Mind Control by DecodeDC

posted by Erik

While I'm not a huge fan of NPR, I found this this audio interesting. Its from an ex-NPR host, Andrea Seabrook, who left NPR to do her own thing called "Decode DC."

"I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.”

“We need to stop coddling lawmakers, stop buying their red team, blue team narrative and ask harder questions of them.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79998.html#ixzz2AZHMOuxr

I have no faith nor hope in politics, but I like to drop in now and then to confirm or revel in my faithlessness. May the Social Dilemma continue...

The Spoils of War Continue to Reap Collateral Damage

Is it the white phosphorous, depleted uranium, PTSD or some combo that's causing the high number of birth defects in Iraq?  toxic legacy of us weapons

Maybe its from all the WMDs they found, or I mean looked for, or Hussein’s repeated use of chemical weapons he obtained with the aid of US, Britain, and Italy (Iraqgate). Yet another "conspiracy" to add to the growing list.

Even William Safire, the right-wing, war-mongering NYT columnist, on December 7, 1992, felt compelled to write that, "Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [the US, Britain and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator". source

Most of the current birth defects in Iraq are probably from the second gulf war, but upwards of 10,000 Kurds can attest to the horrors of "Chemical Ali."

War sucks. Its terrorism. Being robbed to finance it sucks just the same.

Where Am I?

I found this Radio Lab piece on our nervous system rather entertaining and liked it so much I thought I'd share. In their words the program examines "the bond between brain and body, and look[s] at what happens when it breaks..." program link

Facing Grand Jury Intimidation: Fear, Silence and Solidarity

http://truth-out.org/news/item/11181-facing-grand-jury-intimidation-fear-silence-and-solidarity

http://grandjuryresistance.org/

^A number of Grand Jury resistors have show up as of late. And a number of them are not "cooperating" because they are left libs.

The anarchist argues that informal order, voluntary law, and polycentric coercive law are sufficient to maintain social cooperation; the advocate of government argues that monocentric coercive law is needed in addition, and indeed typically maintains that the amount of social order that can be maintained through non-governmental sources alone is quite small...

...Most of us have been taught to regard Constitutionalism as the best of the three options. Concentrating the three functions in a single agency avoids the chaos allegedly endemic to Anarchism; while assigning the three functions to distinct sub-agencies within the monopoly agency allows the three branches (legislative, executive, and judicial) to serve as checks on one another's excesses, thus avoiding the potential for abuse and tyranny inherent in Absolutism. This is the "separation of powers" doctrine built into the U. S. Constitution.

In practice, however, Constitutionalism has proved only marginally better than Absolutism, because there has been sufficient convergence of interests among the three branches that, despite occasional squabbles over details, each branch has been complicit with the others in expanding the power of the central government. Separation of powers, like federalism and elective democracy, merely simulates market competition, within a fundamentally monopolistic context.

...Locke's arguments for a monocentric legal system contain a serious confusion: the confusion between the absence of government and the absence of law. Locke's arguments are good arguments for a formal, organized legal system; but Locke mistakenly assumes that such a system requires a governmental monopoly. The majority of legal systems throughout history, however, have been polycentric rather than monocentric. Locke did not have the benefit of our historical knowledge however; nor, despite his brilliance, was he able to imagine on his own a legal system that was not a government. The actual history of stateless legal orders shows that they do not noticeably suffer from any of the three defects Locke lists; on the contrary, those defects are far more prevalent under governmental law.

...History shows that stateless legal orders tend to create powerful incentives for people to submit their disputes to arbitration wherever possible, in order to avoid the appearance of being an aggressor (and thus the target of defensive coercion oneself). Anarchy does not suffer from Locke's judicial defect.

But government does. In any dispute between a citizen and the state, the state must by necessity act as a judge in its own case — since, as a monopoly, it can recognize no judicial authority but its own. Hence governments by their nature must be subject to the judicial defect. Constitutionalism is supposed to remedy this defect by separating the judicial branch from the executive and legislative branches, so as to prevent the judging agency from being a party to the dispute. But what if the citizen's quarrel is with the judicial branch itself? In any case, even if the quarrel is solely with the legislative or executive branch, it would be naive to assume that the judicial branch of a monopoly will be unsullied by the interests of the other branches.
Next, consider the legislative defect: the worry that without government there will be no generally known and agreed-upon body of law. Why not? We should rather expect markets to converge on a relatively uniform set of laws for the same reason that they tend to converge on a single currency: customer demand.

...Indeed, it is not polycentric legal systems, but rather monocentric ones, that suffer from the legislative defect, since a mountain of bureaucratic regulations that no one can read is in effect equivalent to an absence of generally known law. Under a private legal system, changes in law occur as a response to customer needs, and so the body of law is less likely to metastasize to such unwieldy proportions. The solution to the legislative defect is not to monopolize legislation, but rather to privatize it.

...If there is an executive defect, it applies not to private law but to public law, in which individuals typically lack the power to withstand the arbitrary caprice of the state.

...None of the three functions of government — executive, legislative, or judicial — should be assigned to an exclusive monopoly. In the words of F. A. Hayek: "Law is too important a matter to be left in the hands of government."
The Nature of Law

Law vs. Legislation: Documentary Evidence

Markets Not Capitalism now on audio!

posted by Erik

I started reading Markets Not Capitalism some time ago, but put it down to listen to the new FREE audio book:  Markets Not Capitalism - Audiobook
its also on youtube: Markets Not Capitalism - On YouTube
you can also download the pdf for Kindle etc: radgeek Markets-Not-Capitalism

donations to c4ss are recommended, and buying the book from Autonomedia as well, but do as you will

So far its been a great read. There are some classic pieces, like Benjamin Tucker's "State socialism and anarchism..." and some contemporary pieces as well. Overall its a great introduction, or picture, of left libertarian freed market anarchism. Although I like Stephanie Murphy, I had a little trouble adjusting to her narrating style for the audio-book.  However, given the weight of the subject matter I can see the difficulty in infusing some parts with soul. After the first few sentences, not realizing who narrated it, I thought someone had created some fantastic new auto-reader that had lost almost all of its robotic-like traits for a damn good human imitation because the narration was so metered and matter-of-fact, but still lacked human-like rhythms and tone I'd expect-- they came later, though often subtle. Its growing on me, but it was a little awkward at first, as are many audio-books from what I hear from others. It still seems a little sterile or emotionless, but I'm grateful and happy nonetheless. Thank You Stephanie!

The big ideas of Markets Not Capitalism revolve around liberty/autonomy: free association, anti-authority/hierarchy, anti-privilege, the idea that "cost should be the limit of price," or the "right of increase," and that "usury" (interest, rent, and profit) should be abolished.

“Free-market economics” is generally assumed to be the province of “pro-business” politicians and the economic Right. It is usually state liberals, Progressives, Social Democrats and economic radicals who are expected to argue that people in their roles as workers, tenants, or consumers are shoved into alienating relationships and exploitative transactions – that they are systematically deprived of more humane alternatives and suffer because they are left to bargain, at a tremendous disadvantage, with bosses, banks, landlords, and big, faceless corporations. But while I agree that this is a radical – indeed, a socialistic position – I deny that there is anything reactionary, Right wing, or “pro-business” about the ideal of freed markets. Indeed, it is freed market relationships which provide the most incisive, vibrant, and fruitful basis for socialist ideals of economic justice, worker emancipation, and grassroots solidarity. Anticapitalist claims like the ones I have just made may be rarely heard among vulgar “free enterprise” apologists now, but they are hardly unusual in the long view of libertarian history.

Before the mid-20th century, when American libertarians entangled themselves in conservative coalitions against the New Deal and Soviet Communism, “free market” thinkers largely saw themselves as liberals or radicals, not as conservatives. Libertarian writers, from Smith to Bastiat to Spencer, had little interest in tailoring their politics to conservative or “pro-business” measurements. They frequently identified capitalists, and their protectionist policies, as among the most dangerous enemies of free exchange and property rights. The most radical among them were the mutualists and individualist Anarchists, among them Benjamin Tucker, Dyer Lum, Victor Yarros, and Voltairine de Cleyre...(Charles Johnson p.66)

Benjamin Tucker's ideas are indeed radical, yet a brilliant means to end privilege. Here he combines the ideas of Josiah Warren, Pierre J. Proudhon, and Karl Marx:

that the natural wage of labor is its product; that this wage, or product, is the only just source of income (leaving out, of course, gift, inheritance, etc.); that all who derive income from any other source abstract it directly or indirectly from the natural and just wage of labor; that this abstracting process generally takes one of three forms – interest, rent, and profit; that these three constitute the trinity of usury, and are simply different methods of levying tribute for the use of capital; that, capital being simply stored-up labor which has already received its pay in full, its use ought to be gratuitous, on the principle that labor is the only basis of price; that the lender of capital is entitled to its return intact, and nothing more; that the only reason why the banker, the stockholder, the landlord, the manufacturer, and the merchant are able to exact usury from labor lies in the fact that they are backed by legal privilege, or monopoly; and that the only way to secure labor the enjoyment of its entire product, or natural wage, is to strike down monopoly. (p.24)

 Besides the points above, the book focuses on:

The social relationships that market anarchists explicitly defend, and hope to free from all forms of government control...:

1 .  ownership of property, especially decentralized individual ownership, not only of personal possessions but also of land, homes, natural resources, tools, and capital goods;
2 .  contract and voluntary exchange of goods and services, by individuals or groups, on the expectation of mutual benefit;
3 .  free competition among all buyers and sellers – in price, quality, and
all other aspects of exchange – without ex ante restraints or burdensome barriers to entry;
4 .  entrepreneurial discovery, undertaken not only to compete in existing markets but also in order to discover and develop new opportunities for economic or social benefit; and
5 .  spontaneous order, recognized as a significant and positive coordinating force – in which decentralized negotiations, exchanges, and entrepreneurship converge to produce large-scale coordination without, or beyond the capacity of, any deliberate plans or explicit common blueprints for social or economic development. 

[M]arket anarchists sharply distinguish between the defense of the market form and apologetics for actually-existing distributions of wealth and class divisions, since these distributions and divisions hardly emerged as the result of unfettered markets, but rather from the governed, regimented, and privilege-ridden markets that exist today; they see actually-existing distributions of wealth and class divisions as serious and genuine social problems, but not as problems with the market form itself; these are not market problems but  ownership problems and coordination problems.

[M]arket anarchists see economic privilege as partly the result of serious ownership problems – problems with an unnatural, destructive, politically-imposed maldistribution of property titles – produced by the history of political dispossession and expropriation inflicted worldwide by means of war, colonialism, segregation, nationalization and kleptocracy. Markets are not viewed as being maximally free so long as they are darkened by the shadow of mass robbery or the denial of ownership; and they emphasize the importance of reasonable rectification of past injustices – including grassroots, anti-corporate, anti-neoliberal approaches to the “privatization” of state-controlled resources; processes for restitution to identifiable victims of injustice; and revolutionary expropriation of property fraudulently claimed by the state and state-entitled monopolists. (p.3)