A recent headline from The Week says “NSA: We were just about to stop spying on everyone before Snowden spoke out” (March 30, 2015). At first glance this may seem like a good imitation of an Onion headline but truth is stranger than fiction. The Associated Press tells us, “The proposal to kill the program…

California Governor Jerry Brown’s April 1 decree (Executive Order B-29-15) for rationing water has gotten lots of undeserved positive coverage on the center-left. If you read the fine print, it doesn’t actually reduce the state’s total usage by 25% (although that’s the impression you’d probably get just reading the headlines). It only applies to “potable…

Una recente indagine della Associated Press sulle pratiche dei tribunali del Tennessee durante il patteggiamento ha messo in allerta gli americani su una delle tradizioni governative più agghiaccianti e finora considerate proibite: la sterilizzazione forzata dei carcerati. Secondo la giornalista della AP Sheila Burke, un caso recente ha riguardato una donna del Tennessee con disturbi…

According to the received version of “interest group pluralism” in J.K. Galbraith’s book American Capitalism, there’s supposed to be a sort of check-and-balance system (Galbraith called it “countervailing power”) between big business, government regulatory agencies and organized labor. But what usually happens in the real world, when the allegedly “opposing” centers of power are so…

Recent investigations by the Associated Press into the practices of Tennessee prosecutors during plea-deal negotiations have alerted Americans to one of their government’s most gruesome and supposedly forbidden traditions: forced prisoner sterilization. According to AP reporter Sheila Burke, a recent example of this practice involved a mentally ill Tennessee woman whose infant child died under…

I hear expressions like “I don’t see race” or “I’m color-blind” a lot from people who want to ignore the issues of structural power imbalance or privilege in race issues. The same people are fond of equating racism to simple bigotry; by this standard, white bigotry against blacks and black bigotry against whites are equally…

Usually when right-libertarians defend gentrification, they do so by framing it as an entirely spontaneous free market phenomenon, and minimizing or ignoring the state’s role in promoting it. That’s bad enough. But we don’t usually expect them to come out explicitly in favor of direct state intervention to evict poor people for the sake of…

Un articolo pubblicato nello stato di San Paolo in Brasile (“Brasil que se vire com arenas vazias, diz FIFA. ‘O problema é de vocês’”, Estadão Esportes, 21 marzo) nota come la Fifa abbia perso interesse per il Brasile: gli inutili stadi costruiti per la Coppa del Mondo del 2014 non sono un problema loro; ad…

At the height of anti-NSA furor in January 2014, The New Republic (TNR) published a hit piece on Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald that criticized their anti-government beliefs, portraying the leakers as “paranoid libertarians” and traitors to progressive government ideas. Said TNR: By exposing the secrets of the government, they claim to have revealed…

President Obama thinks that forcing us to vote might be a good idea. That he could favor punishing people for not voting — which means taking their money by force and imprisoning or even shooting them if they resist — is unsurprising. The essence of government is violence — aggressive, not defensive, force. Government is…

This election cycle’s crop of uninspiring presidential hopefuls, now including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, must be a relief to those favoring mass disillusionment with electoral politics. No candidate, Rand Paul included, represents a convincing alternative to the status quo. Contrast this with the current president, whose appeals to “hope” and “change” convinced many Americans of…

Beklendiği gibi, Başbakan Benjamin Netanyahu’nun Washington DC’deki Kongrede verdiği konuşmaya verilen tepkiler Israil’de ve Amerika’da parti içerisinde bölünmelere neden oldu. Netanyahu’nun savaş propagandasına yatkın olanlar Iran’la nükleer anlaşmaya karşı reddedilemez, ikna edici öneri duydular. Netanyahu’nun “kurt bağaran oğlan” rutinine tanıdık olanlar ikna edilmediler. Konuşma sonrasında,Netanyahu’nun İsrail’de beklenen seçim numaraları değişmedi, ve Amerika Birleşik Devletlerinde, Washington’ın partizan muhafazakarlar ve basınlar “liderlik gıpta” iddea ettiler (Elisabeth Hasselbeck, R-Fox…

David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2015). This book is, properly speaking, not a book at all, but a collection of essays loosely clustered around the common theme of bureaucracy. Of the material in the book, only the long introductory essay…

A story over at Estado de S. Paulo (“Brasil que se vire com arenas vazias, diz FIFA. ‘O problema é de vocês’”, Estadão Esportes, March 21) notes that FIFA isn’t at all interested in Brazil anymore, and that the useless stadiums the 2014 World Cup left us are not their problem and should be dealt…

Murray Bookchin. The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies & the Promise of Direct Democracy. Foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin (New York and London: Verso, 2015). This book is a collection of Bookchin’s essays on libertarian municipalism and communalism, extending from the period when he still considered himself an anarchist until his final post-anarchist phase. In…

Il sito Antiwar.com (un nome che dice tutto) il diciotto marzo ha annunciato la decisione di Google Adsense di sospendere il suo conto, risorsa fondamentale per stare online, per aver pubblicato foto di torture e abusi scattate nella prigione militare di Abu Ghraib in Iraq (Eric Garris, “Google Disables All Ads on Antiwar.com,” 18 marzo)….

In 1890, anarchist feminist Voltairine de Cleyre published Sex Slavery, a short speech in defense of Moses Harman, a women’s rights supporter who was prosecuted under Comstock law for publishing allegedly obscene material. De Cleyre argued that in her society, women were viewed as the property of their husbands, and had little power over their…

The website Antiwar.com (whose name is self-explanatory) announced March 18 that Google Adsense had suspended its account — a major source of the revenue it needs to stay online — for publishing new photos of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq (Eric Garris, “Google Disables All Ads on Antiwar.com,” March…

Immaginate questa scena: Una bella sera, perfettamente ubriaco, sfondate un’area recintata dalla polizia con la vostra auto. Immaginate che l’area sia davanti alla Casa Bianca. E che sia stata recintata perché si sospetta che sia la scena di un crimine, una possibile bomba, e voi avete mandato tutto all’aria. Gli agenti corrono subito verso la…

Il sedici marzo è una data importante per tutti quelli che cercano pace e armonia tra gli uomini: la Giornata delle Frontiere Aperte. Il sito openborders.info, fondato da Vipul Naik, è al suo terzo anno di vita (è nato il sedici marzo 2012). Mira ad aprire la conversazione su immigrazione e libertà di movimento oltre…