The Obama administration has announced the formation of a panel of “outside experts” to review the NSA’s surveillance practices. And a wide-ranging, diverse collection of experts they are; when it comes to institutional backgrounds and viewpoints, they span the entire spectrum from A to B. They remind me a bit of the space shuttle crew…

Parece que apenas fornecer armas aos rebeldes síriosnão basta. O governo dos Estados Unidos e seus aliados ocidentais estão prestes a empregar força militar diretanaquele pequeno país do Oriente Médio. Já vimos ouvindo os tambores de guerra há longo tempo – e agora tão cedo quanto na quinta-feira bombas poderão a começar a cair sobre a Síria. Em vez…

Across the world, people are protesting against US intervention in Syria. Polls show widespread skepticism of the impending war. Rather than making Americans safer, intervention is likely to support forces connected to al Qaeda. Yet it still seems inevitable that the US government will launch cruise missiles at Syria, escalating the country’s bloody civil war….

In a recent article, Allison Benedikt makes her case that, as the title says, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person” (Slate, August 29). She clarifies: “Not bad like murderer bad — but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.” The proper course of action, she argues, is to take one for…

Seems as if supplying Syrian rebels with arms just isn’t enough. The US government and its Western allies are about to unleash direct military force in the small Middle Eastern country. We have heard the drumbeat of war for a long time – now as early as Thursday bombs may start falling on Syria. Instead of regime change, we are told,…

The online liberty group “Thoughts on Liberty” pumps out some good stuff more often than not. The site is intellectually managed and operated by “a team of ladies writing about freedom” who offer their unique perspective on libertarianism. Like most addressing the liberty movement, the authors usually take a right leaning (or all-out right stance)…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson‘s “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson‘s “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution“. $20.00 for the…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Clarence Lee Swartz‘s “The Practicability of Mutualism” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Clarence Lee Swartz‘s “The Practicability of Mutualism“. $1.50 for…

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

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

Egypt is in turmoil. As I write this, more than 500 people have been killed and thousands wounded in an ongoing conflict between the Egyptian military (on behalf of a coup-installed junta) and supporters of the overthrown Muslim Brotherhood regime (supporters of the Brotherhood believably claim the death toll is probably much higher). In the…

Everywhere you look in the right-wing commentariat, you see the recurring theme of the “underclass” as parasites. Its most recent appearance was the meme of the productive, tax-paying 53% vs. the tax-consuming 47%. And of course there’s the perennial favorite mythical quote attributed to Alexander Tytler, trotted out by many who should know better, about…

A decade after Califormia’s disastrous experience with Enron-style electrical utility “deregulation” — rolling blackouts and price spikes — caused Arizona to abandon a similar project, the Arizona Corporation Commission is once again considering it. The real problem with “deregulation,” as promoted by the libertarian establishment — the think tanks and lobbyists who pressure the state…

One of the quickest and simplest ways to gloss what “Left-Libertarian,” or the “Libertarian Left” part of ALL, means, is just to say that we are for left-wing social ends through libertarian means. This inevitably involves a certain amount of oversimplification — does “through libertarian means” just mean “by getting rid of government controls and letting social outcomes emerge spontaneously,” or does it mean something…

Two quotations, juxtaposed, summarize the errors into which modern American defenses of ‘free markets’ and capitalism have entered. In the process these errors led to abandoning any real meaning for liberty or human well-being.  Right wing libertarians in particular sincerely believe they are seeking to preserve these values, but they are sincerely wrong. But before…

Esperado e oficial – o estado de escuta global. O vazamento de Edward Snowden para The Guardian mostrou à escâncara o quanto os Estados Unidos foram longe em nome da “segurança nacional”. O que os vazamentos revelaram foi um governo fora dos limites de sua constituição, dedicado à coleta secreta de informações, e incrivelmente intrometido. Nos recintos do poder…

Expected and official – the global surveillance state. Edward Snowden’s leak to The Guardian blew wide open just how far the United States has gone in the name of “national security”. What has been revealed by the leaks is a government outside the limits of its constitution, dedicated to intelligence, and incredibly intrusive. With in…

Os anarquistas tendem a mostrar-se embaraçados diante do tema economia. Ou então resmungamos algo a respeito de Proudhon e em seguida encabuladamente tomamos de empréstimo ideias de Karl Marx. Sempre me pareceu irônico que o anarquismo tenha começado em grande parte como teoria econômica, pensemos apenas em Josiah Warren, Proudhon e Tucker, mas em seguida…

On a very cold day in February more than 40,000 people came together in Washington DC from across the United States and Canada for the largest climate rally in US history — Forward on Climate. They urged the Obama administration to take climate science and our energy crisis seriously. They called attention to devastating storms,…

WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are…