The novel angle here is the focus – inspired, apparently, by Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” – on the Black American community, whose males are, on average, over 600% more likely to end up in prison than their white compatriots. The vast majority of the difference is made up for by imprisonment for the victimless political “crime” of drug possession which, incidentally, they are “guilty” of at about the same rate as their white male counterparts. Who said Justice was colour-blind?
I have long wondered why this overt judicial racism hasn’t already led to a massive insurgency from within the black community. Even today the causes of the next American civil war look far more likely to emerge from the lunatic right-wing Tea Party than the genuinely oppressed black community. But perhaps web sites like this show that, at last, the worm may be beginning to turn…
depressing to find that this has just 5 “likes” on Stumbleupon and has only been viewed 80,125 times on youtube despite having been available, free, for over a year. This degree of apathy explains how they continue to get away with it. They are immune because “We The People” are indifferent. Sad, sad, sad…
Like me, I suspect most of you were already aware of the facts presented in this video, but I doubt you’ve ever seen such a devastatingly simple and effective presentation of those facts. I certainly haven’t. The only thing I would add is that viewers should remember that this picture of America is broadly true of the world at large. Over the last few decades, the global ruling class have ALL massively increased their wealth while those they rule have all suffered significant reductions in their own standard of living
The American Judicial System might be about to demonstrate that it isn’t completely broken. A Federal Judge has just had the balls to speak Truth to Power. A major plank of the USA PATRIOT Act has just been struck down and ruled unconstitutional. Which bit? The totalitarian rule they made to protect themselves from public scrutiny; the bit which gives the FBI and other security related organs of the State, the right to issue “National Security Letters” (NSLs). Yeah, that bit.
(In passing, why did I spot this first on The Register? This is historic news the mainstream media should be bleating from the rooftops. Just did a google for ["national security letters" unconstitutional] and the only “mainstream” entity on the first result page was this Fox News coverage! Who said the Americans don’t do irony?)
You tend to get one or more of these letters if you run any decent sized organisation in the United States. They are unethical, illicit and intrusive demands for information about a citizen; ostensibly on the grounds that there is good reason to believe that the citizen may be pursuing some kind of activity of which We disapprove. Oh, and if you ever get one of these letters, you’re not allowed to tell the “target” citizen, or anyone else, ever.
“We”, they would like us to believe, being “We The People”.
And if the relevant activities being enquired about were exclusively those which aided or abetted military attacks (from any source) on civilians (in any location) there is no doubt that We The People would approve of such well targeted surveillance and would expect to see evidence for this focussed diligence on our behalf in the form of steadily diminishing military attack on civilians. At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, we do not see any such evidence.
What we see are increasingly widespread brutal paranoia among governments. You can create your own league table but China and the USA are both Premier League teams, converging on the same level of pseudo-liberty. We are all gradually being pulled back towards Roman Law.
Wot that?
Roman Law is the historical precedent and basis of so-called “Civil Law” under which it is held that Laws don’t exist unless explicitly created by the Civil Authority. In contrast, UKUSA law is based on the “Common Law” tradition where we make it up as we go along. Neither is perfect, obviously. But the notion that Law doesn’t exist until a properly constituted authority creates it might look eminently sensible. But its real meaning, or at least interpretation by the relevant Civil Authorities, has always been sinisterly nuanced.
Rule One was that, as a citizen, you are obliged to act, at all times, within the law. The absence of a law did not, as you might naively expect, confer liberty. By definition, if you were acting in some way not already described by the law, you could not possibly be acting within it and were, therefore, in breach of Rule One.
This elegant totalitarian concept – that ALL action is forbidden unless I Caesar permit it – is beautifully efficient as a control mechanism. It means you can arrest and prosecute citizens on a whim. Virtually every second of the day you are bound to be doing something I Caesar have not explicitly permitted. For example, I didn’t give you permission to think what you just thought.
Roman Law hasn’t died out. It’s been kind of absorbed and blended with the less authoritarian, but often equally arbitrary, Common Law tradition that we “enjoy” in UKUSA. That’s supposed to mean that unless behaviour is explicitly forbidden by the Civil Authority, then it’s permitted.
Problem with that – if you’re a Civil Authoritarian with Totalitarian tendencies – is that too many damn citizens want to do too many things that I Caesar (elect) disapprove. They want to enjoy themselves, for example, in all sorts of ways that we can’t possibly permit. Buggers want sex all the time. Not to mention Drugs and Rock And Roll. Some of them even want to undermine our right to rule! Which is why we’ve been obliged to create this massive list of prohibited behaviours.
How they get away with it is the interesting bit. Chances are you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t already familiar with much of the explanation for that so I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs. But on the off-chance that these thoughts are new to you, you could do worse that starting with the Manufacturing of Consent.
No, I’m afraid it’s not an exciting video, just informative.
We The People will, of course, endorse a certain number of Prohibitions. Who doesn’t agree with the prohibition of Murder? Rape? Violence against the Person? Theft? Fraud? and a few other obviously antisocial activities we all wish to abolish. Deliberate or negligent harm to a third-party, without their informed and freely given consent, is universally recognised as criminal.
All other prohibitions are steps towards Roman Law. The more they can get away with forbidding, the greater their chances of arresting you on a whim. The greater the chance that you will have been doing something explicitly illegal sometime in the immediate past or present.
This will become especially relevant when they start including Thought Crime – which they are increasingly nudging towards both here in the UK and, of course, over there in the USA. It is, of course, long-established tradition in China and a few other places.
After all, what human has never contemplated an illegal act? Most admit to having at least wanted to murder at least one other person at least once in their lives. Reckon I’m up to a couple of hundred myself. Including a large number of senior American and one or two senior British Politicians.
I guarantee there are people employed to look out for sentences like the two previous; and to make some kind of judgement as to whether such sentiments constitute a “Terrorist Threat”. And I guarantee some of them will conclude that it does. They’re the sort of people who send out NSL letters. (or spend four weeks looking for the author of a Facebook quip about wanting to “Egg Cameron” [added 25/3/2013])
They, at least, will see this legal judgement as marking a very sad day for their cause.
The Von Mises institute represents what we might patronisingly call the intelligent side of American Libertarianism; in contrast to that (larger) faction who have grown up believing that Ayn Rand was a significant philosopher.
I have been trying to find ways to unite anarchists of the right and left for some years, as we all share the same views on individual liberty and the authoritarian evil and dangers of government. And I don’t have any difficulty agreeing with much of the analysis of the institute and its founders. This 2008 critique of the American Constitution, for example, is very much in line with my own:
In effect, what the American Constitution did was only this: Instead of a king who regarded colonial America as his private property and the colonists as his tenants, the Constitution put temporary and interchangeable caretakers in charge of the country’s monopoly of justice and protection.
which, of course, mirrors my own description of (all) so-called democratic governments as nothing more than limited-term elected dictatorships.
And who can argue with:
These caretakers did not own the country, but as long as they were in office, they could make use of it and its residents to their own and their protégés’ advantage. However, as elementary economic theory predicts, this institutional setup will not eliminate the self-interest-driven tendency of a monopolist of law and order toward increased exploitation. To the contrary, it only tends to make his exploitation less calculating, more shortsighted, and wasteful. As Rothbard explained, while a private owner, secure in his property and owning its capital value, plans the use of his resource over a long period of time, the government official must milk the property as quickly as he can, since he has no security of ownership.
Government officials own the use of resources but not their capital value except in the case of the “private property” of a hereditary monarch. When only the current use can be owned, but not the resource itself, there will quickly ensue uneconomic exhaustion of the resources, since it will be to no one’s benefit to conserve it over a period of time and to every owner’s advantage to use it up as quickly as possible.
But what is clearly going to remain a stumbling block between us, however, is their elevation of “Property Rights” above even “Liberty” and the article unconsciously illustrates the problem.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, government was instituted to protect life, property, and the pursuit of happiness.
which would be news to Jefferson, who didn’t mention the word “Property” once in the actual Declaration of Independence. I initially thought it was a mistake but it is repeated further down the article, so it is clearly intentional. This meme manipulation is as unethical as any religious or mainstream political propaganda; and it doesn’t increase the prospects for unification of the wings of Liberty…
I’ve only just stumbled across it but a few months back, Anonymous issued some bizarre guidance on avoiding face recognition technology:
For a bunch of skilled hackers, they’re being oddly naive. Every single countermeasure they suggest will be defeated by the authoritarians within a few months or, at most, a few years. Tilting your head more than fifteen degrees is one of the more ludicrous examples. First off, although the software might currently have a little difficulty spotting a face at that angle, to a human observer, such behaviour would stick out like a sore thumb and prompt much more detailed attention. But, in any case, it’s not going to take them a huge amount of time to improve the software to the point where it’ll easily recognise a face even if it’s carried under your arm and upside down!
And “so what?” if they have difficulty spotting your face? They’re already working on things like gait recognition (even from satellites ferchissake!) and earlobe recognition not to mention the FBI’s well advanced research into the use of voice recognition for both surveillance and forensic purposes, which, given their already illegal but ongoing (and ignored by congress) practice of warrantless wiretapping, and the medieval law they’ve passed which allows them to detain citizens indefinitely without trial (habeas corpus? habeas bollocks!). Or the recent acknowledgement of the growing use of Drones to watch their own citizens. Or the (previously) secret Trapwire program itself – which raised the face recognition issue in the first place but goes much deeper and wider than that – and so on and so on…
Are we smelling the coffee yet? Do you really think that pulling a few ridiculous stunts to make face recognition a little more awkward is any part of the solution? If so, I fear you don’t yet understand the true scale of the problem.
What we’re up against here is the most powerfully equipped authoritarian menace in human history. These people make the STASI look like well-meaning amateurs. They are enthusiastically creating the infrastructure required to police a Totalitarian State in which your every movement, contact and, ultimately every belief and even thought can be logged, analysed and risk assessed with a view to “mitigation”.
One of the few things we’ve still got going for us is that they haven’t yet figured out a way to hide the consequences of (some of) their actions or their involvement. As a result they still feel a trifle constrained to operate within some kind of limitations which would pass, at least, the rigorous investigative probing of the “Journalists” at Fox News. That gives them a fair amount of leeway but god help us if they ever turn nasty.
The solution to this problem is not to confront the enemy in the battlefield of their own choosing. This war requires the classic strategy of the martial artist. We need to use the enemy’s energy against them. For example, at least 1% of those in sensitive posts will be as horrified as we are about the increasing tyrannical nature and potential of the activities they are engaged in. We need to ensure they have secure channels through which to leak the crucial evidence. And if and when we ever win this war, we need to reward and honour those who had the courage to blow the whistles when it most mattered.
I’ve been blathering on for some years now about the (increasing) need for a Trusted Surveillance program which will wrest control from the Authoritarians by making them genuinely and unavoidably accountable. Here, for example, is part 1 (all 8 parts are on youtube) of my 2007 attempt to explain how it might work in the context of the prescient movie “Enemy Of The State” (the movie was made back in 1998 – so this isn’t just a post 9-11 problem)
Implementing Trusted Surveillance will be partly technical and partly political. It requires the abolition of many existing laws and the implementation of new ones. Some of the new laws are genuinely revolutionary and we can expect major resistance from all parts of all establishments as they fight to maintain their hold on power. But, as I hint in various places, the battle we are now engaged in is the final battle for the human soul. It will determine whether, in the coming centuries, our species consists of largely free individuals or regimented hordes required to conform to and service the demands of their rulers.
A battle on this scale requires much more than brute force (which, in any case, the enemy has a near monopoly on, despite the relaxed gun laws in the USA). It requires creative intelligence, in which weapons such as subversion, satire and sedition will play a much greater role than bombs and bullets. We need to make the enemy a laughing-stock. We need to get to the point where even the most ignorant sheep-like citizens are too embarrassed to support their patronizing shepherds. In this regard, the likes of Jon Stuart and Stephen Colbert are every bit as important as, say, Wikileaks and whistleblowing.
I may, of course, be wrong in every detail of my proposals but I am utterly certain that I am at least focussed on the right target and that the problem is every bit as far-reaching as I describe in my various rantings. So if you don’t agree with my solution, fine, but you’d better start coming up with an alternative while we’ve still got the freedom and scope to implement it. Meanwhile remember:
Citizen – Innocent Until Proved Guilty
Authority – Guilty Until Proved Innocent
I didn’t expect to get much from this Alternet article. but I was pleasantly surprised. Like some critics are saying about the new Hobbit movie, the slow start might put you off, but it's worth sticking with.
It is the "confession" of a one time freedom-loving Republican "conservative" who, as a teenager in the 60s, worshipped Barry Goldwater (whose attitudes then were close to Ron Paul's today) and thought he represented mainstream Republican ideals. Gradually, over the ensuing decades he realised that if that ever had been true, it was becoming less and less valid as time marched on.
Even as a 14 year old he had to swallow hard to accept Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights bill that finally made racial discrimination illegal. But the first major game-changer was the infamous Kent State massacre where students were gunned down by the National Guard while protesting, peacefully, against the Vietnam War:
To a Jeffersonian, the brandishing of state power in order to conscript people to fight in a faithless conflagration and then to oppress the right of assembly stipulated by the First Amendment was repellent.
He watched with growing alarm as the definition of “leftist insurrection” became protest against the war or in support of civil rights and, crucially (for students of the rise of American Authoritarianism) how the previous Republican focus on Liberty switched to Control:
…while the Jeffersonian conservatism that I signed up for gave the benefit of the doubt to freedom, a new conservatism now chose order.
Reagan’s 1980 election set the new trend in concrete and the Police State put down firm roots:
Under Reagan… the Justice Department paid a purposely ominous attention to what adults read and watched; the war on drugs grew more ruthless; cynicism about science, particularly as it had to do with the environment, grew more pronounced; antagonism to the freedom of women to make choices about their bodies grew more vehement.
He charts how the Republicans overtly sold their soul to Money and made explicit their religiously based control-freakery:
…three impulses distinguished the new right. The first was how the right’s enmity toward centralized state power was matched by an adoration of centralized corporate power. This constituted an abandonment of the principle of a truly free marketplace—with entrepreneurship and the flourishing of small business becoming more constrained and difficult — and the overarching principle of decentralization. The second impulse was the displacement of liberty as conservatism’s core priority by a new priority, “values,” by which the right invariably meant sexual behavior, predominantly the sexual behavior of women and homosexuals. The third new impulse was most profound. This was a reconceptualization of the republic as one in which citizens are bound not by a Constitution in which God isn’t once mentioned, euphemized, or alluded to but by an unwritten Christian covenant that implicitly subjects free will to an organizing ethos that’s unmistakably theocratic. What was a freedom movement became an authority/wealth/religious movement.
And he gained important insights into the poison of “ideology”:
The extent to which ideology hijacks independent thought, refracting an issue through the lens of an already-settled bias, was all the more disturbing for how long it took me to see it. Ideology is pathological: It provides a psychological structure posing as a theoretical one.
Which led to some puzzlement on my own behalf when I read the only thing I could take issue with:
I honestly believe my children are best served by a free politics that needs two wings to stay airborne and a push-me/pull-you tension between what is a right and what is a privilege, what is entitled and what is not, what reasonably progresses and what responsibly conserves
which seems to me to be supporting the very ideological division which he laments in the rest of the article.
Be that as it may, his transition is very similar to my own journey here in the UK. Born into a Daily Mail family where the Labour Party and other potential Socialists were painted as the devil incarnate while the Tories wore the badge as the party of “individual liberty” I dedicated my adolescent political years to the struggle against the march of totalitarianism which, so I had been conditioned to believe, was the inevitable consequence of Communism or Socialism. This was helpfully illustrated by the plainly authoritarian Soviet and Chinese states, together with their slave states in Eastern Europe and their puerile satellites such as Romania, Albania and North Korea. No one with an ounce of libertarianism in their body was going to be following that path in a hurry.
I resolved to become a more effective enemy of Communism by studying it and exposing its philosophical flaws. I got lucky. I bumped into a proper Socialist who educated me more completely than I’d ever anticipated. I still have a soft spot for the Socialist Party of Great Britain as a result. What I learned was “proper” communists were just as outraged as I was by the obvious authoritarianism in the so-called communist states. If anything they were more angry because their true ideology was being so badly tainted by what the totalitarians were doing in their name. The SPGB and a few other genuine socialist parties are as genuinely libertarian as I am. The only reason that I didn’t end up calling myself a socialist was that, when the chips are down, they’re still committed to an “ideology” and have an almost religious faith in the Marxist analysis of Capitalism and its inevitable self-destruction.
While I was still absorbing these new insights, Britain’s own Reaganite came to power in the shape of Margaret Thatcher and Britain started overtly aping the authoritarian progress of our American cousins, at least in economic terms and, of course, the war on drugs.
Fortunately, they’ve never had the constituency to support the development towards Theocracy and though they’ve made occasional attempts to squeeze the homosexual or abortion genies back inside their bottles and dallied with the “values” question, all such attempts have been thwarted, usually as the result of one or more of them being found guilty of some hypocritical breach of such values. The inevitable public ridicule usually forces them to scuttle back underneath their stones and keep stumm. But their attacks on working class organisation, arguably inspired, or at least encouraged, by Reagan’s defeat of the Air Traffic controllers, were hugely successful and their massive increases in Police powers were a sign of things to come.
The biggest difficulty “free thinkers” now face is that the rest of the world still prefers to believe in black and white, right or wrong answers to the complex questions facing humanity. Those of us who have confronted and overcome our childhood conditioning – whether right or left-wing – usually recognise that all the other forms of conditioning are similarly flawed, to the extent that if you still think the answer to any significant political question is even partially provided by a political party, you almost certainly do not understand the question and have little or no chance of arriving at a real answer.
this delightfully sinister US Government page doesn’t actually state that they will assassinate any of the high-profile targets named there, but it’s bleedin’ obvious that, should any “tips” they receive lead to locations in the middle of Pakistani, Yemeni or other middle eastern hinterlands conveniently far enough away from journalistic surveillance, they’ll be saying farewell to a few more drones.
I doubt they appreciate the irony of how much their technique resembles Jim Bell’s infamous proposal for controlling the world’s authoritarians and other bullies. The major difference is that the money isn’t put up anonymously by a peeved public but blatantly offered by a State that thinks it can make its own laws whenever appropriate.
And they certainly won’t appreciate or even comprehend why they’re both wrong for exactly the same reasons. And both right.
Assassination is certainly a more humane way to fight war than carpet or chemical bombing. And if the Islamist’s 9-11 attack had merely put bullets through the brains of the leading neo-cons and money-men who had already decided they needed a war, the “terrorists” would have won a lot more respect and a lot less hostility from a grateful world.
We’ve seen extraditions to the US for less than this. So how is this legal? Thanks to ScrabbleEddie for sending me to this blogger who provides a bit of background…
What they have done is truly radical, and – if the Federal Government does not move rapidly to stamp on it – even potentially revolutionary; causing much more significant change to society than, for example, the liberating effects of the 60s.
You’ll excuse me if I allow myself a high-five or two, given my own first foray into this field back in 1999. I was then promoting a subversive adoption of Jury Nullification designed to get around the obstacle of the Judiciary to any mention of the N word.
What the Libertarians have pulled off in New Hampshire is much more ambitious than that. They’ve managed to pass a State Law explicitly stating:
“The Jury in a criminal trial case has the undisputed power to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge and contrary to the evidence. This power of jury nullification is a historical prerogative of the jury inherent in the use of the general verdict in criminal cases.”
I genuinely cannot exaggerate the importance of this breakthrough. It may one day be regarded as the day we began the march to true democracy. They’ve “only” delivered the “Second Change“! And if you read that piece you’ll get a feel for the scale of their achievement. The Judicial system has been fighting against this development for over a hundred years.
They actually enacted the new law a few months ago so why didn’t we hear about it before now? Well as you can learn from the “Reason” link above, the law isn’t officially “live” till the first day of 2013. Obviously the Courts in that part of the world are keen to adopt the new rules, which bodes well for their success.
So now we KNOW the truth. Up until today, it was just another conspiracy theory. Think about that…
And then address the question of how we might determine which of the other million or so conspiracy theories floating around the web are also entirely (or at least mostly) true.
Truly excellent. I’m not surprised to learn that this gem has been around for some time, but it’s still the first time I’ve come across it. More importantily, it explains, as well as I ever seen, the principle mechanism by which authoritarianism maintains its grip on society
The cartoon itself illustrates the importance of presentational skills. I guarantee it presents the message far more clearly and accessibly than the original academic study reference on which it is based; the snappily entitled “Stephenson, G. R. (1967). Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys. In: Starek, D., Schneider, R., and Kuhn, H. J. (eds.), Progress in Primatology, Stuttgart: Fischer, pp. 279-288.” See, you’re already asleep…
this nice little image got me thinking: Is there a standard structure to Authoritarian argument? I believe this piece illustrates the genre perfectly. The standardised versions I drew from it are listed below the image…
Standardised:
1 The proposed change is unnatural
2 The status quo is both necessary and sufficient because it produces the socially desirable result
3 Permitting the proposed behaviour will create undesirable role models for children;
or
3a Children need role models consistent with the status quo
4 Accepting the change would reduce the value of the status quo
5 The status has been quo for a long time
6 The issue should be decided by (whoever is most likely to decide it in favour of the status quo)
7 The proposed change is forbidden or not approved by religion
8 Permitting the proposed behaviour will encourage more of it
9 Permitting the proposed behaviour now will be a gateway to even worse behaviour later
10 The proposed change would change something so fundamental it should never be changed
11 There are alternatives which are acceptable to us and which you should accept.
*******************************************
Now try applying that to the authoritarian argument of your choice.
