Market Anarchist Blogs

I remember the media circus around Colin Powell possibly running for president and what party he would choose. The media built him up as the non-partisan military man of honor who was going to save us. What a joke. He disgraced himself with his lying Iraq war sales pitch but now he’s back actually speaking some truth.

If it was up to me I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, but this afternoon. Close it. And I would not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern is well, then they’ll have access to lawyers. Then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what. Let them. Isn’t that what our system is all about. And by the way America, unfortunately, has two million people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus.

In other words, the federal prison system is just as rigged as any military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, so moving the detainees there will end in convictions just as surely. Notice how he starts off sounding like the great civil libertarian and ends up awkwardly admitting how screwed up the federal injustice system is without any more criticism than a muffled ‘unfortunately’. I wonder if he has watched the PBS documentary “Torturing Democracy”? I wonder if he knows what it feels like to go through the federal incarceration system for a victimless crime or on trumped up charges.

The Bradley Manning Support Network has issued a press release announcing the establishment of a legal defense fund for alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Related posts

• No related posts.

You know, I’m not in favor of installing any Paul anywhere as Malcolm X Memorial Professor of Race and Ethnic Studies.  I agree with IOZ that it is rather unforgivable that a politician be so ignorant of racial issues that he doesn’t even seem to realize that he needs to have his talking points on race down cold.  Especially when that politician represents a movement in such  pitiful need of traction.  And you will certainly not find me making the claim that there are fewer racists and sexists among libertarians than any other group, though an exhaustive catalog of those problems would exceed the capacity of this blog, and certainly of this post.

What really bothers me isn’t just the lib-prog indifference to our various wars on people of color, whether we’re talking about the War on Drugs or the various Wars on Terror.  As usual, the liberal focus is aggressively narrow, myopic, domestic, i.e. navel-gazing:  they emphasize repeatedly that Rand Paul is undeniably privileged, undeniably a member of a “white country club,” to stir up resentment among those of us whose daddies aren’t doctors.  Meanwhile, those politicians who do manage to parrot the correct talking points about race, at least most of the time, are showered with (our) wealth, privilege, and accolades almost beyond imagination.  See The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who incidentally concedes here that social sanction is more powerful than hamfisted regulation for shaming alleged racists:

Indeed, I think there’s a beautiful justice that’s visited upon the random politician who, to this very day, is routinely exposed as belonging to a white country club. There’s a kind of social sanction in that embarrassment that I don’t think the law can bring.

The Proud Ignorance of Rand Paul

Um, yeah, did you see the tax bill for Obama’s inauguration celebration?  Something tells me that $170 million exceeds the annual budget even of the Brookline Country Club.  And the effects of his policies notwithstanding, the guy can’t even get his facts about black fatherhood straight.

This tendency to take out frustration with the extremely powerful on the relatively marginal, ineffectual, and powerless is nothing new; see John Markley’s “Acceptable Targets” on the media hounding of 2009′s Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean, for expressing views on gay marriage nearly identical to those of Obama.  Yet it bears repeating IOZ’s sentiments for the Avogadro’s Number + 1th time, here:

[W]hile progs remain desperately convinced that the greatest threat to human life on this planet is some horrific, satanic cartel of Rush Limbaugh, some Tea-Party protester with a spelling problem, and a marginal libertarian congressional candidate from an unremarkable state, it is in fact Barack Obama who is killing thousands of innocent people, presiding over the ongoing oppression of racial minorities through the drug war, transferring billions upon billions of dollars from private citizens to speculative corporate enterprises, and so on and so forth. In other words, the principal nexus for violence, death, destruction, and injustice is our so-called “First African-American President,” the avatar of Hope and Change, the supposedly most “progressive” of candidates, who is in reality as big a death-worshipping corporate hack as anyone.

Proud We Are of All of Them

To be fair, Gawker’s Adrian Chen acknowledges that Rand Paul is against the massively wealth- and life-draining policies favored and executed by our current president, but as little more than a footnote to the fact that he finds the ADA problematic.  Just as finding fault with the Civil Rights Act is automatically interpreted to mean that one hates the disenfranchised, pointing out the excesses of the ADA can be taken to mean that one hates the disabled:

What are Rand Paul’s most crazy ideas?
Well, Rand Paul is a registered Republican, but he’s really a Libertarian extremist. He really hates the government! In the past, he’s spoken out against the Americans with Disabilities Act. If businesses have a handicapped employee “it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator.” He also would like to abolish the Department of Education, the Federal Reserve, all taxes, etc. etc.

Does he have any ideas that aren’t crazy?
A few. He is anti-war, anti-drug war, pro-habeas corpus, anti-death penalty and anti-PATRIOT Act. Also, did we mention he loves Dostoevsky?

Who is Rand Paul, and Why Is He In Our Politics?

Hmm, so Paul is against the War on Drugs, our foreign wars, and the death penalty, all of which imprison and kill blacks in disproportionate numbers.  And that isn’t crazy, according to Dems, though their track record of late gives me reason to doubt the strength of their convictions.  So, anyway, is that an admission that our president, who is for all three ideas, in practice if not in theory, is actually the crazy–even, considering his color, schizophrenic–one here?  Why isn’t that splashed all over the notable progressive blogs?

Last year I wrote that systematic, e.g., legally entrenched, tacitly endorsed racism is far more of a threat than any overblown interpretations of what a random libertarian might or might not think about blacks, in “Lincoln, Obama, and the Wars on Blacks“:

[T]he practical effects of [Obama's] policies will be disastrous for blacks…One, Obama has expanded the troop involvement in Afghanistan. It is well-known that the poor and minorities, and especially poor minorities, are disproportionately represented in the military. Thus they are the most likely to be sacrificed in this expansion.

Two, Obama has not and probably will not do anything to scale back the War on Drugs. If anything, he will probably step it up. (Ron Paul, in contrast, had vowed to end it.) The War on Drugs disproportionately hurts blacks. It is a huge part of the reason that a quarter of black men have been in jail, which is a tragedy in itself, but also ensures that many black children grow up without fathers, among a number of other social ills. This perpetuates a cycle of poverty, which in turn makes occupations like drug-dealing and the military more attractive, which in turns puts black men in jail or kills them on the battlefield, and the whole damn mess starts over.

After watching Rachel Maddow browbeat Rand Paul, IOZ writes today:

[T]he drug war, the American penal system, and the creation and subdivision of public school districts have proven to be the trifecta for achieving a rigid system of de facto racial segregation even in the absence of a legal Jim Crow regime . . . even in the presence of Civil Rights legislation. I said this during the Ron Paul campaign and I will say it again. A libertarian who hates Black people, thinks they are racially and genetically inferior, and would, given the opportunity, refuse to serve racial minorities at his own business could nevertheless be better for Blacks than any cruise missile liberal. Ending the drug war and closing prisons and not sending poor Black people to die in crazy foreign adventures based on hazy “humanitarian” principles is more important than paying lip service to the Civil Rights office at the DOJ. For realz.

As it happens,  we have a cruise missile–or death drone–liberal in power. But the destructiveness of his policies go unchallenged.  Instead of confronting the man who daily sends American men of color to kill other men of color abroad, who admits to dabbling in drugs while overseeing a system that jails a disproportionate number of black men for doing the same, Rachel Maddow, like the rest of her kind, prefers to go after a much easier target:  a small-scale politician like Rand Paul.  Maddow clearly delights in the baiting of Rand, much as Rand’s father was baited with cheap, distracting allegations of personal racism during the 2008 election, while the state and federal government backing of Jim Crow in the past and the Drug War today go completely unremarked upon. (At least it’s a half-step above the liberal hand-wringing over Sarah Palin shooting wolves from planes, while America’s drone strikes on foreign civilians are steadily ignored.)

Basically, by vowing to overturn policies that legally entrench and systematize injustice, the Pauls and their sympathizers must be in favor of…systematic injustice.  In the eyes of the liberal commentariat, personal commitment to civil rights has only one legitimate measure:  the extent lip service is paid to protecting the government’s right to simultaneously enforce racism and colorblindness.

I’m trying to limit the number of depressing things I read about, but it was hard for me to ignore the story of a bullied student named Phoebe Prince who killed herself:

Ostensibly, yesterday was the day that [South Hadley district attorney] Betsy Scheibel announced charges against nine teens who, to varying degrees, made Phoebe Prince feel like life wasn’t worth living.

But what Scheibel had to say was as much an indictment of a look-the-other-way, kids-will-be-kids culture that permeated South Hadley High. Whatever we expect students to do in these situations, there were adults at the high school who didn’t intervene when they could have, adults who didn’t protect Phoebe after Anne Prince told them her daughter was being tormented.

Standing up for Phoebe – The Boston Globe.

Why is it still unthinkable that the parents were the proper adults to protect Phoebe?  Why would a bunch of bureaucrats be expected to have more interest in Phoebe’s welfare than Phoebe’s own parents?

Look, there are animals who have this figured out.  The mother of a bear cub does not phone in timid requests to predators to leave her baby alone.  In the defense of the parents in this particular case, bears are not, um, cowed by so-called child-rearing experts and bureaucrats and conventional wisdom telling them that a rigidly regimented public school is the only appropriate and safe place for children and teens.  In some ways the American parenting style has a lot in common with that of invertebrates.

I have yet to hear of a case where a home-schooled child was bullied and abused so relentlessly.  If someone has, kindly bring it to my attention.  (Yes, there are many children who are abused at home and school.  Usually the schools fail to catch the abuse, and I am specifically asking for cases of home-schooled children here.)

I don’t mean to make light of this tragedy, but it puts me in mind of a brilliant Onion story from just a few days ago:

WASHINGTON—According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home.

Deputy Education Secretary Anthony W. Miller said that many parents who school-home find U.S. households to be frightening, overwhelming environments for their children, and feel that they are just not conducive to producing well-rounded members of society.

…Though school-homing has proven to be an ideal solution for millions of uninvolved parents, increasingly overburdened public schools have recently led to a steady upswing in the number of students being prison-homed.

Increasing Number Of Parents Opting To Have Children School-Homed

Of course, it is actually homeschooling that is the growing but still minor trend, while the status quo is school-homing (and for 1% of the population, and perhaps the teen bullies described above, prison-homing).

Filed under: Children, Education, homeschooling, Prison

I posted this at the new and improved STR, and it’s continuing to gnaw at me.  It’s about the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, founded by Malika Saada Saar, random emphases mine:

The story of a prisoner’s death in Arizona over the summer popped up in the national media for a single news cycle and disappeared without provoking much outrage. Marcia Powell died after being left in an outdoor holding cell in triple-digit heat for more than four hours. She had a history of mental problems and was serving a 27-month sentence for prostitution—a crime for which we can assume none of her clients were prosecuted.

Women are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population, and sexual violence is often at the root of the events that put them behind bars.

According to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD), as many as 88 percent of female inmates have experienced sexual or physical abuse before coming to prison. And by and large the mothers behind bars are not gang-bangers, murderers, or drug kingpins. They are first-time, nonviolent offenders, arrested for untreated addiction. With the drug wars and the passage of mandatory minimum sentences, the incarceration of mothers has skyrocketed.

When the Victim Is Jailed – Page 1 – The Daily Beast.

It is fashionable to get worked up about the shackling of pregnant mothers giving birth in prison, or to advocate reform of “the system” ad nauseum.  These are topics to get worked up about, but the proposed solutions are usually little better than bandaids.  If people focused on ending the prosecution of victimless crimes–prostitution, drug use–a lot of nonviolent women (and men) would be free to deal only with our screwed-up society, not our screwed-up society plus the horrors of prison.  But it’s far more fashionable to dither about what Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or whoever means for women in our “national moment” or whatever.  You know, Bible Spice and something about rape kits, while actual women are actually raped inside and outside of prison.

Every now and then you do something, experience something or meet someone who reminds you what you stand for.  This happened too me recently when I met a African-Swedish man who told me his story while rolling a cigarette.

As it turns out, this man (who I shall call ‘Dave’) had come over from Sweden with a friend, intending to buy a bus to live in, while travelling up and down the East Coast.  As we’re talking, Dave tells me that he’d recently been busted in a nightclub with drugs that amounted to two bottles of acid, some mescaline and a bag of weed.  The police had confiscated Dave’s passport, and he was waiting to sit trial in about Mid-January.

Normally, most would hear these details, tune out and say, ‘well he deserved whatever he gets…’  But let us delve a little deeper.

The police, bless their souls, are apparently doing their best to charge him with every offence possible.  This includes both Trafficking and possession.  As it turns out, Dave had already done one month in prison — most people, if they haven’t written him off already, will have now done so.

Dave goes on to tell me, sincerely, how much he doesn’t want to go back to prison.  He explains that during his month-long stay, he was placed in a cell with a man who had killed two people.  A murderer.

Then, to make matters worse, lawyers and police have been trying to tell him that he is an addict.  He then points out an irony — there is more heroin and meth available on the inside than there was ever available to anyone on the outside.  In Dave’s own words, ‘if you weren’t an addict going in, there’s a good chance you’ll be an addict coming out.’

Dave tells me that if this had happened in Europe, he’d probably just have been fined.  But we in Australia seem to be a little more vindictive than our Old World counterparts.

The police require Dave to stay at a fixed location.  He cannot live on the bus that he had paid a lot of money for.  Instead he has to stay at a hostel.  Additionally, Dave told me that he’s had to pay up to $10,000 in lawyers fees, and his parents have had to fly out from Sweden in order to sit at his trial.

I ask you, where is the real crime?  For what purpose have we gone ruined Dave’s live?  For wanting to alter his consciousness with chemical substances.  The horror!

So let’s take a step back and assess the situation.  You have a man, a foreigner, arrested and charged with possession and trafficking offences (where, depending on the amount you’re caught with, it is automatically assumed you were trying to sell them to people, even if you weren’t).  If convicted, he is a criminal.  An evil person on par with murderers and rapists.  He will be put in prison and forced to associate with hardened criminals.

In essence, parliament has made a law forbidding a thing which has no, real, inherent criminality attached to it — people have been trying to alter their consciousness for centuries.  Big whoop.  Instead, for reasons such as ’safeguarding the morals of the community’, ‘keeping our kids safe and free from drugs’, oh, and my personal favourite, ‘protecting the individual from themselves’, the Australian legal system looks set to lock Dave up, expose him to elements of criminality that Dave had no previous association with, as well as the hardest drugs in great quantities, for a long period of time.  And people ask why so many convicted criminals ‘re-offend’.

Ask yourself, for a moment, is this just?  Are you really happy with a person’s life being destroyed over something so ‘criminal’?

But then, ‘It is the law.  He should have known and has to face the consequences.  That’ll teach him.’

Over at FreeKeene.com, Sam writes that the law library in the Cheshire county prison is antiquated at best and asks that we call officials of the local government gang to find out what the holdup is. So I did. Pardon the weird throat noises, I called before drinking my morning coffee. Check out the 4.5 minute mp3 audio of my calls.

Lots of Unreachable Officials

First, I called Rick Van Wickler, Jail Superintendent at (603) 283-3304. I got his answering machine and left a message. Then I called Peter Heed, County Attorney at (603) 352-0056 and left a message with a new secretary. County Commissioner Jack Wozmak at (603) 352-8215 was next but he’s out of town. So I had an interesting discussion with the receptionist. This is the best call on the recording. I tried calling John Lynch, “governor” at (603) 352-8215 as well but it looks like Terry the receptionist blocked my number from calling again! Weird, eh? I tried that twice and got the same error message both times.

Will You Call, Too?

Will you make these calls, too? At worst I think you’ll have some fun and hone your statist deconversion tactics. The fact is that if they demand a monopoly on justice at least they should provide the ability for folks to understand their legal system and adequately defend themselves without having to go bnkrupt paying off a member of their legal society. It’s just the basics.

Photo credit: umjanedoan. Photo license.

Back in December I reported here that adult film star Janine James was going to federal prison for six months for the non-crime of tax evasion — that is, failing to be robbed willingly by state agents.

Janine -- Halfway-ex-political prisoner

I set up a Google news alert thingy then to follow anything else that wound up in the press about her case. Pretty much everything that came over the wire about her was connected with stories about Sandra Bullock, into whose custody Janine’s young daughter, Sunny, went while she was in prison. Much sappy commentary was written about how enthused Bullock was at her chance to “play mom”. I saw precisely zero attention given to how Sunny might have felt to have her mother kidnapped and caged, or, indeed, any mention at all of what Janine felt.

I expected that my news alert would turn up some mention of Janine’s release, but it never happened. Checking her website, FreeJanine.com (NSFW) the other day, I saw that she was released some time around August 18th. At $29.95/month for a membership, there was simply no way I was going to sign up to read her prison blog. Sorry, Janine.

Assuming the same program as mentioned when she was sentenced, Janine is now enjoying a further six months of brainwashing and control at a halfway house.

All this trouble, of course, meant that Janine wasn’t available to play in Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, a tragedy of a different sort.

So, Janine is free, sort of. Glad you’re out. Hooray, sort of. Meanwhile, a few million other political prisoners remain incarcerated around the world.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on adult film
• By law, US adult film actors must prove they have tested negative …

• Related Blogs on Janine
• Mozart Violin Concerto 5 (2of 5) Janine Jansen- violin | Style …
• Janine Benyus in The Sun Magazine « Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers
• Ted talk: Biomimicry in action: Janine Benyus | ID @ NUS

• Related Blogs on tax evasion
• Tax Research UK » Clamp down on tax evasion through tax havens
• Case almost closed on Bucks residents who were part of tax evasion …
• Tax Research UK » No, No, No Switzerland
• Tax Evasion of $2.1M for Rhode Island Man – Is Wife Eligible for …

Related posts

• FedGov pplz notice lil’ ol’ me! (1)
• May Day reflections on a year of bloggery (6)
• Free Janine! And all political prisoners! (8)

Would you like to believe that you can free your mind — right now?

YES WE CAN!

And we can do it.

Just do it!

Do it now. Do it because your country wants you to. Do it for… do it for love! Do it for… do it for God and CHILDREN and justice in your neighborhood. Do IT for consistency! Do it for philosophy. DO IT FOR AMERICA!

We can do it! Together! We can do it for fun. We can do it for PEACE. We can smash the state (and avoid collapse, mass starvation, conquest by hostile aliens, etc.*) before next Tuesday! We can create a voluntary society based on love and compassion. And we can do it for MASSIVE PROFITS!

Would you like an action plan to improve your life? Do you want to guarantee your retirement and your children’s future? Do you want to know just how EASY all this is? How you can make it all happen by accident? And all for the very special introductory price of $19.95?***

INSTANT SUCCESS — or triple your money back!

I would like to invite you, right now, to get out of your chair. Please: put down your laptop. Please leave your iPhone on the table. Please turn the volume WAY UP LOUD! Please start the music. And, please, get into your body — and go out of your mind!

Turn on, tune in, drop in. Drop in any time!

Shut up and dance!** Get off your ass and get on the path. The path to TRIUMPHANT FALLIBLE FRENZY!**** Arise!

ACCESS ALL AREAS.

DJ Misjah & DJ Tim, “Access”, X-Trax, 1994

Whatever you do, DO NOT DOWNLOAD AND WATCH THIS FILM (isohunt.com, search for “arise subgenius”). You have been warned.

Collaborators will be shot. Prosecutors will be transgressicuted. Deviation and counter-revolutionary talk will not be tolerated.

That is all. Return to your assigned work allocations and dwelling units.

* By reading this sentence you agree that neither nostate.com, Rabbi Guano Infusion PhD. (deceased) nor Michael Jude Gogulski shall be held responsible for damages caused by reading this sentence.

** Seeing this footnote indicates your legally binding consent that should you lack the appropriate number of functioning limbs necessary for dance in your jurisdiction that neither nostate.com, Rabbi Guano Infusion PhD. (deceased), nor Michael Jude Gogulski shall be liable for loss of life, liberty, productive capacity or future potential profit brought about by seeing this footnote or other means.

*** If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

**** Do not over-meditate.

Vaguely related stuff:

The Arrogance of Humanism (Galaxy Books)

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

Bringing Up Boys