I’m usually pretty optimistic about the day after tomorrow — I’ve been dismissed more than once as a techno-utopian — but sometimes when I get depressed by NSA surveillance, drones, and the corporate state’s manufactured aura of inevitability, I need a story to cheer me up. Here it is: A Canadian artist copyrighted his land…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Cory Massimino‘s “No Justice from the Prison State” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. As prison system inspectors visited Franklin Correctional Institution they discovered an incident from three years prior in which an inmate, 27-year-old Randall Jordan-Aparo, begged officer Rollin Suttle Austin, to take him to the hospital because of…

China just announced a regional infrastructure plan to promote the integration of Asian markets under Chinese leadership — sparking predictably hypocritical outrage from the United States (“China’s Pouring $40 Billion Into a New ‘Silk Road,’” The Blaze, November 9). Chinese President Xi unveiled the Silk Road Fund to leaders of Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Tajikistan as…

David Graeber. Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011). David Graeber, as we already saw to be the case with Elinor Ostrom, is characterized above all by a faith in human creativity and agency, and an unwillingness to let a priori theoretical formulations either preempt his perceptions of the particularity and…

Professional fools are an ingrained aspect of our image of the medieval royal court system. Fools, more commonly known as jesters, were permitted to be asses for the amusement of heads of governments. While professional and respectful conduct was expected of most members of the court, the Fool existed to give an image of laxness….

The 2014 midterm election delivered both good news and bad. The good news is that the losers lost. The bad news is that the winners won. Journalist Mike Barnicle says he’s never seen an election in which the people feel so distant from the government. I wish his diagnosis were right, but I suspect it…

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions.  Good scientists are by definition anarchists. –Theo Wallimann, ETH Zurich Abstract Although profitable, cancer therapy has failed to live up to the promises of the War on Cancer waged since 1971. Modern chemotherapy can…

A recent Pew Research study surveys 44 countries, revealing that the Chinese are even friendlier to free markets than Americans. Katie Simmons, a senior researcher at Pew, “notes that China has enacted numerous reforms to open up the country’s economy since the 1970s.” It probably shouldn’t surprise us that people living under the Communist Party of China’s rule…

It’s election day in the USA. The mass incarceration nation is deciding which political opportunists will rule. On the state and local level, citizens are casting their votes on ballot initiatives that will determine the structure, specifics, or application of state coercion. Some of these ballot initiatives probably deserve support from prison abolitionists, specifically initiatives…

There’s a certain kind of economic technocrat who tosses around the term “economies of scale” like a Young Earth creationist tosses around the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is true of legacy liberalism, obviously, which is still defined by the mid-20th century mass-production paradigm of Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandler. It’s also…

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 Sheldon Richman‘s “Class Struggle Rightly Conceived” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Sheldon Richman‘s “Class Struggle Rightly Conceived“. $1.00 for the…

The publication of “Iron Fist” in late 2001 was a milestone for me. Larry Gambone’s decision to publish it as a Red Lion Press pamphlet was an honor, and was the main thing that kicked off my career as a published writer (as opposed to the kind who writes angry letters to the editor and…

Ask the average person on the street what kills more Americans – choking yourself to get off or evil terrorists? I haven’t done this myself but I suspect the results would be tilted quite far to the “evil terrorist” side. And why wouldn’t they be? After all, America is engaged in an epic struggle against…

In one of the weirdest permutations of “intellectual property” ever (Mike Masnick, “Apple Facing Trial Over Whether Its Use Of DRM Violated Antitrust Laws,” Techdirt, October 6), Apple may end up in court for anti-trust violations because its iTunes Digital Rights Management code gave it monopoly power back in the day. The US District Court for…

We already knew Joe Biden was a useful idiot for the “Green” (actually greenwashed) or “Progressive” wing of corporate capital, because of his indignation over the “theft” of “intellectual property.” He denounced “stealing” songs or movies as morally equivalent to a “smash-and-grab at Macy’s” — and in keeping with that belief has supervised FBI actions…

I came late to the news of Twitpic‘s impending (and thankfully partial) closure and even later to an explanation for it. My initial assumption was that the service had failed to turn a profit and become financially insolvent. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is, in the worst way, all about “intellectual property.” And it significantly and negatively impacts…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Hobby Lobby — A Question of Agency” read James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. To repeat, there were a lot of people whose agency was at stake here besides the Green family’s — in particular, the 70% majority of Hobby Lobby’s workers who are women. who may have been having…

Paul Krugman, in denouncing the excessive market power of Amazon (“Amazon’s Monopsony is Not OK,” New York Times, October 19), proclaims that the Robber Baron Era ended when “we as a nation” put an end to it. There’s a powerful story in the book of 2 Samuel about the prophet Nathan confronting King David after…

Speaking at a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser hosted by Democratic billionaire Rich Richman, President Obama denounced the GOP as — wait for it — the “party of billionaires” (Douglas Barclay, “Obama blasts Republican billionaires at home of Democratic billionaire,” Rare, Oct. 9). “If Republicans win, we know who they’ll be fighting for. Once again, the interests of billionaires…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “Our Bodies, Their Subsidies” read Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. Moreover, the Affordable Care Act is merely the latest in a century-long line of legislation ostensibly aimed at increasing the affordability of health care, but which by subsidy have locked in a status quo of needlessly high levels…