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Posts tagged Kevin Carson

Wednesday Lazy Linking

  • … but the streets belong to the people! Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-10): The People’s Stop Sign. In which people in an Ottawa neighborhood take nonviolent direct action to slow down the traffic flying down their neighborhood streets — by putting up their own stop signs at a key intersection. The city government, of course, is now busy with a Criminal Investigation of the public’s heinous contribution to public safety.

  • Abolitionism is the radical notion that other people are not your property. Darian Worden (2009-06-09): The New Abolitionists The point is that the principles of abolitionism, which held that regardless of popular justifications no human is worthy to be master and no human can be owned by another, when carried to their logical conclusion require this: that no human is worthy of authority over another, and that no person is owed allegiance simply because of political status. When reason disassembles the popular justifications of statism, as advances in political philosophy since the 1850's have assisted in doing, the consistent abolitionist cannot oppose the voluntaryist principles of the Keene radicals.

  • Mr. Obama, Speak For Yourself. Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-09-09): Speaking of the State

  • A campaign of isolated incidents. Ellen Goodman, Houston Chronicle (2009-06-08): Sorry, but the doctor’s killer did not act alone

  • Let’s screw all the little guys. Just to be fair. (Or, pay me to advertise my product on your station.) Jesse Walker, Reason (2009-06-09): The Man Can’t Tax Our Music: The music industry wants to impose an onerous new fee on broadcasters.

  • Some dare call it torture. Just not the cops. Or the judges. Wendy McElroy, WendyMcElroy.com (2009-06-08): N.Y. Judge Rules that Police Can Taser Torture in order to coerce compliance with any arbitrary court order. I think that Wendy is right to call pain compliance for what it is — torture (as I have called it here before) — and that it is important to insist on this point as much as possible whenever the topic comes up.

  • On criminalizing compassion. Macon D., stuff white people do (2009-06-05), on the conviction of Walt Staton for knowingly littering water jugs in a wildlife refuge, in order to keep undocumented immigrants from dying in the desert.

  • Freed markets vs. deforesters. Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader Environment (2009-06-04): Do You Know Where Your Shoes Have Been?, on the leather industry and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Utne does a good job of pointing out (by quoting Grist’s Tom Philpott) that the problem is deeply rooted in multi-statist neoliberalism: because of the way in which the Brazilian government and the World Bank act together to subsidize the cattle barons and ‘roid up Brazilian cattle ranching, the report is really about the perils of using state policy to prop up global, corporate-dominated trade.

  • Well, Thank God. (Cont’d.) Thanks to the Lord Justice, we now know that Pringles are, in fact, officially potato chips, not mere savory snacks, in spite of the fact that only about 40% of a Pringles crisp is actually potato flour. Language Log takes this case to demonstrate the quasi-Wittgensteinian point that, fundamentalist legal philosophy to one side, there’s actually no such thing as a self-applying law. (Quoting Adam Cohen’s New York Times Op-Ed, Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more [linguists groan here], while judges like [Sonia] Sotermayor are activists. But there is no magic way to interpret terms like free speech or due process — or potato chip.) I think the main moral of the story has to do with the absurdity of a political system in which whether or not you can keep $160,000,000 of your own damn money rides on whether or not you can prove to a judge that your savory snack hasn’t got the requisite potatoness to count as a potato crisp for the purposes of law and justice.

  • Small riots will get small attention, no riots get no attention, make a big riot, and it will be handled immediately. Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal (2009-05-30): In China, a New Breed of Dissidents. The story makes it seem as though the most remarkable thing about the emerging dissident movement is that they are safe enough for the State to tolerate them, rather than launching all out assaults as they did against the Tienanmen dissidents in 1989. Actually, I think that that misses the point entirely; and that the most interesting thing is that they have adopted such flexible and adaptive networking, both tactically and strategically, and that they now so often rise up from the very social classes that the Chinese Communist Party claims to speak for (not just easily-demonized students and intelligentsia, but ordinary farmers, factory workers, and retirees) — that the regime isn’t tolerating them; it just no longer knows what to do with them.

  • Counter-Cooking and Mutual Meals. Julia Levitt, Worldchanging: Bright Green (2009-06-03): Community Kitchens (Via Kevin Carson’s Shared Items.) If I may recommend, if you’re going to work on any kind of community cooking like this, particularly if you’re interested in it partly for reasons of resiliency and building community alternatives, you should do what you can to make sure that it is strongly connected with the local grey-market solidarity economy, through close cooperation with your local Food Not Bombs (as both a source and a destination for food) and other local alternatives to the state-subsidized corporate-consumer model for food distribution.

  • Looking Forward. Shawn Wilbur, In the Libertarian Labyrinth (009-06-06): Clement M. Hammond on Police Insurance. An excerpt on policing in a freed society, from individualist anarchist Clement M. Hammond’s futurist utopian novel, Then and Now which originally appeared in serialized form in Tucker’s Liberty in 1884 and 1885. (Thus predating Bellamy’s dreary Nationalist potboiler by 4 years.) Hammond’s novel is now available in print through Shawn’s Corvus Distribution. The good news is that, while Bellamy’s date of 2000 has already mercifully passed us by without any such society emerging, we still have almost 80 years to get it together in time for Hammond’s future.

  • Here at Reason we never pass up a chance to have some fun at the expense of Pete Seeger. Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-09): They Wanna Hear Some American Music. On brilliant fakery, the invention of Country and Western music, the cult of authenticity, and the manufacture of Americana. For the long, full treatment see Barry Mazor, No Depression (2009-02-23): Americana, by any other name…

  • Anarchy on the Big Screen. Colin Firth and Kevin Spacey have signed on for a big-screen film adaptation of Homage to Catalonia. The film is supposed to enter production during the first half of 2010.

Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.)

Communications

Wednesday Lazy Linking

Don’t forget.

  • The world is awesome.

  • People are awesome. You don’t need plans, or politics, or power. Put them up against people, and people will win every time. People came up with that video. Also, other people came up with this.

  • Technological civilization is awesome. (In case you’re wondering, it’s awesome because it’s made of people.)

  • Books are awesome. Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times (2009-05-29): Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader

  • To-day is awesome. It’s an anniversary. My love and I were married three years ago today. If the normal online rounds are held up for a while, well, that’s why.

Solidarity.

  • In memory of George Tiller. feministe (2009-05-31): In honor of Dr. Tiller (if you would like to donate in memory and in honor of Dr. Tiller’s work). Among others, the National Network of Abortion Funds has established a George Tiller Memorial Abortion Fund.

  • IQSN, L.A. I.M.C. (2009-05-27): Solidarity with Queer Bulgaria on 27 June 2009. A day of international actions in solidarity with the LGBTQ Pride march in Sofia, Bulgaria. Last year’s march was attacked by neo-Nazi groups who decided to Keep Our Children Safe with a campaign of roving basher gangs and by slinging molotov cocktails and small explosives at the marchers. International Queer Solidarity Network calls for a European mobilization, with support from the United States, that will stand in solidarity with Queer Bulgaria for this year’s march.

News.

Comment.

Historicize.

Communications.

Wednesday Lazy Linking

Communications:

Friday Lazy Linking

  • Winter Soldier: Just Another Tuesday. From Ryan Endicott, formerly a United States government Marine stationed in Iraq.

    YouTube (2009-05-12): Winter Soldier Southwest – Just Another Tuesday

    Via Clay Claibourne, L.A. I.M.C. (2009-05-13): Winter Soldier Southwest on YouTube #1

  • The regulatory State versus freed markets and the human future: A quote from Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, via B.K. Marcus at Mises Economics Blog:

    To expect the government to prevent such fraud from ever occurring would be like wanting it to provide cushions for all the children who might fall. To assume it to be possible to prevent successfully, by regulation, all possible malpractices of this kind, is to sacrifice to a chimerical perfection the whole progress of industry; it is to restrict the imagination of artificers to the narrow limits of the familiar; it is to forbid them all new experiments; it is to renounce even the hope of competing with the foreigners in the making of the new products which they invent daily, since, as they do not conform to our regulations, our workmen cannot imitate these articles without first having obtained permission from the government, that is to say, often after the foreign factories, having profited by the first eagerness of the consumer for this novelty, have already replaced it with something else. … Thus, with obvious injustice, commerce, and consequently the nation, are charged with a heavy burden to save a few idle people the trouble of instructing themselves or of making enquiries to avoid being cheated. To suppose all consumers to be dupes, and all merchants and manufacturers to be cheats, has the effect of authorizing them to be so, and of degrading all the working members of the community.

    –Turgot, Éloge de Gournay (1759), translated by P.D. Groenewegen

Outrage

Think.

Left-Libertarianism

  • On dialectical jujitsu: Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-05-19): How to annoy a conservative

  • Ownership failures, not market failures Chris Dillow, Stumbling and Mumbling (2009-05-01): Markets, the poor & the left. Dillow makes two really important distinctions: one of them the familiar left-libertarian distinction between freed markets, on the one hand, and actually-existing corporate capitalism, on the other; the other a less familiar, but very important, distinction between market processes and patterns of ownership. Quote: In many ways, what look like ways in which markets fail the poor are in fact merely ways in which a lack of assets fail the poor. Exactly; and the many cases where there are not really market failures, but rather ownership failures, have everything to do with feudal, mercantile, neoliberal, and other politically-driven seizures and reallocations of poor people’s land, livelihoods, and possessions — and nothing to do with genuine market exchange.

Counter-Economics

Movement

Communications

Repudiation now

We have not acquired any debt. The so-called public debt really belongs to the oligarchy. We the peoples have not acquired anything or been benefited, and thus we owe nothing.

–Confederation of Ecuadorian Kichwas (ECUARUNARI), quoted in Daniel Denvir, AlterNet (2008-12-15): Ecuador Calls foreign Debt Illegal, Defaults on Payments

Last month, the government of Ecuador defaulted on a US$ 30,600,000 interest payment on US$ 510,000,000 in bond debt. They will be defaulting on payments on two other series of bonds, amounting to US$ 9,937,000,000, or 19% of the entire country’s GDP.

Kevin Carson, in his first (hooray; congratulations) regular weekly commentary at the Center for a Stateless Society, says It’s about time, and Good on them. He points out that this massive government debt has nothing to do with freed trade or voluntary production. It has everything to do with building political alliances between governments and providing government funding for massive forced-modernization boondoggles and corporate privateering — with the costs, as always, taken out of the hides of Ecuadorian workers and farmers. As Carson writes:

That's entirely correct. In the specific case of Ecuador, according to John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man), the loans were designed to foment conditions that make [Ecuador] subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. Infratructure loans were granted on the condition that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco.

. . .

[The main function of the government agencies set up to receive and manage foreign debt] is to work in collusion with the World Bank to run up debt building the infrastructure foreign capital needs for profitable investment. A majority of World Bank loans since that agency's inception have gone to building the roads and utilities necessary to support foreign-owned industry. The effect is to crowd out decentralized, small-scale, locally-owned industry serving local markets, and to integrate the domestic economy into a neoliberal framework of providing raw materials and labor for foreign industry.

The resulting debt (which the people of the country never approved) can then be used to further cement neoliberal policies, by blackmailing the local government into adopting a structural adjustment program. And the policies adopted under such programs generally include the privatization of the same infrastructure the loans were taken out to build, and selling it to the very people it was built to serve. Not only that, but the privatization is generally arranged on terms virtually dictated by the purchasers, with native governments sometimes spending more taxpayer money to make the assets salable than the sale actually fetches.

— Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-01-05): Ecuador Repudiates Foreign Debt: It's About Time

Kevin has an excellent discussion of the structural and economic effects of massive government debts in formerly colonized countries like Ecuador. I think he’s entirely right. Of course, I couldn’t care less about the fact that the government of Ecuador has trouble raising funds for its own domestic parasitism and government-funded, government-regimented programs. Like all government programs, these range from useless to foolish and destructive. Would that the government of Ecuador couldn’t raise any money for any purpose. But what is a problem is the fact that the money for the payments on those debts — like all government payments — is always taken out of the pockets of the Ecuadorian people, through taxation, which is to say, by force.

And it’s that that I want to say something about today — not only the structural effects of government debt and government-lubricated neoliberalism (which is to say, government-financed state capitalism), but also the moral case for unilateral and unconditional repudiation. That case is a simple case, and it’s exactly what ECUARUNARI said: people should never be forced to pay debts that they never agreed to take on.

So-called public debt is, of course, never contracted by the public (if that means all the people of a particular country) it is contracted by a tiny, parasitic minority that lives at the expense of the rest of the public, and which has arbitrarily declared itself the rightful rulers and the designated collective-bargaining agents of everybody else in the country — whether or not anybody else ever agreed to that arrangement. When banks or foreign governments loan money to a government, they loan it to that tiny, parasitic minority, and they do so with the expectation that their investment will be repaid by means of taxation, which is to say, by means of the money that the government extracts from the public by force. None of the rest of us are ever asked to take on these debts; none of us are ever given any meaningful choice over whether to take on these debts, or how to disburse the money that has been loaned to us; we are just made to pay them against our will. (And it will not help to say that we somehow consented to let the government act as our financial agent, and so consented to cover the costs of the decisions they make on our behalf; nobody ever consents to the State.)

Now, those individual people — members of the tiny, parasitic minority — who did contract the debt may try to pay it — out of their own pockets — if they like. That’s their business. If they think it’s worthwhile to do so, they can even pass the plate and ask people to voluntarily help pay it back. That’s between them and their donors. But neither they, nor any governments which may show up later to assume the old regime’s usurping claims, have the least duty, or the least right, to inflict their debts on any other living person, or to send the bill to the government tax apparatus (which just means forcing taxpayers to pay for it). But then there are no legitimate government debts at all; at the very most, there are private debts that the tiny, parasitic minority have taken on themselves and then ransomed from the rest of us by force.

Whatever the would-be governmors of Ecuador may owe, the people of Ecuador owe not one damned dime to the World Bank, the IMF, CitiBank, or any other lender. And so the real issue is justice, not charity — except insofar as the most charitable thing that rich governments can do for poor people is to get their boots off, and their fangs out, of those people’s necks. All of which means that the political focus needs to be on inciting indignation and resistance from the people being forced to pay these criminal debts — not on appealing to the better natures of the people collecting them. And that the only just policy with regard to government debt is to burn the bills and stop taking the collectors’ calls — to repudiate all government debts unilaterally, immediately, completely, everywhere, and forever. Whether or not you have taken the time to get permission from the IMF, the United States government, or the humanitarian rock stars of the world.

It may be claimed that, even if repaying the loans by means of taxation is an injustice against Ecuadorian taxpayers, policy-makers (the dignified term that some people use for ranting, violent power-trippers in government offices) must balance that against the injustice of defaulting on the loans — which would be an injustice against investors who made those loans in good faith, expecting to be repaid. But no, it wouldn’t. They made the loans expecting that their return would be stolen from out of the pockets of the Ecuadorian people. (This is why government bonds are traditionally rated as safe investments; the safety consists in the fact that the interest payments are extracted by force rather than depending on market success.) There is no such thing as a good-faith loan to a piratical enterprise; if those who made the loans get nothing for their trouble, then they’ve earned, and deserve, exactly what they get.

It may also be objected that, whatever the justice of the case, insisting on the right to repudiate government-contracted debts will be harmful for the Ecuadorian people — more harmful than the alternative of paying off those illegitimate debts — and so that it would be a good idea to pay them off anyway, as a sort of a ransom. But these objections always depend on one of two lines of argument, both of which are fallacious. First, there are those who argue that repudiating government debts will make Ecuador a pariah, and cut them off from trade, credit, and other resources for economic growth. Thus, for example, Enrique Alvarez, head of research for Latin America Financial Markets for IDEAglobal in New York: They were already sort of headed into isolation. Essentially now they’ve drawn shut the gate. But this line of argument only makes sense if you talk about Ecuador and completely forget the difference between the Ecuadorian government and the Ecuadorian people. Repudiation of government debts will surely make it more difficult for the government to find credit or make financial deals in the future. But so what? If we’re interested in the well-being of the people in Ecuador, and if development means prosperity for ordinary people, rather than a government-driven fetish for great big centrally planned projects, then the important issue has nothing to do with whether or not the government can find credit. It has to do with whether or not people can find trading partners, investors, and money for their own projects. There’s no reason why repudiating government debts would make people in other countries less interested in trading with or extending credit to individual people or private outfits in Ecuador, and so no reason why anyone other than the Ecuadorian government would end up in isolation. And if the Ecuadorian government ends up in isolation, well, who cares, as long as the Ecuadorian people remain free to do their own work and make their own deals?

Others, having recognized that repudiation only immediately harms the financial prospects of the government, not ordinary Ecuadorians, will go on to object that it will still harm the Ecuadorian people, anyway, because that will make it harder for the Ecuadorian government to raise money for its own projects in the future. But while that’s true enough, it’s a plain non sequitur to infer from it that the Ecuadorian people will be harmed by that fact — unless you help yourself to the auxiliary premise that the Ecuadorian people somehow benefit when the Ecuadorian government has easy access to money for its projects. That in turn makes sense only if you suppose that the Ecuadorian government’s projects tend to benefit the Ecuadorian people. But while lots of people make that claim, either tacitly or explicitly, hardly anyone makes any real effort to defend it. And in fact, given both what we know about governments in general, and in particular about the kind of governments that tend to rule countries like Ecuador, it’s a claim that happens to be ridiculously implausible. As a matter of fact, permanently crippling governments’ ability to raise funds for costly government projects is one of the best developments I could hope for on the world scene.

When Progressive outfits like Make Poverty History have noticed the problems that government debts create, their response has been, mainly, to beg rich governments to cancel the existing debts of poor governments, as a sort of charitable hand-out to the poor dears, preferably through a process mediated by some international bureaucracy, probably under the control of the U.N. The whole proposal is absurd; the main consolation is that, like most other grand Progressive proposals, it is more or less completely ineffectual. (Who do you think has more influence over the U.S. government’s trade and international finance bureaucracies? Bono or the IMF and CitiGroup?)

In fact, discussions of government debt should not focus on mediated settlements or relief from creditor governments, but rather on unilateral repudiation of so-called public debt by debtor governments. Not because enforcing the collection of these debts is scroogish or because it ought to be tempered by considerations of charity, but rather because the debts themselves are completely illegitimate and enforcing the collection of these debts is absolutely unjust. Whether that’s the debts of the governments in Ecuador, or in Tanzania, or, for that matter, in the United States of America — where we are all being extorted to pay off US$ 10,000,000,000,000 of debts that we never once agreed to. Debts that were taken out without our permission, then inflicted on us against our will, so that this government could pay for its murderous wars, its tyrannical surveillance and intelligence apparatus, its brain-dead federal programs, its byzantine busybodying regulation, and its multitrillion dollar preservation programs for endangered capitalists and their habitats in the economic status quo.

So here’s to repudiation; and here’s hoping for two, three, many Ecuadors….

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