Dissenting Leftist

The Prison Industrial Complex vs. the Queer and Trans Community

2011-12-27T01:06:00.000-08:00

Jane Marquardt is a major figure in Utah's LGBTQ community. In 2010 she and her partner Tami jointly received Equality Utah's Allies for Equality Award. Jane now sits on the advisory council for Equality Utah. Yet in addition to their work within the LGBTQ community, the Marquardts profit off of mass incarceration. You see, Jane Marquardt is the Board Vice Chair for Management and Training Corporation, and served as a director and legal counsel for the company between 1980 and 1999. Management and Training Corporation is the third largest private prison profiteering company in the United States. In addition to incarcerating convicted criminals, MTC receives federal contracts to operate immigration detention centers. In order to guarantee continued profit off of those contracts, MTC has pushed anti-immigrant legislation by backing Arizona's Russell Pearce, the sponsor of the infamous SB 1070.

In profiting off of incarceration and backing anti-immigrant politicians, Marquardt puts herself not only on the wrong side of immigration and criminal justice, but also on the wrong side of human rights abuses against the LGBTQ community. Discrimination against the queer and trans community puts us at higher risk of being locked away in prisons and immigration detention centers. And once queer and trans people are locked up, they face a litany of human rights abuses.

Criminalizing Our Communities

Some communities are more likely to have their members incarcerated than others. The racial and class biases that plague our criminal justice system and our immigration enforcement system are well documented and will not be discussed much here. Instead, I want to discuss the policies which criminalize the queer and trans communities, making us more likely to be housed in prisons and detention centers, including those operated by the Management and Training Corporation.

The first major factor that marginalizes and criminalizes members of our community is homelessness. According to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, "Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless American youth, between 20 and 40 percent identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT)." The task force also reports that "26 percent of gay teens who came out to their parents/guardians were told they must leave home; LGBT youth also leave home due to physical, sexual and emotional abuse." In addition to being more likely to participate in criminalized activities like drug use and sex work, homeless LGBTQ youth face the many criminal sanctions which explicitly target the homeless. According to a 2009 report by The National Coalition for the Homeless:

Even though most cities do not provide enough affordable housing, shelter space, and food to meet the need, many cities use the criminal justice system to punish people living on the street for doing things that they need to do to survive. Such measures often prohibit activities such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and/or begging in public spaces and include criminal penalties for violation of these laws. Some cities have even enacted food sharing restrictions that punish groups and individuals for serving homeless people. Many of these measures appear to have the purpose of moving homeless people out of sight, or even out of a given city.

This criminalization of homelessness is not limited to cities conventionally seen as conservative. To the contrary, the same 2009 report ranked both liberal Berkeley and the famously queer friendly San Francisco among their "10 Meanest Cities" for criminalizing homelessness. These criminal sanctions put queer and trans homeless youth at increased risk of eventual incarceration.

Beyond the specific issue of youth homelessness, a variety of factors contribute to structural poverty for certain segments of the LGBTQ community. Queer and transgender people face discrimination in housing and employment. Furthermore, many face educational barriers, due to harassment and bullying in school, or even an inability for transgender people to apply to schools due to discrepancies in their IDs. This graphic from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project is useful for explaining the interlocking discrimination that can trap many people in poverty, particularly as it applies to the trans community.

Once one is trapped in poverty, one is exposed to profiling and disproportionate police presence in poor communities. One is also more likely to be subject to the criminal laws which target the homeless. Furthermore, members of the transgender community can face criminal charges simply for living in accordance with their gender identity. For example, they can be arrested for using the "wrong" bathroom, due to suspicious discrepancies in their ID, and even on trumped up charges of solicitation. This flow chart from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project explains the phenomenon well.

The combination of employment discrimination and criminalization particularly impacts queer and trans immigrants. In America's labyrinthine legal immigration system, finding skilled employment is one of the few paths to legal immigration status. When that is closed off by discrimination, one is far more likely to be an undocumented immigrant. This difficulty is compounded by the structural poverty and criminalization already discussed here, as once an undocumented immigrant is picked up by police, they are likely to be sent to a detention center and eventually deported.

In addition to the risk factors detailed here, evidence from the juvenile justice system demonstrates that once arrested, LGBTQ youth are more likely to be placed in pre-trial detention. According to an article in The Nation:

The road to incarceration begins in pretrial detention, before the youth even meets a judge. Laws and professional standards state that it's appropriate to detain a child before trial only if she might run away or harm someone. Yet for queer youth, these standards are frequently ignored. According to UC Santa Cruz researcher Dr. Angela Irvine, LGBT youth are two times more likely than straight youth to land in a prison cell before adjudication for nonviolent offenses like truancy, running away and prostitution. According to Ilona Picou, executive director of Juvenile Regional Services, Inc., in Louisiana, 50 percent of the gay youth picked up for nonviolent offenses in Louisiana in 2009 were sent to jail to await trial, while less than 10 percent of straight kids were. "Once a child is detained, the judge assumes there's a reason you can't go home," says Dr. Marty Beyer, a juvenile justice specialist. "A kid coming into court wearing handcuffs and shackles versus a kid coming in with his parents—it makes a very different impression."

This initial bias makes it clear that queer and trans youth are disproportionately locked up in this country, even before they are given a trial.

The Brutality Within (Trigger warning for rape, misgendering, and bigoted violence)

To explain the brutal human rights violations faced by queer and trans inmates and immigration detainees, I will begin with the story of Tanya Guzman-Martinez. Guzman-Martinez, a transgender woman, faced a horrific litany of abuses, including sexual assault, while she was held in Arizona's Eloy Detention Center, an immigration detention center run by the prison profiteers at Corrections Corporation of America. In a classic case of the misgendering systematic in our prison system, Guzman-Martinez was housed with male inmates despite the fact that she had "surgically altered her breasts, buttocks, hips, and legs to appear more feminine." According to a lawsuit filed recently by the ACLU, she was harassed and assaulted by inmates and guards many times at the detention center. Both inmates and guards regularly called her "dog," "faggot," and "boy." One guard told inmates that in exchange for "three soup packets" they could "have" Guzman-Martinez, an obvious encouragement of rape. Allegedly she was also "often inappropriately patted down," in other words groped, by male guards.

As if this frequent sexual harassment from guards and inmates were not enough, Guzman-Martinez faced two instances of violent sexual assault while she was detained at Eloy. In one case a fellow inmate pushed her up against a wall, groped her, and threatened to have her beaten and raped if she reported the incident. The other was perpetrated by Justin Manford, a guard at the CCA detention center. According to the ACLU complaint:

Manford maliciously forced Ms. Guzman-Martinez to watch him masturbate into a white styrofoam cup and then demanded that she ingest his ejaculated semen. Failures by Defendants CCA, DeRosa and Manford to adequately screen and monitor Manford, and to prevent situations where a male officer such as Manford is alone with a transgender woman detainee and out of sight of others, enabled this horrific assault on Ms. Guzman-Martinez.
The assault followed a history of frequent inappropriate behavior and inquiries by Manford about Ms. Guzman-Martinez, including questions about her sexuality, whether she had a boyfriend, and whether other inmates had seen her breasts.
During the commission of the assault, Manford made offensive gestures, faces, and comments towards Ms. Guzman-Martinez and threatened that he could have her locked up in “the hole,” lengthen her detention or have her deported to Mexico if she did not follow his demands.

While Guzman-Martinez reported Manford and he was convicted of "attempted unlawful sexual contact", justice certainly was not done. Manford was only sentenced to two days, time served.

Sexual assaults like these are not isolated incidents for queer and trans inmates and detainees. A 2007 study found that “[s]exual assault is 13 times more prevalent among transgender inmates, with 59 percent reporting being sexually assaulted.” This same study found that 67% of inmates who identified as LGBTQ reported being sexually assaulted while incarcerated, a rate 15 times more prevalent than that of the general inmate population. According to a fact sheet from Just Detention International, "LGBTQ inmates are frequently labeled as ‘queens,’ ‘punks,’ or ‘bitches’ for the duration of their detention, permanently marking them as targets." After being assaulted, queer and trans inmates then face bigoted victim blaming. As the JDI fact sheet explains, "Corrections staff tend to confuse homosexuality and transgender status with consent to rape, and trivialize the problem. LGBTQ inmates frequently describe officials ignoring or even laughing at reports of sexual violence. To make matters worse, LGBTQ inmates who report abuse are often subjected to further attacks, humiliating strip searches, and punitive segregation."

Beyond mere heterosexism and cissexism on the part of guards and inmates, policies such as misgendering systematically abuse queer and trans inmates. As the Just Detention fact sheet explains:

The homophobic culture of corrections is compounded by policies that do not take into account the specific concerns of LGBTQ prisoners. For example, transgender women are typically housed with men, in accordance with their birth gender, and are required to shower and submit to strip searches in front of male officers and inmates. In addition, gay and transgender inmates often seek protective custody because of their heightened risk for abuse, only to be placed in solitary confinement, locked in a cell for 23 hours a day, and losing access to programming and other services.

Thus, official policies in the prison system subject queer and transgender inmates to serious psychological discomfort, while heightening their already severe risk of sexual abuse.

In addition to violence, harassment, and sexual assault, queer and trans inmates are often denied access to appropriate medical care. According to Masen Davis, Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center, “Prisons have a legal duty to provide adequate health care, but LGBT people in prisons often face extra barriers to accessing basic and necessary medical treatment.” One example of this is denying transgender inmates access to hormone treatment, even if they were using such hormones prior to incarceration. In Wisconsin, the ACLU had to file a lawsuit to overturn a law that banned medical treatment for transgender prisoners. Another example concerns HIV positive inmates. A 2010 report from Human Rights Watch details the systematic discrimination faced by HIV positive prisoners in South Carolina.

Abuse of queer and trans inmates is not limited to adult prisons and detention centers. A report for The Nation titled 'I Was Scared to Sleep': LGBT Youth Face Violence Behind Bars vividly describes incidents of violence and harassment that LGBTQ youth have faced in America's juvenile justice system. From beatings to victim blaming to bigoted slurs from guards, queer and transgender youth are regularly abused in juvenile corrections facilities. They are faced with human rights violations as brutal as those faced by their adult counterparts.

Deportation as a Death Sentence

For companies like Corrections Corporation of America, GeoGroup, and Management and Training Corporation, the money comes from keeping people locked up. But when you're operating an immigration detention center, the end result for many detainees is inevitably deportation. In order to secure more detainees, all three of these corporations have financially backed anti-immigrant legislation, and such legislation almost certainly means an increase not just in rates of detention, but in rates of deportation.

So what sorts of consequences can deportation have for queer and transgender immigrants? In some cases, it can mean that they will be deported to countries where they are very likely to be persecuted, perhaps even killed, for who they are. For example, Tanya Guzman-Martinez, whose ordeal in a CCA detention facility we already discussed, applied for and received asylum on grounds that she would be persecuted in Mexico for being transgender. When HIV positive immigrants are deported, it can be a death sentence if they are sent to a country without access to necessary medication. A 2009 Human Rights Watch report, Returned to Risk, discusses deportation of HIV positive migrants in detail.

What kind of ally profits from this?

This essay is mostly intended to educate people about the ways prisons, immigration detention centers, and the deportation process oppress the queer and transgender community, not to attack Jane Marquardt. However, it's well worth asking: What kind of ally to the LGBTQ community profits off of these sorts of human rights violations? Jane Marquardt is a respected and influential member of Utah's LGBTQ community, but if she profits off of a system that oppresses us, how good of an ally is she? While I have not yet found specific details regarding how her company, Management and Training Corporation, handles sexual assault against queer and trans inmates, there are multiple documented cases of sexual assault and illegal strip searches in their facilities. Furthermore, regardless of how MTC handles their own facilities, they have pushed for laws that increase rates of immigration detention and deportation. In doing so, they have backed the caging, rape, harassment, abuse, and possibly even wrongful death of queer and trans immigrants.

This also raises a question for the LGBTQ movement more generally. Where will our focus as activists be? Are we going to solely focus on easy issues like gay marriage and Don't Ask Don't Tell, or will we confront the caging of queer and trans people, as well as the subsequent harassment, rape, assault, and deportation they face? This question decides whether we will be allies merely to privileged queers or to all queers.

Has (or can) the internet make pornography less misogynistic?

2011-10-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

One of the best known viewpoints within feminism is opposition to pornography. Many prominent feminists, including Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, Diana Russell, and Jill Riddington, oppose pornography on the grounds that its production involves exploitation and abuse of women, and that it sends misogynistic messages regarding sex. However, their critiques do not apply to all visual or artistic portrayals of sex designed to titillate. Indeed, some feminists explicitly differentiate between different explicit portrayals of sex for entertainment. For instance, in her book Confronting Pornography, Jill Riddington writes “If the message is one that equates sex with domination, or with the infliction of pain, or one that denies sex as a means of human communication, the message is a pornographic one.... Erotica, in contrast, portrays mutual interaction.” Thus, much material which would be defined colloquially as pornography is not defined as negative by those who accept anti-pornography feminist theories. In this paper, I intend to show that much of the pornography proliferation seen on the internet is proliferation of material Riddington would define as erotica rather than pornography. Further, by decentralizing the means of producing pornography, the internet has made pornography less exploitative. By decentralizing the means of pornography production, the internet has enabled feminists and other marginalized communities to produce empowering yet titillating content, all the while decreasing incentives for abuse and exploitation.

One prominent critique of pornography stems from the assertion that performers are often abused and exploited during the production process. In some cases, this involves violence against women, even in pornography which appears to be non-violent. For example, Linda Marchiano, who starred in the seemingly non-violent film Deep Throat, has written several books on the rape and abuse she suffered during that film’s production. In 1983, a variety of porn actresses gave testimony on their own similar ordeals at hearings on a Minneapolis ordinance which would define pornography as a civil rights violation. Such testimony indicates that at least some pornography involves violent abuse of women, which leads anti-pornography feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon to write “before pornography became the pornographer’s speech it was somebody’s life” as a rejoinder to those who argue that pornography is protected as free speech (Russell, 43). Further, even in cases where violence is not employed, professional pornography has elements of exploitation which become morally dubious. Producers operate in a position of power over actors. This workplace hierarchy, combined with financial pressures, blurs lines of consent, pressuring people to participate in sex they may not otherwise enjoy or be comfortable with. Even from a sex positive feminist perspective, this is problematic, as it separates sex from consent, fulfillment, and pleasure, instead placing it in a context of hierarchy and economic pressure.

However, the internet has the potential to largely pornography away from hierarchical professional models of production. “Amateur porn” has become more popular since the advent of the internet permitted anyone with a camera to produce and post pornography. Many fans praise amateur porn for possessing superior realism compared to professionally produced pornography. But more importantly for our purposes, amateur pornography is about the pleasure of the participants, rather than workplace hierarchies or economic incentives. Indeed, the internet has permitted pornography to be made which focuses upon key parts of pleasure which are largely ignored by professional pornographers. For instance, most professionally produced pornography focuses on pleasure for male target audiences, even adding unrealistic elements to lesbianism and female masturbation for the sake of men. However, www.ifeelmyself.com features amateur videos and pictures of women engaging in masturbation. By portraying female sexual pleasure as women actually experience it, www.ifeelmyself.com treats sexuality as providing pleasure in a mutual way rather than exploitative or hierarchical manner, and thus meets Jill Riddington’s definition of erotica rather than pornography. However, regardless of the message sent by amateur pornography, when consensual it does not involve exploitation in anything resembling the way professional pornography does.

The internet may eventually permit pornography to be decentralized enough that hierarchical models of production are almost entirely abolished, replaced instead by various types of amateur porn. As the internet has enabled people to produce and distribute pornography for free, the supply of pornography, including free pornography, will rise while demand remains constant, thus decreasing the average price people are willing to pay for pornography, potentially bringing it down to zero. This dramatic increase in competition will decrease the amount of concentrated capital possessed by pornography production companies, and decrease the incentive to make porn for money. Thus, exploitative models of pornography production could be entirely subsumed by amateur pornography, which we have demonstrated to present fewer problems from a feminist perspective.

It should be made clear that this has not happened yet. Indeed, the internet currently is home to many large pornography companies. For example, many pornography sites are run by Bang Bros, a production company founded in 2000 which currently operates 29 websites. In the year 2007, the company generated 1.9 million dollars in sales revenue. It is noteworthy that in spite of using a commercial production model rather than decentralized and voluntary amateur productions, Bang Bros advertises many of their sites as “amateur porn,” presumably to cash in on the superior realism often associated with amateur pornography. This misrepresentation of commercial pornography as “amateur” has likely slowed down the diversification and decentralization of pornography that the internet enables. In order to limit the commercial aspects of pornography, which introduce dubious power relations and exploitation, the internet’s full potential must be used to undermine commercial pornography’s profitability. Such an approach would involve those who are comfortable doing so producing their own independent amateur pornography. It could also involve violating intellectual property restrictions by distributing existing commercial pornography on image and file sharing sites. This would undercut commercial pornography in the same way other proprietary content industries have had their profits undercut by internet piracy. A combination of the two tactics would dissolve pornography production towards smaller scale production, with sexuality being recorded for the love and pleasure of sexuality, rather than to appeal to lucrative target audiences.

While many feminist arguments against pornography appeal primarily to exploitative working conditions, some are largely based on the notion that pornography sends misogynistic messages and promotes misogynistic behavior among viewers. For instance, Riddington writes that pornography “equates sex with domination, or with the infliction of pain” and “denies sex as a means of human communication.” Moreover, many feminists have argued that viewing pornography increases predilections towards sexual assault. For example, in an article for the Yale Law Journal on the subject of sexual equality and law, Catherine MacKinnon expressed this position by stating:

In one study, one third of American men in the sample say they would rape a woman if assured they would not get caught. The figure climbs following exposure to commonly available aggressive pornography. Pornography, which sexualizes gender inequality, is a major institution of socialization into these roles. The evidence suggests that women are targeted for intimate assault because the degradation and violation of women is eroticized, indeed defines the social meaning of female sexuality in societies of sex inequality. Sexual assault thus becomes a definitive act of sexualized power and masculinity under male supremacy (MacKinnon, 1302-1303).

MacKinnon’s basic argument is that pornography eroticizes and glorifies acts of sexual assault, thus tying it intimately to how males see sexuality and implying that women are sexual objects open to assault. This perspective is expounded upon empirically by Diana Russell in an article for the journal Political Psychology. In this article, Russell cited a variety of studies which showed that men are surprisingly willing to commit sexual assault, and that this willingness increases when they are aroused (43-45). Russell then described data on how often adult entertainment features aggressive or violent content, finding that one fifth of all sex episodes in erotic paperbacks involved rape or sexual assault, that less than 3% of the rapists in these books experienced negative consequences, and that in a sample of 150 pornographic home videos 19% of scenes featured violence or aggression, with the aggressors portrayed in a positive light 60% of the time (46-47). Such empirical data bolstered Russell’s theory of pornography providing a social model for sexual assault, which is very similar to MacKinnon’s theory on this subject. However, MacKinnon and Russell both wrote their articles before pornography became a primarily online phenomenon.

While the internet has dramatically increased the availability of pornography, sexual assault has declined. According to the FBI, forcible rape has declined from 41.1 per 100,000 people in 1990 to 28.7 per 100,000 people, an all time low, in 2009. If Russell and MacKinnon’s theories regarding how pornography can impact inclinations towards sexual assault are correct, this may indicate that porn has become less misogynistic in its message. The diversification and proliferation of pornography online has made it difficult to gather statistics on how much internet porn portrays sexual assault in a positive light, or sends other misogynistic messages. However, one trend which can be documented is a rise in porn which portrays female sexual pleasure in a positive light, and generally operates in line with feminist principles. The example I typically refer back to is www.ifeelmyself.com, which portrays real women masturbating and experiencing pleasure and orgasms. However, entire genres of feminist, alternative, and queer pornography have emerged to portray sexuality in both titillating and empowering ways. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the emergence of the Feminist Porn Awards, issued each year by www.goodforher.com. The award’s site states that “the world is inundated with cheesy, cliche, degrading, and patronizing porn” but also that “erotic fantasy is powerful” and “women and marginalized communities deserve to put their dreams and desires on film, too.” Thus, the awards recognize porn which uses visual erotica not to degrade, marginalize, or exploit, but to portray sexuality in a manner which empowers women and the sexually marginalized. Specifically, to be eligible for a Feminist Porn Award, a film must meet the following criteria:

1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction, etc. of the work.
2) It depicts genuine female pleasure
3) It expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn.

That the Feminist Porn Awards find so many eligible nominees each year indicates that pornography is being used for its positive potential. It indicates that while some pornography may have the rape promoting messages described by MacKinnon and Russell, there is a growing genre of pornography which serves to expand sexual representation and benefit women and other marginalized groups.

This potential for pornography to be used for sexual liberation has been noted before, specifically by individualist feminist Wendy McElroy, the author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography. In her book, McElroy argues that pornography benefits women both personally and politically. One benefit she identifies is that “provides sexual information on at least three levels: it gives a panoramic view of the world's sexual possibilities; it allows women to ‘safely’ experience sexual alternatives; and, it provides a different form of information than can be found in textbooks or discussions.” These purported benefits have all been enhanced by the internet fueled diversification of porn. As pornography begins to be made for nearly every imaginable topic, and the means of pornography production are made available to women and other marginalized groups, the “panoramic view of the world’s sexual possibilities” expands to encompass many sexual topics which would normally be taboo in our puritanical society. Similarly, because pornography has become more diverse online, the ability pornography grants women to “‘safely’ experience sexual alternatives” is expanded by the internet.

Ultimately, the internet has had several impacts on pornography, all of them positive from a feminist perspective. It has provided a means to decrease exploitation, by decentralizing the means of pornography production, allowing people to produce amateur and cooperative pornography based upon pleasure rather than economic pressure. This same decentralization has provided feminists and sexually marginalized communities with an outlet to develop their own pornography and erotica as an alternative to degrading and misogynistic pornography. This decentralization also means pornography has diversified, thus permitting its beneficial and exploratory aspects to be applied to a broader and less confined range of sexuality.

Works cited include, but are not limited to:

Russell, Diana. “Pornography and Rape: A Causal Model.” Political Psychology 9.1

(1988): 41-73

MacKinnon, Catherine. “Reflections on Sex Equality Under Law.” Yale Law Review

100.5 (1999): 1281-1328

McElroy, Wendy. XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography. New York: St. Martin’s

Press, 1995. <http://www.wendymcelroy.com/xxx/>

I Feel Myself. 1 April 2011. Web. 1 April 2011.

Ridington, Jillian. Confronting Pornography: A Feminist on the Front Lines.

Vancouver, Canada: CRIAW/ICREF, 1989. Print.

Don't Tax the Rich, Smash Their Privilege: A Response to Warren Buffett

2011-08-22T00:17:00.000-07:00

Recently the progressive blogosphere was abuzz with approving links to billionaire investor Warren Buffett's latest New York Times op-ed, "Stop Coddling the Super Rich." In this piece, Buffett concisely exposes the various loopholes that allow the wealthiest Americans to pay far fewer taxes than their middle class, working class, and poor counterparts. While the tax code in all its complexity certainly privileges the wealthy at the expense of most Americans, this barely scratches the surface of the ways the state oppresses poor and working people to line the pockets of the opulent. Buffett's article never mentions direct corporate welfare or the numerous privileges that the wealthy hold thanks to intellectual property, the land monopoly, regulatory barriers to entry, suppression of labor movements, and imperialism, to name a few. To illustrate the extent to which government intervention privileges the super rich at the expense of everyone else, I will examine Warren Buffett's stock portfolio and expose how his wealth stems from violence, coercion, imperialism, and statism.

Coca Cola, Human Rights, and Labor Suppression

According to http://warren-buffett-portfolio.com/, the #1 corporation in Warren Buffet's stock portfolio is Coca Cola. Coca Cola has an abysmal human rights record, most noteworthy thanks to its colorful history of repressing labor organizing. According to an article by Jeremy Rayner for the John F. Henning Center for International Labor Relations:

There is mounting evidence that American companies are complicit in the persecution of trade unionists at their Colombian operations. In the case of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, where Isídro Segundo Gil was murdered, the union Sinaltrainal argues that Coca-Cola knowingly stood by and allowed the plant's manager to bring in paramilitaries to destroy the union. The workers at the Carepa plant had been asking both Coca-Cola and its bottler, Bebidas y Alimentos, to intervene on their behalf for two months before Isídro Segundo Gil's murder. The plant manager, Ariosto Milan Mosquera had announced publicly that he had asked the paramilitaries to destroy the union. His declaration had been followed by a series of death threats from the paramilitaries, which had prompted the union to send letters to both Coca-Cola and Bebidas y Alimentos asking that they intervene to secure their workers' safety. And this was not the first time that threats against workers had been carried out. Just two years before, in 1994, the paramilitaries had killed two trade unionists at the same plant. It should have surprised no one when two and a half months after the union's plea for help, Isídro Segundo Gil was murdered and the union busted.

Unionists have also been assassinated at other Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia, both before and after the incident at Carepa. One unionist, José Avelino Chicano, was killed at a Coca-Cola plant in Pasto in 1989. In 2002, despite the limited publicity surrounding the events at Carepa, a union leader named Oscar Dario Soto Polo was killed during the course of contract negotiations at the plant in Bucaramanga. Despite the remarkable courage and perseverance of Colombia's labor activists, the campaign of intimidation has necessarily taken its toll on worker organizing. The president of Sinaltrainal, Javier Correa, reported last year that the number of unionized workers at Coca-Cola plants had dropped by more than two thirds since 1993-from 1,300 workers to only 450.

Such campaigns of violent intimidation have been aided and abetted by US tax dollars. Many of those involved with these anti-union campaigns of violence were graduates of the Defense Department's infamous School of the Americas. The right wing paramilitaries which regularly slaughter labor organizers are closely connected to the Colombian military, which receives huge amounts of aid from the US government so as to fight the drug war as well as a dirty war against the anti-capitalist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Thus, even if Warren Buffett were to pay more in taxes, at least some of that money would go to violence against labor organizers.

In addition to brutality in Colombia, Coca Cola has been implicated in violence and intimidation against unionists in Guatemala. These and other Coca Cola human rights violations are profiled in detail at http://killercoke.org/.

Note that, contrary to Buffett's progressive image, he profits immensely off of Coca Cola's human rights violations. If Buffett really wants to "get serious about shared sacrifice," he should sacrifice the profits he has gained through the corrupt tactics of Coca Cola and use some of his immense wealth to help the Coca Cola workers suffering throughout the globe thanks to those tactics. He should also repudiate the US government's military aid and imperialist intervention in countries like Colombia.

Wells Fargo and the Prison Industrial Complex

The number two corporation in Warren Buffet's stock portfolio is Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo is a major beneficiary of corporate welfare. For instance, they received $43.7 billion in federal taxpayer bailout money. But far more destructive is Wells Fargo's investment in prison profiteers. Wells Fargo owns 4 million shares in the Geo Group, the second largest private prison corporation in America, and 50,000 shares in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison corporation in the country. These shares combined are valued at more than $120 million (Source: http://www.cjjc.org/en/news/50-immigrant-rights/215-wells-fargo-divest-from-prisons ).

Companies such as the Geo Group and CCA do not earn their money by providing goods or services to customers. Rather, they make their money solely from the government, and solely for locking human beings in cages, mostly for non-violent offenses. Further, these companies actively lobby for unjust laws, largely using the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporatist conservative political group. As Bob Elk and Mike Sloan wrote in a recent article for The Nation:

ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Timesinvestigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

These laws increase the number of peaceful people locked in cages, as well as the lengths of their sentences. Those they lock up are almost without exception members of the working class, and they are disproportionately people of color. Meanwhile, Geo Group and CCA gather obscene profits from these racist and classist laws. Wells Fargo then profits by investing in these firms, and Warren Buffett profits by investing heavily in Wells Fargo. If Warren Buffett were to pay more in taxes, at least some of those taxes would go to the prison industrial complex and then head straight back to Warren Buffett's unfathomably large bank account.

Warren Buffett the War Profiteer

Never does the government "coddle the super rich" more than in times of war. In war, poor and working people are sent to fight and die in a foreign land. They are sent to kill the populations of poor countries, and those killed disproportionately represent the country's working class. Meanwhile, corporate executives and investors profit heavily by selling the weapons, vehicles, and other devices used to murder poor people in a distant land. It should not surprise you to learn that Warren Buffett is among the investors profiting off of the American military industrial complex.

According to http://warren-buffett-portfolio.com/, Buffett owns 7.8 million shares of General Electric stock. GE produces a wide variety of products, and their war profiteering portfolio is no less diverse. General Electric has sold the US military aircraft, missiles, bombs, and battlefield computer systems, to name a few. Further, GE has been charged multiple times with defrauding the US government in relation to their defense contracts.

Warren Buffett also owns 34.2 million shares in ConocoPhilips and 0.4 million shares in Exxon Mobil, both of which are oil companies which have profited from the invasion of Iraq. Earlier this year Buffett seriously considered investing in General Dynamics, a company which earns all of its revenue through military contracts.

An increase in Warren Buffett's tax burden would not change this dynamic in the slightest. Indeed, the bulk of tax dollars go to so called "defense spending," which amounts to nothing more than blood stained subsidies to these and other military industrial complex corporations.

Monsanto and the Patent Monopoly

CNN Money reported in 2010 that Warren Buffett owned stock in Monsanto. Monsanto is a controversial agribusiness and biotechnology firm, best known for developing genetically modified organism (GMO) crops. For this reason, they have been strongly opposed by many environmental groups. The impact of GMO crops is a topic for scientific debate which I will not discuss here. However, it is incredibly noteworthy that Monsanto has enlisted patent law to crush small producers, in a dramatic illustration of the "patent monopoly" long written about by individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker.

Monsanto's genetically modified seeds are all patented, granting the company monopoly privileges and the ability to use state violence to harass any farmers who save seeds, or even those whose fields are cross pollinated by Monsanto's GMO crops. Monsanto has filed over 100 patent lawsuits against farmers. One, Kem Ralph, has had to pay $3 million dollars and serve prison time, simply for saving seeds, a common agricultural practice. Such aggressive tactics from Monsanto have prompted a group of farmers represented by the Public Patent Foundation to fight back:

On behalf of 22 agricultural organisations, 12 seed businesses and 26 farms and farmers, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is suing the biotech company in the federal district court in Manhattan and assigned to Judge Naomi Buchwald.
The organic plaintiffs had to pre-emptively protect themselves from potential patent infringement in case of accidental contamination of their crops by genetically modified organisms (GMOs), said PUBPAT.
“This case asks whether Monsanto has the right to sue organic farmers for patent infringement if Monsanto’s transgenic seed should land on their property,” said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT’s executive director and a law professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. PUBPAT is a non-profit legal services organisation based at Cardozo law school. Its stated mission is “to protect freedom in the patent system.”
“It seems quite perverse that an organic farmer contaminated by transgenic seed could be accused of patent infringement, but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for having sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement, so we had to act to protect the interests of our clients,” he said in a press release.

It is disturbing that such a lawsuit is necessary. It is disturbing that a corporation can use the state to exercise this sort of control and intimidation against small farmers. It is perhaps more disturbing that a billionaire who invests in and profits from these coercive business practices is being held up as a progressive icon.

Time to Fight Back in the Class War

Warren Buffett famously said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Buffett was talking about the tax code, but that barely scratches the surface of the violent and rapacious class warfare the super-rich are waging against ordinary people. It becomes a bit difficult to make tax law your top priority when you realize that labor leaders are being murdered, unnecessary wars are being fought, peaceful people are put in prison, and farmers are coerced into bankruptcy, all for the sake of corporate profits. Changes to the tax code will never fix that. So what will?

Every problem I have identified here stems from the same source: Unaccountable centralized power. When a centralized state is granted the power to wage war, its killings are presumed to be "policy" rather than crimes, and corporations can influence state policy, wars for profit are the inevitable result. When a centralized state is given the power to lock up peaceful people in cages, it will. When businesses are owned and controlled by a few wealthy investors and CEO's rather than through workers' self management, the workers will see their material conditions suffer and their free association under vicious assault. People should have control over their own lives, rather than seeing their most important decisions made from Washington, DC or some corporate board rooms. It's time to build a real resistance to coercive power and authority. It's time to resist wars and prisons, to stand up for workers, to build networks of mutual aid, to create grassroots alternatives to government programs and capitalist corporations. It's time to build a new society in the shell of the old.

This is a message you won't receive from Warren Buffett. Surface changes to the tax code would give him a slightly more stable society with a happier population. But he would still be able to profit from rapacious violence and coercion against poor and working people. A real revolution, a society in which people organize from the bottom up and reject institutional violence, would be disastrous for Warren Buffett. Because in a free society, billionaires like Buffett might have to learn to work for a living.

Further reading:
http://www.corpwatch.org/
http://infoshop.org/
http://mutualist.org/
http://all-left.net/
http://www.iww.org/
http://libcom.org/

I thought I was a feminist, but it turns out I'm a "rape-supporter."

2011-06-23T20:19:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty involved in feminist activism. I'm organizing a SlutWalk in Salt Lake City to protest slut shaming, rape apologism, and victim blaming. I am the administrator for the moderately popular feminist Facebook page Rational people against puritanical and misogynistic "slut" shaming. I regularly attend Salt Lake's feminist open mic night When She Speaks I Hear the Revolution. I volunteer with Salt Lake's local transgender rights group, TransAction. Next fall I hope to take a training from the Utah Coalition Against Sexual Assault and start volunteering with the Rape Recovery Center. Whenever I encounter slut shaming, transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, victim blaming, or anti-feminism in a conversation, I will attempt to challenge it. So I was rather surprised to learn that according to radical feminist blogger "Eve's Daughter", I am a "rape-supporter."

The blog post is titled "A Man Is a Rape-Supporter If...", and the very phrase "rape-supporter" is somewhat ambiguous. Many readers, particularly critics of the post, seemed to construe "rape-supporter" as meaning someone who believes rape is desirable, in the same way someone who "supports Ron Paul" or "supports the war on terror" believes Ron Paul or the war on terror are politically desirable. This is, however, inaccurate. The blog's author makes clear in comments that she simply means that the behaviors of "rape-supporters" support rape culture, exacerbate rape culture, victimize rape survivors, or contribute to a culture of misogyny and objectification, regardless of the intent of the "rape-supporter." The use of the phrase "rape-supporter" without this explanation being made early on thus confuses the issue and makes many readers offended and defensive. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the author doesn't clearly explain how the behaviors she identifies contribute to rape culture or present clear evidence that they do within the original post.

But beyond these objections to the blog post's style, I seriously disagree with some of the points made. Some of the actions listed, such as blaming the victim or mocking women who speak out against sexual assault, are clearly rape apologism. Others, such as opposing abortion, promoting misogynistic philosophies, degrading lesbians, or arguing that certain male behaviors towards women should not be subject to feminist scrutiny, do promote cultural misogyny, and can be reasonably argued to be components of rape culture. However, there are some elements of the list which I believe reveal dangerously sex negative and prescriptivist views among some radical feminists. I wish to critique these portions of the list, and I hope that Eve's Daughter or like minded radical feminists will respond to these critiques so that we may advance feminist dialogue.

Feminism and BDSM

Eve's Daughter writes that a man is a rape supporter if:

He has ever sexually engaged with any woman while she was underage, drunk, high, physically restrained, unconscious, or subjected to psychological, physical, economic, or emotional coercion.

For the most part this is simply an accurate definition of rape. However, I object to the inclusion of "physically restrained" on the list, as this includes some consensual BDSM sex acts. She also writes that a man is a "rape-supporter" if "He watches any pornography in which sexual acts are depicted as a struggle for power or domination, regardless of whether women are present," which appears to address BDSM specifically. This hostility to BDSM appears to be repeated when Eve's Daughter alleges that a man is a rape supporter if "He defends the physical abuse of women on the grounds of “consent.”" Now, if we are speaking of actual sexual assault, domestic violence, or abuse, then of course it should not be defended, even if the victim/survivor tacitly "consents." However, based upon my prior experience with radical feminists, I know that many of them do consider BDSM to be categorically abusive. I disagree with that based upon both my own experience and reasoning.

I am a sexual masochist. I enjoy being spanked, I am interested in being whipped and flogged, and I enjoy having my testicles hurt and various parts of me bitten quite hard under consensual circumstances, to name a few of my masochistic fetishes which if shown in pornography allegedly support rape. Even in cases where the violence can be extreme and would be abusive if it occurred without consent, I maintain that if consent, honesty, care, and respect are maintained, BDSM can be a joyful and fulfilling form of sexual exploration. I have several radical feminist friends and acquaintances involved in BDSM, and I think they all would repudiate the notion that it promotes rape culture. Indeed, conflating it with rape and treating it as abusive even when consensual in effect treats the choices of those involved as illegitimate, and disrespects the autonomy and intelligence of women in the BDSM community. The BDSM community is largely a haven for queers, transgender individuals, and people whose body types are marginalized by mainstream beauty standards. Because consent is integral to separating BDSM from abuse, there's a much more explicit discussion of consent within the community than within non-feminist vanilla circles. To simply paint it with a broad brush as a component of rape culture alienates a community which already has major feminist elements and to which feminism should be important.

To be clear, this is not to say that there are not problems within BDSM from a feminist perspective. For instance, that the BDSM social networking site Fetlife features a "fetishes" profile feature but not a "limits" profile feature indicates that the site may not place enough emphasis on consent. When BDSM relationships extend beyond the bedroom, their hierarchical nature may undermine gender equity and the autonomy of those involved. These are real concerns, and there are plenty of other issues I haven't brought up, but they can't be fully addressed unless feminists are willing to explore and learn about BDSM rather than conflating it with rape and categorically condemning it.

Sexual liberation is bad now?

Eve's Daughter writes that a man is a "rape-supporter" if:

He supports sexual “liberation” and claims women would have more sex with (more) men if society did not “inhibit” them.

Now, as an avowed activist for sexual liberation, I found this prong to be particularly offensive. Sexual liberation is essential to women's liberation, LGBTQ liberation, and human liberation. Let's look at the facts:

Until the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling in the case Lawrence v. Texas, members of the queer community could be arrested for "sodomy."
Dildos and other sex toys were illegal to sell or possess in large quantities in Texas until a court overturned the Texas obscenity statute in 2008. I'm not kidding. See here and here. This issue should be taken quite seriously by feminists, as it restricts private female sexual pleasure and promotes the fundamentally misogynistic view that sex should be bound to marriage and procreation, women's choices be damned.
Slut shaming, official punishment, and harassment of girls after they sent explicit pictures to boys they were interested in have driven teenage girls to suicide. See here and here.
In Louisiana, sex workers are placed on the sex offender registry, destroying all future autonomy and moving their situation from bad to nightmarish.
In many rape cases, female sexuality is treated as consent, with sexual assault survivors being persistently slut shamed. Our sex negative culture treats women who engage in certain sexual behaviors as deserving of rape. Here are two examples.

I could go on. But the point is that we currently live in a society which uses both the force of the state and a perverse patriarchal cultural morality to restrict sexual choice, victimize members of marginalized groups, and shame even sexual assault survivors for choices that are completely within their rights. It seems to me that in such a society, supporting sexual liberation should not be construed as making one a "rape-supporter." Rather, it should be understood as essential for fighting rape culture. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Eve's Daughter does not list slut-shaming among the behaviors that can make a man a "rape-supporter" when slut shaming is one of the core attributes of rape apologism, victim blaming, rape culture, and cultural misogyny in general.

Now, I understand that Eve's Daughter may not be targeting all proponents of sexual liberation. She may simply be targeting those who also argue that "women would have more sex with (more) men if society did not “inhibit” them." Now, I do not argue this, at least not categorically. I think that in a society without pervasive puritanism and slut shaming some women would likely be more promiscuous, as many of the unjust harms currently imposed on promiscuous women would be gone. However, in a sexually liberated society all consensual sexual proclivities would be treated with respect. As a result, some women would feel more comfortable coming out as lesbian or asexual than they currently do. Women would not feel pressure to have sex with men at all if that was not their inclination. As we have never lived in a society free of restrictive sexual morals, it's impossible to predict how exactly sex would change, but it would certainly vary from person to person, rather than universally resulting in women having more sex with more men. I think that a sexually liberated society is a worthy goal, and I fail to see how striving for it promotes rape, even if it would result in some women having sex with more men.

First Amendment advocates are "rape-supporters"?

Eve's Daughter writes that a man is a "rape-supporter" if:

He frames discussions of pornography in terms of “freedom of speech.”

In some cases this accusation actually has merit. For instance, if a feminist is critiquing pornography but not calling for the government to restrict it, freedom of speech is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Speech that is First Amendment protected can still be harmful and worth countering with activism or more speech. So, if a defender of porn responds to discussion of patriarchal beauty standards in porn by trying to frame the core issue as "freedom of speech," they are in effect derailing the discussion. The same is true if they attempt to use "free speech" to re-frame a debate about sex trafficking in pornography, the potentially coercive and destructive effect of workplace hierarchy in porn, the prevalence of positive depictions of sexual assault or rape in porn, or evidence that viewing pornography increases a male's willingness to commit rape. These discussions should turn on the evidence and their merits, rather than being derailed by a conflation of all porn opposition with opposition to free speech.

However, when government attempts to restrict pornography, freedom of speech becomes incredibly relevant. This is particularly true because government attacks on pornography are not based on coercion, poor working conditions, or trafficking in the industry, but instead upon puritanical "obscenity" laws. For instance, pornographers including John Stagliano, Max Hardcore, Rob Black, and Lizzie Borden have all been prosecuted in the 21st century for the ill defined crime of "obscenity." Recently several senators urged the US Department of Justice to more aggressively prosecute obscenity. Regarding these issues of pornography, freedom of speech is a core concern, and one is not a "rape-supporter" for framing the debate around the crucial civil liberty the federal government seeks to violate.

Are all men who view porn which depicts women "rape supporters"?

Eve's Daughter writes that a man is a "rape-supporter" if:

He watches pornography in which women are depicted.

Once again, this can make sense in specific cases. In some pornography, women are abused or in some way coerced. Further, even when coercion does not occur directly, the presence of a work place hierarchy does raise questions of consent and distances sexuality from consensual pursuit of mutual pleasure, thus arguably promoting rape culture. However, not all pornography which depicts women has this effect. Animated pornography does not require that anyone perform sexual acts in the production process. Furthermore, some pornography may portray women genuinely pursuing their own pleasure, such as the user produced videos of female masturbation featured on www.ifeelmyself.com, and thus actually present a counter-narrative to sex negativity, puritanism, and patriarchy.

Conclusion

While there are other portions of "A Man is a Rape-Supporter If..." which I find problematic, these are my primary objections. The post demonizes men as "rape-supporters" without providing adequate explanation or evidence for how the behaviors it describes exacerbate or perpetuate rape culture. Further, it lists as "rape supporter" behaviors several behaviors which I believe are perfectly compatible with feminism, and one, advocating sexual liberation, which I consider core to feminism. I hope this critique can help further feminist discourse on these topics, and I look forward to responses from Eve's Daughter and other radical feminists.

A Reaction

2011-01-09T11:24:00.000-08:00

“When politicians murder countless daily via the military and police it’s a ‘topic for debate.’ When someone murders a politician, it’s a national tragedy. This outbreak of ridiculously disproportionate sympathy for pampered middleclass politicos is the desperate gasps of various privileged classes frantically asserting their exceptional status: ‘This sort of thing should never happen to people like us!’”

The reaction to the shooting of Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords yesterday struck me in what it revealed about how we approach violence and murder. Most people don't oppose violence and murder per se. Don't believe me? Ask how many people reacted with horror when the United States government slaughtered innocent civilians in Yemen, including at least 21 children, with cluster bombs. Ask whether there was such furor when Aiyana Jones, a seven year old girl, was killed by a Detroit SWAT team. What about when detainees at Guantanamo were tortured to death? Or footage was released of Reuters journalists being shot from a lurking American helicopter in Iraq?

Many people not only shed no tears over these cases, they argued that those who carried out the homicides were justified.

Could you imagine any mainstream political figure, even Sarah Palin or others whose rhetoric is connected to yesterday's shooting, claiming that the killing was justified?

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," wrote George Orwell in Animal Farm. And that's where we are today. We praise equality and make sweeping moral statements, but most do not consistently believe them. Some violence, specifically violence from the bottom up, violence in which the relatively powerless attack those who are comparatively well off and powerful, is universally viewed with horror. Yet the top down violence, the killing of foreigners, or even of mere mundanes in this country, by agents of government, is often not merely ignored, but commended.

In a truly Orwellian fashion we dehumanize those who are most affected by violence, indulging in vile victim blaming. Guantanamo detainee tortured to death? He was a terrorist. Queer youth subjected to hate crimes and rape in prison? Perverted criminals, the lot of them! The victims of the Contras in Nicaragua? Commies! A man is shot while driving his children to school because he stops to help a wounded man, as we saw in Collateral Murder? "It's his fault for bringing his kids to a battle."

When liberals say that the shooting of Gifford should make us confront the growing violence of our political culture, they're right. They're correct to react with revulsion and horror at assassination attempts against the likes of Congresswoman Giffords and Congressman Tom Perriello, and assassination threats against at least 10 other prominent Democrats. They're right to be disturbed by all the more innocuous violent rhetoric on the right. But our violent political culture is a whole lot bigger than some right wing extremism. Our political system is built on violence, whether it's locking more human beings in cages than any other nation, using torture, continuing to use cluster bombs, being involved in six wars in the middle east, or even the threats of force behind the taxation that funds it all.

Update: Probably my favorite response to this issue was posted by Radley Balko today at Reason Hit and Run. I also really enjoyed this post by Tumblr user Maxistentialist.

Why I Am Not a Democrat

2010-12-30T00:40:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, I identified as a Democrat. Then I realized Democrats are just as right wing as Republicans, just as war prone, just as authoritarian, and just as servile to big business. It's not a choice between being a Democrat, a Republican, or a moderate; it's a choice between being a Democrat, a Republican, a moderate, or someone with a principled ideology (Say, a leftist, socialist, anarchist, traditional conservative, or libertarian).

Don't believe Democrats are similar to Republicans? Well, ask yourself, whose administration uses cluster bombs as part of a secret war in Yemen? Whose administration increased deportations of immigrants? Whose administration has been using drone attacks as part of an undeclared war in Pakistan? Whose administration re-authorized the Patriot Act, which gives federal agents the power to write their own secret extra-judicial warrants? Under whose administration has the FBI harassed anti-war activists? Who promised to run the most transparent White House in history, but then presided over the inhumane detention of an alleged whistleblower? Whose Solicitor General worked successfully to prevent death row inmates from accessing DNA evidence which could prove them innocent? Who appointed a former executive from insurance giant WellPoint to control health care policy, while proclaiming it a victory over corporate interests? Whose administration expanded America's military presence in Colombia in spite of serious human rights concerns? Whose administration used the state secrets privilege to prevent torture victims from suing their torturers? Whose administration continues to carry out renditions, in which terror suspects are secretly kidnapped and detained in other countries? Whose administration successfully denied habeas corpus rights to detainees at Bagram Prison? Whose administration threatened Britain in order suppress investigation of Bush era torture? Whose administration asserts the authority to kill American citizens outside of a war zone with no judicial process?

If you guessed Barack Obama, you're right! And before you say that this is just one Democratic President, consider that the previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, ordered the bombing of a Somalian pharmaceutical factory, causing the suffering and death of thousands. Likewise, Clinton's sanctions on Iraq are estimated by Unicef to have killed around 500,000 children. Indeed, Democratic presidents such as FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and even the often praised JFK, promoted incredibly deadly wars. Thaddeus Russell explained it quite well in his piece Why Liberals Kill, writing "Though opponents of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cheered loudly when Obama spoke reverentially in his campaign speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy, those heroes of the president promoted and oversaw U.S. involvement in wars that killed, by great magnitudes, more Americans and foreign civilians than all the modern Republican military operations combined."

If we wish to stop war crimes and protect liberty and peace, we won't do it through political parties. Align yourself not with parties but with ideals, and then you can work consistently to stop these sorts of atrocities.

How Government Crushes Competition and Ends Entrepreneurs

2010-11-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

This video really illustrates how unjustified government regulations suppress entrepreneurs. This hurts consumers, hurts upward mobility, hurts innovation, and by decreases the bargaining power of workers. The Institute for Justice fights such superfluous regulation in court and through consciousness raising. Whether you're a libertarian, a free market conservative, or a left winger who cares about workers and consumers, this kind of destructive government overreach should concern you.

Why Boyd K. Packer's Speech Matters

2010-10-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

Many of my Mormon friends seem to find it difficult to understand the controversy and protest sparked by Boyd K. Packer's speech last week at General Conference. So here's why we protest:

Imagine you are raised to believe from when you are very young and impressionable that the LDS faith is true. You believe that it represents absolute moral authority and that leaders like Elder Packer speak on behalf of God. For most who disagree with me here, this part will not require any imagination.

For the rest of this post, I ask that you exercise an important element of the human condition called empathy. Imagine that after having this Mormon upbringing you realize you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, or otherwise queer. Naturally, you try to fight it, for you believe such identities are impure, unnatural, and immoral. Yet somehow it won’t go away. You hear Boyd K Packer say that gays are not preset, implying that you can change. Of course, you’ve already tried to do so, and so you internalize guilt and self loathing. For if these tendencies are not inborn then it must be your fault they persist. Furthermore, every time someone like Packer denounces the sinfulness of homosexuality, you know that if you start to accept these tendencies it will threaten your relationship with your family. You hate yourself for reasons you can’t discuss, and if you’re really unlucky you’ll be bullied for those same reasons. Are you finally starting to see why this matters?

To quote Classically Liberal, “Most the gay people I know were assaulted in school, one time or another, because they were gay. They can't tell their fundamentalist parents because they fear rejection from them. They can't talk to their homophobic minister who has regularly consigned them to hell fire for eternity. Is it any wonder that so many of these kids decide they would rather die?”

This is why we care when Elder Packer condemns homosexuality and asserts that we can change. Because such ideas, no matter how removed they may be from my non-LDS life, cause real pain and even death for children. And that should concern everyone with a conscience.

Advocate Censorship on a Forum I Frequent? Expect Something Like This:

2010-09-26T03:33:00.000-07:00

From this thread.

Alright, so a bunch of points have been made throughout the debate on free speech and where its limits ought lie. I'll ignore the barrage of personal attacks between Kenny and the censorship apologists as irrelevant. Let's talk substance.

First, I'll note that Nitish cited the popular "Shouting 'FIRE!'" exception to free speech. Likewise, Kenny mentioned the "Clear and present danger" exception. Both of these ideas come from the same despicable Supreme Court case, Schenck v. United States. This case ruled that the U.S. government had the authority to arrest anti-war protesters because their speech could hamper the war effort. Yet it could be just as plausibly argued that American involvement in the war posed a clear and present danger and that the anti-war activists, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, "were the real firefighters, shouting fire when there really was a fire in a very crowded theater indeed." So, if this precedent were current, banning Quran burnings would be constitutional. Thankfully, that precedent was overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which barred the government from restricting speech unless that speech is both intended to incite and likely to incite imminent lawless action. While speech offensive to Islam is likely to incite lawless action, incitement is not the intent, and thus the speech is constitutionally protected by current precedent.

Nitesh wrote:
A possible future danger? It's already happened. It is happening. It will continue to happen. Aren't we in a "War against Terrorism" right now? How would burning a holy book not create clear and present danger?

Yes, inflammatory anti-Islamic speech does provoke terrorism. But if this logic were applied to stop the anti-Islamic violence of the American government, those negative impacts of anti-Islamic speech would be greatly diminished. Do Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups use the fact that individual Westerners burn Qurans or cartoon Mohammed as their primary recruiting tool? No, those grievances are secondary to the fact that the United States government cluster bombs Yemen, increases the use of drone strikes which kill civilians, kills Iraqi civilians even after "combat operations" are over, asserts the power to execute a Muslim American cleric without pressing charges against him, denies Muslim victims of torture the right to sue, funds an Israeli government which used white phosphorus to burn Muslim civilians alive, etc. No matter how much anti-Muslim speech you stop, the West will remain the target of terrorism unless you stop Western governments from initiating anti-Muslim violence. Giving our government more power to regulate speech will be used to interfere with those of us arguing against this violence. Indeed, even with the Bill of Rights untouched by those who would protect Muslims from being offended, the FBI just last week raided the homes of anti-war activists.

Marianne wrote:
Hate speech laws in the United Kingdom are found in several statutes. Expressions of hatred toward someone on account of that person's colour, race, nationality (including citizenship), ethnic or national origin, religion, or sexual orientation is forbidden. Any communication which is threatening, abusive or insulting, and is intended to harass, alarm, or distress someone is forbidden.The penalties for hate speech include fines, imprisonment, or both.

The UK's weak protections on free speech have not been used to facilitate mature discussions, but rather to prevent mature discussions by allowing one side to fine or imprison, rather than refuting, their opponents. Let's look at a few examples. From Wikipedia, indeed the same entry she quoted:

On 13 October 2001, Harry Hammond, an evangelist, was arrested and charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act (1986) because he had displayed to people in Bournemouth a large sign bearing the words "Jesus Gives Peace, Jesus is Alive, Stop Immorality, Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism, Jesus is Lord". In April 2002, a magistrate convicted Hammond, fined him £300, and ordered him to pay costs of £395.

Now, you might think that being queer identified I might find this result satisfying, but I don't. How are we to have a "mature discussion" of whether my sexual preferences and others like mine are sins if my opponents can be arrested and fined for expressing their views? Furthermore, incidents like these provide homophobes with argumentative ammunition. One red herring brought by homophobes is that recognition of queer civil rights leads to the persecution of Christians, and incidents like this support that conclusion.

On 4 March 2010, a jury returned a verdict of guilty against Harry Taylor, who was charged under Part 4A of the Public Order Act 1986. Taylor was charged because he left anti-religious cartoons in the prayer-room of Liverpool's John Lennon Airport on three occasions in 2008. The airport chaplain, who was insulted, offended, and alarmed by the cartoons, called the police.[11][12][13] On 23 April 2010, Judge Charles James of Liverpool Crown Court sentenced Taylor to a six-month term of imprisonment suspended for two years, made him subject to a five-year Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) (which bans him from carrying religiously offensive material in a public place), ordered him to perform 100 hours of unpaid work, and ordered him to pay £250 costs. Taylor was convicted of similar offences in 2006.[14]

So, in the UK I could be fined, imprisoned, and barred from publicly possessing certain literature and images simply for rudely expressing my view of a faith, even if it's a faith which says I deserve to be tortured for my opinions, sexual orientation, and gender identity. As you might say across the pond, that is bollocks.

The UK's weak protections for free speech have stamped out even mature and non-inflammatory debates. Specifically I refer to the litigation friendly libel laws. Such laws permitted the British Chiropractic Association to sue the excellent popular science author Simon Singh for correctly debunking pseudoscientific claims they had made. Admittedly, Singh eventually won, but only after enlisting the support of most of the British and American scientific and skeptical communities while losing plenty of money on legal fees and tons of time he could have spent writing.

Yours in free speech even for assholes,
QuantumTuba

The Curse of Political Dogmatism

2010-09-05T01:30:00.000-07:00

"The world is far too lovely a place to walk through it along a party line."-Bill Kauffman

As someone who is active as both a libertarian and a radical leftist, I have encountered my fair share of political dogmatists. Rather than honestly engaging their ideological opponents, they seem steadfastly convinced that the opposing party is either morally repugnant, intellectually vacuous, or both. To many of my comrades on the left, libertarians are selfish sociopaths and anyone ever influenced by Ayn Rand has zero moral credibility. This is not to say my libertarian allies are necessarily more tolerant. A common sentiment, especially among voluntaryists and anarcho-capitalists, is that anyone who supports any sort of statism is supporting the initiation of force, and is therefore not merely wrong but evil.

Such petty partisanship risks dooming our movements to the epistemic closure which plagues the mainstream American right. Seemingly immune to facts, right wingers pontificate about the evils of liberalism, progressivism, Marxism, and socialism. The truth or falsehood of statements comes second to whether those statements fit a particular conservative orthodoxy, an orthodoxy confirmed through the echo chambers of talk radio and FOX News, while contrary information is seen as mere propaganda either from the "radical left" or the "liberal media."

But even if we don't sink to such intellectual lows, leftists and libertarians both rob themselves of key insights if they refuse to look outside their inner circles.

What do leftists stand to lose if we demonize libertarians and "the right"? Well, anti-war activists find many allies among paleoconservatives, particularly Ron Paul, who popularized the concept of "blowback" in his 2008 presidential campaign. More paleoconservative anti-war commentary may be found in The American Conservative magazine. When we wish to discuss police militarization and the disgusting, often racist violence of the drug war, we would be foolish to ignore the work of Radley Balko. The fact that he began his research on police misconduct at the Cato Institute and continues it at Reason Magazine, both libertarian outfits funded by Koch Industries, does not detract from his insights one iota. Any opponent of corporate power would be well served by reading Timothy Carney, a free market libertarian who primarily writes about government collusion with big business. Even those who are clearly our opponents can provide useful material. For instance, Ayn Rand was in many respects my antithesis, as she loved big business, defended misogyny and homophobia, supported imperialism, and denigrated anarchists, leftists, and libertarians. But her notion of the anti-concept, a cognitive package deal which conflates distinct ideas under one definition to obscure thought, is incredibly useful to understanding political language, even if you disagree with the examples she gives. Likewise, her critique of "states' rights" is excellent for addressing the theocratic tendencies of paleoconservatives, and I can't count how often I have quoted her defenses of individual rights and rational ethics when I debate homophobes. Some leftists may never expose themselves to the quality libertarian, Objectivist, and conservative writings I just referenced. Instead, they'll buy into straw men, such as Naomi Klein's hatchet job on Milton Friedman in The Shock Doctrine. And they'll have fewer allies and fewer strong arguments as a result.

Libertarians would lose just as immensely if they refused the intellectual output of the left. It's no accident that Lew Rockwell, easily one of the leaders of the libertarian movement, has referred to Howard Zinn, a known socialist, as among his favorite historians. Zinn's skepticism of war and the state exudes from every essay and book he has written. Like radical libertarians, he has some choice words for the war crimes of historical sacred cows such as FDR and Abraham Lincoln. Left wing activists like Jeremy Scahill, Cindy Sheehan, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Wolf, and Amy Goodman have popularity in some libertarian circles for this same style of principled opposition to the growing national security state. But even leftist writing which libertarians may find harder to stomach often contains points that are quite useful for expanding liberty. Noam Chomsky's attacks on free market economics primarily consist of pointing out the prevalence of protectionism and corporate welfare under capitalism, and can thus be valuable reading for those who wish to genuinely free markets. Similarly, despite its smears against free market economists, Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" describes some very real cases of authoritarian corporatism masquerading as free market privatization. Tim Wise may be often condescending and hostile towards libertarians, but his writings on racial privilege can help us counter the inequities that result from a history of enslavement and state assaults on people of color. And don't let Marxism automatically turn you off. The influence of Marx makes Rosa Luxemburg's case for free speech no less powerful, it makes Angela Davis's critique of the prison system no less valid, and it makes Paulo Freire's arguments for critical pedagogy no less eloquent.

Why does it matter that we pursue the truth without regard for these ideological boundaries? Because, to quote Freire, "apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."

Two Challenges for NOM

2010-08-10T18:42:00.000-07:00

The National Organization ~~Against~~ for Marriage, an activist group founded by religious leaders to oppose gay marriage, has been busy revealing their own hypocrisy lately, as usual. However, like all hypocrites, they have the opportunity to reach intellectual consistency, and so I will present two challenges to NOM.

1. I challenge NOM to condemn those who want myself and my fellow queers killed, beaten, or imprisoned.

Brian Brown and other leaders of NOM often express disdain for gay rights rhetoric about "hate." When we protest their rallies, or their favorite Californian Proposition, and use this word, they insist that we are smearing them. You see, they harbor no hatred towards homosexuals and other members of the queer alphabet soup (LGBTQQTAI...), not at all. Rather, they strongly disagree with us on a political issue. They believe that marriage, specifically heterosexual marriage, is a sacred institution, and thus it must be granted special recognition by the state which gay marriages must not receive. Now, ignoring that this position is wrong on many levels, it does not in itself imply hatred towards homosexuals.

However, regardless of whether NOM's leaders hate us, many of their allies in the religious right unambiguously hate us, to the point of wishing violence upon us. For instance, the following is a sign wishing death upon gay couples which a supporter brought to a NOM rally in Indianapolis. Freedom to Marry has a petition requesting that NOM repudiate such rhetoric.

Such violent fantasies and rhetoric are commonplace in the world of the religious right. For instance, this post at the libertarian blog Classically Liberal begins by describing a police raid on a gay bar in Fort Worth, Texas. In that raid, officers engaged in needless, superfluous violence against patrons, and in response, "The Fort Worth city council decided that the time had arrived to have a police liaison officer who works with the gay community to prevent these sorts of abusive actions." However, some Christians didn't like the idea of police making an effort to avoid bigoted beatings and privacy violations.

One minister, Richard Clough, claimed that the the media and gays conspired and "distorted the facts of what happened the night of the Rainbow Lounge to promote the homosexual agenda." Ah, those clever gays. See how they get police to come in, beat them up, and then use that to promote their devious agenda. That is a really bizarre theory but one befitting the man's theology. Consider that he believes Jesus was god, that he planned to come to earth and die, and that he got some nasty people (Jews and/or Romans depending on who you believe) to torture and kill him, so that he could forgive the sins of the world. Similar in a way as both theories contend the victim had an ulterior motive and manipulated the attack to their own ends. I just never figured out why a god, who is all powerful, didn't have the power to forgive sins without all that torture and killing going on.

One news account says the fundamentalists claimed the city "didn't take their Christian beliefs into account."

Wrap your mind around that for a minute? The police aggressively and unnecessarily raid a gay bar and start hurting people in the process. To help prevent such future incidents a police officer is assigned as a liaison to the gay and lesbian community. And this somehow violates the "Christian beliefs" of these bat-shit crazed fundamentalists. What beliefs were ignored here?

Are they saying that their belief is that gay people should be beaten by police officers? Are they saying that basic civil rights of gay people should be ignored simply because they are gay? What are they saying?

What Christian doctrine is at stake here? When it comes to Christian doctrine I think of things like the virgin birth, atonement, resurrection, the trinity, etc. Apparently there is a Christian doctrine that applies to police pushing around gay people. And since these fundamentalists are complaining about measures to stop such activities I have to assume that the doctrine they think exists is one requiring violence against gay people.

About 100 of these people turned out to protest measures to end violence against gay people.

Such hateful attitudes must be condemned by the National Organization for Marriage if I am to take them seriously when they say they don't hate us. Likewise, the Texas Republican Party's desire to reinstate sodomy laws, in effect incarcerating queers for consensual sex, must be condemned. When a preacher like Rick Warren compares us with pedophiles, such statements should be condemned.

And until the National Organization for Marriage comes out against such violent, bigoted, anti-freedom rhetoric, I will not be able to take them seriously when they say hatred is not among their motivations.

2. I challenge NOM to support the total privatization of marriage.

In a recent op-ed for SFGate.com, Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage refers to gay marriage as "a government takeover of an institution the government did not make, cannot in justice redefine, and ought to respect and protect as essential to the common good."

Now, if government did not make marriage, why in the name of Jesus (In his name I pray, peace be upon him, Amen, etc., etc.), does government need to be involved in the marriage business at all? If government takeover of marriage is so dastardly, why should government have any role in marriage other than enforcing contracts made between private individuals in a free market? If government "cannot in good justice redefine" marriage, how is it just for a ballot initiative to exist with the explicit purpose of defining marriage? How is it just for state and federal governments to grant thousands of benefits to legally married couples, rather than leaving marriage benefits at the discretion of churches, employers, and other non-governmental entities?

Furthermore, Gallagher writes "The majority of Americans are not bigots or haters for supporting the commonsense view that marriage is the union of husband and wife." If this is both a majority view and a common sense view, why does it need the endorsement of the state to remain a social norm? Why can't conservatives like Gallagher let that free market they claim to love so much apply to marriage? As Glenn Greenwald writes in his piece Marriage and the Role of the State, a response to Ross Douthat:

the mere fact that the State does not use the mandates of law to enforce Principle X does not preclude Principle X from being advocated or even prevailing. Conversely, the fact that the State recognizes the right of an individual to choose to engage in Act Y does not mean Act Y will be accepted as equal. There are all sorts of things secular law permits which society nonetheless condemns. Engaging in racist speech is a fundamental right but widely scorned. The State is constitutionally required to maintain full neutrality with regard to the relative merits of the various religious sects (and with regard to the question of religion v. non-religion), but certain religions are nonetheless widely respected while others -- along with atheism -- are stigmatized and marginalized. Numerous behaviors which secular law permits -- excessive drinking, adultery, cigarette smoking, inter-faith and inter-racial marriages, homosexual sex -- are viewed negatively by large portions of the population.

Greenwald compellingly continues:

But if the arguments for the objective superiority of heterosexual monogamy are as apparent and compelling as Douthat seems to think, they ought not need the secular thumb pressing on the scale in favor of their view. Individuals on their own will come to see the rightness of Douthat's views on such matters -- or will be persuaded by the religious institutions and societal mores which teach the same thing -- and, attracted by its "distinctive and remarkable" virtues, will opt for a life of heterosexual monogamy. Why does Douthat need the State -- secular law -- to help him in this cause?

If Maggie Gallagher and her colleagues at the National Organization for Marriage genuinely believe in freedom of religion and oppose government takeovers of marriage, they should support its total separation from the state. In such a climate, churches like the LDS Church and the Catholic Church could exclusively recognize heterosexual marriages and churches like the Quakers and Episcopelians could recognize both gay and straight marriages. Partnership benefits could be offered at the discretion of individual employers and insurers, rather than mandated by the state.

If the National Organization for Marriage believes in the intrinsic superiority of heterosexual marriage, they should have enough faith to let it thrive in a free market rather than demand special protections from the state. And no, Brian Brown, telling me "marriage isn't a salad bar" will not be sufficient to revoke this challenge.

The Dangerous Deification of Voting

2010-07-31T14:48:00.000-07:00

From the time Americans begin school,they are taught that their civic duty is to vote. The message is reiterated in every public school social studies course, and amplified further once you take civics or government. Outside of school the same message continues to reverberate. At concerts you encounter Headcount, working to register others to vote. Tune into comedian Craig Ferguson, and you just might find him excoriating nonvoters as "morons." And when presidential elections happen, you would think that important events ceased to occur, as the media drops everything to focus on every word and scandal surrounding the leading candidates. The message is not that electoral politics is one way to influence the policies of your government, but that it is the way to influence the policies of your government.

Recently I have seen this attitude illustrated on both sides of the aisle. Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times op-ed column: "Just to be clear, progressives would be foolish to sit out this election: Mr. Obama may not be the politician of their dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of their nightmares." From an admittedly far less influential right wing figure, a friend of a friend on Facebook who claims to be a "freedom lover" wrote of neocon airhead Sarah Palin, "I would pick her over Romney in a heart-beat. Other than Ron Paul and maybe Christie, who is there for 2012?" And just yesterday I saw it on the left again, with an Obama supporter brushing aside my list of Obama's war crimes and civil liberties violations on the grounds that Republicans are worse.

These figures of the left and right strike me as obsessed with which flavor of corporatist warmonger holds power, and unfortunately, the attitude that this is all politics is leads most people to either embrace the partisan pursuit of power or become utterly apathetic and inactive.

But most of the great achievements in our country's history have been made through non-electoral means. The era of Jim Crow did not end because some Democrats were elected, it ended because of civil disobedience, boycotts, sit ins, and court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education. Women won the vote through the courageous civil disobedience and demonstrations of the suffragettes. Women have choice on abortion not because of Democratic lawmakers, but the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade. And the relevant public opinion change that made that ruling possible was again not a result of elections, but the activism of the likes of Moses Harman and Margaret Sanger, who were often jailed for their "obscene" writings on birth control.

It's these non-electoral approaches which have the potential to solve the most pressing problems identified by the left and the right (Although I will ignore the cultural right's concerns with "moral values" and immigration, as I deem these non-issues).

Having just insulted the right, I suppose I should address their legitimate concerns first, and why I feel they can solve them through non-electoral methods. Let's talk free markets. Property rights are under assault in this country. Licensing laws, regulations, and other bureaucratic red tape make it difficult to run a business, particularly a small business. So, should we vote Republican? Certainly not if your goal is economic freedom. Even most conservatives today acknowledge the government expanding nature of the Bush Administration. But what about Ronald Reagan, the hero of the limited government right? The website of The Ludwig von Mises Institute, a free market think tank, has several articles documenting the protectionism, deficit spending, regulations, and other big government policies that belied Reagan's free market rhetoric. My two favorites are Murray Rothbard's The Myths of Reaganomics and Sheldon Richman's The Sad Legacy of Ronald Reagan. But Democrats don't even pretend to support free markets. So what can be done?

Some of the best advocacy of economic liberty is currently being done by The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm. They file lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of superfluous licensing laws (Seriously, why the fuck should you need a license to be a florist, train yoga teachers, perform cosmetology [even if your type of cosmetic work is never dealt with in the licensing process], repair computers, or call yourself an interior designer, just to name a few). They fight for property rights in cases of eminent domain abuse, and while they lost the infamous case Kelo v. City of New London, the awareness they've brought to the issue through their Castle Coalition has led to meaningful reforms, as explained in this video. Other economic liberty cases fought by the Institute for Justice may be found here.

Another concern frequently brought up by the right wing is the threat campaign finance law poses to free speech. Contrary to the opinions of some of my fellow leftists, such laws do pose a very real problem, as left wing blogger Glenn Greenwald explained here. But the 2008 Republican candidate for president, John McCain, was a co-sponsor and has his name in the title of the most infamous campaign finance law. How were these laws changed on a national level? Through the masterful arguments of attorneys like Ted Olsen and Floyd Abrams before the Supreme Court in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, as well as briefs by groups like the Institute for Justice, the ACLU, and the Cato Institute in that same case. And who challenged (And continue to challenge) local threats to free speech from campaign regulations? Again, public interest legal groups like the ACLU and the Institute for Justice.

Another very legitimate right wing concern (Which many on the left care about too) involves politically correct universities squelching the academic marketplace of ideas through unconstitutional speech codes. The only people solving this problem are the civil liberties activists at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In addition to litigation they draw awareness to these issues through a YouTube channel and a Speech Code of the Month award.

While right wingers do have other legitimate concerns, it's time to talk to my allies: The left. Comrades, we agree on a hell of a lot. Whether it's war, classism, corporatism, immigration, queer rights, misogyny, the prison system, racial privilege, or the Bush administration's abuses of power, I'm probably left of you.

So, let's talk the war crimes and power grabs that characterized the Bush administration. Have Barack Obama or the Democratic Congress reversed the tide on this? Hardly. The Democratic Congress has re-approved the PATRIOT Act, granted immunity to telecom companies for spying for the government without a warrant, continuously renewed funding for the futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and amended FISA to weaken privacy rights. Barack Obama now claims the authority to assassinate an American citizen with no legal due process, his Justice Department has won him the power to detain people without even minimal habeas corpus protection, and he has increased the use of drone bombing campaigns, even in countries on which we have not declared war.

What are the non-electoral methods for dealing with this dire despotism and senseless violence? The bravest among us may choose to follow in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican American War. But for those who prefer a route less guaranteed to lead to incarceration, there are still many solid options. The ACLU and the lesser known Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have filed lawsuits addressing most of the worst civil liberties abuses started under Bush and expanded under Obama. Most of what we now know about the brutal Bush torture programs comes from documents released due to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests filed by the ACLU. On the other hand, Barack Obama has sought to block the release of such information. The other major force against war crimes and related human rights abuses is Wikileaks, a website which analyzes and releases classified information from governments, corporations, and church hierarchies, and protects the whistleblowers who provide the documents. Two leaks which have catapulted the site into the public eye are the Collateral Murder video, and over 90,000 pages of documents known as the Afghan War Diary. Both leaks reveal the brutal, cruel, counterproductive, and often criminal nature of U.S. wars abroad. Both contradict a narrative of American Exceptionalism which has been propped up through secrecy, censorship, and propaganda. So, of course, the United States government wishes to destroy Wikileaks. A classified document detailing this desire and plans to bring it about on the part of U.S. intelligence was released by Wikileaks in March 2010. Bradley Manning is currently being prosecuted by the United States government for allegedly leaking the Collateral Murder video and other classified information to Wikileaks. Why does Wikileaks arouse such fear, loathing, and action on the part of the military industrial complex? Because, like the ACLU and CCR, they do more to counter the America's imperial hubris than any politician ever would. And unlike those civil liberties law firms, Wikileaks can't be stopped by courts.

Another key left wing issue, and one which hits me closest to home, concerns LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer [or Questioning]) rights and equality. While the Democratic Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Act, adding sexual orientation and gender identity to hate crimes law, some queer activists rightly ask whether hate crimes laws work and whether any principled leftist can respond to a problem by granting more power to our racist, classist criminal justice system. The two greatest queer victories on a national level have happened in, you guessed it, the courts. Both the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8 have been found unconstitutional this year. And on a local level, positive change often comes from outside government entirely. In my own state of Utah, the moralistic Mormon majority has not stopped the Utah Pride Center from making this a better place for queers. The Center runs an LGBT youth center, where young adults whose identities are often reviled by their parents and communities can truly be themselves. Support groups abound, including for identities often misunderstood and feared even in the LGBT community, such as transgender individuals. One Pride Center group, TransAction, engages in activism for Utah's trans community. One event I found particularly inspiring was our pool party and barbecue. For obvious reasons, many transpeople are uncomfortable using pools and locker rooms. At this event, I saw one transwoman swim for her first time in about a decade. The importance of organizations like the Utah Pride Center is obvious: They allow often marginalized queer individuals to function among like minded people, and be treated as full fledged human beings rather than second class citizens and freaks. This certainly beats occasional pandering by politicians.

In just about every other case of bigotry the non-electoral approach continues to prove its superiority. Feminism and African American civil rights were briefly discussed at the beginning of this post, but what about the rights of Latin Americans, and undocumented immigrants in particular. In spite of all the hullabaloo surrounding Obama's plan for immigration reform and opposition to Arizona's SB1070, deportations have increased under Obama. The real groups fighting for the rights of Latin Americans and immigrants are grassroots organizations like the Brown Berets, United Farm Workers' Union, Alta Arizona, and (Yes, I'm sure by now I sound like a broken record) the ACLU.

Another key issue for the left is corporate power. But the mainstream progressive reforms tend to support corporate interests. The corporatism of health care reform has been thoroughly documented by Glenn Greenwald in articles like this. Timothy Carney's column provides some of the best analysis of the corporatist nature of progressive legislation around today. In addition to fighting anti-competitive regulations as the Institute for Justice does, one can bring awareness to often secret corporate misconduct, as Wikileaks does, or lead workplace activism, as the radical union Industrial Workers of the World does.

The best ideas of the left are predicated upon the fight against violence and hierarchy, and thus cannot be achieved by voting particular leaders into an intrinsically hierarchic and violent organization. The best ideas of the right are built upon principles of individualism and emergent economic order, and thus cannot be realized by voting different leadership into a centrally planned collectivist institution. In order for the best ideas across the political spectrum to realize their true potential, they must realize electoral politics for the distraction it is and focus their energies in real, meaningful activism.

Kyriarchy All Up in This Bitch Good Movements

2010-07-23T22:21:00.000-07:00

Many left libertarians, particularly of the feminist variety, use the term kyriarchy as an umbrella term denoting intersecting structures of domination and power. For instance, I spend a lot of my time critiquing the kyriarchy that results from an intersection of statism, militarism, nationalism, transphobia, ageism, ableism, homophobia, misogyny, puritanism, racism, corporatism, class divisions, and other such phenomena.

Well, lately I've been noticing that one of the main problems with kyriarchy is that specific liberation movements end up plagued with many structures of domination.

One great example is this article by Courtney Desiree Morris, describing gender violence in radical left and anti-racist movements, and how this enables state violence against such movements. The entire article is well worth reading, but I'll post a few key excerpts below.

To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence [1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

Then, she provides an insightful historical perspective in which to ground discussion of gender violence in leftist and anti-racist movements.

Reflecting on the radical organizations and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s provides an important historical context for this discussion. Memoirs by women who were actively involved in these struggles reveal the pervasiveness of tolerance (and in some cases advocacy) of gender violence. Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown, each at different points in their experiences organizing with the Black Panther Party (BPP), cited sexism and the exploitation of women (and their organizing labor) in the BPP as one of their primary reasons for either leaving the group (in the cases of Brown and Shakur) or refusing to ever formally join (in Davis’s case). Although women were often expected to make significant personal sacrifices to support the movement, when women found themselves victimized by male comrades there was no support for them or channels to seek redress. Whether it was BPP organizers ignoring the fact that Eldridge Cleaver beat his wife, noted activist Kathleen Cleaver, men coercing women into sex, or just men treating women organizers as subordinated sexual playthings, the BPP and similar organizations tended not to take seriously the corrosive effects of gender violence on liberation struggle. In many ways, Elaine Brown’s autobiography, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, has gone the furthest in laying bare the ugly realities of misogyny in the movement and the various ways in which both men and women reproduced and reinforced male privilege and gender violence in these organizations. Her experience as the only woman to ever lead the BPP did not exempt her from the brutal misogyny of the organization. She recounts being assaulted by various male comrades (including Huey Newton) as well as being beaten and terrorized by Eldridge Cleaver, who threatened to “bury her in Algeria” during a delegation to China. Her biography demonstrates more explicitly than either Davis’s or Shakur’s how the masculinist posturing of the BPP (and by extension many radical organizations at the time) created a culture of violence and misogyny that ultimately proved to be the organization’s undoing.

These narratives demystify the legacy of gender violence of the very organizations that many of us look up to. They demonstrate how misogyny was normalized in these spaces, dismissed as “personal” or not as important as the more serious struggles against racism or class inequality. Gender violence has historically been deeply entrenched in the political practices of the Left and constituted one of the greatest (if largely unacknowledged) threats to the survival of these organizations. However, if we pay attention to the work of Davis, Shakur, Brown, and others, we can avoid the mistakes of the past and create different kinds of political community.

And of course, on these matters racial privilege ends up plaguing even explicitly anti-racist movements.

Race further complicates the ways in which gender violence unfolds in our communities. In “Looking for Common Ground: Relief Work in Post-Katrina New Orleans as an American Parable of Race and Gender Violence,” Rachel Luft explores the disturbing pattern of sexual assault against white female volunteers by white male volunteers doing rebuilding work in the Upper Ninth Ward in 2006. She points out how Common Ground failed to address white men’s assaults on their co-organizers and instead shifted the blame to the surrounding Black community, warning white women activists that they needed to be careful because New Orleans was a dangerous place. Ultimately it proved easier to criminalize Black men from the neighborhood than to acknowledge that white women and transgender organizers were most likely to be assaulted by white men they worked with. In one case, a white male volunteer was turned over to the police only after he sexually assaulted at least three women in one week. The privilege that white men enjoyed in Common Ground, an organization ostensibly committed to racial justice, meant that they could be violent toward women and queer activists, enact destructive behaviors that undermined the organization’s work, and know that the movement would not hold them accountable in the same way that it did Black men in the community where they worked.

But then awareness of the racial privilege can end up turning into a form of rape apologism when the violence is committed by men of color.

We often worry about reproducing particular kinds of racist violence that disproportionately target men of color. We are understandably loath to call the police, involve the state in any way, or place men of color at the mercy of a historically racist criminal (in)justice system; yet our communities (political and otherwise) often do not step up to demand justice on our behalf. We don’t feel comfortable talking to therapists who just reaffirm stereotypes about how fucked-up and exceptionally violent our home communities are. The Left often offers even less support. Our victimization is unfortunate, problematic, but ultimately less important to “the work” than the men of all races who reproduce gender violence in our communities.

Of course, the problem isn't just in anti-racist movements. Sexual liberation movements have been plagued with problems of perpetuating kyriarchy for years. As a privileged white male, I'm relatively ignorant of racism in these movements, but here's the Wiki on racism in the LGBT community for your perusal and privilege checking. However, I have noted various sex and gender issues that plague our communities and movements.

Take, for instance, transphobia. Among lesbian feminists, particularly in the 1980's, transphobia has been rampant. Janice Raymond even published a book called The Transsexual Empire in which she argued that transwomen were infiltrating feminism, and even compared them to rapists. Transgender rights activist Patrick Califia writes in his book Sex Changes that back when he identified as a lesbian he participated in witch hunt style behaviors regarding transwomen. Even when not displaying this sort of outright hostility, the overall LGB(t?) movement has often pushed transgender concerns under the rug. We are often so interested in issues like marriage equality and convincing straight people that "we're just like you," that we push things deemed harder to normalize, such as deviations from gender norms, out of the spotlight. Well, maybe it's that I'm genderqueer and quite a few of my friends are outright trans, but these issues are just as important, if not more, than marriage. Sidestepping the rights of an entire segment of our community is not pragmatic, it's callous and simply entrenches transphobia.

Bisexuals and pansexuals often face a similar stigma within the queer community. For people who experience attraction pretty much exclusively to one gender, those of us who can lust and love across the gender spectrum seem like an anomaly. So, many people brand self proclaimed bisexuals and pansexuals "closet cases" who refuse to admit that they're gay. Bisexual females are often suspected of simply being straight girls claiming bisexuality for experimentation and to appear sexy (the sad part is that many straight girls do this, breaking lesbian hearts and giving honest bisexuals a bad name). Bisexual males are often deemed suspicious for STD's, and have even been suspected not to exist. Elena of Women's Glib wrote a great post on these issues, albeit not specifically as they apply within the queer community, fairly recently.

Another problem that I've seen in our community is the pervasive nature of slut shaming. Now, my thoughts regarding the slut/stud dichotomy and judgmental attitudes towards sex in general are made clear in this video and in my founding of the Facebook page Rational people against puritanical and misogynistic "slut" shaming. I have never encountered a community completely free of this sort of sexual prescriptivism, however. Even when I'm with far left, or godless, or queer, or feminist, or even blatantly sex positive friends, I occasionally encounter some variant upon this sexual taboo, this dichotomous judgment.

Now of course, this post is far from an exhaustive discussion of how bigotry pervades movements that seek to fight it, how kyriarchy's branches entangle themselves in groups that seek to kill aspects of it. Hell, I haven't even mentioned how reformist wings of most movements seek to simply moderate the police and prison system's attitudes towards groups, while I think police power, and indeed the power of the state itself, is oppressive regardless of inequities. But one post cataloging every example of such unfortunate kyriarchal structures in movements is both impossible and unnecessary.

Because the real task belongs to each of us involved in such movements and communities. As we work together to fight oppression in society as a whole, we need to take a serious look at oppression that happens in the corners that are already "ours." And then, as Gandhi said, "we must be the change we want to see in the world."

Striking the Roots of Racism

2010-07-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

Several days ago I had a fascinating conversation with a good friend regarding the origins of racism and the optimal methods for ameliorating its impact. The following post is largely based on that conversation, but also draws heavily from my study of such anti-racist thinkers as Tim Wise, Arthur Silber, and Cornel West.

Due to the human tendency towards "in group" and "out group" thinking, just about every human is to an extent racist. This does not mean they hate people based upon race, or that they harbor any ideological racism. But they do hold some emotional bias. This unconscious, unintentional racism has been confirmed by studies. As they say on Avenue Q, "everyone's a little bit racist," even far left, anti-racist bloggers like me.

And so, if we're all racists, whites make up the majority of our population, and whites are conferred with greater power than blacks thanks to years of slavery and Jim Crow, economic inequities between races should not be surprising. It should disturb you that a study by economists at MIT and the University of Chicago found that resumes with "white" sounding names were 50% more likely than the same resumes with "black" sounding names to lead to call backs for interviews. But it should not surprise you. It likewise should not be surprising that when minimum wage laws decrease the amount of people businesses can profitably employ, blacks are the ones hurt most (And in fact whites are often helped). But it should certainly give you pause.

Power of course only exacerbates the problem, particularly power involving authorization to use legal force, break the law with nearly guaranteed impunity, and imprison individuals. Yes, breaking news from the department of "Fucking obvious, but unremarked upon by respectable politicians": The criminal justice system is really racist. Michelle Jones thoroughly documents this in The New Jim Crow, specifically focusing on the war on drugs and the mass incarceration state to which it contributes. A few damning facts she points out include:

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste—not class, caste—permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

But there's a problem with all these facts: Humans want to consider ourselves and the things we love good and moral, and in our society, racism is deemed the height of evil. So we resort to denial. Admit to racism? It's hard to save face with that confession. Unpack the invisible knapsack of privilege? We might no longer feel we earned all we have.

And so, the white establishment must smear those who challenge their delusional vision of a fair and equitable America. Why, accusing white people of racism? These "civil rights activists" must be racist! Conservative firebrand David Horowitz wrote an entire book based on this premise titled hating whitey.

Similarly, employment difficulties of blacks must be denied. The truly skilled white privilege denialist will here play the victim, noting affirmative action programs as a form of "reverse racism."

The most illustrative example of the vehemence of our racial denial is the debacle surrounding Jeremiah Wright. Many politicians on both sides of the aisle are connected to preachers who compare my LGBTQ friends and I to pedophiles or who wish death upon us. Billy Graham had connections to multiple presidential administrations and had a repeated record of explicit racism against blacks. Yet when Reverend Wright told the reality, albeit in an incendiary manner, of American imperialism, war crimes, and racial oppression, that was too much.

And so the denial permeates our political spectrum. Even that radical socialist Barack Obama, known for his "deep seated hatred for white people", operates on the factually dubious assumption of a post-racial America. His most famous line of oratory hinges upon this PC delusion: "There's not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America." As Arthur Silber wrote yesterday on this matter:

Second, and of equal significance, is the fact -- acknowledged by almost no one, and certainly not by good liberals and progressives -- that Obama himself is a notably vicious racist: "All this means that it is Obama himself who has adopted the white racist framework. Yes, I repeat that: Obama has adopted the white racist framework with regard to every issue of importance."

This is true because Obama denies the truth of American history in some of its most essential aspects and fully embraces the myth of American exceptionalism -- which is a myth of white American exceptionalism. It is also true because Obama has intentionally adopted more particular racist tropes, such as the myth of "irresponsible" black fathers. (And follow some of the many links provided near the beginning of this article for much more on this topic.)

Please don't say Obama can't be a racist because he's black, or half-black, or however the hell you want to describe it. Just don't. I know you can be smarter than that, if you'll only try. In America today, the fastest path to power is via the white, male ruling class. Obama wanted and wants power, period. So in every way that matters, he identifies with the white, male ruling class. Now he's the leader of that class. See how that works?

So, how do we deal with all this racism? Certainly addressing symptoms such as the drug war and poverty would help. However, with deep seated problems, we must strike the root. This requires that we view racism not as an epithet to hurl at political opponents, but instead as an idea and structure of domination to seek out and ameliorate. For how else can we honestly find the racism lying latent in our psyches and our favored institutions? And if we can't even admit to the problem, it will be damn hard to solve.

Connor Boyack on Immigration

2010-07-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

Over at Connor's Conundrums, Connor Boyack presents his views on immigration. Boyack is one of my fellow Utah residents, and is a libertarian, Constitutionalist, and Mormon writer. While I disagree with him on religion and overall have more radical views than he does, he is easily one of the most thorough and rational bloggers I've encountered. It shows in this piece. Boyack first presents a detailed history of immigration law in America, offering a persuasive case that originalist and libertarian interpretations of the Constitution would make our current restrictive immigration laws unconstitutional. He also offers well sourced rebuttals to the economic and crime based anti-immigrant arguments.

Free Market Socialism: An Introduction

2010-06-02T22:43:00.001-07:00

My good friend Ciaran, who introduced me to the insights of free market libertarianism (Particularly the works of Frederic Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises), expressed his confusion at the notion of free market socialism. As the concepts are typically considered polar opposites, I figured I would offer some glimpses at various strains of free market socialist thought. To avoid the obvious contradiction, let me make clear to all readers that socialism does not here refer to the nationalization of industry, or other forms of government takeover. This is typically what such great free market economists as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and even Frederic Bastiat meant when they said socialism. However, throughout history socialism has had a broader meaning, which basically boils down to the abolition of the existing capitalist order in favor of a more equitable system without such hallmarks of capitalism as strong class distinctions, boss/employee hierarchies in the workplace, and oligarchic control of the means of production. Throughout the rest of this post, I will give examples of how radical left wing free marketeers have sought to abolish these facets of capitalism while still maintaining libertarian notions of private property rights. Specifically, I will be drawing on the works of the modern individualist anarchists and self proclaimed free market anti-capitalists such as Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson (Often known on the internet as Radgeek), Roderick Long, Sheldon Richman (Editor of the free market periodical The Freeman), and Brad Spangler (Director of the market anarchist Center for a Stateless Society).

First, we'll discuss a favorite in socialist thought: unions. Unions are typically seen as opponents of the free market by libertarians, and many progressives and supporters of labor see statism as a friend of workers' rights. There are many objections to these ideas raised by free market anti-capitalists.

The first is that a variety of government restrictions on free association and contract (i.e. free market activity) explicitly restrict the power of labor unions. In his post Free the Unions (and all political prisoners), Radgeek explains:

Too many of my comrades on the Left fall into the trap of taking the Labor Day version of history for granted: modern unions are trumpeted as the main channel for the voice of workers; the institutionalization of the system through the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board in 1935, and the ensuing spike in union membership during the New Deal period, are regarded as one of the great triumphs for workers of the past century.

You may not be surprised to find out that I don’t find this picture of history entirely persuasive. The Wagner Act was the capstone of years of government promotion of conservative, AFL-line unions in order to subvert the organizing efforts of decentralized, uncompromising, radical unions such as the IWW and to avoid the previous year’s tumultuous general strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. The labor movement as we know it today was created by government bureaucrats who effectively created a massive subsidy program for conservative unions which followed the AFL and CIO models of organizing—which emphatically did not include general strikes or demands for worker ownership of firms. Once the NRLB-recognized unions had swept over the workforce and co-opted most of the movement for organized labor, the second blow of the one-two punch fell: government benefits always mean government strings attached, and in this case it was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which pulled the activities of the recognized unions firmly into the regulatory grip of the federal government. Both the internal culture of post-Wagner mainstream unions, and the external controls of the federal labor regulatory apparatus, have dramatically hamstrung the labor movement for the past half-century. Union methods are legally restricted to collective bargaining and limited strikes (which cannot legally be expanded to secondary strikes, and which can be, and have been, broken by arbitrary fiat of the President). Union hiring halls are banned. Union resources have been systematically sapped by banning closed shop contracts, and encouraging states to ban union shop contracts—thus forcing unions to represent free-riding employees who do not join them and do not contribute dues. Union demands are effectively constrained to modest (and easily revoked) improvements in wages and conditions. And, since modern unions can do so little to achieve their professed goals, and since their professed goals have been substantially lowered anyway, unionization of the workforce continues its decades-long slide.

Explicit regulation and statist neutering of unions is one thing, but it is also notable that government restricts business competition. This produces what Roderick Long terms an "oligopsonistic labour market," meaning a market in which there are few employers compared to laborers, and thus bosses have more bargaining power than workers. Sheldon Richman expanded on this point in his article Workers of the World Unite for a Free Market.

In general, any government intervention that makes it harder to start businesses pushes people into the labor market with less bargaining power than they would have in a free market. Less bargaining power for workers means more bargaining power for bosses. So it stands to reason that some percentage of the workforce must put up with lousy job conditions they would reject in a minute if there were a wider array of better opportunities, including self-employment. But there isn’t because the State, with the backing of established businesses, has kept those opportunities from coming into existence—sometimes by outright prohibition, sometimes by “progressive” measures to “protect” consumers and workers. Technology now makes it more feasible for people to work independently, but statutes and ordinances still stand in the way.

It all comes down to the same thing: squelching competition and creating dependence on thusly protected big hierarchical and often authoritarian firms. (Yes, small business gets some State benefits too, but see Roderick Long’s response here. Also see C. L. Dickenson’s “Free Men for Better Job Performance” here and here.)

Concerns about working conditions sound “left wing” but that’s only because libertarians have neglected the issue, without good reason in my view. (It was not always so. Nineteenth-century liberals explicitly appealed to working people and condemned the State-derived power of “capital.”) Too many contemporary libertarians mistakenly think that since sound economic theory tells us that poor working conditions can’t endure in an advanced competitive market, workers have nothing to worry about in a “capitalist” country like the United States. The problem with the argument is that “capitalism” doesn’t equal “free market,” and we haven’t had a free market—not even close. In fact, the economy we live in is far more the product of government-business collusion—going back to the beginning—than economic freedom.

Where the progressives and state socialists go wrong is in thinking that weak worker bargaining power is inherent in the market itself. It is not. It is the result of State privilege. Therefore the solution is not further government intervention, as the progressives want, but repeal of privileges, subsidies, licenses and the rest of the sources of political advantage that protect the well-connected at the expense of the rest of us.

While these state interventions demonstrate that labor interests and genuinely free markets are not enemies, they still leave open the question of whether a free marketeer can in good conscience support labor unions. Some certainly do. For instance, Brad Spangler, after making a point similar to the one above on how the state reduces labor's bargaining power, wrote on his blog "I urge, and challenge, free-market libertarians to show their solidarity with labor by supporting radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)." So what's so great about these radical unions? And can free market libertarians reasonably support unions at all? In his essay The Ethics of Labor Struggle: A Free Market Perspective, Kevin Carson discusses how well various labor tactics fit into libertarian ethics. He begins by responding the common libertarian objection that union effectiveness is based upon forcing worker compliance with strikes.

Vulgar libertarian critiques of organized labor commonly assert that unions depend entirely on force (or the implicit threat of force), backed by the state, against non-union laborers; they assume, in so arguing, that the strike as it is known today has always been the primary method of labor struggle. Any of Thomas DiLorenzo's articles on the subject at Mises. Org can be taken as a proxy for this ideological tendency. I quote the following as an example:

Historically, the main "weapon" that unions have employed to try to push wages above the levels that employees could get by bargaining for themselves on the free market without a union has been the strike. But in order for the strike to work, and for unions to have any significance at all, some form of coercion or violence must be used to keep competing workers out of the labor market.(9)

This betrays a profound ignorance of the history of the labor movement outside the sterile bubble of the Wagner Act.

First of all, when the strike was chosen as a weapon, it relied more on the threat of imposing costs on the employer than on the forcible exclusion of scabs. You wouldn't think it so hard for the Misoids to understand that the replacement of a major portion of the workforce, especially when the supply of replacement workers is limited by moral sympathy with the strike, might entail considerable transaction costs and disruption of production. The idiosyncratic knowledge of the existing workforce, the time and cost of bringing replacement workers to an equivalent level of productivity, and the damage short-term disruption of production may do to customer relations, together constitute a rent that invests the threat of walking out with a considerable deterrent value. And the cost and disruption is greatly intensified when the strike is backed by sympathy strikes at other stages of production. Wagner and Taft-Hartley greatly reduced the effectiveness of strikes at individual plants by transforming them into declared wars fought by Queensbury rules, and likewise reduced their effectiveness by prohibiting the coordination of actions across multiple plants or industries. Taft-Hartley's cooling off periods, in addition, gave employers time to prepare ahead of time for such disruptions and greatly reduced the informational rents embodied in the training of the existing workforce. Were not such restrictions in place, today's "just-in-time" economy would likely be far more vulnerable to such disruption than that of the 1930s.

Carson continues, discussing the previously noted restrictions on organized labor, and noting free market labor organizing tactics which have been banned.

More importantly, though, unionism was historically less about strikes or excluding non-union workers from the workplace than about what workers did inside the workplace to strengthen their bargaining power against the boss.

The Wagner Act, along with the rest of the corporate liberal legal regime, had as its central goal the redirection of labor resistance away from the successful asymmetric warfare model, toward a formalized, bureaucratic system centered on labor contracts enforced by the state and the union hierarchies. As Karl Hess suggested in a 1976 Playboy interview,

one crucial similarity between those two fascists [Hitler and FDR] is that both successfully destroyed the trade unions. Roosevelt did it by passing exactly the reforms that would ensure the creation of a trade-union bureaucracy. Since F.D.R., the unions have become the protectors of contracts rather than the spearhead of worker demands. And the Roosevelt era brought the "no strike" clause, the notion that your rights are limited by the needs of the state.(10)

The federal labor law regime criminalizes many forms of resistance, like sympathy and boycott strikes up and down the production chain from raw materials to retail, that made the mass and general strikes of the early 1930s so formidable. The Railway Labor Relations Act, which has since been applied to airlines, was specifically designed to prevent transport workers from turning local strikes into general strikes. Taft-Hartley's cooling off period can be used for similar purposes in other strategic sectors, as demonstrated by Bush's invocation of it against the longshoremen's union.

The extent to which state labor policy serves the interests of employers is suggested by the old (pre-Milsted) Libertarian Party Platform, a considerable deviation from the stereotypical libertarian position on organized labor. It expressly called for a repeal, not only of Wagner, but of Taft-Hartley's prohibitions on sympathy and boycott strikes and of state right-to-work prohibitions on union shop contracts. It also condemned any federal right to impose "cooling off" periods or issue back-to-work orders.(11)

Wagner was originally passed, as Alexis Buss suggests below, because the bosses were begging for a regime of enforceable contract, with the unions as enforcers. To quote Adam Smith, when the state regulates relations between workmen and masters, it usually has the masters for its counselors.

Far from being a labor charter that empowered unions for the first time, FDR's labor regime had the same practical effect as telling the irregulars of Lexington and Concord "Look, you guys come out from behind those rocks, put on these bright red uniforms, and march in parade ground formation like the Brits, and in return we'll set up a system of arbitration to guarantee you don't lose all the time." Unfortunately, the Wagner regime left organized labor massively vulnerable to liquidation in the event that ruling elites decided they wanted labor to lose all the time, after all. Since the late '60s, corporate America has moved to exploit the full union-busting potential of Taft-Hartley. And guess what? Labor is prevented by law, for the most part, from abandoning the limits of Wagner and Taft-Hartley and returning to the successful unilateral techniques of the early '30s.

Carson later notes some tactics which, if these regulations were not in place, could permit organized labor to have immense bargaining power over business, while never using force to stop "scabs" from continuing work.

[I]t certainly was easier to win a strike before Taft-Hartley outlawed secondary and boycott strikes up and down the production chain. The classic CIO strikes of the early '30s involved multiple steps in the chain--not only production plants, but their suppliers of raw materials, their retail outlets, and the teamsters who moved finished and unfinished goods. They were planned strategically, as a general staff might plan a campaign. Some strikes turned into what amounted to regional general strikes. Even a minority of workers striking, at each step in the chain, can be far more effective than a conventional strike limited to one plant. Even the AFL-CIO's Sweeney, at one point, half-heartedly suggested that things would be easier if Congress repealed all the labor legislation after Norris-LaGuardia (which took the feds out of the business of issuing injunctions and sending in troops), and let labor and management go at it "mano a mano."(18)

If nothing else, all of this should demonstrate the sheer nonsensicality of the Misoid idea that strikes are ineffectual unless they involve 100% of the workforce and are backed up by the threat of violence against scabs. Even a sizeable minority of workers walking off the job, if they're backed up by similar minorities at other stages of the production and distribution process on early CIO lines, could utterly paralyze a company.

Outside of the strike concept, radical unions such as the IWW have supported on the job direct action. Carson writes:

An alternative model of labor struggle, and one much closer to the overall spirit of organized labor before Wagner, would include the kinds of activity mentioned in the old Wobbly pamphlet "How to Fire Your Boss," and discussed by the I.W.W.'s Alexis Buss in her articles on "minority unionism" for Industrial Worker.

If labor is to return to a pre-Wagner way of doing things, what Buss calls "minority unionism" will be the new organizing principle.

If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly difficult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained. We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force....

Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition....

U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context[;] this is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees.

The labor movement was not built through majority unionism-it couldn't have been.(15)

How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing....

We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for it.(16)

As the Wobbly pamphlet "How to Fire Your Boss" argues, the strike in its current business union form, according to NLRB rules, is about the least effective form of action available to organized labor.

The bosses, with their large financial reserves, are better able to withstand a long drawn-out strike than the workers. In many cases, court injunctions will freeze or confiscate the union's strike funds. And worst of all, a long walk-out only gives the boss a chance to replace striking workers with a scab (replacement) workforce.

Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss' profits while continuing to collect wages, you can cripple the boss without giving some scab the opportunity to take your job. Direct action, by definition, means those tactics workers can undertake themselves, without the help of government agencies, union bureaucrats, or high-priced lawyers. Running to the National Labor Relations Board (N.L.R.B.) for help may be appropriate in some cases, but it is NOT a form of direct action.(17)

Thomas DiLorenzo, ironically, said almost the same thing in the article quoted earlier:

It took decades of dwindling union membership (currently 8.2% of the private-sector labor force in the U.S. according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor) to convince union leaders to scale back the strike as their major "weapon" and resort to other tactics. Despite all the efforts at violence and intimidation, the fact remains that striking union members are harmed by lower incomes during strikes, and in many cases have lost their jobs to replacement workers. To these workers, strikes have created heavy financial burdens for little or no gain. Consequently, some unions have now resorted to what they call "in-plant actions," a euphemism for sabotage.

Damaging the equipment in an oil refinery or slashing the tires of the trucks belonging to a trucking company, for example, is a way for unions to "send a message" to employers that they should give in to union demands, or else. Meanwhile, no unionized employees, including the ones engaged in the acts of sabotage, lose a day's work.

DiLorenzo is wrong, of course, in limiting on-the-job action solely to physical sabotage of the employer's property. As we shall see below, an on-the-job struggle over the pace and intensity of work is inherent in the incomplete nature of the employment contract, the impossibility of defining such particulars ahead of time, and the agency costs involved in monitoring performance after the fact. But what is truly comical is DiLorenzo's ignorance of the role employers and the employers' state played in establishment unions making the strike a "major 'weapon'" in the first place.

Instead of conventional strikes, "How to Fire Your Boss" recommends such forms of direct action as the slowdown, the "work to rule" strike, the "good work" strike, selective strikes (brief, unannounced strikes at random intervals), whisteblowing, and sick-ins. These are all ways of raising costs on the job, without giving the boss a chance to hire scabs.

Sabotage and other forms of direct action pose interesting property rights questions for libertarians. Carson's answer to these questions is as follows:

As I already mentioned, sitdowns and monkey-wrenching would appear at first glance to be obvious transgressions of libertarian principle. Regarding these, I can only say that the morality of trespassing and vandalism against someone else's property hinges on the just character of their property rights.

Murray Rothbard raised the question, at the height of his attempted alliance with the New Left, of what ought to be done with state property. His answer was quite different from that of today's vulgar libertarians ("Why, sell it to a giant corporation, of course, on terms most advantageous to the corporation!"). According to Rothbard, since state ownership of property is in principle illegitimate, all property currently "owned" by the government is really unowned. And since the rightful owner of any piece of unowned property is, in keeping with radical Lockean principles, the first person to occupy it and mix his or her labor with it, it follows that government property is rightfully the property of whoever is currently occupying and using it. That means, for example, that state universities are the rightful property of either the students or faculties, and should either be turned into student consumer co-ops, or placed under the control of scholars' guilds. More provocative still, Rothbard tentatively applied the same principle to the (theatrical gasp) private sector! First he raised the question of nominally "private" universities that got most of their funding from the state, like Columbia. Surely it was only a "private" college "in the most ironic sense." And therefore, it deserved "a similar fate of virtuous homesteading confiscation."

But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to "private" property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison stare, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their "private" property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murderer must be "respected."

But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the "private property" of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized enroute? And, further more, even if the government should decide to nationalize General Dynamics--without compensation, of course-- per se and not as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one gang of thieves--the government--would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75% of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable merit. Certainly it does not mean aggression against private property, and, furthermore, we could expect a considerable diminution of zeal from the military-industrial complex if much of the profits were taken out of war and plunder. And besides, it would make the American military machine less efficient, being governmental, and that is surely all to the good. But why stop at 75%? Fifty per cent seems to be a reasonable cutoff point on whether an organization is largely public or largely private.(19)

If corporations that get the bulk of their profits from state intervention are essentially parts of the state, rightfully subject to being treated as the property of the workers actually occupying them, then sitdowns and sabotage should certainly be legitimate means for bringing this about.

As for the other, less extreme tactics, those who object morally to such on-the-job direct action fail to consider the logical implications of a free contract in labor. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis describe it,

The classical theory of contract implicit in most of neo-classical economics holds that the enforcement of claims is performed by the judicial system at negligible cost to the exchanging parties. We refer to this classical third-party enforcement assumption as exogenous enforcement. Where, by contrast, enforcement of claims arising from an exchange by third parties is infeasible or excessively costly, the exchanging agents must themselves seek to enforce their claims. Endogenous enforcement in labour markets was analysed by Marx--he termed it the extraction of labour from labour power--and has recently become the more or less standard model among microeconomic theorists.

Exogenous enforcement is absent under a variety of quite common conditions: when there is no relevant third party..., when the contested attribute can be measured only imperfectly or at considerable cost (work effort, for example, or the degre of risk assumed by a firm's management), when the relevant evidence is not admissible in a court of law...[,] when there is no possible means of redress..., or when the nature of the contingencies concerning future states of the world relevant to the exchange precludes writing a fully specified contract.

In such cases the ex post terms of exchange are determined by the structure of the interaction between A and B, and in particular on the strategies A is able to adopt to induce B to provide the desired level of the contested attribute, and the counter strategies available to B....

Consider agent A who purchases a good or service from agent B. We call the exchange contested when B's good or service possesses an attribute which is valuable to A, is costly for B to provide, yet is not fully secified in an enforceable contract....

An employment relationship is established when, in return for a wage, the worker B agrees to submit to the authority of the employer A for a specified period of time in return for a wage w. While the employer's promise to pay the wage is legally enforceable, the worker's promise to bestow an adequate level of effort and care upon the tasks assigned, even if offered, is not. Work is subjectively costly for the worker to provide, valuable to the employer, and costly to measure. The manager-worker relationship is thus a contested exchange.(20)

The very term "adequate effort" is meaningless, aside from whatever way its definition is worked out in practice based on the comparative bargaining power of worker and employer. It's virtually impossible to design a contract that specifies ahead of time the exact levels of effort and standards of performance for a wage-laborer, and likewise impossible for employers to reliably monitor performance after the fact. Therefore, the workplace is contested terrain, and workers are justified entirely as much as employers in attempting to maximize their own interests within the leeway left by an incomplete contract. How much effort is "normal" to expend is determined by the informal outcome of the social contest within the workplace, given the de facto balance of power at any given time. And that includes slowdowns, "going canny," and the like. The "normal" effort that an employer is entitled to, when he buys labor-power, is entirely a matter of convention. It's directly analogous the local cultural standards that would determine the nature of "reasonable expectations," in a libertarian common law of implied contract. If libertarians like to think of "a fair day's wage" as an open-ended concept, subject to the employer's discretion and limited by what he can get away with, they should remember that "a fair day's work" is equally open-ended.

This may strike some libertarians as a convoluted rationalization of transgressions against property and contract, but it still presents a well thought out and thoroughly libertarian case for direct action by labor.

Interestingly, the previous Kevin Carson passage provides a perfect segue into another area of free market socialist thought. When he discusses how to deal with state property, which to a pure market anarchist is not legitimately owned by the government, he hits on a key element of free market socialism. The market anarchist, such as Murray Rothbard, believes that because governments obtain property either by force or fiat, it is not legitimately owned by them. Thus, privatization should occur. Unfortunately, the typical meaning of privatization in America involves a conservative practice. When the American government "privatizes" something this either means paying a corporation with tax dollars (Which a pure free marketeer considers ill gotten gain) to do something ordinarily done by government, giving government property to a corporation, or selling said property to a corporation. The first is irrelevant to our discussion of government property, and the second two are clearly illegitimate and distort the market, as they effectively amount to giving away or selling stolen goods. So how does one privatize government property? In his essay How and How Not to Desocialize, Rothbard writes:

It would be far better to enshrine the venerable homesteading principle at the base of the new desocialized property system. Or, to revive the old Marxist slogan: "all land to the peasants, all factories to the workers!" This would establish the basic Lockean principle that ownership of owned property is to be acquired by "mixing one's labor with the soil" or with other unowned resources.

Desocialization is a process of depriving the government of its existing "ownership" or control, and devolving it upon private individuals. In a sense, abolishing government ownership of assets puts them immediately and implicitly into an unowned status, out of which previous homesteading can quickly convert them into private ownership. The homestead principle asserts that these assets are to devolve, not upon the general abstract public as in the handout principle, but upon those who have actually worked upon these resources: that is, their respective workers, peasants, and managers. Of course, these rights are to be genuinely private; that is, land to individual peasants, while capital goods or factories go to workers in the form of private, negotiable shares. Ownership is not to be granted to collectives or cooperatives or workers or peasants holistically, which would only bring back the ills of socialism in a decentralized and chaotic syndicalist form.

There is a reasonable libertarian case to be made for not giving the property to a co-op or collective initially as the form of privatization. However, who is to say that if given control over a factory, the workers would not want to implement a cooperative themselves with their individual shares? As they homesteaded it, this would be their right within a genuinely free market. Radgeek advocates for this and related market socialist forms of privatization (Which he argues could be reasonably be termed "socialization") here and here.

Another issue which tends to separate advocates of pure free markets from socialists is the matter of public property. One common market anarchist view is that in a free market, all property would be privately rather than publicly owned, and thus tightly controlled by the owner. While this would deal with the tragedy of the commons quite nicely, it would also likely decrease options available to the poor, and freedom of movement for everyone. However, public does not imply government owned, and thus there is room in a free market society for public ownership. In 1996 Roderick Long wrote a piece titled In Defense of Public Property, which deals with the issue well. On the matter of whether public property fits libertarian theories of property rights, Long argues

On the libertarian view, we have a right to the fruit of our labor, and we also have a right to what people freely give us. Public property can arise in both these ways.

Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it's hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms — not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day.

The cleared path is the product of labor — not any individual's labor, but all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.

Public property can also be the product of gift. In 19th-century England, it was common for roads to be built privately and then donated to the public for free use. This was done not out of altruism but because the roadbuilders owned land and businesses alongside the site of the new road, and they knew that having a road there would increase the value of their land and attract more customers to their businesses. Thus, the unorganized public can legitimately come to own land, both through original acquisition (the mixing of labor) and through voluntary transfer.

This provides a fairly clear route for a socialistic manner for eliminating government ownership of places like parks, which have been homesteaded by the public at large.

Ultimately, it's important to remember that even if you don't think that roughly socialist economic relations are beneficial, in a libertarian society they may coexist with capitalist relations. Wendy McElroy, no anti-capitalist, explained this quite eloquently in her blog post Capitalism v. The Free Market.

At the risk of being misunderstood, I am not a capitalist. Instead, I advocate the free market. Capitalism is a specific economic arrangement with reference to the ownership of property and capital. It happens to be the arrangement I prefer because I believe it is more just, a far better reflection of reality and produces more prosperity than the alternatives. But I wouldn’t crusade for capitalism the way I would crusade for freedom of speech. What I would crusade for is a free market in which individuals exchange or co-operate with each other according to their own choices.

What’s the difference? Consider: I live near an old-fashioned Mennonite community that organizes its economic life along socialist ideals rather than capitalist ones. The community is absolutely voluntary – that is, it results from the free choices of individuals. In a free market, my neighbors can peacefully disagree with my assessment of capitalism and set up whatever voluntary alternative appeals to them…for whatever reason it appeals to them (e.g. religion). My approval of their non-capitalist lifestyle is not necessary until or unless they attempt to make me adopt their preference. That’s the free market: everyone peacefully pursues whichever economic goals they wish by whatever means is voluntary. If your chosen means is not capitalism and you don’t want my advice…then I wish you well… even though I doubt you will succeed in the way I define ‘success.’ Nevertheless I feel no urge to knock on your door as an evangelist for capitalism who is determined to demonstrate the error of your ways.

I think it would be fitting to close with a video series of Gary Chartier explaining why "advocates of freed markets should oppose capitalism." A written version of the same general arguments is available here.

I have tagged in the Facebook note for this post many advocates of free market anti-capitalist thought, as well as some of my best free market capitalist and non-market socialist leaning friends. I would be interested to read debate on these topics.

The Homosexual Experience is a Gift

2010-05-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

My friend Richard Matthews recently posted as a Facebook note a reflection he wrote titled "The Homosexual Experience is a Gift." I think it presents a really beautiful perspective on homosexuality, and the queer experience in general.

Written January 2009... shortly after coming out.

I just came from my weekly get-together with The Village where we had possibly the most fascinating discussion about the homosexual experience that I have ever had. We dedicated a good portion of our hour-long interaction to the tremendous similarities between the X-Men and the real-life feelings and experiences that LGBT teens and adults have in being closeted, coming out, and living life as outsiders.

For those of you who don't know very much about the X-Men, they're not your average comic book heroes. The biggest names in the world of comics are Superman, Batman, and Spiderman. These are good 'ol boy superheroes. They're invincible, mysterious, and most of all: loved and adored by the respective cities that they protect. Not so with the mutants of the X-Men. While they do have incredible super powers and abilities, their story is one of struggle, rejection, and ultimately redemption.

Mutants in the world of X-Men are born with a genetic mutation that usually doesn't manifest itself until they begin to come of age as teenagers. When these characters begin to realize that they're “freaks”, there is a cataclysmic internal struggle that erupts within each one of them. Desperate to be normal, they struggle with self-loathing, depression, and often rejection by their families.

The tragic beauty of the story is that each one of them has a unique and amazing gift. At first, these mutant teens are consumed with hate for the abnormality that is part of them, but over time, many of them awaken to the stunning exquisiteness of their individuality. When they begin to find each other, they grow in strength and purpose. As this community of misfits grows and begins to take shape, the normal population reacts with cruel and shocking brutality. Laws are passed against them, they are attacked and beaten on the streets, and lies and misinformation flood the airwaves to spread fear and hate.

I hope that by now you've begun to see some similarities to the struggles that real-life gay adolescents and adults face. Our discussion group, The Village, unanimously agreed that our homosexuality is, in fact, a gift. Let's look beyond the fact that many homosexuals have tremendous talent in art, music, writing, etc. Being gay in and of itself is a gift... a magnificent gift. One of our villagers said it very well when he said that the day he accepted his sexuality, he was overcome with the incredible sense that this was special. That this made him forever distinct from average. But what is the gift? The gift... is that at a very critical and formative time in our lives, we have to look deep within ourselves to accept that we're different... and good. We have to learn... that we are good people. Our straight friends will just give us blank stares if asked, “When did you realize that you were a heterosexual?” “When did you accept that being straight was okay?”

These questions (substitute gay for straight) often evoke tremendous meaning and passion from a gay person. The gift of homosexuality is not only our individuality, but is a mirror to the soul. How many times have you had to look into this mirror and try to figure out who you really are? How many prayers have been choked out through bitter tears while wrestling with the most fundamental questions of our very existence? There is something profound to be said for the personal insight gained through struggle and doubt. I would venture to guess that we look into this mirror often as we continue our lifelong struggle for equality, acceptance, self-acceptance, and peace. It's a gift not exclusive to the gay community, but I would say all gays have it to some degree.

In the X-Men saga, a cure is introduced to rid the world of the scourge of mutants. It is made available to any mutant who wants it. This “cure” introduces a whole new level of personal conflict for the special race of mutants. Each one of them has desperately yearned for normalcy at some point in their lives. Even those who have long accepted themselves are shaken to the core by the prospect and supposed simplicity of being “normal.” Ultimately, some of them take the cure, others do not.

Most of us have been through, or are in, a time of our lives when we would have given ANYTHING to be rid of our gift, to be loved and accepted by default by our families, friends, and by society as a whole. There are people who despise their gift. If a “gay cure” were controversially offered today, would you take it?

There was a long period of my life when I would have gladly given up everything to live the boring poorly-dressed life of a straight man. As a 13 year-old boy, the prospect of living my entire life hiding in the closet or being ridiculed as an openly gay man racked my young body with terror and despair. Fourteen years later... fourteen years of anguish, self introspection and soul-searching, I can confidently say that I would not change if given the chance. Hell no. Scarcity creates value; that's why diamonds are so precious. I do not doubt the wisdom of my creator; each one of us is invaluably precious. We were all raised as heterosexuals in a society that HIGHLY values heterosexuality. Yet here we are. “Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” - Oscar Wilde

Ethics, Empiricism, and Emergent Order: My Path to Left Libertarianism

2010-04-26T01:31:00.000-07:00

From my roots as a civil liberties loving Democrat, to my Noam Chomsky and Bertrand Russell inspired move to libertarian socialism, to my current independent left libertarian radicalism, my political views have always been left of center. Initially I thought I had a place firmly within the Democratic Party, but gradually I have moved radically beyond the parameters of their policy platform. My views run the gamut of political philosophy, typically being based upon liberal, progressive, classically liberal, libertarian, socialist, and anarchist works. Fundamentally, however, they always have been, and I posit always will be, characterized by the attitude Bertrand Russell ascribed to liberalism in his essay Philosophy and Politics. Wrote Russell, "The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may lead at any moment to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way they are held in theology." With this openness to new data, my political views have undergone many evolutions.

The story of my political evolution begins, as so many do, with devotion to atheism and scientific naturalism. In fifth grade, while seeking quotes from my favorite historical figure, Thomas Paine, I stumbled across the website Positive Atheism, and their "Big List of Quotations." As I read through this list, containing both brilliant quotes from champions of science and liberalism and disturbing quotes from religious and socially conservative leaders, several opinions solidified. I became firmly convinced that free speech, feminism, reproductive choice, science (Particularly big bang cosmology and evolutionary biology), gay rights, and the separation of church and state were all immensely important and must be defended and advanced. Furthermore, I realized that these goals were under attack by religious fundamentalists and social conservatives, including the administration of George W. Bush. I still stand by these ideas. I remain a secular humanist to my core, diametrically opposed to the asinine assaults on reason which continue to emanate from the religious right and their army of bronze-age-dogma-worshiping bigots and philistines.

The next step in the evolution of my political ideology came from a somewhat less intellectual source: Liberal comedian Al Franken. His books Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them gave me some great laughs, and instilled in me some knowledge of the dishonesty and demagoguery that characterizes the American right. While I remain revolted at the right, I fear that in this period (Around sixth and seventh grade) I grew dogmatic and embraced many aspects of the Democratic Party platform on an emotional rather than rational basis.

But after consuming the pleasant partisan political junk food of Franken's hilarity, I moved onto some real philosophical red meat. My mind was blown by the articulate and principled works of the 19th century classical liberal utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill. I will confess for the sake of intellectual honesty that I have yet to read the entirety of his concise treatise On Liberty, but the excerpts I did read have since defined my political ideology. Most influential was Mill's enunciation of the harm principle: "That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." From this principle I realized the moral vacuity of drug control, bans on prostitution, and other symptoms of America's meddlesome, paternalistic tendency towards moralistic overcriminalization. Later I would learn of police brutality, the economics of prohibition, and many civil liberties issues entangled in these matters, and my opinions would grow stronger still. But fundamentally it was the words of Mill that triggered this libertarian spark in my thinking.

After the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill solidified my devotion to personal liberty, my skepticism of the state was enhanced, ironically enough, by the insightful writings of three great socialists. Of course, these were socialists of a decisively libertarian persuasion, and I believe their work has much to offer for all reasonable people regardless of their place on the political spectrum. I refer, of course, to Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, and George Orwell. The influence of Russell and Orwell upon my ideas is fairly self explanatory. Russell's skepticism and empiricism remain pervasive in my ideals and color my every thought. Orwell taught me how to see through political demagoguery, and particularly how all ideologies, even those which are on the surface devoted to humanity's liberation, can become the instigators of the most brutal and insidious authoritarianism. And of course, the entirety of this socialist trinity loved free speech with an absolutist fervor, while despising and distrusting blind loyalty to any party.

But the influence of Professor Noam Chomsky extends farther than that of his two comrades, brilliant and eloquent as both are. For it was Chomsky who sparked my outrage at America's undemocratic two party system, morally bankrupt and ever bungling CIA, and murderous military-industrial empire. With clear logic, scrupulously documented facts, and moral clarity, Professor Chomsky demonstrated the hypocrisy of our foreign policy, which condemns terrorism and tyranny while terrorizing civilians and installing and maintaining tyrannical regimes. Until I read Failed States, I had never fully comprehended the horrors our government was hypocritically unleashing in the Middle East, or the human cost of our previous unethical and illegal misadventures in Latin America and around the globe. Realizing that presidential administrations from both the Democratic and Republican parties were complicit in what amounted to war crimes toppled my partisan loyalty to the Democrats, which had already been shaken by the admonitions of Russell and Orwell. Professor Chomsky's analysis of how few substantive policy differences exist between the parties, about how the media in America serve as lapdogs for the state corporate apparatus, and of the many other systemic flaws in our political system, awakened me to the need for radicalism. Beyond the folly of the Iraq War, I saw the folly of an entire empire. Beyond the cynical demagoguery of the Republicans, I saw a narrow political spectrum in which Democrats and Republicans alike accepted the same morally repugnant premises. And beyond the lies of O'Reilly and Limbaugh, I noted that even real journalists sacrificed moral and intellectual integrity so as to retain their coveted seat in Washington's royal court.

Chomsky's writings may have saved me from the sick stagnation of the political mainstream, but I was still hampered with delusions. I was a democratic socialist who believed that the optimal solution to our problems was a truly democratic government that provided services to the people and limited corporate power. I also thought that, while Barack Obama was going to be a politician within the center right authoritarian spectrum party, he would substantially roll back the damage Bush did. It is now my opinion that I was wrong on both counts. On the first point, I now see that particularly in America, but also elsewhere, the state has an intractable tendency to become a tool of inequity and privation. Orwell and Chomsky taught me this, but it didn't really sink in until now, particularly as both remained to some extent state socialists. It didn't really sink in until I read detailed policy analysis from the Cato Institute and other sources on corporate welfare. It didn't sink in until Timothy Carney on the right and the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on the left started reporting on Obama's corporatism. And it didn't truly sink in entirely until I re-exposed myself to the philosophy of individualist anarchism. I was first introduced to individualist anarchism when I read Wendy McElroy's brilliant book XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography. In this truly stellar defense of sexual liberation and free expression, Wendy McElroy eviscerated the ideas of anti-pornography feminism, expounding on her philosophy of individualist feminism, which has at its roots such 19th Century individualist anarchists as Moses Harman, who was frequently jailed for his publication of "obscene" articles advocating birth control and condemning marital rape. But this time I encountered a farther left brand of individualist anarchism, an ideology promoted by the likes of Professor Roderick Long, a philosopher at Auburn University. The "free market anti-capitalism" of Roderick Long and his comrades such as Kevin Carson, Brad Spangler, and Sheldon Richman combined the consistent anti-statism I had loved from Wendy McElroy and Murray Rothbard with the compassion for victims of non-governmental hierarchies that I so admired from the likes of Noam Chomsky. This should not be too surprising, for as Roderick Long explained in his lecture "Rothbard's Left and Right: 40 Years Later," leftism and libertarianism were not originally considered opposed, but in fact "what we now call free market libertarianism was originally a left wing position. The great liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left side of the French national assembly, with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing — feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business — were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals." Roderick Long has also written a variety of very persuasive papers, such as Corporations versus the Market, explaining how the state creates oligopolies, and thus an oligoponistic labor market unfriendly both to workers and consumers. Corporate power is largely a product of state intervention, and it has a tendency to then incur ever more favors from the government, resulting in our current corporatist plutocracy. At the same time, the writings of many great economists taught me how undirected emergent order, a phenomena I had long defended in the natural sciences against the teleology of creationists, can lead to great things in human action. For these reasons, I abandoned democratic socialism in favor of free market anti-capitalism. So what caused the other change, what led to my disillusionment with Obama? Well, in accepting the despotic assumptions of the Bush Administration when it comes to civil liberties, in arguing for indefinite detention, in claiming the authority to order the assassination of US citizens, in using the state secrets privilege to cover for the Bush Administration's crimes, Obama has shifted the debate in a dangerously authoritarian direction. Liberals who would have once condemned such policies as "Constitution shredding" now defend them as pragmatic, while the right hysterically screams that Obama will kill us all by allowing some terror suspects their Miranda Rights, and clamors to avert this non-threat by annihilating the Bill of Rights with their "Enemy Belligerent Act." Only principled "civil liberties absolutists" like Glenn Greenwald are left, as a small minority in our political discourse, to argue for Thomas Paine's ideal that "in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other." As long as Obama stands explicitly against the Bill of Rights, I cannot consider myself his supporter.

These are not the only changes that have happened recently in my political consciousness. The writings of several commentators, most notably Radley Balko, have alerted me to the true nature of the modern American criminal justice system. It is an unjust system, in which police and prosecutors are above the law, law enforcement agents become ever more militarized to prosecute a failed "war on drugs," and innocent people are jailed, even executed. Similarly, I have gone from an advocate for mainstream LGBT rights causes such as gay marriage, to a radical seeking to abolish all forms of prescribed gender roles, and the gender dichotomy that excludes transsexuals, intersex individuals, and so many others.

While all my opinions, as Russell wrote, "are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may lead at any moment to their abandonment," I hold my current views with passion and a willingness to act. And so, for now, I proudly proclaim the following:

I stand in solidarity with the queers, the immigrants, the workers, the prisoners, and every civilian casualty in foreign wars and the domestic drug war.
I stand against bigotry of every stripe, violent aggression in all its manifestations (Including the state itself), dogmatism and all the ignorance it begets, corporatist cronyism, and state secrecy and dishonesty.
I stand for justice, reason, and liberty, wherever these values may lead.

Why We Need an Alliance Between Libertarians and the Left

2010-02-27T14:06:00.000-08:00

Currently, there exists a fair amount of animosity between libertarians and the left. It's understandable. Many libertarians go around denying climate science, bashing altruism, smearing the poor as lazy or incompetent, and declaring big business "a persecuted minority." On the other hand, many on the left went into histrionics after the Supreme Court affirmed First Amendment principles in Citizens United v FEC, look to government as the first solution to social and economic ills, and are willing to abandon their anti-war views and support of civil liberties in order to pass their statist domestic agenda. That being said, on the issues I deem most important in our society today, libertarians and the left are (Or should be) in agreement. And we need to unite around these common goals, because, as I will demonstrate in the remainder of this post, the Democrats and Republicans are largely united against our interests here.

The American political machine is fundamentally broken. Libertarians and independent liberals spend lots of time raging against it, for a menagerie of reasons. Thus, I will use this post to diagnose systemic flaws both groups addressed here should find rather terrifying, as well as my favored solutions.

First, let us examine the two party system. For more than a century, we have oscillated between the Democrats and the Republicans, and despite their hatred of one another, the similarities are more striking to me than the differences. Under both parties our troops were sent on superfluous and imperialistic missions. Under both parties the CIA has deposed democratically elected governments, propped up tyranny, and generated blowback which later endangered our national security. Under both parties torture and war crimes have never had any chance of being prosecuted provided they were committed by the US government. Under both parties corporate welfare distorted the market and defiled the public interest. Under both parties "tough on crime" politicians compete to see who can do the most to overcriminalize, take away more of our Fourth Amendment rights, militarize our police force, and incarcerate more of our citizens. Peel away the differences in rhetoric, and underneath you have two parties opposed to peace, equality, and freedom in shockingly similar ways.

Naturally, there have been attempts to bypass this flawed two party system. In 1971, the Libertarian Party was formed to advocate smaller government. As an outgrowth of Ralph Nader's independent campaigns for the presidency, a national Green Party coalesced in 2001 to advocate for environmentalism, grassroots democracy, social justice, tolerance, peace, and non-violence. A plethora of other parties outside of the bipartisan power duopoly exist in the American system. Yet until we reform certain policies, we WILL be subject to rule by "Demopublicans." Neither libertarians nor the independent left are truly represented by either major party. And even if they were, such a narrow political spectrum would be anathema to the values of both groups. Libertarians should understand that a maximization of competition and free discourse are both desirable. The independent left, in its desire both for free exchange of ideas and a functional and participatory democracy, should revile the two party system as well.

But the two party system is currently entrenched by a wide range of political machinations which we must work to dismantle. So as to prevent votes for third parties becoming mere "spoilers," a system such as instant runoff voting, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference, must be implemented. Discriminatory ballot access and campaign finance laws must be reformed, simplified, or abolished. Debates should be wrested from the control of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is run by the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties. A more detailed discussion of such problems and proposed solutions to these problems occurred at the Cato Institute in October 2009, and in the spirit of this note it featured both a libertarian economist and a leader in Ralph Nader's campaign.

Moving beyond the two party system itself, we must examine the corrupt shenanigans which occur in Congress. One common and corrupt practice involves tacking irrelevant and often immensely deleterious amendments onto bills. Examples include a draconian copyright provision the RIAA and Harry Reid snuck into an education bill, a policy decreasing transparency regarding Bush era torture which was added to a defense appropriations bill by Joe Lieberman, and the attempts to use the health reform bill to reinstate federally funded abstinence only sex education. More odious still is the fact that Congress members often don't bother to read their own bills. After being informed of frighteningly anti-Constitutional policies included in the PATRIOT Act, quite a few politicians admitted to voting for the bill without having read it. Now, I know that many politicians (*cough* Michelle Bachmann *cough*) may have difficulty reading bills written above a first grade level, but it's their job. In response to these systemic flaws in our legislature, the libertarian advocacy group Downsize DC has proposed the Read the Bills Act and the One Subject at a Time Act.

Another systemic flaw concerns the creation of classes of citizens which are above accountability for their actions. The mountain of evidence for this proposition of an American "culture of impunity" can, and does, fill many blogs and books. So as to prevent this post from being side tracked, I shall present three clear instances of the phenomenon.

First, the Bush torture program. Such a program is clearly illegal, both under section 2340A of the federal criminal code and under the International Convention Against Torture, which was pushed through by noted far left civil libertarian President Ronald Reagan. Yet not only do Bush, Cheney, Yoo, and other administrative architects of systematic torture of prisoners have almost no chance of being prosecuted, the Obama Administration has actively worked to protect them from mere scrutiny. For instance, in the case Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen, Obama's Department of Justice advocated the position that the state secrets privilege meant torture victims did not even deserve their day in court (http://www.aclu.org/national-security/obama-administration-seeks-keep-torture-victims-having-day-court). In a related story, both the Bush and Obama administrations threatened a British court that we would cut off intelligence sharing with Britain if they released evidence pertaining to the torture of British citizen Binyam Mohammed (http://www.aclu.org/national-security/british-court-orders-release-torture-evidence-extraordinary-rendition-case). The court did so anyway, and intelligence sharing has not ceased, although the Obama Administration expressed regrets and stated that this would harm our future intelligence sharing programs.

Another instance of America's culture of impunity is clearly evident in a concept known as "absolute prosecutorial immunity." This is the notion that if prosecutors deliberately falsify evidence, in clear violation of both ethics and law, they are immune from any lawsuits by the innocent victims of their dishonesty. There exists legal precedent to support prosecutorial immunity, which the Supreme Court justified in such cases as Imbler v. Pacthman using the argument that such protections were necessary so that prosecutors were not deterred from doing their job. The only legal precedent which currently exists to open prosecutors to any semblance of legal accountability for misconduct is Buckley v. Fitzsimmons, which states that prosecutors working in an investigative capacity are subject to mere qualified immunity. Last year, the case Pottawattamie v. McGhee, in which two prosecutors (who had colluded with police in order to manufacture evidence which sent innocent men to prison for 25 years) argued that they could not be sued, came before the Supreme Court. Such a case essentially threatened to overturn the small chance for prosecutorial accountability offered by Buckley v. Fitzsimmons. Among those filing amicus briefs in favor of the prosecutors were a who's who of status quo authoritarians, including the U.S. Solicitor General and the attorney generals of 25 states. Filing briefs on behalf of reason, responsibility, and justice were such organizations as the libertarian Cato Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union, typically deemed a left wing organization. We cannot know how the Supreme Court would have decided the case, as a settlement was reached before the ruling was issued. For more information, I suggest you read Radley Balko's article on this issue. Liberals and libertarians alike (Along with all decent people with any sense of justice) should care about accountability in this case, particularly as the United States already has one of the highest prison populations and has plenty of incentives for prosecutors to convict, with very few for them to avoid convicting the innocent.

The last example I will give you regarding this country's pervasive paucity of accountability concerns police. Regardless of their merits as a group, when they do violate laws, they are typically not subject to anything resembling the punishment faced by us mere civilians. One recent case involves an off duty cop engaging in a hit and run while drunk, yet not facing any prosecution. A litany of similar and often worse stories may be found on Radley Balko's blog under "police professionalism." What makes this lack of accountability even more morally bankrupt is that it coincides with a massive expansion of police powers and incentives to use and abuse them, largely as part of the war on drugs. Under asset forfeiture laws, the police may confiscate your property simply by contending that it was obtained through illicit activity. They can do so even if the property owner has not been charged with any crime. Scarier still, SWAT teams frequently engage in raids armed with heavy artillery and get the wrong house, killing or frightening innocent people and pets as a result. While they are given federal funding to do this, there exists no system of oversight to create incentive to only use such force when it's needed. The Cato Institute has a map of botched paramilitary SWAT raids, color coded in accordance to the specific harm caused.

So far the systemic problems discussed have been matters where it's fairly expected that libertarians and leftists will agree. Civil liberties, imperialism, and the unsatisfactory nature of the two party system are the sort of problems you'll find discussed regularly in both Z Magazine and Reason Magazine.

Where libertarians and the left tend to disagree is economics. Libertarian economic policy is based on the idea of free markets, and seeks to maximize individual control over one's own property and contracts, consequently limiting or eliminating government intervention in voluntary transactions. Left wing economics, on the other hand, is based on the common good, and seeks to help the poor and the workers while limiting the power of corporations over the common people. Thanks to the statist branch of the left and the corporatist branch of the right, many have become convinced that these goals are diametrically opposed. But this is simply a myth, fostered by a left which seeks to smear free markets and a right which seeks to use libertarian rhetoric to protect the wealthy. While there are some cases, such as welfare, health care, and worker protection laws, where libertarianism and leftism arguably are opposed, the litany of largely ignored cases where big government distorts markets and defiles property rights to favor big business means that libertarians can often find common ground with the left even with regards to economics. Moreover, many left libertarians, including Sheldon Richman and philosopher Roderick Long, argue quite persuasively that in a truly free market, the absence of state enforced corporate privilege would grant working people far greater bargaining power and thus deter abusive corporate policies. For purposes here, I will not go as far as them, and will instead focus on cases where the state unambiguously distorts markets to the benefit of big business and the detriment of the public interest.

Perhaps the most obvious example consists of corporate subsidies. According to a report by Stephen Silvinski of the Cato Institute, the federal government spent $92 billion on corporate subsidies in the 2006 fiscal year. Silvinski suggests the formation of a corporate welfare reform commission. Such a commission would analyze the federal budget to find corporate subsidies which do not serve a compelling state interest, and would place their reform recommendations before a congressional vote. Considering the vast swath of agencies which engage in corporate welfare, such a commission would certainly have their work cut out for them.

One of the most bloated and undeniably detrimental manifestations of corporate welfare comes in the form of the extravagant subsidies and perverse incentives which come out of the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA spends piles of taxpayer money subsidizing domestic agribusiness, and while this spending is defended as a way to help small farmers, in reality the bulk of it goes to large corporate farms, as explained here. Worse still, the USDA utilizes protective tariffs and production quotas so as to reduce competition for sugar producers, in addition to offering them direct subsidies, a topic on which this Cato Institute report expounds. These distortions of sugar markets dramatically raise American sugar prices, which often leads companies which use sugar to relocate, resulting in American job losses. Additionally, by making it easier for sugar companies to profit in America, the USDA has encouraged the already disturbing destruction of Florida's Everglades. Combined with our government's extravagant corn subsidies, these artificially inflated sugar prices have led to the perverse proliferation of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener. The horrible health impact of high fructose corn syrup is well supported by scientific evidence, yet the USDA continues to create incentives for it to increase in prevalence.

Another disgusting corporate welfare program is the Export-Import Bank. Unlike the USDA, which serves some purposes of arguable legitimacy such as regulating produce for safety and operating the National Forests, the Export-Import Bank is entirely an agent of rank corporatism. While their supposed purpose is to secure American jobs, many of the companies the Export-Import Bank subsidizes rapidly dispose of their American jobs. Indeed, the Export-Import Bank has financed many a foreign corporate operation, thus arguably creating incentives to get rid of American jobs rather than preserve them. Bernie Sanders, the only self identified socialist in the Senate, wrote an excellent article in The Nation exposing the wasteful corporate welfare that plagues the Export-Import Bank.

I could spend the remainder of my life elaborating on federal level corporate welfare programs and the various ways they sew perverse incentives, but in doing so I would be neglecting the unjust and economically nonsensical programs which occur on the state and local level.

One egregious example of state level corporatist corruption is eminent domain abuse. The Constitution provides for eminent domain, or the confiscation of private land for public use, provided just compensation is given to the previous owners. Historically eminent domain has been used to build publicly owned and accessible projects such as roads and schools. However, recently it has been used to confiscate individual land and transfer it to corporations on the grounds that they will improve the local economy and this constitutes a "public use." This happened to Susette Kelo's house in the city of New London. Her land was confiscated so as to pave the way for a new development by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Kelo's legal challenge to this state sponsored corporatist theft made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that the confiscation of Susette Kelo's land was constitutional. When I first read of this decision, my reaction was a simple "WTF?" And what of the alleged "public" good that would come from pushing Susette Kelo out of her house? Pfizer closed its New London facility in November 2009. This closing both underscores the tragedy and absurdity of using eminent domain to benefit private corporations and provides a certain poetic justice, in which wealthy thieves fail to profit from their kleptocratic cronyism. How's that "public use" looking now?

Another, less well known form of local level corporatism consists of the proliferation of superfluous licensing laws. Licensing laws can be arguably justified when the profession in question can pose a great risk to others when handled incompetently. This is the impetus for licensing laws surrounding medicine, trucking, and school bus driving. It can also be arguably valid when the professionals in question are providing a trusted public service and using taxpayer money, as in teaching. But for the bulk of professions, the impact of licensing is to decrease consumer choice, decrease competition, raise the cost of services, enrich the oligopoly of license holders, and inhibit the poor from starting businesses by increasing start up costs through bureaucratic fees. This is why it is absurd when the state of Texas requires eye brow threaders to obtain Western style cosmetology licenses irrelevant to their particular service (http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3014&Itemid=165). Or when Louisiana requires licenses for florists (http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=747&Itemid=165). Worse still, the laws sometimes blatantly defy the First Amendment, such as the Texas law which does not restrict who can provide interior design services, but does regulate who may term themselves "interior designers" (http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1240&Itemid=165). Free speech problems also emerge with Virginia's licensing laws for yoga teaching (http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3005&Itemid=165).

I have barely skimmed the surface of how the state has acted to counteract the interests of both leftists and libertarians. Suffice to say that we need a political movement which provides an alternative to the corporatist, authoritarian, warmongering, corrupt, unaccountable bipartisan duopoly which currently plagues our government.

This is why libertarians, liberals, and leftists should join forces for radical yet rational change. That and the fact that, as all their names start with L, there are awesome opportunities for alliteration.

Refuting Anti-Immigrant Ignorance

2010-02-27T13:49:00.000-08:00

"WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Press 1 for English. Press 2 to disconnect until you learn to speak English. And remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, JESUS CHRIST and the AMERICAN SOLIDER. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom. If you agree... copy and paste in your status"

As many of you may expect, I find this Facebook status meme to be odious on multiple levels. For the purposes of this blog I will ignore the platitudes about "JESUS CHRIST and the AMERICAN SOLDIER" dying for us, as the substance of this nativist status meme concerns how one should treat immigrants who do not speak English.

Now, ignore that this country has no national language, and it's merely an emergent property of our society that English is the dominant tongue. We should at least grant a few things to the nativists here, after all. Assume that a country where we all speak the same language, English, is an important goal.

Alright, for the remainder of this discussion we assume that the priorities of this status meme are sound. We assume that a populace with one language is superior to a population where some speak English and some speak Spanish, presumably because English speakers were here first. We'll ignore the fact that most of the early European immigrants on this continent didn't take the time to learn the indigenous languages.

A national language is important, dammit! And it's clearly the fault of immigrants for not learning our language, right? I mean, that's indicative of intellectual laziness. It's not as though they have anything else to do.

Oh wait.

Most immigrants to whom nativists object, particularly those who don't speak English, are economically disadvantaged individuals who are working hard to build a better life for their family. Now, typically that can require a full time job, which can interfere with the already challenging task of learning a language. If only that were the only challenge and time commitment faced by immigrants in this country. Sadly, our bureaucratic, tough on crime, xenophobia exploiting government has decided to make their lives even more difficult, further cutting into each alien's time to learn English.

The remainder of this essay shall document a few of the difficulties faced by immigrants which are direct results of government policies, or have been exacerbated by government policies.

First, we shall discuss the difficulties faced by illegal and undocumented immigrants. The most obvious of these is the blatant trampling of their constitutional rights. The agency most concerned with using the law against illegal aliens is the Border Patrol. And unlike the rest of our law enforcement community, the Border Patrol is not bound to follow the standards for search and seizure established by the Fourth Amendment. The American Civil Liberties Union has termed the border, specifically all areas within 100 miles of the external boundary of the United States, to be a "Constitution free zone," because Border Patrol agents are permitted within this vicinity to stop any vehicle for a "routine search." No warrant or probable cause is required. Now, it's not just immigrants who face the impact of this. Indeed, by the ACLU's population estimates, "fully TWO-THIRDS of the United States’ population lives within this Constitution-free or Constitution-lite Zone. That’s 197.4 million people who live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders." So, it's not just immigrants who face the impact of this policy, but still, when one has a full time job and is being sought by an agency unrestrained by usual Constitutional safeguards, learning English might be a tad bit difficult. And that's still ignoring the fact that Border Patrol further moves their search into powerful privacy invasion mode via technology, including: "watch list and database systems such as the Automated Targeting System (ATS) traveler risk assessment program, identity and tracking systems such as electronic (RFID) passports, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), and intrusive technological schemes such as the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBINet) or “virtual border fence” and unmanned aerial vehicles (aka 'drone aircraft')." A more detailed expose on how the Border Patrol regularly violates constitutional rights may be found in this post at Fr33Agents.

The constitutional rights of illegal aliens face further threats beyond the powerful Border Patrol itself. Take perhaps the most egregious example: Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. Radley Balko of the libertarian magazine Reason describes Arpaio with the following colorful language: "The publicity-loving self-proclaimed 'Toughest Sheriff in America' made himself famous with his desert tent prisons, chain gangs, reality TV show, and, most recently, with his almost certainly illegal crackdowns on undocumented immigrants. Arpaio is now the subject of a federal grand jury investigation." That's right; Arpaio's tactics for cracking down on illegal immigration are so legally dubious that the United States Department of Justice is engaging in an investigation of Arpaio and the police department he runs. This is the same Department of Justice which wrote a legal brief advocating that prosecutors have absolute immunity from lawsuits if they deliberately falsify evidence. Yet even they note constitutional problems with Joe Arpaio. Their investigation involves charges that Sheriff Arpaio engaged in racial profiling in violation of the 14th Amendment and that he blatantly violated the procedural rights of the accused in his anti-immigration crackdown. The Sheriff's lesser known comrade, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Peyton Thomas, has engaged in quite a few legally dubious moves himself. One of the most relevant for illegal immigration is that he has attempted to charge immigrants with human trafficking for smuggling themselves into the country. And though the ACLU, widely considered a left leaning organization, is among the leading critics of Maricopa County's tyrant wannabes, these bumbling authoritarians face a certain amount of ire from the libertarian right as well. Arizona's right leaning think tank the Goldwater Institute has quite a few choice words for Joe Arpaio and Andrew Peyton Thomas. For instance, after Thomas issued a subpoena to obtain the IP information of all who access the website of the Phoenix newspaper "New Times" (in retaliation for a critical article about Arpaio), Clint Bolick, a former Reagan Administration official and current constitutional expert at the Goldwater Institute, stated "That may have been the broadest subpoena ever issued in the history of the United States. It literally violated the rights of tens of thousands of people. Including me, I should add. I read the New Times online." Needless to say, Arpaio and Thomas defile the rights of both native citizens and immigrants in their jurisdiction, but one of their primary focuses has been cracking down on illegal immigration. Something tells me that learning English isn't your top priority when you're being harassed by near tyrannical law enforcement agents.

Another key thing to consider is that illegal immigrants, already economically disadvantaged, are often put at a further economic disadvantage by government policies. Example: The health reform bill. At this point, almost nobody argues that health care for illegal immigrants should be subsidized by the taxpayers. However, the Senate bill takes this attitude even further. Under the Senate bill, illegal immigrants are not permitted to privately buy the cheaper insurance which would be afforded by the new health insurance exchange. Yet at the same time, it's possible that illegal or undocumented immigrants would not be exempted from the individual mandate (The House bill does not feature that exemption). So, in other words, they would be legally obligated to buy insurance, and it would automatically have a higher price and be harder to find than that available to US citizens. A full explanation of this was written in Reason Magazine here. I'm sure the extra financial burden will be quite conducive to educating oneself in the mechanics and subtleties of the English language. /sarcasm

So, all these burdens faced by illegal aliens raise an interesting question: If there are so many disadvantages to illegal immigration, why don't the immigrants simply work through the legal immigration process? The answer is that our path to citizenship is now run by a bloated, inefficient, and downright labyrinthine bureaucracy, as illustrated in this flowchart from Reason Magazine. I challenge anyone who copied and pasted the status to which this post is a response to navigate that kind of tedious bureaucratic process while on a low income and learning a new language.

Now, the point of this note is not to say that there wouldn't be advantages to all or nearly all American residents knowing English. Doing so might well do wonders for ease and efficiency of commerce and communication, as well as for social cohesion. But learning a new language is also easier said than done. If the "learn to speak English" crowd really wants an America where we all speak English, they shouldn't be complaining about the immigrants. Instead, they should be complaining to their representatives, asking them to create a more streamlined, efficient, and immigrant friendly system in which immigrants would have the time to learn English. Hell, perhaps they should even push for publicly funded English classes, and create incentives by making success in those classes a key to a faster route to citizenship than is currently offered. But somehow I doubt many of them will do this. Because fundamentally I doubt their objections really are founded in the potential advantages of all Americans sharing a common language. Instead, I strongly suspect their concerns are grounded in fear, bigotry, racism, nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. And I think I've documented quite well how destructive such tendencies are to our rights and our prosperity.

#1 Lesson from the Obama Administration: Don't Trust a Politician

2009-09-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

Politicians exist to be elected and to maintain their power once they have been. At no point do honesty, empirical reality, or human rights play into this, and when they do, it's a less than secondary concern.

The way pragmatic political concerns override principle is made perfectly clear by the gradual revelation that on policy, Barack Obama is far from progressive, particularly on matters of civil liberties. Of course, to most independent observers, this was already fairly apparent. Advocates for civil liberties, accountability, and the rule of law expressed their dismay in 2008 when then Senator Obama voted to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies complicit in warrantless wiretapping. Anarcho-syndicalist activist Noam Chomsky advised that left libertarians, progressives, and liberals "vote Obama, but without delusions." He pointed out that while Obama was clearly better than McCain, his approach was full of rhetoric onto which we could project our hopes, but largely bereft of substance, particularly on matters such as American imperialism, accountability, and other matters on which our political status quo is rotten to the core.

However, not all progressives were so suitably cynical. I witnessed delighted and ecstatic excitement among many of my liberal friends upon his election, and even I was admittedly overjoyed to see the end of the Bush regime.

Since the election, the value of cynicism has been confirmed many times over. Whether on drug policy, rendition, torture, transparency, or military action, he has been simply Bush lite. He removed some of the more grievous injustices of Bush Administration policy, but still maintained their primary distinguishing substance of statist lawlessness.

President Obama promised the most transparent presidency in the history of the United States of America. This was decidedly not what he delivered. While I could cite innumerable examples of this, I will for the sake of concision cite only one. I'll let the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington explain.

"The Obama administration has now taken exactly the same position as the Bush administration, telling us the visitor logs are presidential records," said Anne Weismann, the legal counsel for CREW. "I don't see how you can keep people from knowing who visits the White House and adhere to a policy of openness and transparency. The discrepancy between the rhetoric and the policy is especially great."

The White House attempted to provide excuses, even going so far as to claim in classic Orwellian form that their secrecy was meant to maintain openness.

Asked about the issue by reporters, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said today that the administration's policy regarding the release of the logs is under review.
"The policy -- as you know, and I think many of you know, this has involved -- visitor logs have been involved in some litigation dating back to sometime in 2006," Gibbs said. "The White House is reviewing that policy based on some of that litigation."
Gibbs declined to say when the review would be completed, but said it is being conducted by the White House counsel's office and "other people."
"The goal is, and I think the president underscored his commitment to transparency on his first full day in office," Gibbs said. "This is not a contest between this administration or that administration or any administration. It's to uphold the principle of open government."

Ed Brayton responded with facts and solid libertarian principles.

If the goal is to uphold the principle of open government, the documents would have been turned over. The response from the administration to the FOIA request repeats that they are taking the exact same position Bush did, that visitor logs are "presidential records" rather than "agency records" and therefore exempt from FOIA.
And while the administration notes that this issue is currently a matter of litigation, it does not note that a federal judge has already ruled on the issue and said that those visitor logs are public records and must be made public under FOIA. That ruling is being appealed and the Obama administration is taking the same position that Bush did. This isn't a matter of it being "under review," the Obama administration has already declared its position in that court case.
On his first day in office, Obama issued an executive order that agencies must process FOIA requests with a focus on more transparency and accountability. His actions since then, however, show just how empty those orders were.

Similarly, while President Obama did (and still does) hold the incoherent position that we should "look forward" rather than prosecuting the grievous crimes of the Bush Administration, he did promise to restore due process and human rights to US policy on terrorism. This too proved to be a particularly empty promise.

For instance, rather than simply refusing to act to bring accountability for torture, the Obama Administration actively attempted to suppress information on it, by threatening to undermine the security of British citizens. Glenn Greenwald explains the case as follows.

Ever since he was released from Guantanamo in February after six years of due-process-less detention and brutal torture, Binyam Mohamed has been attempting to obtain justice for what was done to him. But his torturers have been continuously protected, and Mohamed's quest for a day in court repeatedly thwarted, by one individual: Barack Obama. Today, there is new and graphic evidence of just how far the Obama administration is going to prevent evidence of the Bush administration's torture program from becoming public.
In February, Obama's DOJ demanded dismissal of Mohamed's lawsuit against the company which helped "render" him to be tortured on the ground that national security would be harmed if the lawsuit continued. Then, after a British High Court ruled that there was credible evidence that Mohamed was subjected to brutal torture and was entitled to obtain evidence in the possession of the British government which detailed the CIA's treatment of Mohamed, and after a formal police inquiry began into allegations that British agents collaborated in his torture, the British government cited threats from the U.S. government that it would no longer engage in intelligence-sharing with Britain -- i.e., it would no longer pass on information about terrorist threats aimed at British citizens -- if the British court disclosed the facts of Mohamed's torture.

For the complete odious details of this threat, one can read excerpts of the letters sent by the administration to the British court.

Further, in addition to covering for past misdeeds, Obama continues policies of rendition, in which prisoners may be sent to secret prisons overseas, generally in countries where abusive methods such as torture can more easily occur. While the administration states that they will attempt to curtail abuse and torture, it remains a violation of habeas corpus and due process rights.

I could continue, but this post is fundamentally not about Obama. This is about why it is fallacious to trust politicians. Regardless of the eloquence of their speeches, their history of intellect and organizing, or any other points in their favor, they will act in their self interest for reelection and maintaining their power. Thus, the only rational approach is to treat them with cynical skepticism and scrutinize all of their policies, rather than "trusting" them, regardless of how much we may like them and support the plans they mention.

Regardless of their intentions or personalities, the filthiness of politics and power permeates the policies of every politician to some degree, and as George Orwell pointed out, "politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."

Gun Control: A Left Libertarian Critique

2009-09-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

Let me first make something perfectly clear: I don't like guns. I am a pacifist with poor motor skills who sees firearms as antithetical to my values and an item with which I would likely be incompetent anyway. That being said, I oppose strict gun control measures, both on empirically based pragmatic grounds and left libertarian concerns.

First, as an empiricist and skeptic, I must consider what scientific studies and empirical evidence suggest regarding the effectiveness of gun control policies at achieving their goals. Generally, the goal of a gun control measure is to decrease rates of violent crime.

One of the most extensive studies of effectiveness of gun control in curtailing violent crime was performed by John Lott, a law professor at the University of Chicago. Specifically, his study dealt with the legality and prevalence of concealed handgun use. The findings: An inverse correlation between prevalence of concealed handguns and rates of violent crimes. A brief explanation by Lott of his findings is available here.

One finding which should be of particular interest to liberals, considering our devotion to fighting violence against women, is that the correlation is more pronounced when we consider violent crimes against women. Lott explains this as follows:

Concealed handguns also appear to help women more than men. Murder rates decline when either sex carries more guns, but the effect is especially pronounced when women are considered separately. An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about three to four times more than an additional armed man reduces the murder rate for men. Victims of violent crime are generally physically weaker than the criminals who prey on them. Allowing a woman to defend herself with a concealed handgun makes a larger difference in her ability to defend herself than the change created by providing a man with a handgun. Guns are the great equalizer between the weak and the vicious. At the Democratic convention, President Clinton played up his proposed expansion of the 1994 Brady Law, which by making it harder for men convicted of domestic violence to obtain guns is designed to reduce crime against women. Our study is the first to provide direct empirical evidence of the Brady Law's effect on crime rates and we found just the opposite result: The law's implementation is associated with more aggravated assaults and rapes. Mrs. Brady's exaggerated estimates of the number of felons denied access to guns are a poor measure of the law's impact on crime rates.

Moving beyond sheer matters of effectiveness, the various logical arguments my fellow left libertarians use against drug prohibition may also apply to gun control. Noted anarcho-capitalist and libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, in his book For a New Liberty, summarized the excellent arguments by St. Louis University law professor Don B. Kates, Jr. for why liberals should oppose gun control.

In a notable article attacking control of handguns (the type of gun liberals most want to restrict), St. Louis University law professor Don B. Kates, Jr., chides his fellow liberals for not applying the same logic to guns that they use for marijuana laws. Thus, he points out that there are over fifty million handgun owners in America today, and that, based on polls and past experience, from two-thirds to over eighty percent of Americans would fail to comply with a ban on handguns. The inevitable result, as in the case of sex and marijuana laws, would be harsh penalties and yet highly selective enforcement — breeding disrespect for the law and law enforcement agencies. And the law would be enforced selectively against those people whom the authorities didn't like: "Enforcement becomes progressively more haphazard until at last the laws are used only against those who are unpopular with the police. We hardly need to be reminded of the odious search and seizure tactics police and government agents have often resorted to in order to trap [p. 116] violators of these laws." Kates adds that "if these arguments seem familiar, it is probably because they parallel the standard liberal argument against pot laws."⁷
Kates then adds a highly perceptive insight into this curious liberal blind spot. For:

Gun prohibition is the brainchild of white middle-class liberals who are oblivious to the situation of poor and minority people living in areas where the police have given up on crime control. Such liberals weren't upset about marijuana laws, either, in the fifties when the busts were confined to the ghettos. Secure in well-policed suburbs or high-security apartments guarded by Pinkertons (whom no one proposes to disarm), the oblivious liberal derides gun ownership as "an anachronism from the Old West."⁸

Kates further points out the demonstrated empirical value of self-defense armed with guns; in Chicago, for example, armed civilians justifiably killed three times as many violent criminals in the past five years as did the police. And, in a study of several hundred violent confrontations with criminals, Kates found the armed civilians to be more successful than the police: the civilians defending themselves captured, wounded, killed, or scared off criminals in 75% of the confrontations, whereas the police only had a 61% success rate. It is true that victims who resist robbery are more likely to be injured than those who remain passive. But Kates points out neglected qualifiers: (1) that resistance without a gun has been twice as hazardous to the victim than resistance with one, and (2) that the choice of resistance is up to the victim and his circumstances and values.

Avoiding injury will be paramount to a white, liberal academic with a comfortable bank account. It will necessarily be less important to the casual laborer or welfare recipient who is being robbed of the wherewithal to support his family [p. 117] for a month — or to a black shopkeeper who can't get robbery insurance and will be literally run out of business by successive robberies.

And the 1975 national survey of handgun owners by the Decision Making Information organization found that the leading subgroups who own a gun only for self-defense include blacks, the lowest income groups, and senior citizens. "These are the people," Kates eloquently warns, "it is proposed we jail because they insist on keeping the only protection available for their families in areas in which the police have given up."⁹

Gun control is a matter in which I must break with the statism proferred by many on the left, including those whose commentary I usually enjoy, such as self proclaimed "libertarian" Bill Maher, who has come out in support of stricter gun control laws.

The Supreme Court Takes on Asset Forfeiture

2009-09-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

As usual, there are some Supreme Court cases going on at the moment of great interest to me.

First and foremost, we have Alvarez v. Smith, on which Radley Balko over at Reason Magazine has written an excellent article. The case addresses the constitutionality of the asset forfeiture laws in place in Illinois. The contentious element of asset forfeiture is that it permits police to sieze property under the pretense that it was gained by illegal means, without need of a warrant or even charging the the property owner with a crime. As SCOTUS Wiki puts it, the case discusses "Whether local law enforcement agencies may seize and retain custody indefinitely of personal property without judicial or administrative review of the lawfulness of the continued detention of the property." Yes, you read that correctly; there is no judicial or administrative review of the legality of the confiscation. Balko makes that point clear in his description of the petitioners in this case.

The six petitioners in Alvarez each had property seized by police who suspected the property had been involved in a drug crime. Three had their cars seized, three had cash taken. None of the six were served with a warrant, none of the six were charged with the crime. All perfectly legal, at least until now.

In addition to there being no real oversight to guarantee that police have evidence before siezing property, they have an economic incentive to be overzealous in their seizures. Balko explains both that and the practice's origins as part of America's disastrous drug policy here.

Civil asset forfeiture is a particularly odious outgrowth of the drug war. While few would argue that criminals ought to be able to keep the proceeds of their crimes, civil forfeiture allows the government to seize and keep property without actually having to prove a crime was committed in the first place. Hence, forfeiture cases tend to have names like U.S. v. Eight Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifty Dollars, or U.S. v. One 1987 Jeep Wrangler. Proceeds from civil forfeiture at the state and local level usually go back to the police departments and prosecutors' offices, giving them a clear and unmistakeable incentive to seize as much property as often as possible.

Fittingly, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in Alvarez on the 25th anniversary of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the federal legislation that gave us the modern abomination that is drug forfeiture. That law made it easier for federal prosecutors to seize the assets of drug suspects, regardless of whether they were ever charged with a crime. It allowed the government to use hearsay evidence in forfeiture proceedings, and required a showing of only probable cause that the property was tied to a drug crime in order for the government to keep it. That meant, for example, that federal agents could testify to something an informant had told them even if the informant was unavailable to the defense for cross examination.

After a series of particularly outrageous forfeiture cases made national headlines throughout the 1990s, the late Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) was able to push through some reforms in 2000. The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA) bumped the government's standard of proof to "a preponderance of the evidence," prevented the use of hearsay, and provided for defendants who won in court to be compensated for attorney's fees.

But the CAFRA reforms applied only to federal law, not to the states, and after 1984 many states passed forfeiture bills similar to the new federal law. Illinois' law is one of the worst in the country. DAFPA still allows the state to use hearsay evidence, for example, and still sets the state's evidentiary burden at probable cause. Conversely, if property owners want to use the "innocent owner" defense, they can't use hearsay, and their burden is the higher "preponderance of the evidence" standard. Property owners must post a bond on the seized property just to get a hearing, which again can take up to six months. And even if they prevail in court, they still forfeit 10 percent of the bond. The government isn't required to reimburse them for attorney's fees, court costs, or interest, nor is the state liable for any loss of time or income caused by the pilfered property.

The fact that such practices even exist is completely absurd. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution unequivicolly asserts that

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I seem to have missed the part where it says "unless we feel the need to engage in unreasonable seizure for prosecution of the drug war."