I am happy to announce that I have been invited to speak at three sessions at the upcoming Libertopia convention, October 11-14, in San Diego, California. In particular, I’m going to be doing:

1. Part of a panel on so-called Intellectual Property, together with Stephan Kinsella (Saturday October 13, 2012, 2pm-3pm), on the Main Stage.

2. A breakout session on Ask an Anti-Capitalist! A Freewheeling Q&A on Markets Not Capitalism, Left-Libertarianism, and Mutualist Ends Through Free-Market Means (Sunday October 14, 2012, 9:45am-10:30am).

3. Part of a panel discussion on Markets Not Capitalism, together with my co-editor Gary Chartier, and contributors Roderick Long and Sheldon Richman. (Sunday October 14, 2012, 3pm-4pm), on the Main Stage.

4. Tabling in the exhibition area for Markets Not Capitalism, the ALL Distro, and Center for a Stateless Society. We’ll have copies of the book, booklets, pamphlets, buttons, and more; and we’ll be there to talk to convention-goers about free-market anticapitalism and left-libertarian ideas. I’m going to enjoy the talks but in all honesty the person-to-person contact and the tabling is the kind of groundwork that I see as by far the most important stuff, and which I’m most looking forward to doing.

I should mention that the Ask an Anti-Capitalist! session is being held in the John Galt Room, which I’m choosing to take as one of the more hilarious culture-clash moments I’ve had since I started doing this gig. The bad news is that this is scheduled opposite breakout sessions by Gary Chartier on war, and Sharon Presley on libertarian feminism (?!?). I guess the good news is that by packing us in like this, they’ve ensured that no matter what breakout session you go to during that block, you are going to get some lefty libertarian stuff to hear. Anyway, there’s going to be a veritable mob of left-libertarians, free-market anticapitalists, C4SSers and other lefty-friendly commentators there throughout the event, including Gary Chartier, Sheldon Richman, Roderick Long, Stephanie Murphy, not to mention presentations by Angela Keaton, Sharon Presley and Anthony Gregory. You can check out the whole schedule here.

We’re doing our best to do all this on as thin a shoestring budget as possible. I’ve arranged for couch-surfing and carpooling to help keep the travel and lodging expenses as minimal as possible, but there’s still a couple of hefty charges that we’re paying out of pocket to get Markets Not Capitalism and a rambunctious left-libertarian presence out to California. So if you want to help out, you can toss a few coins into the hat with the ChipIn widget below. Donations go to the Molinari Institute, so any proceeds above reimburseable expenses will go to support the production and distribution of market anarchist literature, and towards supporting future speaking gigs for Markets Not Capitalism. Anyway, here’s the shoestring, for reference. (This may be revised as other arrangements get nailed down.)

Thanks! And I hope I’ll see y’ALL there!

To-day’s clipped stories, from the Opelika Auburn News (September 20, 2012).

• Front Page. Nothing to clip here, actually. The biggest real estate is occupied by a story about how some super-millionaire said something in private that turned out to be aired in public that may or may not hurt his chances on the margin in his attempt to go from being one of the most massively privileged people in the entire world to the single most massively privileged person in the entire world. This may or may not help out the chances of his super-millionaire opponent to remain the most massively privileged person in the entire world, if it convinces more people that the super-millionaire challenger cares less about ordinary folks than the incumbent super-millionaire does. Somebody is supposed to care about this. I don’t: it couldn’t possibly matter less how much the most massively privileged person in the entire world cares, or who he or she cares about, because the existence of such massive, ruinous and lethal structures of social and economic privilege is exactly the problem, and it is the one problem which such debates over the less-worse of a pair of party-backed super-millionaires will never raise.

• 2A. Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. A fairly typical police puff piece to announce that the police force occupying Auburn, Alabama has a new dog that they are going to use to hound people who are trying to get away from them, and to get or fabricate probable cause for harassing people suspected of nonviolent drug offenses.

  Bo has a nose for finding trouble. But in his line of work, that’s a good thing.^[1]

  The Auburn Police Division welcomed Bo, an 11-month-old Belgian Malinois, to the force on Wednesday.

  Trained in both narcotics detection and human tracking, Bo was officially introduced to members of the media at Auburn Technology Park North.

  For years, we have called on (Lee County) Sheriff Jay Jones and (Opelika Police) Chief Thomas Mangham for use of their tracking K-9s, for which we’re thankful, but we felt like it was time for us to have our own, Auburn Police Chief Tommy Dawson. We’re very excited about putting this dog to work.

  … Dawson said Bo was purchased last month from the Alabama Canine Law Enforcement Officers Training Center in Northport with approximately $10,000 in seized assets from drug arrests.

  … The acquisition of Bo puts the APD’s number of K-9 officers at four, said Dawson, a former K-9 handler.

  –Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. Opelika-Auburn News, September 20, 2012. A2.

  Well, that’s a damn shame. The primary purpose that they will use Bo for, as they use all police dogs, will be to provide pretexts to justify what are essentially random sweeps, searches and seizures; to harass, intimidate and coerce innocent people on easily fabricated, often mistaken and incredibly thin probable cause, with the minutest of ritual gestures at a sort of farce on due process, in order to prosecute a Drug War that doesn’t need to be prosecuted and to imprison, disenfranchise, and ruin the lives of people who have done nothing at all that merits being imprisoned, disenfranchised, or having their lives ruined by tyrannical drug laws. It’s not the dog’s fault, of course; he looks like a perfectly nice dog. But the people who bought him (with the proceeds from their own search-n-seizure racket), and who are using him, are putting him to a violent and degrading use, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

• Op-Ed Page, 4A. Muslim religion should be feared in US. Rudy Tidwell, of Valley, a God-and-Country fixture on the Op-Ed page, decides that he doesn’t like Church-State integrationists when they aren’t part of his favorite church. Then, by means of an insanely ambitious collectivism, he assimilates the actions of his least favorite hypercollectivists to the thoughts and feelings of literally all 1,600,000,000 (he rounds up to 2 billion) Muslims in the world.

  The phrase Arab Spring has become a catchphrase for the media and other liberals to minimize the real dangers of the actual enemy of America.^[2] The so-called Arab Spring is actually a Muslim Spring, meaning that the growing takeovers we see in various Middle Eastern countries^[3] are Muslims rising up worldwide.

  Why is this aspect of the Middle East unrest not recognized for what it is? The euphemism^[4] made between so-called radical Muslims and peaceful Muslims. Islam is a dangerous body of more than 2 billion people who are determined to convert or kill, and there is no compromise to be made?

  It’s not just a few radical Muslims who make terrorist attacks. How then do you account for the fact that when the attacks on 9/11 occurred, Muslims around the world rejoiced and danced in the streets?

  More recent events in Libya and Egypt have been recognized as and declared to be planned attacks, not benign protests. Were all the people burning the embassies and tearing down and burning the American flags peace-loving Muslims?

  We have a growing number of Muslims in the United States. There are enclaves of Muslims who rule with rigid and brutal Shariah law. Dearborn, Mich, is perhaps the most notable. Muslims are entering the U.S. in numbers that would shock us if we knew the full extent.

  I encourage you to get a copy of the Quran and read it. It is a frightening book that demands faithfulness to its teachings to the point of death. It is the guide book for a worldwide takeover, not by reason and diplomacy as Communism said it would do over time,^[5] but by conversion or death.

  Rudy Tidwell
  Valley

  Well, then. 2,000,000,000? Really? Did they all do the converting and killing and rejoicing and dancing all at once, or do they maybe take it in turns? Well I suppose the gigantic hive mind that they all link up to when they join that dangerous body no doubt ensures that such problems of coordination don’t really arise.

• Op-Ed Page, 4A. Today in History.

  On Sept. 20, 1962, James Meredith, a black student, was blocked from enrolling at the University of Mississippi by Democratic Gov. Ross R. Barnett. (Meredith was later admitted.)

  . . .

  In 1884, the National Equal Rights Party was formed during a convention of suffragists in San Francisco.

  In 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. was seriously wounded during a book signing at a New York City department store when Izola Curry stabbed him in the chest. (Curry was later found mentally incompetent.)

  In 1973, in their so-called battle of the sexes, tennis star Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, at the Houston Astrodome.

  In 1996, President Bill Clinton announced that he was signing the Defense of Marriage Act, a bill outlawing same-sex marriages, but said it should not be used as an excuse for discrimination,^[6] violence or intimidation against gays and lesbians.

  In 2011, repeal of the U.S. military’s 18-year-old don’t ask, don’t tell compromise took effect, allowing gay and lesbian service^[7] members to serve^[8] openly.

Section A contains no international news at all today, unless you count the collecto-eliminationist letter from Rudy Tidwell on the Op-Ed page.

1. ^[1][For whom? –R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][Sic. Of course what he means, as he makes clear, is the enemy of the United States government. Which is not true either, but in any case obviously not the same thing. –RG.]↩
3. ^[3][Sic. Of course all governments are usurpers, and thus are ongoing takeovers by nature. That includes transitional and revolutionary states; on the other hand it also obviously includes the hyperauthoritarian regimes recently challenged or thrown out. What the hell was the Mubarak regime, say, if not a constantly repeated, jackbooted takeover of innocent people’s lives? –RG.]↩
4. ^[4][Sic. What he describes is not a euphemism, but rather a distinction that he regards as being misapplied. –RG.]↩
5. ^[5][Rudy Tidwell is speaking outside of his area of expertise. –RG.]↩
6. ^[6][. . . –R.G.]↩
7. ^[7][Sic. –RG.]↩
8. ^[8][Sic. –RG.]↩

In recent news, from the Money Monopoly, Ethan Clay, the owner of a Pittsburgh-area ice-cream parlor, has been offering a small-time check-cashing service and community bank through his shop’s gift card system. The interest on deposits is paid out in ice cream gift cards. From the WSJ story, it sounds like he was largely motivated by frustration over fees from the cartelists in the Bureaucratically Correct banking system. So he’s offering a neighborhood alternative that’s designed to minimize fees, offer a moderate rate of interest on deposits, and offer low-interest microloans.

PITTSBURGH–State banking officials want to put the freeze^[1] on the owner of an ice-cream parlor who opened a community-bank alternative that pays interest in the form of gift cards for ice cream, waffles and coffee.

Ethan Clay, 31 years old, opened Whalebone Café Bank seven months ago in his shop, Oh Yeah!, a year and a half after he was hit with $1,600 in overdraft fees from a local bank where his account was overdrawn by a series of checks.

Mr. Clay says he wants to offer an alternative banking experience, and has accepted small deposits and made small loans. He claims he isn’t subject to banking rules because his operation is a gift-card savings account.

. . . Mr. Clay’s ice-cream-bank novelty is drawing attention at a time when people, irritated over banking fees and overdraft penalties, are increasingly looking to alternatives to traditional banking. Today, 8.2% of the nation’s households—up from 7.7% in 2009—are managing their finances without a bank, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

. . . Mr. Clay said he has $550 from depositors and has loaned $1,700, an amount that includes some of his own seed money. My goal is to get to $100,000 in deposits by Dec. 21, he said. This is the prototype, but I hope to become the neighborhood bank.

He said he came up with the idea after he paid 45 fees at $35 each to his local bank. If I’m overdrawn by 64 cents, the bank should charge me 10 cents and not $20, said Mr. Clay. At some point, he said he might have to consider a small penalty for borrowers who spend money they don’t have.

You have to have a way of making it uncomfortable for people to be overdrawn, he said.

— John W. Miller, Wall Street Journal (2012-09-13)

The story doesn’t mention anything about it, but I expect that accepting the deposits would also be a good way for Clay to capitalize his small business without having to go through the high volumes or bureaucratic demands for getting standard business loans from a bank, and without paying off the Money Monopolist’s skim. In any case, the prospect of a community alternative to cartel banking is certainly more than enough for the Pennsylvania Department of Banking to leap into action. My God, the man is threatening to compete. And he isn’t even a banker!

Now of course I do in general terms understand the cartelizing function of banking regulations, and the role that they play in insulating incumbent capitalists from the threat of market competition. And I know that these cartelizing and insulating functions are in fact, and always have been, the essence and the raison d’être of the regulations. And I realize that there really isn’t any micromanaging defend-the-status-quo, control-at-any-cost argument so baldfacedly idiotic that it can’t still be assimilated and rationalized and seriously produced by the internal logic of bureaucratic rationality. Still, when I read this stuff from a guy like Ed Novak, Spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Banking …

It’s a strange case, we don’t have the authority to go close an ice-cream store, said Ed Novak, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Banking. But we are going to do something. You can’t mess with people’s money.^[2]

. . . There are other issues, as well. Oh Yeah! does not have depositors insurance. If a bank goes under, the depositors get their money back, said Mr. Novak. If the ice-cream store goes under, who knows what happens?^[3]

— John W. Miller, Wall Street Journal (2012-09-13)

… I do still find myself wondering, at some level, how you ever get to a point in your life when you can actually say this kind of stuff without just falling over laughing at yourself. In any case, when he ventures to say it in public, the rest of us ought to at the very least to pick up the slack and laugh him out of the room for it.

In any case, here’s a bit more from Novak:

There is also the question of enforcing banking charters, which licenses institutions to cash checks. Banking in the 19th century was a hit-or-miss proposition, says Mr. Novak. And we have a banking system now to make sure that that’s not the issue.

— John W. Miller, Wall Street Journal (2012-09-13)

Now, of course, you can’t mess with people’s money, and we don’t have any of that hit-or-miss stuff. You can’t mess with people’s money because now we have a Banking System which owns all the money, and only allows you to do what they please with it. And within the enclosed game reserve of that Banking System, there is no hit-or-miss: government guarantees that megacapitalists like Citi and J.P. Morgan-Chase will bag their targets.^[4] Whether you think all this is a good thing or not depends on how much you like being in the crosshairs.

Also.

• State Capitalism and the Many Monopolies, in The Freeman 61.7 (September 2011).
• GT 2011-01-21: Revolving Door
• GT 2011-05-16: Investors Anonymous
• GT 2008-03-19: Small enough to fail.

1. ^[1][The Editor would like to extend his apologies. The Wall Street Journal story seems to exist mostly in order to print as many awful journalistic puns as you can fit in the available space. –RG]↩
2. ^[2][This was apparently said with a straight face. –R.G.]↩
3. ^[3][This too. –R.G.]↩
4. ^[4]If they should miss on their first shot, FDIC and TARP will roll up in a tank and open fire on their behalf.↩

We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan . . . .

— Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican National Convention

We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan . . . .

— Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican National Convention

We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan . . . .

— Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican National Convention

We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan . . . .

— Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican National Convention

Every time they have another Democratic or Republican National Convention, some comfortable man in an expensive suit gets up on the podium and says more or less exactly this, in more or less exactly these words, and in tones of the blandest self-assurance. Every time some politician says this, I want to cry.

These are from the streets of Tampa, Florida. The first is from Brian Miller, via Radley Balko (August 28, 2012) (via my cousin Emily): it’s a picture of the out-of-town police brought in to Tampa to guard the 2012 Republican National Convention. The others are from many sources, collected in Examiner.com’s article on the use of the newest technology in civilian surveillance and police weaponry in Tampa and Charlotte.

* * *

Show me what elected government looks like…

This is what elected government looks like.

* * *

Show me what a police state looks like…

This is what a police state looks like.

* * *

From the Examiner.com article:

Officials in Tampa are preparing for mass arrests; Orient Road Jail has been vacated to ensure that the 1,700 beds can be utilized if needed. It has been reported that an Occupy Tampa protester was arrested on August 27, 2012, for refusing to remove his mask at the request of the police. Occupy Tampa has also reported that homeless people are being arrested near the convention by !!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;secret service.'

Tampa received a $50 million federal grant just for security. Tampa bought high-tech security cameras, body armor, and an armored tank. During the RNC, Tampa will have boat patrols armed with fully automatic .308 caliber rifles. Trapwire surveillance systems have also been installed throughout Tampa . . . .

. . . According to 2012Tampa.com "The Convention is designated by the Department of Homeland Security as one of only four National Special Security Events (NSSE) to be held in 2012; other examples of potential NSSE events include G-8/G-20 Summits and the World Bank/IMF meetings."

— Chris Time Steele, Examiner.com (August 27, 2012): From the DNC in Denver to the RNC in Tampa, the surveillance state grows

* * *

* * *

Here is what I wrote a few years ago, during the paramilitary occupations of the Twin Cities during the last Republican National Convention.

. . . Remember that so-called electoral democracy — in fact, nothing more than an imperial elective oligarchy — never means that we (meaning you and I and our neighbors) are respected as sovereign individuals or left alone to manage our own affairs. What it means is that a highly organized, heavily armed elite insists on the privilege of representing us, ruling over us, and ordering us around, on the excuse that, once every several years, we are given some minimal opportunity to select which of two tightly regimented political parties will take control of the ruling apparatus. It is, in other words, not freedom, but rather a Party State, in which we are given only the choice of which of two bureaucratic political parties might control our lives and livelihoods, with their authority supposedly justified by the ritual of elections and the mandate of popular sovereignty. And if the people (again, meaning you and I and our neighbors) should dare to think that we might challenge the authority of the regime supposedly representing us, you'll find that it's the people that go out the window, not the rigged electoral system or the parties’ grasp on the authority supposedly derived from those people.

— GT 2008-09-03: This is what a police state looks like (part 1 of ???)

* * *

* * *

Also.

• Solidarity First on Ustream.tv: (Documenting police presence with live recordings from Tampa.)
• OccupyTampa.org: Protest Live (August 27, 2012)
• OccupyThe99Percent.com: Occupy Protester Arrested at RNC (August 27, 2012)
• WTSP News: 3 arrested in Black Bloc tactic used by protesters during RNC march
• Examiner.com: From the DNC in Denver to the RNC in Tampa, the surveillance state grows.

From 2008.

• GT 2008-10-07: Cute.
• GT 2008-09-11: This is what a police state looks like… (Part 3 of ???)
• GT 2008-09-09: Cops are here to protect you (#7)
• GT 2008-09-04: This is what a police state looks like… (part 2 of ???)
• GT 2008-09-05: (William Gillis is my fucking hero.)