OK, so we returned from the Permanent Autonomous Zones conference a bit worn out on crusty punk kids, but very charged by the experience and ready to work on a lot of possible projects, including setting up a radical civic media center / infoshop in Auburn. On getting home, I checked out information on getting a business license in the city of Auburn.

So here’s a question: why the hell does it cost $505.00 just for the privilege of being allowed to sell watermelons out of your truck without the cops harassing you? It costs only $105 or so to get a business license if you want to sell stuff out of your shop, so why the extra $400 just for the privilege of setting your truck out in the hot sun on somebody’s parking lot (assuming you can get their permission to use their parking lot in the first place). Does the city really have that much of an interest in preventing impoverished local farmers from selling their own damn stuff instead of being ripped off by corporatized grocers? The barriers to entry for any new independent businesses are insane — costs for a business license, and just the basic work of sifting through a 30-page licensing ordinance; no wonder downtown Auburn is being completely colonized by corporate chains like the GAP and Mellow Mushroom, who already have tons of pencil-pushers hired to take care of all this crap. Meanwhile, local farmers and booksellers are sliding out of business and not coming back thanks in large part to these pointless start-up costs imposed by city government’s corporativist economic planning.

For your reading pleasure, the libertarians over at Cato Institute have produced a very useful Policy Analysis document on Ending Corporate Welfare As We Know It.

Here’s a tidbit on how the government wisely uses your tax dollars: through sugar price support programs, the United States spends $1.4 billion ($1,400,000,000) of your money to make sugar cost more. About 40% of the giveaway benefits the largest 1% of sugar farms, with the 33 largest sugar cane plantations each receiving more than $1,000,000 each, all so that you can pay more at the grocery store (the total cost to the consumer in higher sugar prices is estimated to be several billion dollars every year).

Next time a Republican complains to you about welfare recipients, it would be good to point out the biggest and most unproductive welfare leeches in the United States are monster corporations in industry and agribusiness. By comparison, TANF, WIC, and other traditional poverty-based welfare programs consume a tiny percentage of the federal budget and have relatively high success rates in supporting people through temporary dire circumstances. But for some reason I don’t see Tommy Thompson developing a welfare-to-work program for General Motors or the big sugar cane plantations, even though they stay on billion-dollar doles year after year after year.

Steve Lohr highlights some interesting parallels between the emerging technological privacy movement and the early days of the environmental movement in the 1960s [NY Times]. A couple of brief notes:

• Who says that there has been no book on privacy with the impact of Silent Spring? After all, there are few political books as well known and as shattering as George Orwell’s 1984, a book which is in large part about the destruction of privacy through State technological surveillance and control.
• It’s worth noting that a deeper parallel between the two movements rests in their mutual fears of technology being turned into an instrument of exploitation and control: for the environmentalists, of nature; for the privacy advocates, of individual people. They both come out of a strong background of populism and autonomous self-government.
• For hands-on information on protecting your privacy online, check out Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Now! campaign, security.tao.ca — oriented towards leftist / anarchist activists doing political work online, and SafeWeb — an online anonymizer.

Whew! After half a year of hard work, Southern Girls Convention 2001 finally happened this past weekend in Auburn, Alabama. As you may have noticed from my extended absence, it was absolutely exhausting, long, hard work, but it was totally worth it. Over FIVE HUNDRED totally rad feminist women and boys came from all over the country (and Canada too!) for over 60 information-filled workshops, tables with all kinds of information, four music shows (including an outstanding hardcore show at Olde Auburn Ale House), and an amazing chance for community, networking, and meeting lots of rad kids from the South. Although as organizers we were constantly running around exhausted and dealing with crises, everyone told us that they had an amazing time and the positive feedback was more than enough to keep us going on vicarious great experiences.

Auburn hasn’t seen so much diversity or political consciousness in a long time. Queer punk girls were lounging outside of Foy Union, everyone from PIRG to SURGE to Planned Parenthood were hosting tables, and a group of Radical Cheerleaders coordinated a spontaneous march and took over the downtown Taco Bell in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ campaign for tomato pickers.

I can’t write here how challenging, exhausting, uniting, empowering, and wonderful the experience of organizing SGC2001 and carrying it through have been. But it’s been all that and more. I don’t want to organize any more conventions for a long time, but I am super-psyched about going to next year’s SGC and experiencing it from a participant’s-eye-view. I hope, I pray that SGC will be an on-going, transformative presence in the South for a long time to come.

I ran across an interesting article by Libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor (whose articles I have often admired) today giving a critical view on why so few women are involved in the Libertarian movement, citing many Libertarians’ reflexive antifeminism and the movement’s marginalization of women’s issues, as well as hostility by Libertarian men when criticized on these grounds. She advocates that Libertarians work with and try to reach out to mainstream liberal feminists. Well, I think she errs in defining radical feminists as the enemy – I think that radical feminists (especially those that are, well, anarchists/anarcha-feminists) are by and large going to be far more amenable to the argument that male-dominated government is hostile to women’s interest, than the average liberal feminist is going to be. Unfortunately, for the time being, even self-proclaimed Libertarian feminist groups (such as Wendy McElroy’s ifeminists online community) remain mostly oppositional in nature: they set themselves up as Libertarian feminists and then spend most of their time criticizing other feminists for not being Libertarian enough—rather than forging more respectful alliances between Libertarians and feminists. I hope that Joan Kennedy Taylor’s article may be the first step in the right direction towards that goal.