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)

Cut from the Cloth

Cut from the cloth, and cut quite severely
Is this my world I no longer recognize
I'm hearing common words, common expressions
But nothing is common in my eyes

How do people sleep amidst the slaughter
Why would they vote in favor of their own defeat
Get out to the well and check the water (water water)
Results were incomplete

Cut from the cloth

Cut from the cloth, and dead to the masses
Just another case to be eulogized
But I'm breathing, breathing with no assistance
And responding to stimuli

Can anyone explain these new laws of nature
Why would they rule in favor of their own defeat
Cynics are excused from standing up to problems (problems problems)
Because they can't get out of their seats

Cut from the cloth, ran out screaming
I hope that none of this will stick to me
Everyone is nice, everyone is kind now
At least they're nice and kind to me

Why would they fold up something so precious
Why would they sing in favor of their own defeat
Maybe they found their voice while out shopping
The price was hard to beat

Cut from the cloth

Gang Violence by Ballot- Why Democracy is Bogus

Posted by Erik

“Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

Some reasons why I don't and won't vote: mp3 audio-- Democracies of any type make decisions via elections, the very essence of which transfers one’s will, thought, autonomy, and freedom to an outside power. It makes no difference whether one transfers that power to an elected representative or to an elusive majority. The point is that it’s no longer your own. Democracy has given it to the majority. You have been alienated from your capacity to determine the conditions of your existence in free cooperation with those around you.

There is an important distinction here. Parties are political in their claim to represent the interests of others. This is a claim to alienated power, because when someone takes power with a claim to represent me, I am separated from my own freedom to act...



In summary:

also see a newer post: Democracy Take 2

My issues with Democracies are more with representative Democracy than direct/participatory democracy, but neither is perfect.

"Democracy is freedom" is what I was taught, but no longer what I believe.  How is it "freedom", when the 'debate' or arguments are framed by the power elite as The Way, and The Light, and only its ends are sanctioned as solutions? Solutions outside the frame are excluded-- freedom, diversity, and autonomy die.

Our freedom of "choice" is typically A vs. B, yes vs. no, voting. Freedom is presented as a vote, but its a box. There is an illusion of participation, an illusion of freedom, and a presentation of right vs. wrong. The box becomes team against team, polarization, reductionism, sloganism, and often wedge-issues. The box is a predetermined narrow choice. Thesis vs. antithesis, and rarely synthesis. The teams become reactive, not proactive, and arguments outside the box may be ignored or rejected as outside the realm of acceptable because they are not the choices presented by the polity. The "Choice" given is believed/accepted as representing truth, the sanctity of democracy, and democracy as an end in itself. But it is the end of the self. The end of freedom. The end of choice. The end of autonomy. The individual becomes a subject of the voters, the subject of a master sovereign. The so-called freedom to decide via democracy is the right to kill the freedom of another (with the ballot box).

There is an illusion of a market of ideas, but voters are essentially consumers, if not spectators, feeding from the trough of A and B choices given to us by the producers that create and frame the agendas-- a shell-game we are supposed to care about or believe in. A game many think means freedom and power, but its merely the relinquishment of control. Some people do not vote for this reason, or the fact that the outcome is despised, or even the debate itself. As noted above, many people have to be urged to vote, and many are disgusted no matter what the outcome, or doubt anything real will emerge. This sentiment may lead to a complete lack of interest in voting at all.

The irony is that a failure to vote is viewed as a consent to be ruled. "If you don't vote you can't complain." "Can't complain"! F*ck off! I can and I will complain. "Can't complain" is exactly the retort I would expect from someone that believes in the freedom found in a box. Why should anyone have to submit to another, or a majority? Democracy is tyranny, it is the despotism of votes. The voter becomes a tyrant/despot by entering a voting booth. That's worth complaining about, vote or no vote. Besides, with A vs. B, someone is going to get the shaft. Is this OK? "Why would they vote (rule) in favor of their own defeat?" Ian Mackaye

The lesser of two (three or four...) evils may still be evil in the end. Not OK. That is not choice. "A" may be suicide, and B homicide. Democracy is the loading of the bullet by the ballot that triggers the death of freedom.

A fundamental issue is this: the freedom democracy purports to represent is not freedom. Democracy breaks the link between thought and action, or desire and fulfillment. The self organization of individuals, or unmediated interaction of free individuals, is crushed for a box of tyranny (of the majority or minority...and the majority may not even be a true majority if everyone doesn't vote. But that's besides the point.) Democracy creates a system where the conditions of our existence are not under our control. It is Rules, Rulers, and Ruled. Our desires are separated from our power to act. Voting transfers the will, or thoughts, or autonomy, or freedom, to an outside power. Democracy is not freedom, it is slavery, it is servitude. We are alienated from our own decisions, own actions, and free cooperation.

Oppression is supposed to be relieved by voting, yet voting is an act of aggression, and an act to become an oppressor. Voting asks that someone else submits, like it or not, and the State will carry out the act triggered by the vote, even if it requires the use of force or violence against others. Some sanctioned actions the State acts upon are "criminal" in nature. Freedom dies under authoritarianism.

Freedom is choice, not rights, but believing in rights goes hand-in-hand with democracy, as an outside force is necessary to protect those rights. However, "choice" in a democracy is usually an A and B dichotomy of submission to the gang's right to rule based on A or B. It is rights that limit choice, it is democracy that limits choice, and it is freedom from rights, or just freedom in choice, that is freedom.

You just have to realize that it is individuals standing up for their own moral choices who are the only defense of liberty. You don't have to wait for someone else to deliver whatever "right" you believe you are entitled to enjoy.  Make the choice to defend those freedoms you value.  And if someone tries to stomp on your freedom, you will have to choose what to do about it.  You can accept the stomping, and lose your freedom, by default.  Or you can fight back.  If you do so impulsively, stupidly, ineffectively, you can still lose and get stomped.  But with planning, ingenuity and perseverance, you can win. Especially if you have help from like-minded friends and allies. Maybe you won't, but it's a chance, and you decide if it's a chance worth fighting for. Your own choices are the only control you have over your life; they are also the source of any security or liberty you will achieve. Dabooda

Society can exist without the State, but reaching civility is not obtained by acting against sectors of society by voting, i.e. strong-arming others into the box of servitude. The result is not order, but chaos and disfranchisement, the election of a gang into the halls of authority with a league of bureaucratic thugs to see the racketeering is carried out.

The current mafioso election, and the 57th time we'll be duped:
OBAMA: Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's no evidence of that in their daily lives. (actually said during the 56th primary?)
ROMNEY: My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

In the end its not voting that really matters, but how we act with and towards others. With or without the State apparatus and voting, the real change or difference is in our actions towards or with others. Its not like voting really changes things, it is the actors in a "society" that do-- as Obama and Romney point out above. Although democracy manifests itself as legit, it essentially amounts to gang violence by ballot.

People whose agenda for building a better society depends on electoral politics are like rubes in a carnival audience, so distracted by the pretty assistant that they don’t pay attention to the magician’s hands. The real action is the stuff people are doing outside the state, without waiting for the state’s permission, to create the building blocks of a new society. Kevin Carson

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." Emma Goldman

With suffrage, or the universal vote, it is evident that the law is neither direct nor personal, any more than collective. The law of the majority is not my law, it is the law of force; hence the government based upon it is not my government; it is government by force.

That I may remain free; that I may not have to submit to any law but my own, and that I may govern myself, the authority of the suffrage must be renounced: we must give up the vote, as well as representation and monarchy. In a word, everything in the government of society which rests on the divine must be suppressed, and the whole rebuilt upon the human idea of contract.

When I agree with one or more of my fellow citizens for any object whatever, it is clear that my own will is my law; it is I myself, who, in fulfilling my obligation, am my own government.

Therefore if I could make a contract with all, as I can with some; if all could renew it among themselves, if each group of citizens, as a town, county, province, corporation, company, formed by a like contract, and considered as a moral person, could thereafter, and always by a similar contract, agree with every and all other groups, it would be the same as if my own will were multiplied to infinity. I should be sure that the law thus made on all questions in the Republic, from millions of different initiatives, would never be anything but my law; and if this new order of things were called government, it would be my government.

Thus the principle of contract, far more than that of authority, would bring about the union of producers, centralize their forces, and assure the unity and solidarity of their interests.

The system of contracts, substituted for the system of laws, would constitute the true government of the man and of the citizen; the true sovereignty of the people, the republic.

The Contract is Equality, in its profound and spiritual essence.—Does this man believe himself my equal; does he not take the attitude of my master and exploiter, who demands from me more than it suits me to furnish, and has no intention of returning it to me; who says that I am incapable of making my own law, and expects me to submit to his? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Vote for yourself, elect no one.

Legislation – at least the kind of legislation practiced by states – is not an alternative to violence but is rather a mode of violence. Those who favour persuasion over coercion should be seeking to reduce or eliminate it, not to glorify it.

Nor is violence an accidental feature of the state’s way of doing things. It is essential to states that they compel dissenters to go along with their projects; if they ceased to do this they would become mere wholesome voluntary associations, without the monopoly power that characterizes the state as such...

The state, after all, is just a particular (pathological) pattern of social activity, one constituted and sustained by the actions not only of the rulers but, crucially, of the ruled. The libertarian revolution is the only kind of revolution that doesn't by its nature require violence, since it doesn't need to take over the reins of power (either by electoral or insurrectionary means). Such a revolution can be nonviolent because it proceeds by building alternative institutions and gradually winning more and more people’s allegiance (if that’s not too statey a word) to those institutions. The pillars that uphold the state are, like Soylent Green, made of people; when the people walk away to form new patterns, the pillars dissolve and the state crumbles. No need to storm the barricades; just cease to prop them up.

By contrast with the all-or-nothing character of conventional political reform, where proposals have to be approved by 51% of the voters (or by 51% of a bunch of politicians elected by 51% of the voters) in order to be implemented, the libertarian revolution spreads incrementally, the way new products do – a few customers at a time. The revolution is complete when those still participating in the state’s institutions and practices are too few to cause any trouble to the rest of us. In Paul Goodman’s words: “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life.”  Roderick Long

“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

Representative democracy asks that we select a master, yet somehow unable to be masters ourselves, but the ability to make the leap from sovereignty to the selection of a sovereign begs whether we need to select the later at all, as we are capable of discerning what it takes by ourselves— representation leaves power with the representative once selected, at that point the voter sits on the sidelines and hopes for the best, practically powerless.

Other options? http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3D82D71342FF00E5