Here’s some Halloween treats for radicals who have been working for alliance between left-friendly libertarians and anti-authoritarian Leftists. These are all articles that have appeared over the past week Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s anti-imperialist Left magazine CounterPunch:

• James Bovard (2007-10-27): Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI’s Right to Threaten Torture

• Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-10-27): Ruling by Decree: The Fraud of the War on Terror

• Anthony Papa (2007-10-30): The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws: The Preppie Killer Could Spend More Time in Prison for a Cocaine Bust Than for the Murder of Jennifer Rubin

• Sheldon Richman (2007-10-31): President Busybody: Bush has Time to Run the World

• Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-11-01): The War on Telephone Privacy: The Meaning of the Nacchio Case

One of the things that I’m especially pleased about with Hornberger’s article is that it’s not just a column covering some point of substantial pre-existing agreement between committed libertarians and committed Leftists (anti-imperialism, civil liberties, etc.). The article has that, and that kind of thing is very important and very valuable. But Hornberger’s article goes even further; not only is he crossing the bridges that are already there, but he is also building some new ones. One of Hornberger’s main analytical claims has to do with the way in which the bureaucratic State’s pervasive and byzantine regulation puts tremendous coercive power into the hands of the Stasi, and the way in which the State’s regulatory carrots and sticks serve to keep the interests of big business and the State firmly aligned:

First, as we have long pointed out, the real value of the regulated society is not any protection it provides to people. All that protection talk is just a sham. The real purpose of the regulated society is to keep the business and banking community in line — meaning in conformity with federal policy. The real purpose of the rules and regulations is to serve as a Damocles sword, ready to fall on any business or bank that refuses to go along with the feds.

… Of course, the feds would argue that the law is the law and that Nacchio broke it and therefore has to pay the price. That, of course, is not the point. The point is that in the regulated society, everyone breaks the law, one way or another, which then provides the feds with the option of prosecuting anyone they want whenever they want.

Consider, for example, the IRS code. Despite never-ending railing among political candidates about how complex the code is, the feds love the complexity. Why? Because they know that no one can ever file a perfect income-tax return and especially not wealthy and influential businessmen. If the feds looked hard enough, they could prosecute anyone they wanted at any time for income-tax violations.

It’s the same with insider-trading laws, Sarbanes-Oxley, hiring illegal aliens, or a multitude of other economic crimes. If they hadn’t gotten Nacchio on insider trading, they would have undoubtedly gone after him for other things. The point is, he refused to go along with illegality and wrongdoing, and they went after him for it.

To add insult to injury, President Bush and some of his federal cohorts in Congress are seeking to give civil immunity to the telephone companies that allegedly chose to become federal informers. They are trying to get Congress to pass a law that would prohibit the customers of the telephone companies from suing for the companies’ allegedly wrongful (and cowardly) misconduct.

In other words, become a federal informer and we’ll protect you. Refuse to do so, and we’ll send you to jail.

What is the difference between neighborhood captains in Castro’s Cuba, who report people’s activities to their government, and U.S. telephone companies who report people’s activities to their government? Don’t they all rationalize their conduct under the same warped sense of patriotism?

— Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-11-01): The War on Telephone Privacy: The Meaning of the Nacchio Case

When libertarians challenge the regulatory State, well-intentioned Leftists will often point to all kinds of sharp dealing, exploitation, and irresponsible behavior that big business engaged in prior to the massive expansion of government regulation during the Progressive and New Deal eras. The case for this is often impressionistic and overstated, and usually glosses over the way in which byzantine State regulations allow for new kinds of market-cornering, agency-capturing, sharp dealing, and legal insulation from corporate responsibility. But too many conventional libertarians miss the point by responding with little more than apologia for big business. The right response is to point out that there is more than one way to deal with nasty business practices. The question is whether the means are going to be coercive or voluntary. Coercive solutions tend to deal with the problem from the top down, through a class of professional bureaucrats; voluntary methods tend to favor dealing with these problems from the bottom up, with you and your neighbors working together in grassroots efforts like fighting unions, organized boycotts, consumer associations, mutual aid societies, or watchdog pressure groups.

The grassroots approach puts power into the hands of ordinary people, who enjoy a lot of choice over what causes to support, how to organize responses, when to participate, when to withdraw, and so on. The bureaucratic approach takes power out of the hands of ordinary people and puts it in the hands of professional lawyers and bureaucrats; it tries to fight the unaccountable power of Behemoth by building up the unaccountable power of Leviathan. But the State has its own reasons for doing what it does, and it’s extraordinarily hard, indeed practically impossible, to keep those reasons aligned with anything like ordinary people’s real interests or concerns. Business and government simply get involved in elaborate power plays, as each tries to convert departments of the other into a captured agency for their own purposes, variously using the tools of campaign contributions, front groups, astroturf, cronyism, tax breaks, tax revenue, regulation, prosecution, extortion, and other forms of mutual back-scratching and mutual terrorizing. This is exactly what happened with the government’s successful efforts to turn telecom companies into multibillion dollar snitches for the Securitate creeps; as usual, the end result is that they all get in it together against the rest of us. That’s not an unhappy accident; it’s the way it’s always going to be as long as State agencies can arrogate power that individual people cannot opt out of.

All power to the people; the bureaus can go to hell.

Further reading:

• GT 2005-10-09: State of grace

In the federal government’s ongoing efforts to salvage COINTELPRO from the dustbin of history, the House of Representatives recently passed H.R. 1955, a bill that would, if it also passes the Senate, create a new National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism and a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States (sic!), which would study the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism in the United States and methods that can be utilized by Federal, State, local, and tribal homeland security officials to mitigate violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism.

Here are the definitions for the unwieldy jargon used in the bill:

(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION–The term violent radicalization means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

(3) HOMEGROWN TERRORISM–The term homegrown terrorism means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

(4) IDEOLOGICALLY BASED VIOLENCE–The term ideologically based violence means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.

Well, O.K., fine. If that is what the Center for Excellence &c. is going to study, then they may as well start with the worst offenders. May I suggest that they begin with studying the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots of the extremist propaganda coming out of Office of National Drug Control Policy, which promotes the use of force or violence by armed narcs to promote the Drug Warriors’ political and social beliefs against the will of the civilian population? Or perhaps the Internal Revenue Service, which routinely engages in the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence to intimidate or coerce the civilian population of the United States, in furtherance of the United States government’s political objectives with respect to the war on Iraq, Social Security, corporate welfare, government schooling, the drug war, etc.? Or perhaps the Department of Defense, which has used repeated, massive, and merciless ideologically-based violence in order to promote the federal government’s ideology with respect to parliamentary government, nuclear disarmament, etc., etc., etc., in countries all over the world?

I fully expect that they will get right on it. After all, you’d hardly expect a double-standard from the State when it comes to ideologically-based violence.

(Story thanks to Stephanie McMillan 2007-10-28.)

Here’s a passage from Wednesday’s New York Times story on yet another set of secret legal opinions issued by the Bush Administration’s Department of Justice licensing the use of torture in interrogations:

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.

— Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen, New York Times (2007-10-03): Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations, p. 2

It vill not be difficult, mein F?@c3;bc;hrer…

Michael Chertoff, the top creep at the Comittee of Public Safety, thinks that you and I are not sacrificing enough for our own good. And it’s getting on his very last nerve:

Such opposition [to new border control programs] ranges from Texas ranchers who don’t want border fences built on their property to northern border-state residents who don’t want to get passports to cross back-and-forth between Canada and the USA. Chertoff says he is frustrated by the growing number of people who say, Yes, protect us, but not if it inconveniences me.

But don’t worry. Chertoff will make sure the government protects the hell out of you, anyway. And you’re going to like it, too.

In an interview shortly before the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Chertoff said he considers it one of his biggest obligations in his remaining 16 months in office to eliminate the not-in-my-backyard attitude when it comes to relatively small costs and inconveniences.

And don’t you worry. Michael Chertoff will find that all the costs and inconveniences of national identification papers, a border wall, new passport requirements, deliberate intimidation of employers by La Migra, etc. are relatively small.

Tim Roemer, a member of the 9/11 Commission, said President Bush should help Chertoff better inform the public about new security programs designed to keep terrorists out of the country.

The average citizen needs to know more about what to do to stop these people, Roemer said.

Chertoff says he worries that the public is suffering fatigue after six years of counterterrorism efforts abroad and at home.

— USA Today (2007-09-06): Chertoff: Security requires sacrifice

And there’ll be no security fatigue in Chertoff’s command–that’s an order. You’d better fall in, soldier.

Perhaps if the people who are actually affected by the costs and inconveniences Michael Chertoff’s so-called security policies are not as enthusiastic as Michael Chertoff is about those policies, he should reconsider his efforts to protect them against their will.

(Story thanks to Wolfesblog 2007-09-06: Chertoff says we’re not sacrificing enough.)

Further reading:

• GT 2006-12-04: In five words or fewer #2: Michael McHale on the 50-shot police murder of Sean Bell
• GT 2006-05-11: Quidditative essence

Here’s the New York Times’s report on Hordak‘s latest battle-cry:

BRUSSELS, May 11 — Vice President Dick Cheney used the deck of an American aircraft carrier just 150 miles off Iran's coast as the backdrop today to warn the country that the United States was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting off oil routes or gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.

… Mr. Cheney's sharp warnings appeared to be part of a two-track administration campaign to push back at Iran, while leaving the door open to negotiations. It was almost exactly a year ago that the United States offered to negotiate with Iran as long as it first agreed to halt enriching uranium, a decision in which Mr. Cheney, participants said, was not a major player. Similarly, the speech today was not circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, a senior American diplomat said. He kind of runs by his own rules, the official said.

… With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike, he said. We'll keep the sea lanes open. We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We'll disrupt attacks on our own forces. We'll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.

… I want you to know that the American people will not support a policy of retreat, Mr. Cheney said. We want to complete the mission, we want to get it done right, and then we want to return home with honor.

— David E. Sanger, New York Times (2006-05-11): On Carrier in Gulf, Cheney Warns Iran

According to the story, after Dick Cheney completes his Middle East mission of sending clear messages, he will return home, sometime next week. No word yet on when American soldiers will complete their mission of opposing, disrupting, relieving, delivering military justice, occupying, keeping the sea lanes open, etc., or when he and his buddies will allow them to return home. Nor is there any word yet on when he and his buddies will stop forcing the American people, i.e. the rest of us, to foot the bill for his plans against our will.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-12-21: In ten words or fewer (personal pronouns edition): George W. Bush on the next year of the Iraq War
• GT 2004-02-08: What you mean We?