First they came for the immigrants.

Then they came for the anarchists.

Here is what the Committee for Public Safety and the local Red Squad have been collaborating on in Tacoma, Washington:

Dear Fellow Human Beings,

At 3 PM, on Friday, November 2nd, the landlord of the building which houses the Pitch Pipe Infoshop received a call from a Tacoma PD lieutenant. He told her that the Infoshop and the Anarchist Bookfair which it is holding this Saturday and Sunday is a homeland security threat and will be monitored by police for the entire weekend. The landlord then approached residents of the building and threatened eviction. As of now, no one is threatened with a sudden eviction.

This is a direct attack on the part of the government against those it disagrees with. The government is attempting to destroy and stop the protests planned for the 9th and 10th of November against the existence of the ICE detention center. It is attempting to shroud the bookfair in a cloud of fear and discourage people from attending. EVERYONE SHOULD STILL ATTEND! We will not allow this attack on our lives from the government.

… The government just threatened us with the same apparatus that we are fighting against: The Department Of Homeland Security. The same apparatus that is keeping people locked in cages in the Detention Center while we write this. They absolutely can not have protests like the ones planned for the 9th and 10th of November against their fascist infrastructure. Beyond this, the military is bringing a shipment of Strykers back through (supposedly) Olympia on Monday. One thing is clear: they are frightened of us.

— InfoShop 2007-11-02: Tacoma Anarchist Bookfair Accused Of Being Homeland Security Threat

Incidentally, please note their ongoing efforts to recruit the business owners and Respectable Citizens of the community as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter:

The Tacoma PD encouraged the Downtown Merchants Guild to remove all portable items from their storefronts and asked the business owners to be the “eyes and ears” of the police and report any suspicious activity.

The Pitch Pipe Infoshop Collective concludes:

The police stated that potential actions might be directed at shutting down the Tacoma Link Light Rail or towards destroying property. What reason they have to believe this we do not know but are anxious to find out. As to why they are telling everyone these things the answer is simple: they wish to forcibly stop the protests against ICE by whatever means necessary. Plus, they are terrified of so many anarchists being in the area for the glorious homecoming of their killing machines from overseas.

We can not back down from this. Do not let their petty tactics sway you from coming to the Bookfair or to the protests on the 9th and 10th. This is nothing but them attempting to stifle the energy at our backs. Everyone in the area should come together and not allow another one of these attacks. Because if they feel as if they have succeeded in pushing our efforts back, they will not hesitate to do the same to other groups who push against the grain.

I wish them well in their protests tomorrow and on Saturday. The more the State tries to use Stasi-statism to try to harass, intimidate, and lock us down, the more emphatically we need to expose and resist them.

Onward.

Left libertarians, like all libertarians, believe that all State control of industry and all State ownership of natural resources should be abolished. In that sense, libertarian Leftists advocate complete and absolute privatization of, well, everything. Governments, or quasi-governmental public monopolies, have no business building or running roads, bridges, railroads, airports, parks, housing, libraries, post offices, television stations, electric lines, power plants, water works, oil rigs, gas pipelines, or anything else of the sort. (Those of us who are anarchists add that governments have no business building or running fire departments, police stations, courts, armies, or anything else of the sort, because governments — which are necessarily coercive and necessarily elitist — have no business existing or doing anything at all.)

It’s hard enough to sell this idea to our fellow Leftists, just on the merits. State Leftists have a long-standing and healthy skepticism towards the more utopian claims that are sometimes made about how businesses might act on the free market; meanwhile, they have a long-standing and very unhealthy naïveté towards the utopian claims that are often made on behalf of government bureaucracies under an electoral form of government. But setting the substantive issues aside, there’s another major roadblock for us to confront, just from the use of language.

There is something called privatization which has been a hot topic in Leftist circles for the past 15-20 years. It has been a big deal in Eastern Europe, in third world countries under the influence of the IMF, and in some cases in the United States, too. Naomi Klein has a new book on the topic, which has attracted some notice. Klein’s book focuses on the role that natural and artificial crises play in establishing the conditions for what she calls privatization. But privatization, as understood by the IMF, the neoliberal governments, and the robber baron corporations, is a very different beast from privatization as understood by free market radicals. What consistent libertarians advocate is the devolution of all wealth to the people who created it, and the reconstruction of all industry on the principle of free association and voluntary mutual exchange. But the IMF and Naomi Klein both seem to agree on the idea that privatization includes reforms like the following:

• Tax-funded government contracts to corporations like Blackwater or DynCorp for private mercenaries to fight government wars. This has become increasingly popular as a way for the U.S. to wage small and large wars over the past 15 years; I think it was largely pioneered through the U.S. government’s efforts to suppress international free trade in unauthorized drugs, and is currently heavily used by the U.S. in Colombia, the Balkans, and Iraq.

• Tax-funded government contracts to corporations like Wackenhut for government-funded but privately managed prisons, police forces, firefighters, etc. This has also become increasingly popular in the U.S. over the past 15 years; in the case of prisons, at least, it was largely inspired by the increasing number of people imprisoned by the U.S. government for using unauthorized drugs or selling them to willing customers.

• Government auctions or sweetheart contracts in which nationalized monopoly firms — oil companies, water works, power companies, and the like — are sold off to corporations, with the profits going into the State treasury, and usually with some form of legally-enforced monopoly left intact after privatization. One of the most notorious cases is the cannibalistic bonanza that Boris Yeltsin and a select class of politically-connected Oligarchs helped themselves to after the implosion of Soviet Communism. Throughout the third world, similar auction or contract schemes are suggested or demanded as a condition for the national government to receive a line of tax-funded credit from the member states of the International Monetary Fund.

• Yet Another Damn Account schemes for converting government pension systems from a welfare model to a forced savings model, in which workers are forced to put part of their paycheck into a special, government-created retirement account, where it can be invested according to government-crafted formulas in one of a limited number of government-approved investment vehicles offered by a tightly regulated cartel of government-approved uncompetitive investment brokers. This kind of government retirement plan is supposedly the centerpiece of privatization in Pinochet’s Chile, and has repeatedly been advocated by George W. Bush and other Republican politicians in the United States.

Klein and other state Leftists very claim that these government privatization schemes are closely associated with Right-wing authoritarian repression, up to and including secret police, death squads, and beating, torturing, or disappearing innocent people for exercising their rights of free speech or free association in labor unions or dissident groups.

And they are right. Those police state tactics aren’t compatible with any kind of free market, but then, neither are any of the government auctions, government contracting, government loans, and government regulatory schemes that Klein and her comrades present as examples of privatization. They are examples of government-backed corporate kleptocracy. The problem is that the oligarchs, the robber barons, and their hirelings dishonestly present these schemes — one and all of them involving massive government intervention and government plunder from ordinary working people — as if they were free market reforms. And Klein and her comrades usually believe them; the worst sorts of robber baron state capitalism are routinely presented as if they were arguments against the free market, even though pervasive government monopoly, government regulation, government confiscation, government contracting, and government finance have nothing even remotely to do with free markets.

I’d like to suggest that this confusion needs to be exposed, and combated. In order to combat it, we may very well need to mint some new language. As far as I know, privatization was coined by analogy with nationalization; if nationalization was the seizure of industry or resources by government, then privatization was the reversal of that process, devolving the industry or the resources into private hands. It is clear that the kind of government outsourcing and kleptocratic monopolies that Klein et al condemn don’t match up very well with the term. On the other hand, the term has been abused and perverted so long that it may not be very useful to us anymore, either.

So here’s my proposal for linguistic reform. What we advocate is the devolution of state-confiscated wealth and state-confiscated industries back to civil society. In some cases, that might mean transferring an industry or a resource to private proprietorship (if, for example, you can find the person or the people from whom a nationalized factory was originally seized, the just thing to do would be to turn the factory back over to them). But in most cases, it could just as easily mean any number of other ways to devolve property back to the people:

1. Some resources should be ceded to the joint ownership of those who habitually use them. For example, who should own your neighborhood streets? Answer: you and your neighbors should own the streets that you live on. For the government to seize your tax money and your land and use it to build neighborhood roads, and then to sell them out from under you to some unrelated third party who doesn’t live on them, doesn’t habitually use them, etc., would be theft.

2. Government industries and lands where an original private owner cannot be found could, and probably should, be devolved to the co-operative ownership of the people who work in them or on them. The factories to the workers; the soil to those who till it.

3. Some universally-used utilities (water works, regional power companies, perhaps highways) which were created by tax money might be ceded to the joint ownership of all the citizens of the area they serve. (This is somewhat similar to the Czechoslovakian model of privatization, in which government industries were converted into joint-stock companies, and every citizen was given so many shares.)

4. Some resources (many parks, perhaps) might be ceded to the unorganized public — that is, they would become public property in Roderick’s sense, rather than in the sense of government control.

Now, given the diversity of cases, and all of the different ways in which government might justly devolve property from State control to civil society, privatization is really too limiting a term. So instead let’s call what we want the socialization of the means of production.

As for the IMF / Blackwater model of privatization, again, the word doesn’t fit the situation very well, and we need something new in order to help mark the distinction. Whereas what we want could rightly be called socialization, I think that the government outsourcing, government-backed monopoly capitalism, and government goon squads, might more accurately be described as privateering.

I’m just sayin’.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-06-07: Property to the People: the Leftist case for privatization
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical health care reform

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.)

Someone must have slandered Jean Gambell, for one morning in 1937, without having done anything truly wrong, she was arrested. Gambell, a poor working girl in England, was falsely convicted of stealing two and a half shillings from her boss. She didn’t steal the money, and in fact the money was later found, but by then it was too late. She had already been convicted, and, more to the point, she had already come under the eye of State psychiatry. Declared feeble-minded, this fifteen year old girl was locked up in English psychoprisons for seventy years over a trivial crime that she never committed. Her family desperately tried to get her released, but could not. Eventually she simply disappeared into the system, and her brothers no longer even knew whether she was alive or dead. Jean Gambell herself repeatedly told her prison guards in a care home that she had family she could go to, but they kept her locked up, because she had been officially declared crazy and stupid and could, therefore, be dismissed as a liar. All for her own good.

Jean Gambell finally escaped the talons of the therapeutic State last month–at the age of 85, with a lifetime stolen from her–when her brother finally learned that she was alive and confined in Macclesfield Mews Care Home.

Seventy years locked up in institutions hardly seems to be a punishment that befits the crime of stealing half-a-crown.

However, it is just such a fate that befell Jean Gambell when at the age of 15, in 1937, she was falsely accused of stealing 2s 6d (12.5p) from the doctor’s surgery where she worked as a cleaner.

She was sectioned under the 1890 Lunacy Act and even though the money was later found, she has been moved from mental institution to mental institution. More recently, she went into a care home and has been lost to her family, who thought she was dead.

But last month, by chance, her brother stumbled across correspondence which led to the discovery of her existence and the family was reunited.

Her brother David Gambell, 63, who still lives in his mother’s old home in Wirral, Merseyside, received a questionnaire addressed to his mother from Macclesfield Mews Care Home.

I thought it was just a survey for old people and I was about to throw it away when I saw Jean’s name pencilled in on one corner, he said yesterday.

I couldn’t believe it. I suddenly realised that my sister was still alive. I rang the care home straight away and they confirmed that our sister was there. He and his brother Alan, who had last seen their sister as small children when she was allowed to visit home with two wardens as guards, travelled to the Macclesfield home.

They were told by staff that their 85-year-old sister was deaf, could only communicate in writing and was very unlikely to remember them.

A little old lady on walking sticks came in, said Alan. She looked at us and cried out: Alan…David. Then she put her arms around us. It was very emotional.

I am sure that what has kept her going all these years was the challenge of proving to the authorities that she had a family. The trouble was, nobody would listen to her.

The brothers spent much of their childhood in orphanages because their parents were so poor. They said that they had later discovered that their father had tried for years to get Jean freed after she was put in Cranage Hall mental hospital in Macclesfield for being of feeble mind, but was unsuccessful because her records had been mislaid.

She spent years, lost in a maze of instutitons and care homes, trying to convince people in authority that she had a family. But nobody would believe her.

— David Sapsted, The Telegraph (2007-09-29): Falsely accused woman freed after 70 years

There is one thing that is even more terrifying than the savage cruelty of the hangman State, and that is the dispassionate sadism of psychiatric State–the therapist armed with the law, the straight-jacket, the lobotomy, and a near-absolute entitlement to take your freedom and destroy your life, and call that care for your professionally-reckoned best interests.

(Link thanks to Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-10-21: The Coldest of All Cold Monsters and Anthony Gregory @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2007-10-21: Innocent Woman Freed After 70 Years.)