The Prison Industrial Complex vs. the Queer and Trans Community

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.

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

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Why I Am Not a Democrat

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.

The Dangerous Deification of Voting

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.

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

Disclaimer: The following post reflects the views I held at the time of writing.  Some of my views may have changed, though many are the same.

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 social democrat who believed that the optimal solution to our problems was a truly democratic government that provided services to the people and limited corporate power through regulation. 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 social democracy 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

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.

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

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."