by David D’Amato

Ethnic and cultural frictions have long simmered in Ivory Coast, a francophone, West African state known for its cocoa exports and — until recently — its relative peace and prosperity. For years the country’s lucrative cocoa production lured ethnically and religiously distinct newcomers from poor, neighboring states, mostly to the north of Ivory Coast, halving the country along a strained geopolitical divide.

Before 2002, when tensions that had remained largely dormant for years erupted in civil war, Ivory Coast enjoyed a period of stability, standing out as one of the only former European colonies to witness a post-independence increase in European population. In a country that persisted as a single-party state until 1990, the birth of elections was regarded opportunistically, seen as affording chances to wrest control of profitable exports from a corrupt political class. Of course, leaving the fundamental problems in place, elections have been unable to reconcile the structural conflicts of statism.

In the face of such political unrest, the more discernible violence of outright armed conflict has resulted accordingly, and a confederated group of rebels called the New Forces now oversee the country’s north. Following a November election in the country — in which its Independent Electoral Commission declared the northern-backed Alassane Ouattara winner — both candidates have claimed victory and taken oaths of office.

The BBC has reported that, in reaction to the election strife, Dr. Knox Chitiyo of the Royal United Services Institute (a British think tank) “believes that having two presidents could eventually lead to some sort of power-sharing.” With international voices broaching the possibilities of various power allotments or a coalition government, the premise seems to accept on some level that neither of these candidates necessarily ought to be thrust upon the entire country, that it’s possible to prevent further violence by diffusing rather than concentrating political authority.

That premise is shared by anarchism, which endorses unqualified “power-sharing,” or a vying between multiple sources of legal and social arrangements. Addressing the popular misconception that “law and order could not exist in a society without the organized, authoritarian institutions of the state,” economist Bruce Benson suggests that “law can develop ‘from the ground.’” He notes that, “as customs and practice evolve,” the sum of the many uncoordinated transactions and relationships between individuals within a community give rise to a law based on the expectations within that community.

In the United States, we often hear about the idea of “voting with one’s feet” as a rationale for our horizontal federalism — the relationships between the states within our federal government. Similar to commentators on the political crisis in Ivory Coast, we tend to think that it’s a good idea to allow this “power-sharing,” to allow people to “vote” in such a way, and to sustain this style of “competition.” We entertain comparable reasoning with regard to our legal system. We allow different courts to have jurisdiction over the same issue, and we give those courts the power to interpret statutes given by the First Branch of the government.

All of the reasoning enlisted to justify these interrelated processes, all of the incentives they are thought to engender, can be drawn on to defend anarchism’s notion of competing “governments.” Why not allow all of these institutions or services, traditionally associated with states, to exist alongside one another, peaceful rivals within the same geographic area? But, because they don’t rely on the theft of taxation or the absence of competitors, the potential institutions of anarchy cannot properly be called “governments” or “states.”

Murray Rothbard imagined a world where the defense of human life typically thought of as the exclusive jurisdiction of the state “would have to be as freely competitive and as noncoercive against noninvaders as are all other suppliers of goods and services on the free market. Defense services, like all other services,” he said, “would be marketable and marketable only.” In Ivory Coast, the United States and around the world, the partitioning of decision-making authority among networks of noncompulsory associations — such as are witnessed every day in those less-constrained areas of human life — are increasingly attractive.

The state’s monopolization of law, both its creation and interpretation, has revealed its oppressive character again and again. Anarchism provides the alternative, a cooperative, customary law built upon an observation of individual rights reciprocated between all people.

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C4SS News Analyst David D’Amato is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

by David D’Amato

The perceived inefficiency of government is often measured against the wholly unsubstantiated myth of the well-oiled corporate machine. The state’s many modules, thought of as shiftlessly unconcerned with the bottom line, are implored by the standard conservative philippic to be “run like a business,” as if real-world businesses are models of sleek efficiency.

The binary framework of American political folklore sees business interests as hermetically sealed from state interests, with the cold orderliness of “professionalism” defining our image of the corporate world. The state, by comparison, is thought to be the sanctum of all the good-hearted, underpaid crusaders for social justice, imprudent with the dollar but well-meaning. Just a passing glance at the actual corporation (as opposed to its idealized image), however, begs for a thorough reconsideration of the prevailing narrative.

In a special feature for CNN.com, Jason Fried, author of the book Rework, challenged the notion of corporate order and productivity. He notes that while “[c]ompanies spend billions on rent, offices, and office equipment so their employees will have a great place to work,” those employees nevertheless prefer to work outside of the “interruption factory” of the modern office, a seedbed of waste and misspent hours. It would seem, then, that the corporate world and the state — whatever their differences — operate in much the same way, squandering resources that might have been put to productive use.

Of those features that we, as libertarians, proclaim to admire most about the free market (e.g., innovation, responsiveness, social utility), most if not all of them are conspicuously absent from America’s multinational monsters. Conceding that the United States’ sweep of cubicles is a muskeg of stifling communication barriers and sinkholes for labor, our inquest ought to focus on why this is, on what conditions give rise to these results. After all, aren’t profit motive and the need to account to stockholders sufficient to incentivize some creative solutions from the country’s boardrooms?

It may very well be that these inducements are potentially enough, but — even assuming that’s the case — they are, in today’s corporatist economy, either completely erased or largely alleviated as considerations. In his book Organization Theory, Kevin Carson observes the fundamental difference between the existing corporate economy and the market economy that libertarian anarchists desire. He quotes David Friedman as noting that the American system, the titular situs of “free enterprise,” is actually “largely populated by indigestible lumps of socialism called corporations.”

And as vast, hierarchical institutions defined by a numbness to technological and social change, corporations seem an especially appropriate analogy to the bureaucratic mammoths of state socialism. The largest and most powerful of them, rather than being the most avant-garde or the most reactive to the wants of the humble consumer, are the most inept and incapable of competing in the tempestuous world of untrammeled exchange. In his exhaustive treatise on economics, Human Action, Ludwig von Mises counseled that a “successful corporation is ultimately never controlled by hired managers,” and in a free market that may be true.

In the state-corporate society, though, where status lives in job titles and climbing the corporate ladder, managerial elites enjoy a tight grip on the power. It is no coincidence that they run their companies in much the same way that the state functions, through gradations of authority and arbitrary administrative processes. It isn’t even as though there’s a societal balance between state and corporate interests, implying some polarity between the two. They are very simply elements of the same arrangement, whereby laws like the Williams Act — a securities rule that purports to protect shareholders — regulate away challenges to indolent suits in corner offices.

Just as taxpayers pay and vote for their own bondage, the average corporate nine to fiver finances the bloated salaries of CEOs who drive their companies into the ground only to be salvaged by ever more rule-making that stacks the deck for the Washington-Wall Street cufflink class. It’s no wonder the worker bees of the corporate prison have such low job satisfaction, or that so many seek escape in Big Pharma’s versions of Brave New World’s “soma.”

In this system, with only so many “seats at the table,” human life is defined by meaningless paper-pushing that augments the fortunes of our soi-disant “social betters.” But free markets would besiege corporatism with the energetic inventiveness of an order brought about not by autarchic rules, but by mutual respect and free exchange.

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C4SS News Analyst David D’Amato is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

by Kevin Carson

In a previous column (“Civil Aviation:  A Case Study in Systems Disruption,” C4SS, Nov. 23),  I argued that al Qaeda’s “failed” attacks on the US civil aviation system were in fact successes because their primary objective was not to inflict casualties. Rather, they were intended to impose new, ongoing costs on the functioning of the system, and to make it more authoritarian (and hence more brittle and inflexible, and incapable of functioning effectively).  Mike Masnick of Techdirt made a similar observation (“How the US Response Turns ‘Failed’ Terrorist Attacks into Successes,” Nov. 30). The attacks are cheap, and the responses are extremely costly.

By this standard, Wikileaks is also a rousing success.  Julian Assange has argued, similarly, that the most important effect of leaking secret documents is not the external pressure on authoritarian, hierarchical organizations to change their policies. It’s the self-destructive policies the organizations themselves adopt in response:

“The leak … is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers … its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist … depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together … prevents them from acting as a conspiracy.”  (Quoted by Masnick in “How the Response to Wikileaks is Exactly What Assange Wants,” Dec. 2)

Government attempts to suppress Wikileaks demonstrate, once again, the old adage that the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

Wikileaks’ Domain Name Service knuckled under to U.S. government pressure and shut down the Wikileaks domain name. But what happened in response?

In the short term, Wikileaks supporters publicized surviving URLs outside the reach of ICANN, like wikileaks.cn.  Hundreds of Wikileaks “mirrors” have proliferated around the world. I’m proud to say that the Center for a Stateless Society, which pays me to write these columns, hosts one of them.

And even though Wikileaks is inaccessible under its old URL in the United States, it is available at its dotted IP address from servers in Europe: http://213.251.145.96/ This IP address has been blogged and tweeted all over the Internet, in an act of defiance comparable to the DeCSS uprising of several years ago (when bloggers publicized the “illegal” hack to movie DRM).

As long as there are Wikileaks servers in countries outside the reach of the U.S. government, they will be available through their IP addresses — and people will learn how to find them.

In the long term, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has started a project to create a peer-to-peer DNS system, which won’t docile take orders from the U.S. government, as an alternative to ICANN.

Meanwhile, oleaginous moral scold Joe Lieberman is using the same ineffectual strategy to suppress Wikileaks that the recording industry used against file-sharers. Under pressure from Lieberman, Amazon.com stopped hosting Wikileaks. Amazon subsequently claimed that this had nothing to do with Lieberman’s request. But Amazon’s spin was clearly false; according to Talking Points Memo, Amazon followed up its action with a statement to Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee staff confirming it had obeyed Its Master’s Voice (“After Getting Amazon To Boot Wikileaks, Lieberman Eyes Other Firms,” TPM, Dec. 2).

Daniel Ellsberg is now calling for Amazon employees to leak details of the company’s contacts with Lieberman to Wikileaks. Wouldn’t it be sweet to see Holy Joe dancing around and gibbering in even more impotent rage?

If necessary, Wikileaks could distribute information through numerous simultaneous BitTorrent submissions, which could only be stopped by shutting down the Internet.

The more the dinosaurs thrash around, the faster they sink into the tar pit. If the National Security State continues this strategy, it’s only a matter of time until the State Department falls to Wikileaks and the helicopters evacuate Hillary Clinton from the roof of the Harry S. Truman Building.

So bring it on. As I’ve said before: This is a war to the death between hierarchy on the one hand, and networks and free culture on the other.  In the end, we’ll have their bleeding heads on our battlements.

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C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

by David D’Amato

Economic historian Robert Higgs recently pointed out that, when the state engages in “bribing or intimidating foreign governments to assist big multinational corporations,” we call it “U.S. foreign policy.” In like manner, when the U.S. presses the overseas outlets of its hegemony to tolerate more of those giant corporations’ products, we describe the result as a “free trade agreement.”

Beset by a November jobs report that detailed few new jobs and unemployment at “a seven-month high of 9.8 percent,” President Obama is in desperate need for a showpiece that might make the economy appear anything but completely stagnant. Cue the conclusion of a new free trade agreement with South Korea, hailed by Obama as, according to the Associated Press, “a big victory for American farmers and ranchers, the aerospace and electronics industries, and U.S. automakers.”

When finalized, the pact will be the most expansive U.S. trade agreement since the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”), a deal that forged the linkage networking the corporatist systems of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. And contrary to their libertarian namesake, that’s all governments’ “free trade agreements” do — spread the same system of state-corporate nexus over a broader area for the benefit of a coterie of companies that already dominate our lives.

Representing a rare moment of candor from the state, the interests enumerated by the President as winners in the U.S.-South Korea agreement actually will reap its benefits, but that doesn’t mean what we might think. More than just “winning” in some metaphorical sense, the corporate players that come out on top in the game of state-capitalism are indeed beating something. The fulcrum of our economic system, a zero-sum game with winners and losers, is how best to maneuver the utensils of the state to sidestep true free trade, and the rules of the game make that a breeze for established participants.

The U.S. economy, assuming that we understand it to be more than just its corporate oligarchy, is the real loser in agreements like this one, which underpin what Murray Rothbard accurately branded a “cartelized economy.” By implying that the success of, for example, Big Agribusiness and American car companies is the success of the American economy at large, the President engages the idea that Higgs’ book Against Leviathan traces to economic fascism, that “[corporate] interests, when properly organized and channeled, are the people.” Parallel to Obama’s praise for the deal, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak called the development a “win-win” for the two countries.

Lee’s is an accurate enough appraisal, but the win-win extends only to the countries’ elites, to the continuing affiliation between corporate and state power. The Export-Import Bank of the United States, a corrupt servant of corporate welfare, underwrites loans to tumefied corporations at the expense of taxpayers and of activities within the economy that are actually productive. The Bank dishes out enormous subsidies, numbered in the billions of dollars, to corporate marauders who exist through a combination of government contracts and various methods of theft-sponsored life support.

The business ventures of all of us lowly commoners have to proceed — to either sink or swim — without the help of the risk-offsetting assurances of the federal government, but the likes of GM and Boeing get the buffer of the Bank and the government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). Free trade agreements between states create a whole range of freedoms for the chosen peers of the realm — freedoms to steal and preclude competition – but this kind of freedom has nothing to do with the kind anarchists are interested in.

The average American gains nothing through the U.S.-South Korea deal, not new jobs or greater opportunities; instead, he is forced to defray the cost of corporate advantages that surge his cost of living skyward and prevent the kinds of small-scale interactions that could truly ameliorate his workaday life. Anyone who supports real free trade, not sheer corporate welfare and dominance, ought to have serious qualms where these agreements are concerned, recommending instead across the board free trade, the kind that might someday exist between all individuals.

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C4SS News Analyst David D’Amato is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

by Darian Worden

Public officials reeling from the first round of diplomatic cable releases are trying to find as many ways to fight WikiLeaks as possible. A major area of attack seems to revolve around defining what is truly journalism, and what may be subject to censorship.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley is trying to delegitimize the speech that WikiLeaks is engaged in. According to CNN (McCain presses for accountability in WikiLeaks breach, Dec 2) he said that WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange “could be considered a political actor. I think he’s an anarchist, but he’s not a journalist.” Crowley went on to say:

“Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him from the possibility of being considered a journalist…

“He’s not an objective observer of anything. He’s an active player. He has an agenda, he’s trying to pursue that agenda and I don’t think he can qualify either as a journalist on the one hand or a whistle-blower on the other.”

Because Assange is an “active player” pursuing a political agenda and not an “objective observer,” Crowley says that the protections afforded to journalists should not apply to him or the organization he represents.

But a truly objective observer can’t really exist. The best a journalist can do is try to be as unbiased as possible and present objective facts to the best of his ability.

When American news media features entertainment news while their foreign counterparts highlight US policy disasters, this is an example of bias. Editors’ views on what is most important will be colored by their perceptions. This is why it is important to have multiple news sources and broad access to data.

What if political beliefs inspire people to start a competing news service because they don’t like the way news has been prioritized in established venues? Are they not journalists?

Julian Assange and the rest of the WikiLeaks staff play an editorial role in the public distribution of information. They make information accessible to the general public and give news to prominent media. The US internet user can read their Cablegate files as easily as a foreign intelligence analyst can.

WikiLeaks is clearly presenting information that interests a large segment of the public. And it presents it in the form of raw data, which is as objective as news can be. While the choices made by WikiLeaks staff about how data will be presented to the public do involve personal priorities, this is no more biased than the arrangement of articles in a newspaper or the length of time a news broadcast spends on a story.

Whatever political motivation Assange has (and it does appear that his views are close to anarchism), it has not compromised the ability of WikiLeaks to present credible information to the public. WikiLeaks has neither promoted falsehoods nor tried to spin events into any favorable narrative. It does not need to make compromises to obtain sources through official channels, as its reputation for credibility, accessibility, and protecting sources means that anybody within an organization can pass along inside information.

Crowley says that because Assange is actively pursuing an agenda, he cannot be a whistleblower or a journalist. Having an agenda couldn’t really disqualify Assange from being a whistleblower, since a whistleblower almost by definition has an agenda. But could Assange’s political agenda prevent him from being a journalist? Only if the success of his agenda requires distorting the truth.

If a reformer’s dedication to exposing corruption leads to his discovery of backroom deals that others have overlooked, he has done good journalism. Similarly, if Assange’s agenda is to “undermine the international system,” as Crowley puts it, the truthful revealing of bad behavior that governments hide would indeed be journalism. If Assange believes that revealing the truth will create support for his political agenda, then he can be a reliable journalist with a political agenda.

Crowley’s remarks are especially out of touch in an era of citizen journalism. Should every blogger, YouTube uploader, or podcast producer complete a loyalty oath before being allowed to distribute information? Journalism, like any craft, may continue to have specialists, but amateurs should not be prohibited from participating.

Critics of WikiLeaks decry its staff’s motivations, its spokesman’s unrelated alleged crimes, and its ability to resist persecution. All this noise is meant to drown out the issues they don’t want to face: WikiLeaks is a reliable source of news that makes them look bad.

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C4SS News Analyst Darian Worden is an individualist anarchist writer with experience in libertarian activism. His fiction includes Bring a Gun To School Day and the forthcoming Trade War. His essays and other works can be viewed at DarianWorden.com. He also hosts an internet radio show, Thinking Liberty.

by Kevin Carson

Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne used to point out (“The 7 Vital Principles of Government”) the obvious truth that, no matter what promises are made by the sponsors of a law you favor, and no matter what their stated rationale for it, once it’s passed it will be interpreted and enforced by people utterly unaccountable to you.  And it will most likely be interpreted by people you don’t like, to serve the interests of the powerful.

In World War I the Wilson administration and legislative sponsors of the Sedition Act assured the public it would be used only to prosecute those who actively interfered with the war effort or hampered conscription — not to harass dissidents who publicly criticized the government or disagreed with the war on policy grounds.  The ensuing mass arrests of left-wing dissidents under the Sedition Act, including Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, were the largest repression of dissent in American history from the Civil War to the present.

More recently, we’ve seen the abuse of RICO statutes — ostensibly passed for the comparatively narrow purpose of fighting organized crime — to suppress political movements out of favor with the government.

Now we’re seeing an especially instructive example of this phenomenon: Homeland Security’s seizure, at the behest of the music and movie industries, of the domain names of dozens of websites which were accused (but not charged, tried or convicted) of promoting copyright infringement. You just go to a URL, and in place of the former website you see a menacing Department of Justice logo. Please note that the “infringing activities” of some of the websites which were shut down consisted entirely of providing search engine results linking to torrent sites. So apparently there’s no longer even a safe harbor for those who link to alleged “copyright infringers.”

Most people who supported the USA PATRIOT Act and the creation of DHS, no matter how unjustifiably, presumably believed that those extraordinary grants of power would be used only for the extraordinary purpose of fighting genuine terror networks like Al Qaeda and preventing terrorist attacks on the United States.  It should be abundantly clear now that those people were had.

Homeland Security is expanding its mission into areas totally unrelated to the ostensible purpose for which it was initially sold to the public. And it is engaging in this mission creep under the influence of powerful economic interests which are totally unaccountable to the public: Namely, Joe Biden’s friends in the MPAA and RIAA.

The Copyright Gestapo has admitted as much: Erik Barnett, an “assistant deputy director” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, admits the sites were shut down without due process of law entirely on the basis of allegations from the entertainment industry. Never mind due process in the old fashioned common law sense; there was never even an administrative hearing where the site owners were given an opportunity to challenge the allegations before the shutdowns.

And by the way: The fact that a government agency can seize domain names by administrative edict, without first proving guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, indicates that all those promises about “due process of law” in the Fifth Amendment weren’t worth the paper they were written on, either.

Meanwhile, two other Homeland Security fiefdoms — TSA and Border Patrol — teamed up with Tampa cops to conduct a bus station checkpoint which allegedly caught some illegal aliens and stopped a drug-related cash smuggling operation.

So basically, it doesn’t matter that the vast expansion of police powers after 9-11 was sold to the public as an extraordinary measure for the specific purpose of fighting Al Qaeda. Now the government has this almighty big hammer, and it’s by-God gonna hammer nails wherever it feels like looking for them.

If you supported USA PATRIOT and the creation of DHS, based on the promises of Bush, Cheney and Ashcroft, you were fooled. There’s an old saying:  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

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C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

by David D’Amato

Critics of American foreign policy center the great majority of their analyses on Iraq and Afghanistan, rightly recognized as the focal points of current U.S. military action. That attention — prioritizing the two countries in criticisms of military imperialism — is too often accompanied by an overshadowing or lack of consideration for the less easily seen instances of the global war conducted by the United States.

The assumption of the popular conception of American foreign policy and of war more generally is that military violence is narrowly concentrated on clearly- and specifically-defined areas that the U.S. transparently identifies and then confronts. But in contrast to the black and white view of war as setting the U.S. against explicitly designated enemies in narrowly demarcated regions, the reality is a disarranged miscellany of secrets bombings, covert actions and sub rosa partnerships.

An apposite example of the expansiveness of U.S. military presence around the world came through in the latest sequence of classified documents released by WikiLeaks. The newest unveiling, reports Michael Isikoff of NBC News, includes “an unusually revealing State Department cable in which Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his top ministers appear to agree to cover up the extent of the U.S. military role in disputed air strikes in Yemen.” Although Yemen has spurned U.S. attempts to increase military presence in the country, its cooperation should come as little surprise given the hundreds of millions of dollars of aid it receives from the U.S. annually.

Beyond merely revealing the bribed complicity of American thralls like Yemen, however, the story exposes the magnitude and reach of the War on Terror; where the rubber meets the road, its impact has not been to deracinate terrorism where it grows, but to ravage the lives of innocents unable to escape the United States’ ubiquitous bloodletting. Of the Yemeni bombing at issue in the new cable, Amnesty International had previously judged that 41 of the 55 people killed were civilians, most of whom were women and children.

Furthermore, the leaked communiqué between President Saleh and U.S. General David Petraeus advances a plan to increase the use of U.S. drones in the country, where they are, according to Yemen’s Foreign Minister, already at work. Drones — or, in Pentagon argot, “Unmanned Multirole Surveillance and Strike Aircraft” — have ascended to a favored position within the U.S. warfare schematic, with some estimates projecting a 600 percent increase in their use over the next ten years.

These remote-controlled airplanes, piloted by operators whose derrières are comfortably planted in the U.S., rain bombs inaccurately all over, for instance, Pakistan — and to devastating effect. Due to their indiscriminate destruction of human life, American drone attacks, in the words of Winslow T. Wheeler and Pierre M. Sprey, “make news with embarrassing regularity”; Wheeler and Sprey continue that, instead of subduing terrorists, drones are “more successful at killing civilians, infuriating the previously uncommitted local population into supporting the enemy, and deluding Americans into thinking remote-control bombing of other peoples’ homelands is a freebie spectator sport with no U.S. casualties and no consequences … .” Drones can be expected to continue featuring prominently in the War on Terror, and hopefully in the news as well, but the complete framework of reference for that War is still largely unseen.

Even when Americans hear about massacres — like that in Yemen — with more obviously scandalous death tolls, they are unlikely to learn of everyday outrages like the one suffered by Karim Khan. Occupying a tiny village in Pakistan’s tribal regions, Khan’s home was bombarded by U.S. drones, killing his son, brother and a hired hand. Khan has said that he will sue the CIA, and, although the suit will surely end up a fruitless endeavor, it brings to the fore the commonness of civilian casualties.

The secrecy surrounding the drone program and the number of innocents it kills is the most important device for ensuring the continued impunity of the American Empire. Opprobrium at the United States’ wars should — in order to underscore complete scope of their horrors — take the statists seriously when they say that the War on Terror is a “global war.” The Empire will muscle its way into any corner of the world if it means the ballooning of the security/surveillance state at home and a windfall for the racketeers who supply our missiles and unmanned aircrafts.

Only by acquainting ourselves with the global war we so repeatedly hear about, as compared to the romanticized mainstream media pictures of Iraq and Afghanistan, can we begin to splinter the syndicate of interests that drive the death turbines.

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C4SS News Analyst David D’Amato is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

by Kevin Carson

Sheldon Richman, in the Christian Science Monitor (“Bradley Manning isn’t a Criminal; He’s a Hero,” Nov. 29),  raises the issue of the American public’s right to know about government operations overseas for which they “could suffer retaliation.” Excellent point.

Glenn Greenwald notes (Salon, Nov. 29) that the same people who casually dismiss innocent casualties like Afghan wedding parties as “unfortunate and unavoidable collateral damage” are also the first to shriek that Manning and Assange have “blood on their hands” (you know, like what they so presciently warned would result from previous leaks), and call for treating them as terrorists if even one person dies as an indirect result of their leaks.

I suppose for such people the number of Americans who get killed as a result of blowback from peace-loving American foreign policy is also unavoidable collateral damage. But oddly enough, they’re not as tolerant when it comes to the lives allegedly endangered as collateral damage from letting the American people know what “their” government is doing. And oddly enough, Congressman Peter King isn’t demanding the U.S. government be classified as a terrorist organization for launching a war that will (to borrow a phrase) “put countless innocent lives at risk.”

Apparently the goals and interests of the allegedly sovereign people aren’t worth as much collateral damage as those of their “public servants.”

Former Clinton Administration official Jamie Rubin, a certified Serious, Responsible Thinker, has hit the talking head circuit arguing that Wikileaks has no principled standard for determining what to leak. The stuff in the latest release, he says, isn’t like the Pentagon Papers — involving the wisdom of the highest levels of policy — but rather interferes with government’s ability to maintain the secrecy needed for carrying out the operational details of any policy. The cable leaks impede the government’s ability to “promote the security interests of the American people.”

I think, rather, that Rubin lacks any coherent standard for distinguishing the “important” stuff from the “operational” stuff. That the U.S. government is using the government of Yemen as an imperial proxy, to provide political cover for conducting drone strikes that are wildly unpopular with the people of a region in which the U.S. is supposedly trying to promote “democracy,” goes to the fundamental character of policy. Not only the American people but the people of states like Saudi Arabia have a right to know when “their” governments are egging each other on to launch a war that could result in regional chaos and $500/barrel oil.

Here’s my nomination for this year’s Orwell Award, from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:

“… [S]uch disclosures put at ris k… people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government. These documents also may include named individuals who … live and work under oppressive regimes and who are trying to create more open and free societies.”

So by informing the people of oppressive regimes like Saudi Arabia and Yemen about the dirty things their governments do in collusion with the U.S., Wikileaks undermines efforts by the U.S. government to — ahem! — promote democracy, open government, and open and free societies in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Rubin’s real mistake, as a certified Serious Thinker (what sociologist C. Wright Mills called a “crackpot realist”) is believing the U.S. government is a force for good, pursuing something that can legitimately be called the “security interests of the American people.”

The truth is, governments are evil. A government’s foreign policy serves the primary purpose of promoting, not some disinterested “security interests of the people,” but a domestic system of power. American foreign policy serves the coalition of corporate interests that controls the state. Saudi foreign policy serves the interests of the House of Saud, the oil industry and other economic interests attached to it. Yemeni foreign policy is governed by similar considerations of class.  Relations between governments are relations between so many crime families that have divided up the world.

In arguing that Wikileaks should not impede the ability of government to “promote the interests of the American people,” what Rubin really means is that the American government should be free to promote the interests of the corporate ruling class, to act in collusion with similarly criminal governments around the world in promoting their joint interests at the expense of the ruled, without any interference from the “sovereign” peoples they allegedly represent. The sovereign peoples’ role is to participate in a spectator election every few years to choose between competing wings of the same establishment with almost identical agendas, then sit down, shut up and supply blood and treasure to the Serious Thinkers who rule by the grace of God.

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C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

by David D’Amato

Last Tuesday, the US Senate voted overwhelmingly passed food safety legislation that the Associated Press reports “potentially giv[es] the government broad new powers to increase inspections of food processing facilities and force companies to recall tainted food.” The lopsided vote on the bill, popular with both Democrats and Republicans, might seem to indicate that it promotes the uncontroversial goal of sheltering consumers from the menace of, for example, e. coli or salmonella.

Certainly such a bulwark, apparently bridling those acquisitive corporations that would irresponsibly market us biohazards to inflate their bottom lines, would appear a worthy project. Assuming that the proposed law would bring on genuine protection for the artless little guy, it would be difficult to quarrel with, but acts like this one do just the opposite.

As historian Gabriel Kolko argues in his shrewd masterwork of revisionism, The Triumph of Conservatism, “Important business elements [can] always be found in the forefront of agitation for such regulation, and … federal economic regulation [is] generally designed by the regulated interest to meet its own end, and not those of the public or the commonweal.” The function of the bill is to erect barriers to entry — hurdles such as restrictions on imports and increased administrative costs — that impede prospective competitors who cannot afford to jump through the hoops of the state-corporate elite.

While politicians have enjoyed touting the bill as putting the screws to derelict Big Agribusiness, the major food companies and the Chamber of Commerce rallied to its cause forthwith. It was, as the Associated Press observed, “advocates of … locally produced food and operators of small farms” that — fearing that it would “bankrupt some small businesses” — resisted the law.

Kolko points out that charges of collusion between commercial and government interests are regularly lumped together with “conspiracy theories” by those who accept the standard line that pits the two against one another. Warning against such generalizations, he urges consideration of the facts over nugatory “labels” and doesn’t bother to hazard his own guess as to whether corporate progressivism was the result of conspiracy or “open channels.”

Likewise, free market anarchists need not feel obliged to unravel the psychological or cultural predicates that drive the collusion between Big Business and Big Government. Whatever the language we use to explain their relationship, the state and the corporation entertain no confusion as to its fundamental nature. Supervisory rules that impose high costs on businesses actually serve to guarantee corporate profits, a system that — though it can be counterintuitive at first blush — makes perfect sense for the farming industrial complex.

By lobbying for laws that damage their small competitors, corporations can secure an uninterrupted revenue stream and drive prices far above the levels that a truly free market would allow. Considering that today’s food prices are completely sequestered from the experimental pressures of real free enterprise, is it any wonder that safety standards are as well?

When we talk about “safety” within the context of consumer products, what we’re really suggesting is some concept of accountability — not an argument for perfect protection from any possibility of contaminated food, but for some redress should an injury befall us. In our own lives, we take for granted that certain kinds of arrangements between free people are more suited to accountable behavior, but we readily abandon those unspoken precepts when we contemplate giant corporate producers of processed foods.

Although we wouldn’t think it permissible to arbitrarily levy needless, prohibitive expenses — i.e., functional penalties — on our neighbors, we accept it when rich, highly capitalized companies do the same to local farmers. If we reflect on the would-be supply excluded from its natural market of consumers by the state’s obstructive rules, we can begin to imagine just how much higher prices are today than they need to be.

What’s more, it’s no great leap to visualize, in the lack of complacent corporate free-riders, revitalized sanitation and food safety standards. Insofar as we have to buy their products at their prices with no real market to speak of, we’re fastened to endure whatever low bar they set for themselves through their state.

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C4SS News Analyst David D’Amato is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

by Thomas L. Knapp

… but, of course, it isn’t.

Julian Assange isn’t an American citizen. Wikileaks isn’t an American organization. Even if we accept the logic of state, neither Assange nor Wikileaks owe any duty of loyalty to the US government. Where no loyalty is due, no betrayal is possible. Whatever else they might be, the Wikileaks “dumps” of information deemed “classified” by the US government aren’t “treason” (as the usual suspects keep calling them) by any reasonable definition of that word.

Nor, contra US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s surreal claim, is the latest Wikileaks release “an attack on the international community.” If such a “community” exists, identifying it with the parasite states sitting atop its regional populations is like designating canine breeds on the basis of the ticks which infest each dog’s fur.

And talk about the pot calling the kettle black! It was Clinton, not Assange, who directed US State Department employees to spy on United Nations officials — including but not limited to permanent members of the UN Security Council and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon himself — in what looks an awful lot like an identity theft scheme right out of the latest crime news headlines. If the UN’s member states do indeed compose the “international community,” Clinton has cast herself in the role of neighborhood burglar.

But, if this be treason, make the most of it.

The penchant of state actors for secrecy stems from the same motives as any other criminal’s desire to keep his deeds out of the public eye. Their threats against those who might reveal their secrets are of precisely the same nature as the warnings of any child rapist to his victims: “Don’t tell, or YOU will get in trouble.”

We’ve been here before, many times. Not many remember, but the most vehement western objections to Russia’s “October Revolution” were concerned not with nature of Bolshevism but with this language in Lenin’s Decree on Peace:

We have to fight against the hypocrisy of the governments, which, while talking about peace and justice, actually carry on wars of conquest and plunder. Not one single government will tell you what it really means. But we are opposed to secret diplomacy and can afford to act openly before all people.

While Russia’s former allies did indeed oppose communism and desire an active Eastern Front (to reduce pressure on the Western Front), they were outright desperate to hide the details of their complicity in the ongoing disaster now known as World War One. Like vampires, politicians will choose gunfire over sunlight every time.

The subsequent actions of the new Russian state constitute an existence proof of the incompatibility of political government and transparency. Forced to choose between truth and power, the Bolsheviks chose power. Their regime and its spinoffs became (pardon the pun) the gold standard for secretive government.

The strength of Wikileaks is that it faces no similar choice. It’s not a state, nor do its principals evince any intention of making it one. Truth is its entire portfolio, and this drives the Hillary Clintons of the world insane. It threatens their aspirations to unquestioned power. It forces them to explain themselves to the rest of us: To the serfs who, as the politicians see things, exist for the sole purpose of footing the bill — in money and in blood — for those aspirations.

Which is exactly how it should be. “Treason” to and “betrayal” of the state is service to humanity. Wikileaks is your friend. Hillary Clinton is your enemy. Never forget that.

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Thomas L. Knapp, Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society, is a long-time libertarian activist and author of Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed. Knapp publishes Rational Review News Digest, a daily news and commentary roundup for the freedom movement.