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US Justice Department lawyers are refusing to argue the governments cases against detainees at Guantanamo.

Writes Scott Horton on his blog at Harpers:

“Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. Under the Code of Professional Responsibility, there are certain circumstances when a lawyer is not ethically permitted to appear and advance arguments that a client wants him to make. One is when the client is appearing in court advancing claims of fact that the lawyer knows to be untrue.”

Hat tip: FishOutofWater.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Wilt Alston on why it matters little to him how the government is run because he now grasps that government itself is the problem — Is It Wrong If I Just Don’t Care?

I have concluded something very important recently. (OK, so maybe not very important, but mildly interesting anyway!) I just don’t care about a lot of stuff that used to really excite me. For instance, I don’t care:

* That Karl Rove resigned;
* That Alberto Gonzales resigned;
* That they haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet;
* Who gets selected for the Supreme Court;
* If George Bush (or any other President) gets impeached;
* Who gets elected President of the United States.

…

Why don’t I care about the things I list? I could take each of these separately, and I will embellish on a few of my reasons, but basically it comes down to this. I’m an anarchist.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Yet another example of state capitalism smashing small business… From Jeffrey Tucker at the Mises Institute blog:

Last night, a lady from my neighborhood just delivered her last pint of chicken salad to my door. Her chicken salad–made by “The Chicken Salad Chick”–has been all the rage, with everyone in the neighborhood forking over for this stuff. It’s a classic case of a suburban food hysteria.

But she is shutting down, not because of her failures but her success. The Health Department of the County called her home. They were very nice and sweet in a Southern sort of way. But they explained that it is not fair to those who have complied with all the regulations for selling retail that she should be allowed to bake and sell from her domestic kitchen. You have to have industrial ovens. You must comply with all food regulations. You must cook and sell only from an area zoned for commercial purposes. And yes, someone called to complain: not a customer but a competitor who does comply with all these regs.

It’s just fairness right? Well, call it what you want but note that this action was taking for motives having nothing whatever to do with the health of the public. It was driven by a competitor wanting to drive up her costs and therefore hurt her business. The regs are being used to clobber competition — which is precisely why they were created and precisely the way they work in the real world, all civics-texts pieties aside.

The matter is instructive, regardless of what your cognitive framework leads you to call state capitalism — “capitalism”, “socialism”, “corporatism”, “mercantilism” or “fascism”. The centralizing tendency of state intervention in the market to support an unproductive plutocratic oligarchy at the expense of authentically voluntary market relations is the principal economic point of pain. Almost all other misery derives from that.

Those of you who continue to call yourselves “anarcho-capitalists” would be wise to use other labels. Otherwise, you’re throwing away the opportunity to demonstrate to earnest socialists that the phenomenon they refer to as “capitalist accumulation” is a necessarily statist phenomenon deriving from market intervention by the state on behalf of the political class. And since all states are demonstrably inherently oligarchical… well, you hopefully get the picture.

Black and grey market chicken salad? They do it with bread.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Anarchist Report Back from the Midwest GOP Convention - They’ll let just about anyone into these things.

“I make my way out of the reception room, shaken up and sweating. I sit down and text one of the outside crew, coordinating more of the plan. At this point I’m extremely frightened. Look at all these Republicans! And I’m able to walk in their midst with no problem! The guy next to me on the bench starts to mutter about how Ron Paul supporters are hoodlums. I solemnly agree…”

Hat tip: Smygo

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Rolling Stone describing the Bush regime’s war corporatism in The Great Iraq Swindle:

“…a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.”

Hat tip: End the War on Freedom

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Minor wingnut talk radio figure Jim McQuinn out of Pittsburgh this morning confirms what most who can add 2 and 2 in order to come up with 4 already knew…

The Bush admin’s recent labeling of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization is part of a deliberate attempt to prepare the legal groundwork for an unprovoked attack on Iran in the very near future.

The fascists who control the US government have been aching to make such an attack for a long time. A while back, a few of us on the left put together the Iran Pledge of Resistance in response to their ongoing threat:

We, the undersigned, will not further acquiesce to military aggression against other nations by the Bush regime. In the event of an attack by US military forces against the nation of Iran, we pledge to oppose that aggression by our active participation in a campaign of mass non-violent resistance, including civil disobedience, with the express intent of impeding further aggression.

I ask readers to do three things:

1) Join us in signing the Iran Pledge of Resistance.

2) Help promote the Iran Pledge of Resistance. Tell your friends and family. Send people links. Talk about it. Spread the word far and wide.

3) Help promote jury nullification as the correct grassroots response to criminal charges for acts of non-violent resistance carried out in accordance with the Iran Pledge of Resistance. If I was on a jury, I would remember that the historical prerogative of jurors has, for hundreds of years, been to disregard any and all instructions from the judge in order to judge the justice of the law in question in addition to the facts (and mitigating circumstances) of any given case.

Cross-posted to Daily Kos. If you have a DKos account, please join in promoting the copy of the post there by logging in and using the “Recommend Diary” button in the right sidebar on that site.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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So Abu Gonzales has resigned. I’m not impressed. The torture and violations of civil liberties will not stop. The slaughter in Iraq will not stop and the American people will continue to be coerced into paying for it all.

I’d much rather watch George W. Bush sing “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”.

Hat tip: End the War on Freedom

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Comrade Wally Conger has posted an outstanding short essay by a nearly forgotten libertarian movement activist, El Ray, from back in the 70’s — On Strategy of Cultural Change. As Wally notes:

“It’s a fantastic repudiation of the ‘retreatist’ charge made against anti-politics and, in turn, agorism.”

Also interesting is the degree of similarity to elements of what’s called the “post-leftist” trend in anarchism, particularly Crimethinc. My own view of what’s called post-leftism per se is that it’s a snapshot of a period in time, reflecting what will be seen in retrospect historically as a period leading to a re-definition of what “the left” even is.

As the right solidifies into a uniformly fascistic movement, the social democrats falsely called “liberals” and the Marxists will fade away to be replaced by de-centralization oriented progressive libertarians and greens in the realm of electoral politics, while we anarchists will cement our seizure of the pinnacle of revolutionary radicalism from the state socialists. Advances in anarchist theory by the likes of Carson confirm that Liberty, alone, answers the social question. The agorists have, in the concept of the counter-economic revolution, the weapon to bring that Liberty about.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Most recent dispatch from Chuck Munson regarding the Crossroads Infoshop renovation project:

At our meeting last week, we agreed to have one last work day this Saturday, September 1, from Noon until 6 pm. We will have another drywall day later in September to put up the ceiling below the back balcony.

Please consider joining us for this important work day. We will be getting the space cleaned up for the grand re-opening on September 15th. If you don’t have carpentry skills, this will be the day to help out. We’ll be cleaning, dusting, painting, and prepping the floor for sealant.

At this point, most of the construction for the space is finished. The sales counter and bar have been built. This weekend we started cleaning out stuff that was in the upper back balcony. That space will be turned into office space over the next few months. Most of the electrical work is up and running.

What do we need to finish prepping the space for the grand opening?

Stuff
* Small end tables
* Lamps

Books
* We are always looking for book donations

Financial
* More sustainers to help us keep the project running for the long term
* Money for Internet connection and wi-fi (Price to be determined)
* Around $100 to buy drywall to finish ceiling

Any help appreciated.

Tags: Kansas City by Brad Spangler
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So I’ve been tagged by TG and now I’m supposed to come up with eight overly-personal anecdotes/factoids…

People who are tagged need to write these rules in their own blogs & share eight things about themselves that others might not know. At the end of the their blog post, they need to tag six people and list their (blog) names. Leave a comment on the blogs of the people they’ve chosen telling them they’ve been tagged and encouraging them to come over and read the eight things you’ve written on your blog.

1) Help! Help! I’m being repressed!

I came face-to-face with an armed-and-vested US Marshall last week as she charged into KC’s Crossroads Infoshop. My first thought as I saw her striding purposefully through the door was that something must have gone horribly wrong at the Bush speech in KC earlier that day and my presence at the most visible anarchist presence in town was somehow going to result in a one-way ticket to Gitmo. This was not helped by the fact that I had just been chatting with a visitor to the store who kept making bizarre, unexplained references to almanacs.

2) I call her “Mini-Me”.

My daughter, “Z”, continues to freak me out by looking so much like myself at her age (apart from having her Mom’s blue eyes).

3) LSD is a gateway drug…

Totally bass-ackwards. I was more or less the straight-edge type in my teen years apart from some very occasional drinking. In my early twenties, I jumped feet-first into a short period of experimentation with LSD. Later, I started smoking weed on occasions when nobody I knew could score any trip. Marijuana, in turn, made me cough so much that I took to smoking cigarettes to try to train my lungs. I still smoke a pack plus daily.

4) O-positive.

5) Military vet? Depends…

I have roughly as much law enforcement training as a rookie cop from being a former military policeman in the US Army Reserve a long time ago, having enlisted two days after my seventeenth birthday. Two and a half years later, I went active duty in the US Air Force as a computer/communications specialist and was kicked out roughly a year later on a general discharge for “assorted minor disciplinary infractions”. I don’t really think of myself as a veteran because I never went to war or even overseas. I came out of the administrative discharge process with no criminal record and (if I recall correctly) eligibility for all standard veterans benefits except the only one I ever actually wanted — GI Bill college money. Shortly after, as a newly-minted civilian, I discovered libertarianism, thereby became strongly anti-war and was alienated by the media spectacle of the first Gulf War. For going on two decades since, I’ve been glad I got out when I did — being neither proud of that part of my life, nor particularly ashamed of it either. Since my choices were shaped by the culture I grew up in, I didn’t know any better. It’s just a part of my personal history.

6) Yes, that really, really hurt…

As a teenager, I accidentally came within a couple inches of burning my testicles off while playing with homemade thermite.

7) I hate this sort of chain-letter stuff…

Which is why I’m only listing seven things and not passing it on to anyone else. Readers can start it again themselves if they wish, but I refuse to put other people on the spot.

Tags: Personal by Brad Spangler
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