A LITTLE REBELLION

From Wounded Knee to Afghanistan

A beautifully tragic poem detailing the history of the American Empire and what is commonly referred to as "American Exceptionalism." It is staggering how there is hardly a single country that hasn't felt the wrath of the US government's killing fields.

Out of Baghdad, On to Tehran?

After Caesar announced that he would be pulling all combat troops out of Iraq - not for any sound and principled opposition to occupation, of course, but only because he was abiding by the SOFA that Bush signed in 2008 and that US troops would no longer have immunity from the law - I wondered what sneaky trick the White House and Pentagon would play in order to keep their imperial military influence in the Gulf.

Obama heads the largest empire the world has ever known, after all, and given that the US is expanding into Africa and building new drone bases all over the Gulf of Aden, I assumed that there would likely be something to counterweight the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq.

And according to the NYT, Obama the megalomaniac has his cross hairs on Iran.

The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran [they say it like it's inevitable!].

The plans, under discussion for months, gained new urgency after President Obama's announcement this month that the last American soldiers would be brought home from Iraq by the end of December. Ending the eight-year war was a central pledge of his presidential campaign, but American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.

After unsuccessfully pressing both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government to permit as many as 20,000 American troops to remain in Iraq beyond 2011, the Pentagon is now drawing up an alternative.

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.

At a time when the US government is trillions in debt, borrowing almost half of every dollar it spends, and spread thin across the entire globe, this is absolute madness. Is the White House really worried and threatened by Iran?

A dangerous tripwire: US military exercises in the Persian Gulf, circa 2008.

Forget about all the hype from the American neocons and the Likud Party in Israel calling Iran the "existential threat," comparing their powerless president to Hitler, and calling for a pile of Persian bones.

When one takes a sober look at Iran, there is very little to be scared about. Iran's annual military budget is less than $10 billion a year, and even the US government's top intelligence agencies claim that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

The US military presence near the Persian Gulf is supposed to be a deterrent against the threat that Iran would cut off or restrict the flow of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz. But even if we accept the fact that Americans should have the fruits of their labor confiscated so that government bureaucrats can possibly kill and die for oil, the US would barely feel it if Iran decided to do such a foolish thing.

For starters, 36% of American oil is domestic. 22% comes from Canada, and Mexico comes in at third. The Persian Gulf supplies just about 13% of American oil. A sudden drop in production would definitely have an effect on the American economy, but how about increasing oil production here? If China can drill in the Gulf of Mexico, than so can we.

Instead of patrolling the Persian Gulf with theftillion dollar Destroyers, why not sit down with Iran and realize that is in the interests of both countries to trade and be at peace. An overwhelming majority of Iranians love Americans; they just hate the policies of the US government. And most importantly, most Iranians favor diplomatic relations with the US.

So why does the US continue to have such a hawkish stance towards a people that want peace and trade with us? There are many domestic reasons, of course: the Israel lobby, more war means more weapons means more profits for the merchants of death means more campaign donations, and there's nothing like an ethnically and religiously different bogeyman to instill fear.

But I ultimately think that most of the US actions around the globe are in a response to China's growing power. There are other factors as well, but given that it is cheaper to buy oil than it is to steal it, the Pentagon likely supports intervention everywhere for the sole purpose of preventing China from getting there. Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan; if the US is occupying them, than the Chinese can't.

The only problem is: we are broke. Actually, broke doesn't even begin to describe the financial mess the US is in.

But whatever the reason the US is rattling its saber near Iran, expanding the empire into Africa, and building new drone bases - hegemony, China, or good ol' fashioned imperial glory and blood-lust - it ultimately can not go on forever.

And the sooner we realize how counterproductive and costly empire is, the better off we, and the rest of the world, will be.

Economist Ed Stringham: Policing is Too Important to be Left to the Government

 

Murray Rothbard on the Founding of the Federal Reserve

Here is the godfather of libertarian ethics in a speech for a Mises Institute seminar on 1984 on the history of the Fed. Before coming across this video, I had only read his writings and heard some random lectures of his I downloaded, and I am amazed with the modest passion that he gives off when he speaks.

There are many great writers and thinkers that I admire and that have influenced me, but it was Rothbard that really taught me about the logical conclusions of the non-aggression principle and libertarian philosophy: anarcho-capitalism, and to hate the state with all my heart and soul.

 

The New Scramble for Africa

Pepe Escobar on the new scramble for Africa:

A few hundred soldiers and no less than 80,000 civilians have been bombed for weeks by NATO and the former "rebels". Only 20,000 civilians have managed to escape. There's no food left. Water and electricity have been cut off. Hospitals are idle. The city - under siege - is in ruins. Sirte imams have issued a fatwa (decree) allowing survivors to eat cats and dogs.

What Gaddafi never did to Benghazi - and there's no evidence he might have - the TNC is doing to Sirte, Gaddafi's home town. Just like the murderous US offensive in Fallujah in the Iraqi Sunni triangle in late 2004, Sirte is being destroyed in order to "save it". Sirte, the new Fallujah, is brought to you by NATO rebels. R2P ["Responsibility to Protect", the new foreign polocy jargon of the Obama Regime], RIP.

And Libya is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new US intervention into Africa. Caesar Obamaus, already dictator of the rest of the world, is now the King of Africa.

Hillary visits Libya, the latest outpost of the Empire

Even before Libya, Obama was sending his robots into Somalia and has his own torture dungeon near Mogadishu.

After building new drone bases in Saudi Arabia, Obama's got a new Reaper base in Ethiopia.

The press was creepily quiet about Obama sending in troops "advisors" to one of the most chaotic and dangerous places in the world - Central Africa -  but there are now military personnel in Uganda, the Central African Republic, the Congo, South Sudan, and Kenya. That's FIVE new countries added to the sphere of the American Empire.

And just remember that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the thousands of US personnel that were sent into Vietnam were called "advisors." What they were advising? When it comes to logic of the Empire, who knows. But given that the US was bogged down in the juggles of Southeast Asia for twenty years after - carpetbombing entire countries, losing almost 60,000 Americans, countless civilians, and billions of dollars - they couldn't have been up to any good.

Will the interventions in Africa turn out in a similar way? It's hard to tell. One thing going for those of us on the side of sanity and peace is that even if the Imperial Overlords in DC want a bunch of new open-ended, no-win wars, they're running out of foreign countries to lend them the money to do it. We're flat out broke.

But Obama truly has opened up Pandaro's box with his Libyan intervention and other minor ones across that troubled continent. All across North Africa and the Middle East, Islamist regimes are replacing the former US puppets. Chaos, violence, and militia rule are the norm. Blowback for the US appears to be certain.

Obama: "We stand for freedom and democracy (except when it's inconvenient, like our tyrant allies in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, and countless others)!"

And don't forget about the usual cronies behind the scenes looking to ride the Empire's coattails to make some blood money.

Western security, construction and infrastructure companies that see profit-making opportunities receding in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned their sights on Libya, now free of four decades of dictatorship. Entrepreneurs are abuzz about the business potential of a country with huge needs and the oil to pay for them, plus the competitive advantage of Libyan gratitude toward the United States and its NATO partners.

Unfortunately, I think that unless someone like Ron Paul is elected and begins dismantling this imperial nonsense, the incentives of the self-licking ice cream cone will keep the empire rolling along, cosequences be damned.

It's the new scramble for Africa! The US of A, the land of the free and the home of the brave, are the new Dutch colonists in Africa, dividing spoils, throwing cash and weapons around, and centrally planning the continent.

No good can from this.

The Opportunity Costs of Statism

One of the most tragic aspects of the state is the "broken window" fallacy. This fallacy demonstrates how the states' initiation of force harms economic productivity. Whenever a government taxes people, there are opportunity costs that exist as the products, services, or capital that would have existed as a result of the voluntary efforts of individuals if they were not taxed.

And due to the state's notorious inefficiencies and waste, these costs play a significant role but are also hard to quantify. Because of the hidden nature of these costs, it is often easy for states to get away with looting because the results of government spending are often intentionally made to stand out. Pyramids, dams, NASA launches, and other infrastructure projects are just a few examples.

The Libertarian News blog, however, has a great post showing the opportunity costs of statism.For example, a F-35 stealth fighter jet costs $207.6 million each, and the Pentagon just bought 32 of them for 2012.

Because the State decided it needed a 208 million dollar fighter plane more than you needed to keep the fruits of your own labor:

832 quarter million dollar houses were not built.

5,777 college educations were not obtained.

6,500 fully loaded Honda Accords were not built.

60,836 GE Profile top-of-the-line refrigerators were not built.

83,200 Sony Bravia 46″ LCD TVs were not built.

208,000 Dell XPS 8300 computers were not built.

34,000,000 six dollar meals were not produced.

Now take all of those numbers and multiply them by 2,443 to see what the State intends on depriving you of, just from this SINGLE defense program.

And if you take account that the US government is by far the largest government that has existed in the history of the world, with debts and unfunded liabilities in the trillions of dollars, the costs to the private (i.e. real, voluntary) economy are actually more than those trillions.

It is truly mind boggling to imagine what inventions, tools, and services would be available to us without the financial and economic costs of feeding the Washington beast.

Nobody 2012

As we foolishly look to "leaders" and top-down policy from Washington to solve our problems, we should learn the lessons of anarchist Pennsylvania:

If for most of 1684-88 there was no colonywide government in existence, what of the local officials? Were they not around to provide that evidence of the state's continued existence, which so many people through the ages have deemed vital to man's very survival? The answer is no. The lower courts met only a few days a year, and the county officials were, again, private citizens who devoted very little time to upholding the law. No, the reality must be faced that the new, but rather large, colony of Pennsylvania lived for the greater part of four years in a de facto condition of individual anarchism, and seemed none the worse for the experience. Furthermore, the Assembly passed no laws after 1686, as it was involved in a continual wrangle over attempts to increase its powers and to amend, rather than just reject, legislation.

But Without a State, Who Would Build the Roads???

In England and Wales, there's the Private Roads Services that owns and operates over 4o,ooo private roads:

Private Roads Services Ltd ("PRS") provides services to residents' associations and companies responsible for private roads and estates in England and Wales.

We offer our own insurance scheme, a book on the law, extensive online resources for members, and a "starter pack" for residents seeking to form an association or company.

In Sweden (.pdf):

Private road associations (PRAs) manage two thirds of the road network in Sweden. They manage the roads at less cost and with better results than the Government road agencies. In fact, the PRAs perform so well that some urban municipalities request the associations to manage the municipal roads which connect to the private roads. There are also PRAs that are responsible for ferry services, for example in the Stockholm archipelago.

And a beautiful private highway in Japan:

Financed without government assistance and lacking any toll collection, the freeway's operating revenue is sourced from the rent of three floors of businessess housed within buildings directly below its pavement.

Pentagon Prepares for Economic Warfare

The Pentagon is running war games, but these aren't your typical chess-game explorations in military battles and strategy. This is the 21st Century, in an incredibly interconnected world. And now that the US government owes trillions to other governments all over the world, new methods must be used to prevent its weakening grasp at the top of the world from slipping.

Instead of soldiers and generals running the war games, its bankers and Wall Street cronies. The weapons: currency, debt, stocks, gold. Whatever it takes to gain the advantage and keep others on their knees. "Banks and bonds are now weapons, just as much as bombs."

Unless the Pentagon Monster and the Military-Industrial-Complex is dismantled, then threats of war - whether traditional or economic - will continue to put the world in a delicate balance where a small incident or accident could drastically affect the lives of millions.

The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

Samuel Johnson famously said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. This means that when backed against a wall of logic and reason, statists and warmongers will wrap themselves in the flag in a desperate attempt to combat the cognitive dissonance and smear his opponent. What are you, un-American?

Johnson made that observation over 250 years ago, but the principles of the fallacy stay the same. Only now, it has branched off into multiple areas of public debate. Terms racist, homophobe, sexist, Islamophobe, etc. saturate the media and are overused to such a point that they lose their meaning. They also are a great distraction from the issue at hand, as one is left to disprove a negative.

One of the more recent of these fallacies to be used is one of the most vicious: "anti-Semite." Not only does the term Semitic describe practically the entire Middle East, but it is usually hurled by those who have little in the argument or substance department to appeal to emotion.

Jeffrey Lord is a contributor to the American Spectator magazine, and he has taken it upon himself to go after Ron Paul (and more specifically, his non-interventionist foreign policy), which is fine on its own. Nothing wrong with disagreements and debate.

But now Lord has found refuge in blind, uninformed name-calling. In a recent column, Lord calls out Ron Paul and his supporters for (surprise, surprise) being anti-semites.

How dare Paul not worship at Benjamin Netanyahu's feet? The US should be neutral and engage in free trade and free markets with the Middle East, says Paul, cut off all foreign "aid" looted from the American taxpayer, and let Israel, with over 300 nukes, handle her security.

Sounds reasonable to me.

But notice that Jeffrey Lord, and his buddy Mark Levin, doesn't actually critique or address Ron Paul's foreign policy positions. Lord has called Paul "liberal," "naive," "dangerous," and now anti-Semitic, yet fails to provide a coherent alternative to a non-interventionist (i.e., small-government) foreign policy and cheers on big government as it marches across the globe.

Without an argument, the coward will either put his fingers in his ear, scream, and stomp his feet, or lash out the only way he knows how: by appealing to emotion, demagoguery, and the last refuge of a scoundrel, whether it's patriotism or name-calling.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

(thanks to HLR)

Fascistas Terrorize Oakland

While some protesters at Occupy Oakland ran to the aid of a badly-injured person yesterday, Oakland Police threw tear gas and flash grenades into the crowd.

 

Also, Scott Olsen, a veteran who did two tours in Iraq, was hospitalized when a police projectile struck him and fractured his skull.

Catholic Socialists

Although I was raised Catholic, the past few years of introspection, research, and a love for philosophy and science has turned me into a skeptical agnostic.

One of the biggest reasons why is that the Catholic Church has tended to have a very backwards and ignorant understanding of economics. In a document released on Monday by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Church condemned the "idolatry of the market."

Here's the great libertarian author (and Catholic) Thomas Woods on the Church's nonsense.

On the one hand, it speaks of excessive money growth as a problem that can lead to dangerous "speculative bubbles." On the other, it calls for a world economic authority that will ... what? Be exempt from the errors and hubris of government officials and national central banks?

We were assured that the best and the brightest were running the Fed. These were people who told us the rise in housing prices was attributable to strong fundamentals. Alan Greenspan told people to take out adjustable-rate mortgages. Ben Bernanke said in 2006 that lending standards were sound. And so on.

Whenever rising interest rates might have discouraged crazed speculation in real estate, the Fed kept the mania going by maintaining low rates. When the market was trying to send us red lights, in other words, the Fed was turning them all green.

Had we really been engaged in "idolatry of the market," we might have listened to the market. Instead, the central authorities drowned out what the market was trying to tell us.

It's been idolatry not of the market but of central banks, the institutionalized sources of moral hazard and financial instability around the world. (The aura of infallibility and the cult of personality surrounding Fed chairmen make the language of idolatry more than mere poetic license.

The Catholic Church has unfortunately had anti-capitalist bias for centuries now. With much apologies to the Spanish Scholastics of the 16th Century who laid the intellectual and philosophical foundations for modern Austrian/free market economics, nearly every other economic treatise I've read from the Catholic Church has railed against the market and praised central planning.

It's a shame, since so much of what is right with Western Civilization is thanks to Christianity and the Christian concepts of individual autonomy and value.

Obama's Death Panel

President Peace Price has a completely secret panel of high ranking government officials that place the names of individuals on a hit list. Just like the Mafia, only infinitely larger and more powerful.

No congressional oversight, no judicial review. Obama then turns into judge, jury, and executioner as he orders a kill from the comfort of his White House.

John T. Flynn once defined a totalitarian government as one who felt that there was no limits to its power. And when a President claims the right to bypass the judiciary system and the 5th Amendment and order individuals to be vaporized by a drone strike, there truly is very little he can not do.

Gadaffi Is Dead, But Tyranny Lives

New original column for Strike The Root.

They Don't Even Hide It Anymore

Here is neocon extraordinare John Bolton admitting that the wars the US government has waged in the Middle East have been to protect oil interests. He also criticizes Obama's phony pullout in Iraq, and provides the usual bogeyman rhetoric on Iran.

Unapologetic, arrogant imperialism. Hey, at least he's honest, right?

 

What's Another $75 Trillion?

From the position of global superpower since the end of WW2, the US has witnessed an unrivaled Pax Americana throughout the world. Military might, a global archipelago of bases, and the US dollar as the world's reserve currency has allowed America to export her specific brand of fascism throughout the world: central banking, police state-ism, and crony capitalism.

Which means that when a part of the world struggles or finally hits the inevitable bust that results from central banking and the business cycle, the US must intervene. This is why during the beginning of the economic crisis a few years ago, the Federal Reserve lend out trillions to foreign central banks, providing the whiskey and ice to the alcoholic who badly needs sobriety.

But that previous loan has got nothing on what the Fed and the banksters are up to now.

Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

This stuff always sounds like a foreign language to me. So to put it in more basic terms, this means that Bank of America's $75 trillion worth of derivatives, and the risk, is now guaranteed by the American taxpayer.

$75 trillion. One's head spins when comprehending this number, yet without hardly a whisper and without public input, we are on the hook for 75,000 billion dollars.

To say that we are little more than tax-cattle and debt-slaves to the US government - and its corporate leeches - is not hyperbole.

Intellectual Property Is Theft

The concept of state-enforced intellectual property has always troubled me. Property rights exist because of scarcity of time, land, and goods in order to minimize the inevitable conflict over this scarcity. By purchasing a hamburger, I therefore own it, and have exclusive rights over it. Exchanges of property can only occur through voluntarily means, by contract, direct exchange, or as a gift.

However, since ideas by their very nature are not scarce, assigning property ownership to a non-scarce good limits what everyone else can do with their scarce goods. Intellectual property is thus a violation of property rights, and antithetical to a free society.

Plus, they are completely arbitrary. How long should a copyright (the monopoly use of a non-scarce resource) last? 5 years? 20? 100?

Even now, there are voluntary and contractual ways to deal with IP issues, like Creative Commons. No doubt if state IP laws were abolished, more would flourish.

Like most laws that go beyond the protection of life and property from third-party aggression, there are consequences. IP tends to benefit large corporations over their smaller competitors, as they can afford to hire the necessary lawyers. Companies are formed for the sole purpose of buying up copyrights and patents just to sue people who may (advertantly or inadvertently) violate them. Innovation, too, is slowed as companies are forced to hire defense IP protection.

In an article for C4SS, Kevin Carson describes the length large corporations go to use state-enforced IP to their advantage, and concludes:

Most importantly, none of this would even have been an issue if Microsoft’s tyranny weren’t enabled by the state’s digital copyright law. So long as copyright exists, we never really own anything we’ve paid for. We’re legally permitted to use the stuff we’ve purchased the way we want to use it only at the sufferance of the people we bought it from.

“Intellectual property” is theft.

Without IP, there would likely be more decentralization and profit-making opportunities in fields traditionally strangled in the web of IP like music and the arts. Ideas should be spread, not controlled.

 

Science Saved My Soul

 

War On You