too much for one family, and our clothing from the neighborhood seamstress.   Our cars and appliances will be kept going by custom-machined parts from a well-equipped local workshop.  Our primary healthcare will come through a modernized version of “lodge practice” (previously suppressed by the medical licensing cartels), with the physician working on retainer for a local barter network in return for credit with the system.   Old age and disability insurance, and provision for support in neighborhood care facilities if needed, will be funded by premiums deducted from one’s balance in the barter network.

To the extent that people continue to rely on wage labor to meet a significant minority of their needs outside the barter network (obviously there won’t be neighborhood microchip foundries any time soon), the fact that most people use wage labor only for supplemental income and can afford to do without it for months at a time will mean that labor finally has the whip hand, and the advantage that comes from the ability to walk away from the table.   The average worker might work, say, one or two days a week to earn money to meet the needs that can’t be satisfied within the barter network (perhaps something from the much smaller product stream of new appliances).   And like the cottager of 250 years ago, he can afford to “retire on the common” for a spell if he finds the terms of employment too onerous (it was exactly this very circumstance, in which working people could either take work or leave it, which motivated the employing classes to enclose the commons).

If local currency systems are used as just another yuppified “buy local” program for the Main Street establishment, I suppose it’s still better than nothing.   But if a majority of the participants are people actually engaged in self-employed production for the barter network, rather than just cashing in part of their paychecks for local scrip, local currencies could be a powerful counter-economic weapon for ordinary working people to achieve independence from the corporate state.

Much has been made of late about the North Korean government’s actions: Taepodong 2 missile tests, underground nuclear testing, massive naval exercises, bellicose threats, and the detention of two American female journalists – ostensibly in a forced labor camp. At present, a U.S. Navy destroyer is shadowing the Kang Nam I, a North Korean cargo vessel believed to be headed towards Myanmar with a cargo of missiles or other weapons.

Barack Obama and others in the political world have called loudly for universal condemnation of these events, seeking multi-governmental sanctions against the North Korean state. To be sure, the North Korean government is arguably the most ruthless and oppressive example of a state currently in existence. The directives of communist dictator Kim Jong-Il exude arrogance and violence.

Fundamentally, however, is America any different? In some ways yes, and in some ways, no.

Americans may tend to forget that they are living under a government which conducts military exercises all the time and on a far greater scale than North Korea, with bases all over the world. Only Russia’s government possesses and controls more nuclear weapons than America’s. North Korea’s government is believed to possibly possess two. The U.S. military has prosecuted a wholly unprovoked war in Iraq for six years now, at a cost of untold lives and billions of dollars stolen from taxpayers at gunpoint by the IRS and other taxing agencies. Even Americans living abroad are subject to paying taxes to the IRS, just like in Turkey, and Vietnam … and North Korea. No other states on earth engage in this practice.

Currently, over two million people languish in prisons across America – a number greater both by itself and per capita than any prisoner population under any other government in the world. Over half of them are entirely non-violent victims of drug laws, tax laws, or other U.S. government policies. An estimated 200,000 people may fill North Korea’s jails and concentration camps, out of a population of 23 million.

The American government routinely sells weapons – even nuclear ones – to other governments deemed acceptable by those in Washington, D.C. Where, after all, did Israel or India acquire nuclear technology?

Can Americans honestly deceive themselves into believing that the U.S. government’s stances are anything but entirely hypocritical? Rationalizing that the “American way of life” under government as we know it is somehow morally superior to its North Korean counterpart appears just a little ridiculous when held up to the light of rational analysis.

No, no one is likely at this point in time to come and arrest me for writing these words – unlike if I were in North Korea engaging in criticism of that government. Yet, like any North Korean who wants to stay out of trouble, I must pay the taxes government demands, stay away from anything the government disapproves of me having, and tolerate the fact that its soldiers are killing and brutalizing people who live in other lands while its police – who are becoming increasingly militarized – beat, tase, brutallize, and often kill my fellow man right here at home, often for doing nothing more than behaving in ways other than politicians approve.

The big question Americans need to start asking themselves is not whether an American democratic style government is better than a North Korean communist one (remember too, the North Koreans refer to their society as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”), but whether free markets and individual liberty are preferable to any form of government in the first place.