Quelle: TASS
„Übereinstimmend mit den Kampftrainingsplänen der Schwarzmeer-U-Boot-Flotte haben die beiden U-Boote Marschflugkörper des Typen Kalibr gegen Boden- und Luftziele gestartet“, so der Sprecher.
Die Raketen wurden dabei unter Wasser gestartet und mehr als 20 Kampfschiffe sowie Flugzeuge haben den Trainingsbereich abgesichert, fügte er hinzu. Die Kalibr-Marschflugkörper werden regelmäßig in Syrien gegen Ziele des Islamischen Staates (ISIS, IS, Daesh) eingesetzt. Oftmals werden diese vom Kaspischen Meer aus gestartet.
„Wir sind über den Erwerb des S-400-Systems besorgt, weil wir immer betont haben, wie wichtig es ist, die Interoperabilität mit den Waffensystemen der Vereinigten Staaten und anderer Länder in der Region bei der Durchführung großer militärischer Beschaffungsprogramme aufrechtzuerhalten. Diese Kompatibilität ist notwendig, um gemeinsame Bedrohungen abzuwehren“, zitiert der digitale Informationsdienst Sputnik Deutschland Baldansa.
Die Vereinigten Staaten und Saudi-Arabien haben im Bereich der militärischen Beschaffung „feste Beziehungen“, so die Sprecherin weiter. Erst in der letzten Nahost-Reise des US-Präsidenten Donald Trump wurde mit Riad ein Waffendeal von über 100 Milliarden Dollar vereinbart. Auch auf die Luftabwehr setzt Riad derzeit noch auf das THAAD-Luftabwehrsystem der USA. Bei einem Staatsbesuch des Saudi-Königs Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in Moskau wurde eine Absichtserklärung zum Kauf des russischen Flugabwehrsystems S-400 unterzeichnet. Auch die Türkei setzt als NATO-Mitglied künftig auf die russische Luftabwehr, was ebenfalls für schlechte Stimmung im Pentagon sorgte.
S-400 oder SA-21 ist ein in der Sowjetunion bzw. Russland entwickeltes und produziertes mobiles allwetterfähiges Langstrecken-Boden-Luft-Raketen-System zur Bekämpfung von Kampfflugzeugen und Marschflugkörpern in allen Flughöhen. Ebenso können ballistische Kurz- und Mittelstreckenraketen abgefangen werden. Das westliche Gegenstück hierzu ist THAAD, ein Raketenabwehrsystem der United States Army gegen ballistische Raketen, die einen Kriegsschauplatz oder eine Region bedrohen.
via News Front
Die Militärquellen in Syrien teilten mit, dass die Kämpfer der syrischen Opposition «Freie Syrische Armee» entsprechend dem Abkommen aus dem Bezirk Al-Kadam in Süddamaskus ausgeführt sein werden und werden in der allernächsten Zeit nach Norden des Landes gebracht. In anderem Fall werden die Regierungstruppen die Opperation zur Befreiung des Gebietes anfangen und die Kämpfer werden vernichtet.
Quelle: Farsnews
via News Front
Auf seiner Seite in einem sozialen Netzwerk hat bekannter ukrainische Journalist Wladimir Bojko die Meinung ausgesprochen hat, die niemanden kalt lässt. Bojko hat eines der aktuellsten Themen berührt: Er erklärte, dass der russische Präsident Wladimir Putin es besser gemacht hat als man es sich nur vorstellen konnte, — er hat der Krim die Freiheit gegeben.
Bojko kritisierte eine neue gerichtliche Reform der Ukraine und betonte, dass es das wichtige Argument für Abtrennen von der Ukraine ist. Insbesondere müssen die Bewohner der selbsternannten Volksrepubliken Lugansk und Donezk verstehen, was auf sie warten wird, wenn sie wieder ein Teil der Ukraine werden.
„Und noch dieses Gesetz muss man auf Russisch übersetzen und auf der Krim verbreiten, damit die Menschen dort verstehen, vor welcher Katastrophe Putin sie gerettet hat, als er Truppen vor drei Jahren auf die Halbinsel schickte », schreibt Bojko. -Die Folgen «der gerichtlichen Reform» wird die Kriminalität und das Banditentum (eindämmen)».
«Und wer keine Möglichkeit hat, muss die Waffen nehmen, sagt Bojko, weil «niemand, außer Ihnen selbst, wird Sie und Ihre Verwandte nicht schützen».
Der saudische König Salman Abdel-Aziz Al Saud ist zu Besuch in Moskau. Im Gepäck hatte er 459 Tonnen, die er mit nach Russland einflog. Gestern, am zweiten Tag seines Besuches wurden eine Reihe von Absichtserklärungen für die künftige wirtschaftliche, militärische und atomare Zusammenarbeit zwischen Moskau und Riad. Ein historischer Besuch.
Unter anderem wurde eine Absichtserklärung für den Kauf des russischen Flugabwehrsystems S-400 unterzeichnet, wie Russlands-Vizepremier Dmitri Rogosin vor der arabischen Presse mitteilte. Allerdings ist der Waffendeal noch nicht fix und es werden noch weitere Gespräche im Hinblick auf der militärisch-wirtschaftlichen Ebene folgen. Zudem wurden über Kooperationen im Bereich Wirtschaft und Technik gesprochen. So will man unter anderem auch in der Eisenbahnbranche künftig zusammenarbeiten. Aber auch das Thema Energie, insbesondere der Ölsektor wurde besprochen. Laut dem russischen Energieminister Alexander Nowak wolle man enger im Ölhandel sowie in der Forschung und Entwicklung in diesem Bereich zusammenarbeiten. Für beide Länder war der Fall des Ölpreises ein Schock gewesen.
Weiters sprach man über die Zusammenarbeit im Bereich Atomenergie sowie die „friedliche Nutzung des Weltraumes“, wie der russische Staatssender RT schreibt. Zudem wurde über Innovationen im Produktionssektor gesprochen. Auch ein gemeinsamer Fonds in Höhe von 1 Milliarde Dollar wurde zwischen russischen und saudischen Investmentgesellschaften entwickelt, der die gemeinsame Entwicklung moderner Technologie finanzieren soll. Noch nie zuvor war ein saudischer König auf Staatsbesuch in Moskau, so dass dieser Besuch der erste in der Geschichte beider Staaten ist. Ein historisches Ereignis sozusagen.
Es zeigt vor allem, dass Russland seine Einflussbereich in Richtung Nahen Osten ausgeweitet hat. Ursache ist hier sicher auch der militärische Einsatz in Syrien, den Russland seit über zwei Jahren auf Bitten der syrischen führt, sowie dessen erfolgreicher Verlauf. Russland dominiert die Astana-Verhandlungen , wo über das Schicksal Syriens mit der Türkei und dem Iran in der kasachischen Hauptstadt beraten wird. Die USA, wichtigster Bündnispartner und Waffenlieferant des Königreiches, spielen hier nur eine Zuschauerrolle. Gleichwohl schloss der US-Präsident Donald Trump einen lukrativen Waffendeal während seiner Nahost-Reise im Sommer mit den Saudis ab. Im Juni brach daraufhin die sogenannte Katar-Krise aus, wo die Astana-Teilnehmer Russland, die Türkei und der Iran, eine eher vermittelnde Rolle eingenommen haben.
via News Front
Es ist den Regierungstruppen mit der Unterstützung der Luftwaffe der Russischen Föderation gelungen, den südlichen Teil der Stadt aus der Kontrolle der Terroristen zu bringen. Laut dem Bericht konnte syrische Armee das Gasfeld Al-Hayl am Donnerstag zu befreien. Auch wurde die Bahn Palmyra-as-Suchna eröffnet. Nach Angaben wurden mehrere Terroristen «Islamisches Staates» getötet.
E. #Hama: #Russia|n MoD acknowledges a #RuAF Mi-28 made an "emergency landing" & says crew safe. #ISIS claims shot down. Seemingly destroyed pic.twitter.com/HgJG1iQrRh
— Qalaat Al Mudiq (@QalaatAlMudiq) October 6, 2017
Mit der eigenen Luftabwehr soll der russische Hubschrauber von den Terroristen abgeschossen sein. Vor zwei Tagen gab der IS an, zwei russische Soldaten in Gefangenschaft genommen zu haben.
Every time there’s a “public mass shooting” (defined by the Congressional Research Service as an incident in which four or more people are indiscriminately killed, not including the shooter or shooters, in a relatively public place) in America, the usual suspects climb atop of the pile of bodies before they’re even cold and start doing the funky chicken to the tune of “gun control, gun control, this wouldn’t happen if we just added one more gun control law to the hundreds of gun control laws that we already have.”
They’re always wrong, their political posturing is always ghoulish and disgusting, and any policy outcomes they achieve are stupid and pointless at best and an outrage against the rights of the people at worst.
This time, it looks like the former. US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is pushing legislation to ban “bump stocks,” devices which allow one to fire a semi-automatic weapon (which fires one shot per pull of the trigger) at rates not unlike those of an automatic weapon (hundreds of rounds per minute for as long as the trigger is depressed, unless the gun runs out of ammo, or it jams, or its barrel melts).
“Bump firing” devices are pretty simple. They’re based on holding the trigger finger in place and using the recoil of the weapon to, you guessed it, bump the trigger against the finger repeatedly.
Because they’re so simple, anyone who really wants one will get or make one, ban or no ban. And, because they make a weapon’s fire incredibly inaccurate and difficult to control, hardly anyone DOES want one for any purpose other than impersonating Rambo in YouTube videos.
If the Vegas shooter did use a bump stock, as seems to be the case, it probably saved some lives. A reasonably proficient marksman would likely have killed more people with aimed shots from a semi-automatic, or even bolt action single shot, rifle under the circumstances (thousands of people packed together, less than 500 yards away, with a clear line of sight and no counter-sniper fire to worry about).
Republican politicians and the National Rifle Association are already jumping on the bump stock ban wagon. I’m not surprised. There’s no “there” there. The whole idea is even dumber, and less pernicious in effect, than the 1994 ban on “assault weapons” (defined as guns that people like Dianne Feinstein think look scary).
This stump stupid idea has to be fought on principle, of course. “Shall not be infringed” means exactly that, and politicians should never be rewarded for publicly rolling around in the blood of murder victims while demanding that we sacrifice our rights to their ambitions. But I won’t personally be losing any sleep over Feinstein’s stunt.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
ISLAMABAD—Eight member delegation of YFK–International Kashmir Lobby Group (Youth Forum For Kashmir) called upon Ambassador of Azerbaijan H.E. Ali Alizada to bring in his notice the current situation in Indian-occupied Kashmir and how Azerbaijan as a brotherly country of Pakistan can play its role in highlighting and resolving the internationally recognized conflict of Kashmir.
Ambassador keenly listened to the presentation by Zaman Bajwa on how youth of Pakistan are playing their part in highlighting Kashmir conflict and Shaista Safi narrated the days and nights of people in conflict.
H.E. Ali Alizada said, “We understand and feel as we are facing the same situation in 20% of our territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, and have witnessed Khojaly genocide”.
Ambassador urged the youth to explore all means to promote the case of Kashmir even through cultural activities.
YFK–International Kashmir Lobby Group (Youth Forum For Kashmir) is a non-partisan, international non-governmental organization, working for the peaceful resolution of Kashmir Conflict in accordance with United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions.
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans released their grandiosely titled “Unified Framework for Fixing Our Broken Tax Code” on September 27. The plan looks a lot more like a grab bag designed by lobbyists than like any kind of carefully considered plan for “tax reform.”
It’s full of smoke and mirrors. For example, the one-page highlight sheet brags that “the framework roughly doubles the standard deduction so that typical middle-class families will keep more of their paycheck.” I’d hoped that this might be the start of something like an Incremental Tax Exemption program (themite.org). But as I dug into the details, it turned out to be a bait and switch scam: “To simplify the tax rules, the additional standard deduction and personal exemptions for the taxpayer and spouse are consolidated into this larger standard deduction.” The plan takes as much more from you on one side of the equation as it leaves with you on the other.
When critics point out that the plan’s tax cuts are weighted heavily toward the wealthiest Americans, they’re right. It’s full-on “supply side” hokum: Cut the corporate and other business rates and wealth will “trickle down” as entrepreneurs innovate and create jobs. But “demand side” cuts would actually convey more information to those entrepreneurs, guiding their innovation as they chase the additional dollars left in the pockets of regular consumers.
I’m all for tax cuts and not terribly particular about where they fall. But let’s be honest: Cutting the corporate and top rates isn’t about sound economics, it’s about whose lobbyists buy the most expensive lunches for, and who contributes most reliably to the campaigns of, which politicians.
Of course, the main criticism coming from opponents of tax cuts as such is that those cuts would “cost” the US government something. The New York Times claims (drawing on an analysis by the Tax Policy Center) that “the corporate tax cuts will cost nearly $7 trillion over the next two decades …. the entire package is expected to cost an estimated $5.6 trillion over the next 20 years.”
Well, no. The total “cost” of the proposed tax cuts would be a whopping zero dollars and zero cents.
If I’m mugged one night and it turns out I left my wallet at home, that fact doesn’t “cost” the mugger the $20 that was in it. The $20 wasn’t his in the first place. It was mine. If I walk past a restaurant without buying something to eat, it doesn’t “cost” the restaurateur anything. Ditto for money that government doesn’t take from you or me.
Politicians want us to believe that our money naturally belongs to government and that letting us keep any of it is generosity on their part. But politicians don’t create wealth. They just seize it from the rest of us, or borrow it from lenders who expect them to seize it from us later.
The Republican plan looks like a combination of weak tea, scammy distractions and voodoo economics to me. But I guess we could do (and have done) worse.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
A few minutes after midnight on October 1, authorities at Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center released O.J. Simpson on parole after the former football great had served nine years of a 33-year sentence for criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, robbery, and using a deadly weapon.
Simpson, who faces several years of parole/probation restrictions, says he’d like to move back to Florida, where he lived before his conviction. Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, who never misses an opportunity to grandstand, says that “should not be an option.” “Our state,” she whines, “should not become a country club for this convicted criminal.”
Bondi, of course, is very different from Simpson, and not just in skin tone or sex. He was convicted of something that wouldn’t be considered a crime in any sane society. She hasn’t even been charged with the real crime she undeniably committed (soliciting and accepting a bribe, er, “campaign contribution,” from the Trump Foundation for keeping Florida out of a multi-state fraud lawsuit against Trump University).
Yes, O.J. Simpson is a “convicted criminal.” But what was he convicted of? Demanding the return of stolen property while someone with a gun was present . He claimed not to know that two of the people accompanying him were armed, but even if he knew, let me repeat the two key words, “stolen property.”
In the normal course of things, Simpson would likely have filed a criminal complaint or a civil suit to retrieve the property. Why didn’t he?
Well, more than a decade before, Los Angeles police had unsuccessfully attempted to frame him for the murder of his ex-wife and a friend. No, I’m not saying he didn’t do it, but LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman and others artificially created a case that fell apart under scrutiny instead of objectively investigating the crime. I recommend J. Neil Schulman’s excellent The Frame of the Century? for a more skeptical look at the case.
Then, after his acquittal, the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman used the civil court system to rob Simpson of a prospective $33.5 million in damages for the same crime a jury had acquitted him of committing.
Why on Earth would anyone expect O.J. Simpson to trust the police, or the civil court system, to have his back on a matter of stolen property? If he wanted it back, he had to get it himself … and when he did, the criminal justice system came down on him like a ton of bricks yet again, levying a sentence that was clearly enhanced by a full order of magnitude as “payback” for the crime he’d been acquitted of.
Love him or hate him, it’s clear that OJ Simpson has paid the price, and then some, for the acts he’s actually been proven to have committed. It’s time for the Goldman and Simpson families, Pam Bondi, and everyone else, to stop using a 70-year-old man as a public punching bag and let him live out the remainder of his life in peace rather than in penury.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
“Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit America’s racial and religious divisions,” the Washington Post claims in a September 25 headline.
Over at The Daily Beast, Dean Obeidallah explains “How Russian Hackers Used My Face to Sabotage Our Politics and Elect Trump.”
And US Senator James Lankford (R-OK) thinks that “the Russians and their troll farms” (as opposed to Donald Trump and professional football players) are behind the current “take a knee” kerfuffle between Donald Trump and professional football players.
Because, you know, Americans never had rowdy disagreements with each other over race and religion until last year, and wouldn’t be having them now if not for those dirty, no-good Russian hackers who stole the 2016 presidential election from the second most hated candidate in history, on behalf of the most hated candidate in history, operating through subterfuge to achieve the outcome that some of us predicted months in advance, long before anyone mentioned Russian hackers.*
Evidence? Who needs evidence? The people who hated the outcome and have been railing against it for nearly a year now have told us what happened, and why, and whodunit, and they’d never lie to us about something like that, would they? They lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and about illegal wiretapping by the NSA, and about a thousand other things, but THIS is DIFFERENT.
Keep in mind that when all the most wild and baseless accusations (e.g. that !THEM RUSSIANS! hacked the voting machines) are discarded, the basic claim remaining is this: By spreading “fake news” through social media, !THEM RUSSIANS! fooled a bunch of Americans into voting the wrong way.
Let’s assume for a moment that the basic claim is true, although so far the actual evidence indicates a tiny propaganda operation in the scale of things. If it’s true, the conclusion it points to is:
American voters are morons who can be gamed into doing anything by anyone with the ability to buy ads on Facebook and Twitter.
I didn’t say that. Russian hackers didn’t say that, at least in public. That’s what the propagators of the new Red Scare are claiming.
If the American electorate is really as abjectly stupid as the “blame the Russians” crowd insists, it seems to me that instead of blaming the Russians, they should get to work on either making the electorate smarter or coming up with a system that doesn’t leave important political decisions in the hands of the gullible. Just sayin’ …
*In May of 2016, I predicted that Donald Trump would carry every state Mitt Romney carried in 2012, plus Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. I didn’t predict Wisconsin and Iowa, but 48 of 50 states from six months out ain’t too shabby, is it?
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
ISLAMABAD—The use of a Palestinian girl’s picture at UN by Pakistan has triggered a worldwide debate on pellet victims in Kashmir. Seizing on this opportunity, Kashmir activists have come up with a novel idea: the release of five verified, credible pictures every day for a month on social media as part of a campaign titled ‘Pictures Speak For Kashmir’.
These pictures, taken by photographers working on the ground in Indian-occupied Kashmir for known international news agencies, are verified, dated, and captioned, documenting Indian human rights violations in the international conflict of Kashmir.
The campaign has been launched by YFK, an international lobby group that unites young activists from Azad Kashmir, Indian-occupied Kashmir, Pakistan, India and the world. The group is focused on bringing peace to South Asia by resolving Kashmir conflict through the implementation of UN resolutions on a referendum in Kashmir.
Shaista Safi, a young activist from Baramulla, Indian-occupied Kashmir, and Ghulam Shabbir, a young activist from Pakistan, are leading the campaign.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” said Shaista Safi, adding, “We saw how one picture created a global buzz when Permanent Representative of Pakistan to United Nations Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi triggered a debate at UNGA. To keep the momentum, YFK–International Kashmir Lobby Group (Youth Forum For Kashmir) launches a social media campaign called “Pictures Speak For Kashmir.”
Shabbir said the campaign will run on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #KashmirPictures and urged all users and supporters worldwide to click on the hashtag and share the posts.
The New York Times reports that at least six members of the Trump administration used personal email accounts to discuss White House matters.
Given president Donald Trump’s campaign and post-campaign harping (as the Times puts it) on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server and mishandling of classified information, it’s unsurprising to hear charges of hypocrisy from Democratic quarters. But the hypocrisy here a matter of political class elitism, not partisan politics. Those in power, regardless of party, want to know what you’re doing, but think what they’re doing is none of your business (except when they send you the bill for all of it).
The US government and its state and local subsidiaries operate the largest and most far-reaching surveillance apparatus in the history of humankind. Their intelligence and police agencies intercept, analyze and catalog our phone calls and emails, create and install malware on our computers to keep track of what we do online, and watch us via satellite and over vast networks of cameras in public areas. They track our activities using our Social Security numbers, drivers’ licenses, car VINs and license plates, banking and employment information, and electronic device IP address and MAC IDs. Modern America puts the Third Reich’s death camp tattoo system and the Soviet Union’s internal passport scheme to shame in this respect.
Whenever we mere mortals notice and complain about any aspect of this surveillance state, the response consists of operatic appeals to “national security,” “fighting crime,” and other variations on the theme of “we’re just trying to protect you.”
But whenever an Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange pulls back the curtain, revealing crimes committed by the political class, all hell breaks loose. How DARE these pesky whistle-blowers show the serfs that their emperor isn’t just naked, but also killing and stealing on a scale that would make Ted Bundy and Bernie Madoff blush? And how dare the serfs notice?
Excuse me for a moment while I break out the world’s smallest violin and compose “Dirge for the Lost Privacy of Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Jared Kushner, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Ivanka Trump and Stephen Miller.”
So long as American politicians and bureaucrats continue to put the rest of us under a magnifying glass, they deserve no sympathy when they get caught trying to hide their own actions from public view.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
In a September 21 post, Mark Zuckerberg shared nine steps the site he started is taking “to protect election integrity and make sure that Facebook is a force for good in democracy,” by “actively working with the government” and “partnering with public authorities.”
The day before that, the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Theresa May, used the United Nations General Assembly as a forum to demand that social media networks “ensure terrorist material [read: content that May disapproves of] is detected and removed within one to two hours.”
From the current Red Scare (“Russian election meddling”) and other nation-state attempts to limit speech they define as foreign propaganda or support for terrorism, to ongoing efforts to “combat hate speech,” the cycle of demands from government and compliance by social media giants is speeding up regarding what the rest of us are allowed to read, write, watch, and share.
Newer social media networks like Minds.com and Gab.ai have been growing as the targets of these efforts abandon Facebook and Twitter. But those upstarts are themselves facing backlash of various sorts from service providers such as web hosts and domain registrars.
An increasingly important question, especially for libertarians (of both the civil and ideological variety), is:
At what point does “actively working with the government” and “partnering with public authorities” cease to be private, albeit civic-minded, market activity and become de facto government activity?
Or, to put it differently, when does it cease to be merely “you can’t talk like that in my living room” (exercise of legitimate property rights) and start becoming “you can’t talk like that, period” (censorship)?
My own answer: When Mark Zuckerberg starts using the phrase “actively working with the government” as if that’s a good thing, we’re well into the danger zone.
Fortunately, the situation is (or at least can be) self-correcting. Companies rise and companies fall. The positions of Facebook and Twitter atop the social media pile may SEEM unassailable at the moment, but there was a time when few expected a new generation of retailers to bring Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck to their knees. If you’re not too young you may remember how that turned out.
Social media already serves two masters: Its users and its advertisers. One more master — the state — is one too many. If Facebook and Twitter don’t stop playing with fire, let market demand for free speech burn them to the ground.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
United Nations, New York, September 23, 2017. Hundreds of Kashmiri Americans held a huge rally in front of the United Nations during the speech of the Indian Delegate to its General Assembly. Raising slogans of: “India: Honor UN Pledges” “Freedom for all, Freedom for Kashmir” Indian Forces: Out of Kashmir” “Time to Resolve Kashmir Dispute Now” “Kashmir: The Nuclear Flashpoint” “No Justice, No Peace”, they demanded United Nations — assured right of self-determination to the people of Kashmir.
When RAW staged a fake “Free Balochistan” protest in Geneva some five days ago and hired some non-Baloch immigrants for a few-men rally, probably it had not factored in the reaction of real Baloch of the province. Today, they came out in droves in every nook and corner of the province to give their firm message unequivocally, “Lay off Modi”. If this is not message enough for Modi & Co, nothing ever will be. Modi, Doval, RAW and their proxies in Balochistan have lost their Balochistan game. People of the province made them eat the humble pie today.
According to eye-witness account, the entire province was out on the roads, visibly furious at India and its local proxies. There has never been a mass protest of this scale in the history of the province.
Dismemberment of Pakistan has been the basic mandate of India’s Deep State as enunciated in their infamous Kao Plan. According to this plan, East Pakistan and Balochistan, through PSYWAR and insurgencies, were to be separated from Pakistan. First part was accomplished but the sinister plans for Balochistan since the 70s miserably failed, largely due to the resistance put up by the people. Indian Deep State had plans to separate Balochistan immediately after East Pakistan but Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had to put the entire plan on hold due to possible resistance from the then Shah of Iran, China and also from CIA. But the Kao-boys had already started contacting Baloch leaders through social activities in foreign countries and a PSYWAR was launched amongst the Balochistan people with a crystal clear reference to what happened in East Pakistan and how India helped East Pakistanis to have a separate, independent country.
Political parties, media and even the judiciary at some point in time were not only oblivious to the Indian game, these were aiding the insurgency. It was the people of Balochistan who stood up to Indian proxies and their assassins and frustrated all the designs of the enemy. The Baloch people stood behind the security forces to eliminate the separatist element. Today Balochistan is a peaceful province and this can be rightly called a Joint Venture of Baloch people and the security forces.
When JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a “fraud,” what ensued looked a lot like a “poop and scoop” con: The practice of driving down a thing’s price by saying bad things about it, then buying up a bunch of it before the price bounces back. After Dimon’s comments, JPMorgan briefly became one of the cryptocurrency’s biggest buyers. The company claims it was purchasing Bitcoin on behalf of clients, not as corporate policy, but it looked bad.
Now Dimon is badmouthing cryptocurrency again. And, as before, he clearly either has no idea what he’s talking about or has sinister motives.
“It’s creating something out of nothing that to me is worth nothing,” Dimon told CNBC. “It will end badly.” He also warned that as cryptocurrencies become more popular, government crackdowns will drive them into the black market (that’s happening in China right now).
The key words in Dimon’s “to me [it’s] worth nothing” are “to me.” Value is subjective. What’s a thing worth? Whatever it’s worth to you, or to me, or to Jamie Dimon. Each of us may find that thing more valuable, or less, than do the other two.
Dimon considers cryptocurrency “worth nothing” for one reason only: Because his company — the largest bank in the United States and among the largest in the world — doesn’t control it. And that’s one of several reasons why others find it very valuable indeed.
Cryptocurrencies run on blockchains, “distributed ledgers” without central authorities. Dimon prefers fiat currencies, which are created by governments, managed by central banks, and funneled through institutions like his, legally privileged choke points taking generous rake-offs from wealth created by others but forced to pass through them.
Neither crypto nor fiat currencies are backed by physical commodities like gold or silver, but the resemblance ends there. Crypto is backed by the work of maintaining its ledgers, called by the imaginative name “mining.” Fiat currency is backed only by your trust in the governments (and the Jamie Dimons) of the world.
“Creating money out of thin air without government backing is very different from money with government backing,” he says. He’s right. Money with government backing pays Jamie Dimon. Cryptocurrency threatens his business, his paycheck and his way of life.
His prediction of government crackdowns isn’t just a prediction, it’s a fervent wish. He’s desperate to see cryptocurrency crushed, unless he can find a way to force it through the JPMorgan toll booth.
Dimon should be careful what he wishes for. If cryptocurrency is forced entirely into the “black market,” that market will, sooner or later, bury his. His only chance is to co-opt blockchain and cryptocurrency methods into the fiat system. Here’s hoping he fails.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
UNITED NATIONS, GENEVA— Kashmiris from across Europe descended on the city of Geneva, home to diplomats, international bureaucrats and rights organizations, in another sign of Kashmir’s return to the top of the international agenda.
Hundreds of Kashmiris from Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain Germany and France, arrived at the Broken Chair, the square in front of Palais des Nations, the seat of UN, where rights activists meet to raise key international human rights issues. This time, India’s human rights violations in Kashmir came in sharp focus. The echo of slogans in English could be heard in the chambers of UN Human Rights Council.
“This was a Kashmir Day in Geneva,” said Altaf Hussain Wani from Indian-occupied Kashmir. Wani is leading a Kashmir Delegation to the 36th session of UNHRC.
The slogans in English language attracted passers-by. “Terrorist, Terrorist, Modi Terrorist” and “One Slogan, One Track, Go India, Go Back” were two of the top slogans raised at the occasion. Interestingly, some young Indian citizens briefly joined the protest and appeared keen to raise the slogan against Indian PM Modi.
Before the protest in front of the UN, an exhibition of pictures taken by photographers of international news agencies based in Indian-occupied Kashmir was held at the Geneva Press Club. Every picture, with its original caption and description, adorned the walls of the main hall of at the club.
Senior politicians from Azad (Free) Kashmir, Indian-occupied Kashmir, the UK and Pakistan participated.
This included Speaker AJK Assembly Shah Ghulam Qadir, former AJK minister Chaudhry Pervez Ashraf, Leader of Opposition in AJK Assembly Chaudhry Mohammad Yasin, Leader of Opposition, Lord Nazir Ahmed of UK, Convener APHC Syed Faiz Naqshbandi, and Senator Samina Raheel Qazi.
A Kashmir Delegation representing both parts of the disputed region is in Geneva to participate in the 36th session of UN Human Rights Council. For the first time in decades, Jammu and Kashmir has become a top agenda item in the policy statement of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights. The OHCHR has included Kashmir in the list of other urgent international conflicts, like Syria and Ukraine.
Kashmir Delegation is led by Altaf Hussain Wani, and includes Mrs. Shamim Shawl from Srinagar, Sardar Amjad Yousef from AJK, Pervez Ahmad Shah Advocate, Hassan Banna, APHC Convener Faiz Naqshbandi, Prof. Shagufta Ashraf, and Ahmed Quraishi.
YFK–International Kashmir Lobby Group (Youth Forum For Kashmir) is a non-partisan, international non-governmental organization, working for the peaceful resolution of Kashmir Conflict in accordance with United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions.
1. Respect and honour all human beings irrespective of their religion, colour, race, sex, language, status, property, birth, profession/job and so on. [17:70]
2. Talk straight, to the point, without any ambiguity or deception. [33:70]
3. Choose best words to speak and say them in the best possible way. [17:53, 2:83]
4. Do not shout. Speak politely keeping your voice low. [31:19]
5. Always speak the truth. Shun words that are deceitful and ostentatious. [22:30]
6. Do not confound truth with falsehood. [2:42]
7. Say with your mouth what is in your heart. [3:167]
8. Speak in a civilized manner in a language that is recognized by the society and is commonly used. [4:5]
9. When you voice an opinion, be just, even if it is against a relative. [6:152]
10. Do not be a bragging boaster. [31:18]
11. Do not talk, listen or do anything vain. [23:3, 28:55]
12. Do not participate in any paltry. If you pass near a futile play, then pass by with dignity. [25:72]
13. Do not verge upon any immodesty or lewdness whether surreptitious or overt. [6:151]
14. If unintentionally, any misconduct occurs by you, then correct yourself expeditiously. [3:135].
15. Do not be contemptuous or arrogant with people. [31:18]
16. Do not walk haughtily or with conceit. [17:37, 31:18]
17. Be moderate in thy pace. [31:19]
18. Walk with humility and sedateness. [25:63]
19. Keep your gazes lowered devoid of any lecherous leers and salacious stares. [24:30-31, 40:19].
20. If you do not have complete knowledge about anything, better keep your mouth shut. You might think that speaking something without full knowledge is a trivial matter but it might have grave consequences. [24:15-16]
21. When you hear something malicious about someone, keep a favourable view about him/her until you attain full knowledge about the matter. Consider others innocent until they are proven guilty with solid and truthful evidence. [24:12-13]
22. Ascertain the truth of any news, lest you smite someone in ignorance and afterwards repent of what you did. [49:6]
23. Do not follow blindly any information of which you have no direct knowledge. (Using your faculties of perception and conception) you must verify it for yourself. In the Court of your Lord, you will be held accountable for your hearing, sight, and the faculty of reasoning. [17:36].
24. Never think that you have reached the final stage of knowledge and nobody knows more than yourself. Remember! Above everyone endowed with knowledge is another endowed with more knowledge. [12:76].
25. The believers are but a single Brotherhood. Live like members of one family, brothers and sisters unto one another. [49:10]
26. Do not make mockery of others or ridicule others. [49:11]
27. Do not defame others. [49:11]
28. Do not insult others by nicknames. [49:11]
29. Avoid suspicion and guesswork. Suspicion and guesswork might deplete your communal energy. [49:12]
30. Spy not upon one another. [49:12]
31. Do not back bite one another. [49:12]
32. When you meet each other, offer good wishes and blessings for safety. One who conveys to you a message of safety and security and also when a courteous greeting is offered to you, meet it with a greeting still more courteous or (at least) of equal courtesy. [4:86]
33. When you enter your own home or the home of somebody else, compliment the inmates. [24:61]
34. Do not enter houses other than your own until you have sought permission; and then greet the inmates and wish them a life of blessing, purity and pleasure [24:27]
35. Treat kindly, your parents, relatives, the orphans and those who have been left alone in the society,. [4:36]
36. Take care of the needy, the disabled, those whose hard earned income is insufficient to meet their needs and those whose businesses have stalled and those who have lost their jobs. (4:36)
37. Treat kindly your related neighbours and unrelated neighbours, companions by your side in public gatherings, or public transportation. [4:36]
38. Be generous to the needy wayfarer, the homeless son of the street, and the one who reaches you in a destitute condition. [4:36]
39. Be nice to people who work under your care. [4:36]
40. Do not follow up what you have given to others to afflict them with reminders of your generosity. [2:262].
41. Do not expect a return for your good behaviour, not even thanks. [76:9]
42. Cooperate with one another in good deeds and do not cooperate with others in evil and bad matters. [5:2]
43. Do not try to impress people on account of self-proclaimed virtues. [53:32]
44. You should enjoin right conduct on others but mend your own ways first. Actions speak louder than words. You must first practice good deeds yourself, then preach. [2:44]
45. Correct yourself and your families first [before trying to correct others]. [66:6]
46. Pardon gracefully if anyone among you who commits a bad deed out of ignorance, and then repents and amends. [6:54, 3:134]
47. Divert and sublimate your anger and potentially virulent emotions to creative energy, and become a source of tranquillity and comfort to people. [3:134]
48. Call people to the Way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful exhortation. Reason with them most decently. [16:125]
49. Leave to themselves those who do not give any importance to the Divine code and have adopted and consider it as mere play and amusement. [6:70]
50. Sit not in the company of those who ridicule Divine Law unless they engage in some other conversation. [4:140]
51. Do not be jealous of those who are blessed. [4:54]
52. In your collective life, make room for others. [58:11]
53. When invited to dine, go at the appointed time. Do not arrive too early to wait for the preparation of meal or linger after eating to engage in bootless babble. Such things may cause inconvenience to the host. [33:53]
54. Eat and drink [what is lawful] in moderation. [7:31].
55. Do not squander your wealth senselessly. [17:26]
56. Fulfil your promises and commitments. [17:34]
57. Keep yourself clean and pure. [9/108, 4:43, 5:6].
58. Dress-up in agreeable attire and adorn yourself with exquisite character from inside out. [7:26]
59. Seek your provision only by fair endeavour. [29:17, 2:188]
60. Do not devour the wealth and property of others unjustly, nor bribe the officials or the judges to deprive others of their possessions. [2:188]
On September 18, Ars Technica reports, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published a new specification recommendation, Encrypted Media Extensions. The recommendation, which natively implements a “Digital Rights Management” scheme in web browsers, marks a giant step backward for user freedom and an “open” World Wide Web.
W3C is the Web’s “international standards organization.” Simply put, its recommendations are the reason you can load almost any web page in almost any browser and expect to see the same things on your screen. When W3C recommends something, it’s a lead pipe cinch that all the major browser creators will incorporate that recommendation in their products ASAP.
In this case, W3C’s recommendation is the equivalent of a printing standards body deciding that henceforth printing presses should only emboss cuneiform characters in clay tablets. That is, it calls for universal adoption of an obsolete — to the point of silliness — way of doing things.
The purpose of Digital Rights Management is to allow creators to control the use of, and prevent the copying of, “intellectual property” — in the form of copyrighted informational works or proprietary hardware creations — after its original sale.
The 30-odd year history of DRM is one of consumer dissatisfaction and sequential failure. Every DRM scheme is broken sooner or later (usually sooner), after playing hob with purchasers’ ability to actually make use of the products they’ve bought. Lately, in addition to trying to improve DRM, Big Content and Big Manufacturing have begun asking politicians to criminalize cracking of DRM. That’s not going to work either. The only winners in the DRM saga will be the companies which drop the whole idea and come up with revenue models that don’t require them to screw their customers in the name of preventing copying and modification. The false hope of EME puts off that day.
Until the Encrypted Media Extensions scheme is broken in some fundamental way (a way that can’t be fixed with browser updates to the EME code itself), Internet users are going to increasingly find themselves frustrated in copying material they own between their devices, making archival copies, or grabbing snippets under the “fair use” provisions of copyright law.
EME has also already produced a gigantic breach in trust within W3C itself. As Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out (in an open letter announcing EFF’s resignation from the body), “W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus,” yet EME was imposed on behalf of Big Content and over many objections by the body’s director, Tim Berners-Lee, and adopted by a vote of less than 60%. Berners-Lee and the proponents of DRM may well have permanently wrecked W3C’s reputation as a trustworthy creator and evaluator of standards for the Web.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
The Washington Post reports that Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government has rescinded its offer of a visiting fellowship to whistle-blower Chelsea Manning.
Following tantrums from Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo (who withdrew from a planned speech) and Michael Morell, a former CIA deputy director (who resigned his own fellowship at the school), Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf issued a statement calling the invitation a “mistake” and denying any intent to “honor [Manning] in any way or to endorse any of her words or deeds.”
Harvard is a private university (to the extent possible in a mixed economy featuring various sorts of government funding for students, researchers, etc.). Its leaders are entitled to discriminate as they wish regarding faculty and curriculum. But the Kennedy School’s action and Elmendorf’s statement are a stain on the nearly 400-year-old university’s honor.
A ping on the ol’ irony meter:
Among those who contend that the assassination of JFK was not the act of a lone gunman, the CIA tends to move to center stage as the likely center of a conspiracy to kill the president. While Kennedy’s intent to thwart the military-industrial complex in general and the CIA in particular may be exaggerated, he nonetheless enjoys a posthumous reputation for attempting to rein the agency in.
Now, more than half a century later, the school that bears his name kowtows to that same CIA over what Julian Assange of WikiLeaks accurately deems a “cry-bully complaint” from Pompeo and Morell. It’s sickening.
Chelsea Manning is an American hero who, after an illegally long pre-trial detention and a show trial lacking even the pretense of due process, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for exposing the crimes committed by numerous actors within the US government. Former president Barack Obama deserves plaudits for his decision to commute her sentence, and condemnation for not going further with a full pardon, lavish financial compensation for the wrongs done her, and an apology and thanks for services rendered on behalf of of a grateful nation.
The Kennedy School’s motto is “ask what you can do,” presumably as excerpted from JFK’s inaugural address: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”
Chelsea Manning asked herself what she could do for her country and for the freedom of man. She then proceeded to act — at great personal cost to herself — on the answers she found to that question. No person on the Kennedy School’s current list of visiting fellows is even close to as qualified as Manning to teach the mission implied by the school’s motto. Douglas W. Elmendorf’s denial of intent to honor Manning or endorse her deeds is a confession that appeasing reprobates like Pompeo and Morell comes before doing the right thing for his students.
Shame on Harvard.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
UNITED NATIONS, GENEVA—UN’s top human rights official has elevated Kashmir Conflict to the top of the international agenda. He did this for the fourth time in his policy statement at the inauguration of the 36th session of UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva this week.
Kashmir Conflict was all but ignored and neglected at UN forums despite remaining on Security Council’s agenda for the past nearly seven decades.
This changed in September 2016, when Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, added Kashmir to the list of international conflicts that require urgent attention like Syria and Ukraine.
In September 2016, and then March, June and now September 2017, Al-Hussein made Jammu and Kashmir an integral part of his policy statement at the start of every session of UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Policymakers and human rights activists see the Council as a testing ground for emerging issues in the world today.
On September 11, High Commissioner Zeid Al-Hussein did it for the fourth time, listing Kashmir in his policy statement along with other pressing international conflicts.
In this statement, Al-Hussein took on both India and Pakistan regarding Kashmir:
“I regret the reluctance of both India and Pakistan to engage with my Office on the human rights concerns I have raised in recent months. This includes their failure to grant access to Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) to verify the worrying developments that continue to be reported there. In the absence of such access, my Office is undertaking remote monitoring of the human rights situation in Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control, with a view to making the findings public in the near future.”
This type of engagement by top UN official on Kashmir is unprecedented in recent years. And it is a welcome development.
“The world is beginning to rediscover Kashmir,” said Ahmed Quraishi, Executive Director of YFK–International Kashmir Lobby Group. “As human rights defenders, we thank Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, and the entire team of human rights mechanisms for making this happen. This is a win for justice and fair play.”
Quraishi believes Azad (Free) Kashmir, which is Pakistan-administered, should prepare itself and its people for more international scrutiny.
“We in Azad Kashmir need to be ready for more international interest as the UN starts focusing on what Indian occupation authorities are doing in the Kashmir region under its control,” he said.
This is a key point in today’s Kashmir advocacy: the focus must remain on the blatant human rights violations in Kashmir in the territory occupied by India since 1947. Trade and business interests of key world powers should not distract from this.
Altaf Hussein Wani, from Indian-occupied Kashmir, currently leading the Kashmir Delegation to UNHRC’s 36th session, believes the inherent indigenous and peaceful nature of Kashmir freedom movement won the hearts of people around the world, including the officials at UN.
“Kashmiris faced disinformation and the propaganda machine of a big country. They succeeded in breaking through the siege and conveying their message to the world,” Wani said.
While High Commissioner Al-Hussein has complained against both India and Pakistan, Islamabad has made it clear it welcomes a UN fact-finding mission as long as India allows one inside the Kashmir territory it occupies.
“Nearly half-million soldiers, the worst treatment of civilians, disappearances, rape as a tool of war, all of this is the hallmark of Indian control over Kashmir,” said Sardar Amjad Youssef Khan, Executive Director of Kashmir Institute of International Relations (KIIR).
“There’s little comparison between Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir. But even then, UN fact-finding teams should visit AJK but politics should not distract them from the massive rights violations by India in Kashmir,” Khan said.
YFK–International Kashmir Lobby Group (Youth Forum For Kashmir) is a non-partisan, international non-governmental organization, working for the peaceful resolution of Kashmir Conflict in accordance with United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions.
Muslims are being violently attacked and persecuted in an unacceptable and unforgivable act of ethnic cleansing and mass murder in Burma (Myanmar). Plight of Rohingya Muslims can only be compared to persecution of Ashkenazi Jews by the Nazis.
Despite Dalai Lama’s statement in which he supported Rohingya Muslims, Buddhist extremists continue the genocide. All Buddhists don’t need to be apologetic on the acts of few, just like Muslims don’t have to be apologetic about the acts of some radical extremists. However it is of significance that important figures like Dalai Lama take a strong stance on Rohingya Muslims, much like how Muslim world has distanced itself from almost all terror groups.
Inaction of International community in general and OIC members (Muslim World) in specific is criminal. Burmese government cannot be compared to Nazis as far the military power is concerned, nor is there any economic resemblance between the two.
First we need to understand the internal conflicts of Burma. It is a little less complicated then the early 20th century Balkans.
British Burma used to be one of the richest countries in Asia, attracting many investors, visitors and immigrants alike. Sadly the country never regained its status after the brief Japanese occupation in World War 2 and its economic woes continue today. During the Japanese occupation, almost all foreigners walked to British India through the inhospitable jungle and marshes of Burma like Rohingya do today. Famous Urdu writer A. Hameed was one of them. He recounted the journey in one of his books; it is horrifying to say the least. The British formally annexed Burma and made it their colony in 1888. Until 1937 it was part of British India. East India Company practically ran it decades before that.
It appears British promised independence to almost all the parties demanding plebiscite today, before the victorious yet slowly crumbling empire abandoned them all and left abruptly in 1948. We all know Lord Mountbatten was good at it.
One can only wonder in disgust that how many more decades it would take for the wounds left by colonialism to heal. It is a country divided, at civil war since 1948, host to indigenous movements, proxies and spies of all the international and regional powers. For example, United Wa State Army is the de facto ruler of Wa State (officially unrecognised state in the east). They defeated the communist insurgency, are involved in drug trafficking and nominally (though officially) recognise the sovereignty of Yangon (or Rangoon).
Then there is Kachin state. Since independence of Burma they have been fighting for their independence as well. About 2/3rd of people of Kachin ethnicity are Christians.
Their second largest insurgency is in Kayah state. Third largest is in Kayan state. Fourth is in Rakhine and fifth in Shan state. There are numerous other movements in Burma that keep Yangon occupied from time to time.
We have to understand what is wrong with Burma? To understand that we need to open the history books.
Basically it’s a study of city states occasionally coming under the influence of empires that unified the region at times. The region fell into East India Company which handed it over to the British Crown who created British Burma.
Why are the Rohingya being killed, raped and exiled? Probably because they are the weakest people in Burma. What’s happening in Burma today would haunt regional powers in the future. It is not possible that such gross injustice would go unpunished. History has its way of balancing things.
Aristotle put forward a belief in physics called “horror vacui”, which means Nature abhors vacuum. It is inevitable that someone would eventually help the Rohingya. An Iraq like situation would be a disaster. A little arm twisting by OIC players would stop the massacre. I mean, what’s a few billion dollars for Iran and Saudis? Loyalties of officials and people of influence in the region are infamous for being flexible since the days of axis of evil. They might not have to do much, just grease some palms. Worth a try isn’t it? Taking refugees is a temporary solution. Although it must be done and their well-being should be insured. It is important that they have a right to return and live as they see fit in Arakan/Rakhine and it should not be negotiable.
There are three likely scenarios from here:
Usually destabilisation of a Balkanised state is a matter of time, unless state acts fast, in good faith, in right direction, with precision and with force. It is inevitable that future conflicts will spill over to neighbouring countries. A course correction in Rangoon needs to occur and soon.
UNITED NATIONS, GENEVA—Representatives of international powers at the United Nations in Geneva witnessed an interesting moment during the 36th session of UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) when the top diplomat from Venezuela and representatives from Azad and Indian-occupied Kashmir met in front of the full glare of international community.
The foreign minister of Venezuela stole the show during the Council session. Young and dynamic, Mr. Jorge Arreaza walked into the hall to defend his country in the face of criticism by the UN on how his government is handling the opposition and constitutional reforms.
As he left, he ran into Sardar Amjad Youssef Khan from Azad Kashmir, and Syed Faiz Naqshbandi from Srinagar. Khan and Naqshbandi are attending the UNHRC session as part of a Kashmir Delegation, lobbying the world on the situation in disputed region.
“Foreign Minister Arreaza was gracious. He met us and gave us a few minutes from his schedule to discuss Kashmir,” Naqshbandi said.
“Venezuela has supported Kashmir in the past,” Sardar Amjad said, adding that he and his colleague from the Indian-controlled part wanted to thank FM Arreaza for Venezuela’s support for the freedom struggle in the past.
Both Naqshbandi and Khan did not elaborate on what the Venezuelan foreign minister said.
The United Nations has made history by breaking its decades-long silence on Kashmir in September 2017. The Kashmir Conflict is now part of the top policy agenda of the UN Human Rights Council, whose 36th session is currently underway in Geneva. A Kashmir Delegation is attending the session. Its members are drawn from Azad (Free) Kashmir and the Indian-occupied part.
YFK–International Kashmir Lobby Group (Youth Forum For Kashmir) is a non-partisan, international non-governmental organization, working for the peaceful resolution of Kashmir Conflict in accordance with United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions.
UNITED NATIONS, GENEVA—Kashmiri human rights defenders from Azad and Indian-occupied territories urged India and Pakistan to open the disputed territory to international investigators.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein had made UN history of some sorts when he broke international silence a year ago and included Kashmir in the top annual human rights agenda of United Nations. But in the four sessions of UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) since September 2016 and until September 2017, the High Commissioner has complained that New Delhi and Islamabad have not given access to UN investigators who want to assess the human rights situation on both sides of the temporary ceasefire line in Kashmir known as Line of Control (LoC).
Pakistan has said it is ready to welcome a UN team in Azad Kashmir when a similar team lands in the Indian-occupied territory.
Kashmiri activists urged both countries to comply with UN request but emphasized how massive and glaring human rights violations are concentrated in the territory under Indian army occupation.
Leading the charge was Syed Faiz Naqshbandi, Convener of All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), the umbrella organization of pro-freedom political parties in Indian-occupied Kashmir.
“There is grim situation of human rights in Indian occupied Jammu & Kashmir,” Naqshbandi said, adding, “where on the one hand, India does not allow UN fact finding team to visit Kashmir as said by the High Commissioner for Human Rights and on the other, the armed forces of India enjoy impunity Confession before a police officer stands declared a valid confession in the Indian Evidence Act.”
Naqshbandi raised the issue of the illegal detention of APHC leadership Mirwaiz Dr. Umar Farooq, Syed Ali Shah Gillani, and Yasin Malik.
Mrs. Shamim Shawl, senior women’s leader at APHC, in her statement in front of High Commissioner Zeid Al-Hussein, welcomed the High Commissioner’s statements where “Indian and Pakistan were asked to give access to fact finding missions to ascertain the human rights situations on the both sides of line of control.”
Mrs. Shawl praised UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for singling out India on treatment of minorities. “My organization is also thankful to the office of the high commissioner for showing its dismay over the rise of intolerance towards religious and other minorities in India,” she said.
Senior APHC leader Parvez Ahmad Shah Advocate welcomed UN Human Rights Council’s emphasis on sending fact-finding missions to AJK and IOK. “My organization supports the high commissioners continued demand from Indian and Pakistani governments for sending fact finding missions on both sides of Line of Control.”
“During the recent update,” Shah said, “the high commissioner has again emphasized for sending missions. The states must cooperate with the UN procedures and mandate holders to unfold the truth which will on one hand expose the claims of the states for the wrongdoings and on the other hand will assist in satisfying the victims to know the reality and the fate of their loved ones especially the enforcedly disappeared persons in Jammu and Kashmir.”
Prof. Shagufta Ashraf, from AJK, welcomed UN decision to send fact-finding teams to AJK and IOK. “I welcomed the statements made by High Commissioner in last 2 consecutive HRC’s session when both the governments of India and Pakistan were being asked to give access to fact finding missions to ascertain the human rights situations on the both sides of Line of Control.”
Recalling India’s refusal to grant access to its team, Ashraf welcomed UN’s decision to create a remote monitoring mechanism for rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir. “In such circumstances, Mr. President, It is imperative and I appreciate that his office is undertaking remote monitoring of the human rights situation in Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control to expose the real face of occupation forces who have been running slaughtering machine in J&K for decades,” Ashraf said.
Quoting an expression being used at the UN on Burma, Ashraf said the situation in Indian-occupied Kashmir “seems a textbook example of systematic genocide.”
YFK–International Kashmir Lobby Group (Youth Forum For Kashmir) is a non-partisan, international non-governmental organization, working for the peaceful resolution of Kashmir Conflict in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSC).
Jinnah never claimed to be the sole spokesman of his nation. His lifelong stance was that the sole representative of the Muslim nation was All-India Muslim League (and later its off-shoot in the new state). In April 1946, he also took the pledge of loyalty to the League just like ordinary Muslims.
The idea that he was the sole spokesman of his nation seems to have originated in the contempt in which his nation was held by the Indian nationalists and some of their foreign masters.
Gandhi described the Indian Muslims as a batch of converts, whose claim to be a nation seemed preposterous to him. Likewise, Lord Mountbatten felt offended when Jinnah refused to accept his partition plan without consulting the party. ‘I am not the Muslim League,’ said Jinnah. The Viceroy replied rudely, ‘Don’t tell me that. You can try and tell the world that. But please don’t try to kid yourself that I don’t know who’s who and what’s what in the Muslim League.’ Recalling this dialogue many years later, he insisted that Jinnah ‘was the Muslim League and what he said, they did.’
Arrogance might have prevented the British aristocrat from conceding that Muslims could also have a political organization but it is difficult to understand why Stanley Wolpert also holds the same belief. Sir Stafford Cripps noted that Jinnah refused to go against the dictates of his party because ‘he was not his own master’. In Jinnah of Pakistan, Wolpert calls it ‘a singular confession for Jinnah, yet one he knew would appeal to Cripps.’ By no means was it ‘a singular confession’ but it seems that Wolpert got carried away by an urge to suggest that a genuine political organization was part of Cripps’ background but not of Jinnah’s.
The idea remains the central theme in the biography written by Wolpert but forms the very title of the book written by Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman. ‘Jinnah sought to be recognised as the sole spokesman of Indian Muslims,’ she writes, in stark contradiction to Jinnah’s lifelong stance. A scholar like her is perhaps within her rights in interpreting facts according to her perception but we would fail to see the bigger picture if we mistake that interpretation, no matter how well-presented, as fact.
The bigger picture here is the party Jinnah belonged to and the reason behind his calling it the sole representative of the nation.
The Washington Post reports that US president Donald Trump and Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “have agreed to pursue a deal that would permanently remove the requirement that Congress repeatedly raise the debt ceiling.”
That must be a bitter pill to swallow for those who thought they were electing an “anti-establishment” president to “drain the swamp” in Washington, but it should be no surprise. After all, Trump built his business career on going into debt up to his neck, taking a profit when things worked out, and leaving his partners holding the bankruptcy bag when they didn’t.
The political establishment’s way of handling the debt ceiling is for all of the allegedly competing sides to rattle sabers and threaten a fake “government shutdown” if they don’t get their way. Then, before such a “shutdown” (or after a few days of one), the politicians get together to “responsibly” and “reluctantly” authorize a bigger line of credit for themselves, with you named as guarantor whether you like it or not.
In keeping with his authoritarian dislike of red tape that restricts government from doing anything it might take a notion to do, and in fine establishment style, Trump intends to do away with the theatrics. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders characterizes the Trump/Schumer proposal as “a more permanent solution to the debt ceiling.” By which she means that in the future, no one on Capitol Hill or at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will even bother to put on a burlesque of fiscal responsibility. Any time the credit card is about to max out, the limit will just go up automatically.
But of course it isn’t quite that simple.
The politicians’ debt (they call it the “national” debt in hopes that the rest of us will go along with the fiction that WE borrowed the money and are obligated to pay it back) will soon top $20 trillion. The entire US Gross Domestic Product for 2017, if seized and liquidated for the purpose of paying down that debt, would not quite completely pay it off.
That debt is never going to be repaid in full. In fact, the Trump/Schumer plan is an open statement of intent to never even begin paying it down. The politicians intend to keep on spending more than they take in and borrowing the difference until nobody’s willing to loan money to them anymore.
The US national debt will, sooner or later, be defaulted on. That will damage the American economy badly. But the sooner it’s done, the less the damage will be. If Trump was really an anti-establishment president, he’d veto any attempt to raise the debt ceiling, repudiate the existing debt, and demand a balanced budget from Congress.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY
For example, for some reason I get periodic emails (I think he’s a LinkedIn connection or something) from a guy named Michael Likosky, who’s written a bunch of breathless think pieces at HuffPo on “public-private partnerships” in infrastructure. The two main recurring points in all his op-eds are that 1) Trump is going to do great things for infrastructure, and 2) public-private partnerships are the greatest thing since Jesus. Likosky is the chief infrastructure specialist at 32 Advisers, a high-priced consulting firm made up of former high-profile economic policy wonks like Austan Goolsbee, that “identifies market opportunities” resulting from “the intersection of the economy with public policy.” In other words, they advise folks who can afford their premium rates how to get rich off corporate welfare. It’s obvious why this gang of parasites would be enthusiastic about the idea of enormous streams of guaranteed revenue flowing directly into the coffers of transnational corporations.
Reason, the magazine of “free minds and free markets,” is also unsurprisingly bullish on the idea of public-private partnerships. Reason periodically hand-waves its opposition to something it calls “crony capitalism,” but gives no indication of having any coherent definition of crony capitalism aside from it being a category that includes the Export-Import Bank, publicly financed sports stadiums and apparently not much else. If the phrase “crony capitalism” is to have any substantive content at all, “public-private partnerships” sums up what it’s about as well as anything. But — as with “school choice” (aka charter school cronyism) — Reason loves anything that involves contracting government functions out to for-profit corporations. Something of their attitude towards infrastructure partnerships can be gleaned by Nick Gillespie’s title, “The Huge Promise of Trump’s ‘Infrastructure Week'”. For Gillespie, “public-private partnerships” don’t have much of a downside. They’re a way to “successfully upgrade and operate roads, bridges, and more with little or no tax dollars being spent.”
It’s amusing that both Likosky and Gillespie frame such partnerships as “a way to get politics out of infrastructure” and eliminate the corruption of old-time patronage, considering that Trump’s private wheeling and dealing with potential financiers resemble nothing so much as Vernon Parrington’s “Great Barbecue.” The Saudi royal family’s sovereign wealth investment fund has teamed up with Blackstone (which stands to be a major player in running privatized infrastructure) to build a “war chest” of $40 billion (Blackstone has also lent Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, $400 million since 2013). As characterized by Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, “Donald Trump brokering a deal between Saudi royalty and private equity magnates associated with both the Republican and Democratic Party is about as much corruption and self-dealing as can be squeezed into a single sentence”.1
According to Gillespie, things like “asset recycling” (in which corporations lease infrastructure long-term in return for an up-front payment, and then recoup their investment through tolls and user fees) will be done in an entirely above-board manner because public authorities must approve rate increases. Considering the shady history of the companies that actually administer privatized infrastructure, that strikes me as somewhat less than realistic. For example Transurban, a company that operates tolls in the Washington Beltway, has a reputation for “price gouging and predatory debt collection practices”: “In one lawsuit, a driver claimed that she was charged $3,413.75 for unpaid tolls, fees, and fines after Transurban failed to accept her initial payment for $104.15 for missing tolls on the Beltway toll lanes”.2
Supporters of the “public-private partnership” approach, perhaps understanding that the quickest way to con someone is to appeal to their greed, frame it as using a relatively small amount of taxpayer money to leverage much larger investments from the private sector. But as Robert Reich shows, it’s really just the opposite. Besides the $200 billion in direct government spending that right-wing propagandists acknowledge, Trump’s trial balloon would also provide $800 billion in tax incentives. That means that “for every dollar developers put into a project, they’d actually pay only 18 cents – after tax credits – and taxpayers would contribute the other 82 cents through their tax dollars.”3
That corresponds exactly with a broader assessment of public-private infrastructure partnerships by Nicholas Hildyard of The Corner. His book Licensed Larceny: Infrastructure, financial extraction and the Global South is an extremely detailed study of the recent global trend towards such “public-private” financing of infrastructure. Hildyard showed that most such projects follow the same “socialized cost, privatized profit” model Reich ascribed to Trump’s infrastructure plan. On a global scale, just like in Trump’s proposal, the privatized infrastructure plans are sold as a way to leverage private investment at little cost to taxpayers, when the truth is just the opposite — the public foots most of the bill, and the private “partner” gets guaranteed returns. And it’s all about the guarantee (from my review of Hildyard):
And private investors are quite clear that they have no interest in projects without guaranteed rights of return. As one investment management firm director put it, “You could have a pipeline that you don’t want to touch because there are are no contractual rights on it and it is completely market-exposed to price.” Remember the claim in all that cheerleading propaganda for “our free enterprise system” that says “profit is the reward for risk”? No. The state exists to absorb risk, shield capital from it, and guarantee profit without risk.
That a publication like Reason celebrates this kind of thing says everything about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of right-libertarianism. It’s an ideology that claims to oppose “crony capitalism,” and periodically repeats treacly platitudes that “libertarianism is pro-market, not pro-business.” But it’s a lie. Right-libertarianism is very much in favor of most real-world examples of crony capitalism, and implicitly identifies “the market” with the interests of business.
It’s another example of the way neoliberal ideology keeps relentlessly returning its focus to the individual, and diverting attention from the structural. Criticizing “crony capitalism” is fine, so long as it’s a particular case of government promoting the interests of one company over another, or acting in collusion with a specific individual like Elon Musk. But when an entire government function like education or highways is farmed out to private industry, operating within a web of protections and subsidies, with guaranteed profit to a parasitic class of corporate management and investors in addition to government bureaucrats, that’s “free market reform.”
This structural model of farming out government functions to private capital, at public expense and with guaranteed private profit, and within a web of state-enforced monopolies and legal protections, is at the heart of what’s called “free market reform” under neoliberalism. The state is structurally central to all neoliberal models of “free market reform”; capitalism is just as dependent on the state for accumulation and realization of returns, under the Reagan-Thatcher model, as it always has been. Any pretense of reducing the role of state in capitalism is a lie. It is impossible to smash the state without, as an immediate consequence, smashing capitalism along with it.
Lesotho couldn’t be overpopulated, Bailey says, because it’s got a far lower population density per square mile than a long string of European countries he reels off. Nope, it’s not overpopulation — after all, Britain doubled its population from 1861 to 1901, while increasing real per capita GDP 70%. The real problem: Lesotho is poor because it doesn’t have as much capitalism as those European countries he listed.
Never mind that Great Britain was a colonial power that was sucking wealth out of African countries like a black hole during that time period, continued doing so for decades more afterward, and that British capital continues doing so to this day. Never mind that the colonial authorities in British Africa (along with French, Portuguese, Belgian, etc., etc. Africa) looted the mineral resources of the continent and worked the mines with forced labor, or gave much of Africa’s arable land to settlers who then turned the evicted peasants into hired labor on their own land. Never mind that much of these looted resources are still in the hands of Western capital, and that in the post-colonial era, the West props up authoritarian regimes that make sure all that Western capital remains securely in control of all that looted wealth. Never mind that Western capital continues to extract $2 trillion every single year from the Global South over and above what it contributes in aid (“Same Colonial Wealth Extraction, Different Name,” C4SS, Feb. 17).
Holy fallacy of composition, Batman! Next Bailey will be arguing that what mugging victims need is more robbery — just look at how well those robbers are doing!
The article is filled with other standard Ron Bailey nonsense. He makes a great deal of the Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom index and its correlation with per capita GDP. The index is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a right-wing hack outfit like the Heritage Foundation, and hence exactly the kind of thing whose authority you’d expect Bailey to appeal to. For Heritage, “economic freedom” means the freedom of the propertied and employing class to extract rent from everybody else — period. “Intellectual property” rights — which are nothing but the right to restrict other people from doing things unless they pay you tribute — figure highly in their index of security of property. So does legal protection of landed oligarchies and Western mining companies in title to the resources they stole from conquered, colonized and enslaved populations. Its standards of “labor freedom” entirely concern the freedom of employers relative to employees, and not vice versa. The more “flexible” labor is — i.e. the more absolutely it’s stripped of bargaining power — the better.
The correlation of this “economic freedom” [sic] with per capita GDP becomes more meaningless still when you subject per capita GDP itself to critical scrutiny. Despite all his fetishizing of the concept, Bailey has never addressed the role of colonial and neo-colonial expropriation in increasing nominal GDP in the Global South, by evicting subsistence cultivators who were previously supporting their families on their own land, and turning them into wage laborers forced to earn the money to buy food in the cash nexus. Per capita measures of income and wealth are meaningless without reference to distribution; put Bill Gates in a room with seventy other people, and on average they’re all billionaires.
Put all this together, and you’ve got neoliberal apologetics on the level of a second-rate Thomas Friedman— but without the big travel budget.
To be charitable, I don’t think Bailey himself realizes what twaddle this all is. He’s a guy who thinks in cliches but means well. But regardless of his intent, he’s an advocate, not for freedom, but for power.
]]>“Democracy disrupts this balance and places society under the unaccountable domain of community. An individual’s means of survival thus came to depend entirely on one’s reputation with one’s neighbours. It is, as Proudhon said, the rule of all by all, which includes every individual involved in that sum.
It is under this condition that Proudhon proclaimed that community, too, is theft. Yet never, in any of his works, did he declare that community is liberty. Despite the fact that, just as he famously declared that property is theft, he also declared property to be liberty. Community was just much a problem, an enigma, as property itself….
“Property is liberty” when labour controls its own product and individuals are sovereign over their means of survival. This is a counterbalance to the absolutist domain of community. If this dimension of property becomes a totalizing force, the regime of liberty suffers again.
We can say that pure democracy threatens to make the domain of community universal, while capitalism likewise threatens to make the domain of property universal. Under both regimes, liberty suffers. Anarchy is neither capitalism nor communism. It is self-government; the absolute sovereignty of the individual.
We should not desire a society where every good is bought and sold under the cash nexus. Neither should we desire a society where one’s access to resources is determined by one’s neighbour’s good will.
This dichotomy needs a resolution, and that resolution is Proudhonian mutualism….
Critical to the survival of anarchy is mutualism: the balance of property and community. The market cannot be free without the commons, and the commons cannot be free without the market.”
The commons, in my opinion, is itself an institution for synthesizing community with liberty. It is a sort of platform, outside the realm of state politics. Unconditional equal access rights to the commons amount to inalienable control over one’s livelihood.
It may be objected that one’s right of access to the commons depends on the goodwill of one’s neighbors. But by that standard, there is no form of possession or property right that does not depend on the willingness of neighbors to recognize and enforce. Any form of organization in an anarchist society ultimately assumes that a majority of the community are of good will and good faith, and willing to adhere to agreed-upon rules. In fact the philosophy of anarchism itself juxtaposes certain assumptions about human nature – the ability of human beings to organize society around peaceful agreement – against the Hobbesian assumption that a state is necessary to impose peace and order.
I think that what Gabriel wants to avoid is “politics” in the sense of one’s rights and livelihood being constantly imperiled by majoritarian politics. We can achieve this by substituting another kind of democracy – organized around the commons, and the transformation of the state into a networked platform – that amounts to the neutral and routinized “administration of things.” Such commons governance is arguably at least as automatic and apolitical as routinized enforcement of property claims in a court system.
In “Democracy, Anarchism, & Freedom,” Wayne Price argues that “anarchism is democracy without the state”; i.e., that “anarchism is the most extreme, radical, form of democracy”:
“I see both “democracy” and “anarchism” as requiring decision-making by the people, from the bottom-up, through cooperation, clashes of opinion, social experimentation, and group intelligence.
But “democracy” means collective decision-making. It does not apply to matters which are of individual or minority concern only, such as individual sexual orientation, religion, or artistic taste. Free choice should rule here, whatever the majority thinks.”
And unlike bourgeois or capitalist democracy, those like Wayne who see anarchism as the ultimate in democracy advocate democratic control over the economy (“[f]or example, a federation of worker-run industries, consumer co-ops, and collective communes”).
He also notes that even professed “anti-democratic” anarchists nevertheless:
“…advocate “self-rule,” “self-governing,” and “self-management.” These terms are no different than “direct democracy” and “participatory democracy.”
If everyone is involved in governing (participatory democracy), then there is no government—no special institution over society which rules people. Anarchists are not against all social coordination, community decision-making, and protection of the people. They are generally for some sort of association of workplace committees and neighborhood assemblies. They are for the replacement of the police and military by an armed people (a democratic militia, so long as that is necessary). This is the self-organization of the people—of the former working class and oppressed population, until the heritage of class divisions and oppression has been dissolved into a united population.”
So those of us who see anarchism as the ultimate in democracy, as I do, define “democracy” in terms of non-coercive governance – a value shared even by most anarchists who dislike the word “democracy” as such.
Wayne uses the example of a community decision on whether or not to build a road to examine the question of whether non-state democratic governance entails domination of some sort.
“Does this radical democracy still mean the coercion or domination of some people by others? Let us imagine an industrial-agricultural commune under anarchism. Some member proposes that it build a new road. People have differing opinions. A decision will have to be made; either the road will be built or it won’t (this is coercion by reality, not by the police). Suppose a majority of the assembly decides in favor of road-building. A minority disagrees. Perhaps it is outvoted (under majority rule). Or perhaps it decides to “stand aside” so as not to “block consensus” (under a consensus system).
Is the minority coerced? Its members have participated fully in the community discussions which led up to the decision. They have been free to argue for their viewpoint. They have been able to organize themselves (in a caucus or “party”) to fight against building the road. In the end, the minority members retain full rights. They may be in the majority on the next issue. (Of course, dissatisfied members may leave the community and go elsewhere. But other communities also have to decide whether to build roads.)
The minority may be said to have been coerced on this road-building issue, but I do not see this situation as one of domination. It is not like a white majority consistently dominating its African-American minority. In a state-less system of direct democracy, all participate in decision-making, even if all individuals are not always satisfied with the outcome. In any case, the aim of anarchism is not to end absolutely all coercion, but to reduce coercion to the barest minimum possible. Institutions of domination must be abolished and replaced by bottom-up democratic-libertarian organization. But there will never be a perfect society. This is why I began by defining “anarchism” as a society without the state, capitalism, or other institutions of domination.”
Now this contention that anarchism is about minimizing coercion, and not eliminating it altogether, is likely to be challenged by many anarchists. But if we break down the issues here, we may find that even what at first appears to be a minimal level of coercion may be a phantom.
A lot of it hinges, first of all, on the material effect of the majority decision on the minority, after the vote is taken. Is the road to be built on an existing right of way that is common property, or on a route that doesn’t encroach on someone’s existing possessions? Is it to be built with natural resources that are a democratically governed commons? Is the labor to be contributed by willing participants, with no conscription of labor from the unwilling or levies of food and other material means of support from the unwilling?
Second, what is the nature of the social unit making the decision, and what is the relationship of the majority and minority voters to it? As I noted in my own initial contribution to this symposium, when an indivisible asset or resource is being discussed, or a simple up-or-down decision that can’t be broken down into smaller parts, and when a unitary body is making the decision – when some decision is necessary, and it will of necessity affect everyone in an indivisible decision-making unit – the outcome is generally not regarded as coercive. For example, when the roommates sharing an apartment adhere to a majority decision on how to set the thermostat in the living room, the minority who consider the resulting temperature too cold or too hot have not been coerced.
So depending on the answers to all these questions, it is quite possible to address governance issues (like whether to build a road) by majority decision without anyone being subject to coercion.
The second question I raised above may have at least some bearing on the distinction Shawn Wilbur raises in his contribution, “Anarchy and Democracy: Examining the Divide,” between the realm of authority and the realm characterized by the anarchic principle. That is, whether a social unit can be governed democratically and still be characterized by “social relations free from hierarchy, claims of authority and the various types of exploitation that seem to inevitably arise from them” depends in large part on the nature of the social unit itself, and its members’ relationships with it.
If the members are viewed primarily as atomistic individuals in an amorphous, unstructured larger social body, in which any agreement between members of society is on an ad hoc, issue-by-issue basis, then a decision taken may be viewed as a coercive imposition on them. On the other hand if the members are viewed as members of a common enterprise, or going concern, with internal bylaws, things take on a different character. For example in a medieval European open-field village, in which the land is treated as a common unit and the village as a corporate body, the allocation of furlong strips between families on a year-to-year basis is not an act of coercion (as opposed to an action by the state against property held on a fee simple basis, in a system operating on Lockean assumptions). The question of what is “coercive” or “authoritarian” can only be answered by resorting to the question of what are the fundamental component social units of the society.
If social functions can be organized through some combination of commons governance within corporate bodies (for example land and natural resources), self-selected collectives or stigmergic networks, and market exchange, then we may have a state of affairs where “society” as such comes to bear on the individual only insofar as she is co-owner of a democratically-governed common resource, or some self-selected cooperative body, and in no case operates directly on her through any sort of claimed police power for initiating force. It is a virtually pure expression of “collective force” in which “relations remain strictly horizontal.”
And if the only institutional structure co-extensive with society as a whole, or overlapping with most of it, is something along the lines of Orsini’s and Bauwens’s Partner State – to recur to that concept once again – that functions as a support platform, coordinated by the various resource commons and voluntary associations that choose to participate in maintaining it, then it follows that its only relationship to the individual is mediated by the natural resource commons or voluntary collectivities to which she belongs.
I confess to finding myself generally at odds with William Gillis’s approach, in “The Abolition Of Rulership Or The Rule Of All Over All,” of argument by definition. His argument seems to hinge on a dogmatic assertion, based largely on etymology, that democracy “really means” majoritarian tyranny. From this it follows that anarchists who emphasize the liberatory strands within the historical composite of “democracy” are guilty of “orwellianism” or pandering.
I’ve long objected, for similar reasons (arbitrary argumentation from definition) to “post-Left anarchism.” It’s a circular argument that starts out by defining “Left” in terms of the most objectionable characteristics of the stereotypical Old Left – workerism, focus on organizational coordination and mass, etc. – and then defining anything out of it, like decentralist or anti-authoritarian strands of the Left, that’s inconsistent with that stereotype. So anything that doesn’t smack of vanguardism and trudging masses in overalls isn’t “really Left.”
This strikes me as being nearly as fruitless as the Bircher argument that the United States is “a republic not a democracy” based on dogmatic, essentialist definitions of “republic” and “democracy.”
Referring to other conceptions of democracy as “an uphill battle to redefine” it is begging the question. “Democracy” has connotated face-to-face participation by equals in governance where a common decision is necessary, and the right to a say in matters affecting oneself, since the beginning. Focusing on those aspects of the term in considering its relation to anarchy is not “redefining it.”
In fact I agree with William in celebrating liberatory technologies like weapons that shift the advantage to the defense, networked communications, and the emergence of a detente (like left-libertarian, possession-based property norms) from the mutual veto power of individuals. But for me, these things are the ultimate in genuine democracy. And the society I’ve described at various points, of an overlapping series of natural resource commons, self-selected stigmergic networks, voluntary production collectives, etc., horizontally cooperating to maintain a “Partner State” as a non-coercive mutual infrastructure, is the ultimate in William’s “consensus society… comprised of autonomous realms.” And the various opt-in affiliations in such a society are perfectly described by William’s “collectivity” that is “organic and ad hoc,” with “an unterrified attitude about dissolution and reformation.”
This, I think, is what many anarchists have long meant by “democracy,” and recognizing that as a legitimate sense of the term requires no “redefinition” nor violence to its meaning.
I also agree entirely with William’s caveat against fetishizing collective decisionmaking itself. There are indeed “many pragmatic contexts” that require it under some circumstances – mostly natural monopolies like sharing the same groundwater or other resource which must be commonly governed – I have always enthusiastically promoted stigmergic, permissionless organization wherever it is feasible, and celebrated technologies which facilitate stigmergic organization and reduce the need for institutional coordination. My current book project is a critique of Old Left organizational models that lionize large, hierarchical institutions and emphasize the need to get everybody on the same page to do anything.
I’ve also long objected to the mindset that equates meetings and slogan-shouting crowds with “activism”; this is basically a cargo cult approach that takes the incidents of activism as its essentials, without regard to their functional significance or their relevance to a given situation. My enthusiastic support for Occupy was based on the fact – for which it was uniformly criticized by the verticalist usual suspects – of not centrally formulating demands and appointing spokespersons. Occupy was so effective precisely because it was a stigmergic support platform, or toolkit, which could be used in a permissionless manner by the wide variety of nodes participating in it. It functioned in the same “bazaar” model as open-source software, the file-sharing movement, Wikipedia and Al Qaeda – any innovation developed by any node immediately became part of the entire network’s toolkit, available to be used by any other node or not entirely at its discretion.
Organizations built on this model have what strategist John Boyd called “short OODA loops”: they are able to assess feedback from the results of their own previous actions, act on it, assess the feedback from that, and so forth, many times faster than hierarchies that require consensus. The result is that they innovate with the speed of replicating yeast, and run circles around the dinosaur hierarchies they contend with.
As for the idea of “democracy as a say in the things that affect you,” I think it’s a distortion to frame it as a positive right to actions by others that benefit you (e.g. a date with your crush, your social group’s decision re snapchat, etc.). It’s far more charitable (and consistent with actual historic usage), in my opinion, to use it in a sense similar to William’s mutual veto power and resulting detente.
Regarding Graeber’s purported equation of democracy to the “rabble” or “mob,” I’m totally at a loss. I’ve read The Democracy Project, as well as a considerable amount of his other corpus that touch on the subject, and I can’t recall seeing anything remotely like this. To the extent that he discusses democracy as a historic phenomenon, it’s always in a concrete, situationally embedded context comparable to Kropotkin’s folkmotes and Colin Ward’s building societies, or Ostrom’s common pool resource governance – about as far as you can get from mass democracy.
Derek Wittorff, in “Democracy: Self-Government or Systemic Powerlessness?” likewise starts by arguing from a definition of democracy as majoritarianism, and proposing consensus in its stead. This strikes me as ironic, given that David Graeber treated consensus as his favored model of democracy throughout The Democracy Project, and William previously tarred Graeber with “mobocracy.”
I’m not going to address Derek’s definitional issues; to a large extent it would be revisiting ground I already covered. Suffice it to say I see consensus within self-selected nodes as very much a form of democracy.
What’s more interesting is that Derek mates consensus decision-making with a network-node model of federalism, with consensus taking place only at the smallest level at which agreement and collective action are actually necessary, and mostly within nodes which are self-selected collectives. I agree with this approach.
Nathan Goodman’s approach of democracy as openness, in “Anarchism as Radical Liberalism,” seems similar in spirit to mine. The Partner State approach of Orsini and Bauwens has also been described as “open source government.” The description Goodman quotes from Don Lavoie – “a kind of distributed intelligence, not representable by any single organization which may claim to act on society’s behalf” – also coincides closely with the Partner State model (at least as I have developed it in this forum).
In Lavoie’s framework, democracy is not something expressed through a state with a monopoly on the use of force, or through elections to decide what such a state will do. Instead, democracy occurs through open discourse, debate, contestation, and interaction among citizens. To borrow a concept from the Ostroms, democracy rightly understood is polycentric rather than monocentric.
As an anarchist without adjectives, and therefore reticent about promoting any single organizational model as the schema for an anarchist society, I would take it a step beyond celebrating the stigmergic character or openness of markets in particular. There is an almost infinite variety of means by which individuals can constitute horizontal relationships within nodes, and nodes can constitute horizontal relationships in a larger society, and Nathan’s comments regarding openness apply to all of them as well as to markets.
My differences with Grayson English (“Demolish the Demos”) cover much of the same ground I’ve already covered above in critiquing William’s argument from definition, so I’ll limit myself to what’s unique to Grayson’s argument. Getting from Graeber’s treatment of “self-organization and self-governance” to the constitution of a demos or People – let alone “the annihilation of the individual in the collective” – seems to leave out a lot of intermediate steps, with no indication that Graeber himself had any intention of following that path.
In my reading, Graeber’s model of consensus democracy at the local level is fully compatible with Toni Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s “multitude,” which they directly oppose to unitary or monolithic conceptions like “the People,” “the masses,” or “the proletariat.” The defining characteristic of multitude is its internal heterogeneity, its status as a “legion” composed by a near infinite number of individuals and nodes horizontally related to each other. And Negri and Hardt (although Multitude predated the Occupy movement) explicitly pointed to stigmergic, networked movements like the post-Seattle movement as examples of the multitude.
Jessica Flanagan, in her lead essay, also takes an approach of arguing from definition; in her case, by defining democracy as the equal right of everyone in society “to determine how political acts of violence will be used and whether and when they and their compatriots will be coerced.”
But as I have already argued, “equal authority” set at a common value of zero, resulting in the kinds of mutual vetoes and detente that William describes, are fully compatible with the spirit of democracy.
Democracy, as such, does not at all necessarily entail a political “tyranny of the majority” through majority control over a coercive state. It can be expressed through self-governance in the wide range of self-constituted bodies and associations discussed above.
Jessica writes: “In ideal theory, collective decisions should be made in ways that minimize the domination of all people and promote openness and human freedom.” I fully agree with her that the need for collective decisions should be minimized, and relegated to those situations (like the governance of shared natural resources) where a single policy is required. The great bulk of social organization should be permissionless and opt-in. For me that maximizes the value of consent, which – as I stated in my lead essay – is the central value of democracy as I understand it.
Jessica goes on to express skepticism as to whether mechanisms for collective decision-making without domination are even possible. She considers markets as equally problematic with the state insofar as they require a social consensus on property conventions. In that regard I don’t think the dependence of property rights on consensus can ever be escaped, because there is no particular property rights regime that can be directly or self-evidently deduced from natural rights without the intermediation of custom, convention, and expediency.
Mutual Exchange is C4SS’s goal in two senses: We favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to C4SS’s audience.
Online symposiums will include essays by a diverse range of writers presenting and debating their views on a variety of interrelated and overlapping topics, tied together by the overarching monthly theme. C4SS is extremely interested in feedback from our readers. Suggestions and comments are enthusiastically encouraged. If you’re interested in proposing topics and/or authors for our program to pursue, or if you’re interested in participating yourself, please email C4SS’s Mutual Exchange Coordinator, Cory Massimino, at cory.massimino@c4ss.org.
]]>“LOOK, REALLY OUR MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO FOR NO REASON, PLUS THEY SEEM TO BE GOING DOWN IN QUALITY, AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY, AND WE’RE MOSTLY JUST DESPERATELY FLAILING AROUND LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS HERE.”
Public school expenditures per student have more than doubled in real terms since 1970, while test scores have remained flat. Average university tuition has increased tenfold since 1980; you can judge for yourself whether the quality of a university education has improved in that time. Healthcare costs have quintupled since the 1970s; average health insurance premiums have risen from ten days’ pay to sixty days’ pay. And while life expectancy has risen since then, expectancies are similar or higher in many other developed countries with healthcare costs as low as 25% of ours. The final two items are costs per mile of infrastructure like subways and housing costs, both of which have skyrocketed.
The cause isn’t labor costs, Alexander notes, because in all these industries average pay has either remained flat, fallen or just roughly kept up with the general growth in wages (which hasn’t been much in recent decades). He goes on to consider a series of other possible causes, some of them more satisfactory explanations than others.
The most plausible — indeed probable — is that “markets [might] just not work” (i.e. the competitive mechanism assumed by neoclassical economics isn’t actually operating for some reason). He dismisses the possibility that it could be “pure price-gouging” because profits haven’t increased enough to account for the increased costs. But that assumes the corporation is run primarily to make profits for shareholders, as opposed to providing senior management with bloated salaries.
In any case the “Cost Disease” was observed by radical critics of capitalism as far back as Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich. Illich noted that because of radical monopolies that suppressed competition from cheaper vernacular alternatives, and rendered comfortable poverty impossible, it typically cost 300% or 400% more than necessary to make or do anything. Goodman described the way that the organizational culture of bureaucratic hierarchies systematically inflated operating costs:
To sum up: what swell the costs in enterprises carried on in the interlocking centralized systems of society, whether commercial, official, or non-profit institutional, are all the factors of organization, procedure, and motivation that are not directly determined to the function and the desire to perform it. Their patents and rents, fixed prices, union scales, featherbedding, fringe benefits, status salaries, expense accounts, proliferating administration, paper work, permanent overhead, public relations and promotions, waste of time and skill by departmentalizing task-roles, bureaucratic thinking that is penny-wise pound-foolish, inflexible procedure and tight scheduling that exaggerate congingencies and overtime.
But the “Cost Disease” really isn’t a disease at all. It’s a symptom of more fundamental phenomena, and results from structural forces at the heart of capitalism.
First, the large oligopoly corporation operates from a position of false abundance. Because each industry is dominated by a handful of corporations that follow the price leader system, price competition is replaced by administered pricing in which costs can simply be passed on to the consumer. This ability to set prices on a cost-plus markup basis results in the same cost-maximization incentives that, as Seymour Melman noted in The Permanent War Economy, prevail in the Military-Industrial Complex and in regulated utilities.
Because of oligopoly prices and restricted competition, the large corporation is typically able to finance its new investments entirely through retained earnings — and not only that, but to have retained earnings far in excess of rational projects to spend it on. So big business treats expenditures on capital improvements as “free money” and undertakes projects that a genuinely competitive enterprise would regard as a waste of money.
Because of this artificial abundance of capital for reinvestment, and the ability to pass on costs of wasteful investment to consumers as a markup, big business also has an incentive to pursue a strategy of capital substitution, in order to improve labor discipline and reduce the bargaining power of labor, to an extent that would otherwise be unprofitable.
The resulting wasteful internal capital expenditures of the large corporation resemble Friedrich Hayek’s prediction of the kinds of capital investment that would prevail in a planned economy without rational price signals.
[We should expect] the excessive development of some lines of production at the expense of others and the use of methods which are inappropriate under the circumstances. We should expect to find overdevelopment of some industries at a cost which was not justified by the importance of their increased output and see unchecked the ambition of the engineer to apply the latest development elsewhere, without considering whether they were economically suited in the situation. In many cases the use of the latest methods of production, which could not have been applied without central planning, would then be a symptom of a misuse of resources rather than a proof of success.
From this false abundance — the result of administered pricing and enormous retained earnings — everything else follows. Monopoly capitalism’s chronic tendency towards surplus investment capital creates structural imperatives for waste. This is encouraged, among other things, by accounting mechanisms that treat the consumption of resource inputs as such as the creation of value.
This is the case with the standard corporate accounting rules, which treat labor — and labor alone — as the sole source of direct costs. The result is efficiency experts obsessively looking for ways to shave off every possible minute of labor time — often at the cost of severe degradation of efficiency from eviscerating the human capital, the human relationships and distributed knowledge, that are the sources of so much of an organization’s productivity. Meanwhile, even as management strains at a gnat in order to reduce labor costs, it swallows a camel in its prodigiously wasteful spending on administrative salaries and capital projects.
Under these same accounting rules, management salaries and capital expenditures are treated as indirect costs, which become part of general overhead. And this overhead is disposed of by a bit of accounting legerdemain known as “overhead absorption,” in which it is figured into the internal transfer price of goods which are “sold” to inventory. And since inventory is an asset, the higher the level of overhead and the resulting markup of these artificial transfer prices, the higher the asset value of the goods sitting in the warehouse.
So we see corporations constantly downsizing workers and speeding up production in order to “save money,” yet at the same time paying monstrous management salaries and pouring money down irrational capital spending ratholes that would rival the irrationalities of the old Soviet planned economy.
The same accounting principles operate in calculating Gross Domestic Product: Any expenditure entailed in producing a good or service adds to the total GDP, and is therefore counted as producing value. So the more inefficient production is, the more resources wasted in producing goods and services, and the higher the rate at which natural resources are briefly channelled through our living rooms on their way to the landfill because of planned obsolescence, the higher the measure of our national “prosperity.”
Alexander argues that the Cost Disease casts new light on the conventional framing of a lot of political issues. Most of the controversy over things like universal healthcare, free college, or right-wing approaches to education reform that treat “the teachers’ unions” as the primary enemy, actually results from a zero-sum fight over how to “distribute our losses.”
For example: some people promote free universal college education, remembering a time when it was easy for middle class people to afford college if they wanted it. Other people oppose the policy, remembering a time when people didn’t depend on government handouts. Both are true! My uncle paid for his tuition at a really good college just by working a pretty easy summer job – not so hard when college cost a tenth of what it did now. The modern conflict between opponents and proponents of free college education is over how to distribute our losses. In the old days, we could combine low taxes with widely available education. Now we can’t, and we have to argue about which value to sacrifice.
Or: some people get upset about teachers’ unions, saying they must be sucking the “dynamism” out of education because of increasing costs. Others people fiercely defend them, saying teachers are underpaid and overworked. Once again, in the context of cost disease, both are obviously true. The taxpayers are just trying to protect their right to get education as cheaply as they used to. The teachers are trying to protect their right to make as much money as they used to. The conflict between the taxpayers and the teachers’ unions is about how to distribute losses; Somebody is going to have to be worse off than they were a generation ago, so who should it be?
The typical progressive approach is to guarantee a product like education as a healthcare as a human right, which in practical terms means leaving the bureaucratic, high-overhead institutional culture intact but spending enough taxpayer money to buy the product for everyone at the godawful monopoly price.
In the context of cost disease, these look like industries constantly doubling, tripling, or dectupling their price, and the government saying “Okay, fine,” and increasing taxes however much it costs to pay for whatever they’re demanding now.
If we give everyone free college education, that solves a big social problem. It also locks in a price which is ten times too high for no reason.
Not only is this fiscally unsustainable, but it stigmatizes people as “freeloaders” who wouldn’t have needed assistance in the first place absent unbelievable waste and price gouging by unaccountable bureaucracies.
Technologies of abundance are, by their nature, radically deflationary. Their ultimate tendency is to reduce the marginal cost of goods and services, and the labor required to produce them, closer and closer to zero. Only in a profoundly dysfunctional economic system could the technologies of abundance and resulting reduced need for labor be regarded as catastrophic for workers. Nevertheless, catastrophic they are — the reason being that the cost savings from increased productivity, rather than going to benefit labor in the form of receiving the same standard of living for fewer hours of work, are instead extracted by the propertied classes in the form of artificial scarcity rents.
And the response of “progressives” is essentially Hamiltonian: first, to prop up the price of goods and services through unnecessary management and overhead, and embedded rents on copyrights and patents, in order to generate a sufficient revenue stream to pay workers; and second, to make production artificially labor-intensive in order to provide sufficient “jobs” to earn the wages to buy these goods and services at their gross inefficiency-based prices. The result is something like one of those machines designed by Rube Goldberg.
What we should be doing instead is:
1) Destroying all unnecessary waste of inputs, all unnecessary production, all planned obsolescence, and unnecessary labor, in order to reduce necessary labor time and production costs to the absolute minimum; while at the same time
2) Abolishing the privileges and monopolies by which the propertied classes enclose the productivity gains of technological improvement for themselves, as a source of rents, and
3) Taking advantage of small-scale, ephemeral means of production to remove the largest share of production possible from the sphere of paid employment to direct production for use in the social sphere; so that
4) All the cost savings of increased efficiency go to the public in the form of reduced work hours and reduced prices, while the remaining hours of paid labor are evenly distributed and pay enough to buy back the full value of everything produced.
]]>In Four Futures Peter Frase poses, as a thought experiment, an “anti-Star Trek”: a world that shares the same technologies as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s post-scarcity communist society, but in which those technologies of abundance are enclosed with “intellectual property” barriers so that capitalists can continue to live off the rents of artificial scarcity.
“…[I]magine that unlike Star Trek, we don’t all have access to our own replicators. And that in order to get access to a replicator, you would have to buy one from a company that licenses the right to use it. You can’t get someone to give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license and get them in legal trouble.
What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. Captain Jean-Luc Picard customarily walks to the replicator and requests “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” But his anti-Star Trek counterpart would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea.”
In such a world, earning the money to pay for the things will be a problem, since there is no need for labor to actually make anything. What remaining work there is will be a small pool of intensely competed-for jobs designing stuff, some amount of guard labor enforcing “intellectual property” against piracy and protecting the accumulated property of the rich, and an odd assortment of work in household service or hand-crafting luxury goods for those in the propertied classes who value the status symbolism entailed in such things.
This is the world of The Diamond Age. In Stephenson’s medium-term future, Star Trek’s matter-energy replicators are a reality (well, the food replication is considerably well below Star Trek standards). A world of plentiful sustenance for all, without money, is technologically feasible. But there the similarity ends.
The story is set at some indefinite point in the mid-21st century—presumably somewhere around the 2060s or so, given that a quite old lady reminisces about being a thrasher in the ’90s.
The world in this future is governed by the international order that emerged from a period of chaos—the Interregnum—following the collapse of most major nation-states that occurred when encrypted currencies starved them of tax revenue. The basic unit of organization is the phyle—a deterritorialized, networked opt-in community with associated support platforms, which is based on some shared point of affinity like ethnicity, ideology or religion.
The first phyle to emerge from the Interregnum was the First Distributed Republic, apparently an entirely pragmatic, non-ideological platform whose chief purpose—like the lodges in Poul Anderson’s Northwestern Federation (Orion Shall Rise)—was to keep the lights on and the trash picked up. By the time of the story, there are many scores of phyles. The largest and richest are the neo-Victorians (recruited largely from the Anglosphere) and the Nipponese, both governed by an intensively work-oriented and capitalistic ethos and making money through nanotech and other forms of engineering and design. The others—Mormons, Israelis, Parsis, Boers, Ashanti, Hindustani, Sendero Luminoso, etc., etc.—range widely in size. CryptNet is a phyle governed by a pirate ideology, and classified somewhere between subversive and terrorist by the mainstream phyles and their international order.
Depending on their size and wealth, the various phyles maintain territorial enclaves ranging in size from city-states to clusters of a few buildings in cities around the world, with the largest and most widely proliferated belonging to the neo-Victorians and Nipponese for obvious reasons.
Given the existence of technologies of abundance, the profitability of neo-Victorian and Nipponese industry obviously depends on patents and copyrights. And the post-scarcity potential of matter-energy replicators—“matter compilers”—is limited by the Feed. Feeds are long-distance pipelines of various volumes transferring feed stocks of assorted atoms to supply mater compilers. A Feed, in turn, is supplied by a Source—a facility which uses nanotech membranes and other nano-filtering mechanisms to sort out the various elements from seawater and air and store them in separate holding tanks. The major Sources are located in, and operated by, enclaves of the most technically advanced phyles.
The combination of “intellectual property” and the dependence of matter compilers on the Feed severely hobbles the potential for abundance. Some basic minimum of essential life support—fabricated staple foods, clothing, blankets—is available for free from public matter compilers. Everything else has a price, often steep. The “thetes”—a large underclass of people, perhaps a majority of the Earth’s population, unaffiliated with any phyle—stay alive through a combination of casual labor for members of the rich phyles and access to free stuff from the MCs. A considerable burden of high-interest debt, enforced in the last resort by workhouses for defaulters, is apparently the norm among this population.
This system of artificial scarcity is maintained through an international regime called the Common Economic Protocol (CEP). The CEP is enforced by the joint military forces of Protocol Enforcement. Constable Moore, himself Scottish, is a retired Brigadier who served with the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force—largely recruited from the American, British, Ulster Protestant and Uitlander lumpenproletariat, and other thetes of the Anglosphere. Mention is also made of a Nipponese division. The primary purpose of Protocol Enforcement is to enforce “intellectual property” law and secure the Feeds against attack from disgruntled local populations in the territories they pass through.
Although David De Ugarte‘s adoption of the term “phyle” for neo-Venetian platforms like the Las Indias Group was obviously an homage to The Diamond Age, the capitalist phyles in the story are nothing like De Ugarte’s vision of networked platforms incubating cooperative enterprises for commons-based peer production. The neo-Victorians, the only phyle whose internal workings are described in much detail, adhere to a social regime based—as their name suggests—on intense social hierarchy and strict sexual mores. The majority of their members are salaried laborers in the engineering firms like Machine-Phase Systems Limited and Imperial Tectonics Limited that produce most of the phyle’s income. The phyle itself is a giant corporation governed by “Equity Lords” with ownership stakes of various sizes (earl-level, duke-level, and so forth).
The main geographic setting of the story is the southern coast of China—the coastal city-states and the neo-Victorian clave of New Atlantis—along with the regional successor states of the Chinese interior. The relationship Stephenson depicts between the capitalist phyles, Protocol Enforcement and the various Chinese states is reminiscent—deliberately so, obviously—of the era of the Open Door and gunboat diplomacy, with the Rape of Nanking thrown in for good measure.
At the time of the story, the disemployment of hundreds of millions of peasants in the Chinese interior by newly developed synthetic rice from the MCs has resulted in a radical uprising—the Fists of Righteous Harmony—obviously based on the Boxer Rebellion. Peasant armies are marching southward, preparing to invade the coastal city-states and phyles, and burning Feeds along the way. Protocol Enforcement is fighting a losing war against them and gradually retreating southward.
Meanwhile, a coalition of CryptNet, other dissident phyles, and local mini-states allied with the Fists is at work developing a genuine post-scarcity alternative to the Feed, which will destroy the material foundation of the CEP’s global order. This rival technology—the Seed—will use self-assembling nanotech to compile food, tools and goods of all kinds from ambient matter on-site, independently of Feed lines.
The various subplots of the novel involve, directly or indirectly, the complex intrigues between New Atlantis and Protocol Enforcement, which are trying to thwart completion of the Seed, and the coalition struggling to complete it. Central to the latter coalition is the Celestial Kingdom, a city-state in the Greater Shanghai area governed by a caste of Mandarins with a Confucian ideology. Their leadership sees the Seed, a producer-centered technology amenable to village economy, as a way to restore the dignity of the peasantry and create an independent society with an organic social order independent of the CEP’s international order.
The attitude of the capitalist phyles and Protocol Enforcement towards the Seed is, understandably, one of revulsion. John Hackworth, an artifex (senior engineer) in one of the New Atlantan nanotech firms, describes it from his point of view:
“CryptNet’s true desire is the Seed—a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and Peace—to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward…. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books—that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upoin it will be founded a more highly evolved society….
Of course, it can’t be allowed—the Feed is not a system of control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only way order can be maintained in modern society—if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destrucive power rivalled that of… nuclear weapons. This is why Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet’s activities.”
The real reason for his horror—of course—is that the Seed would “dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.” More specifically it would, by enabling people to meet all their needs for free and without limit or permission, destroy the wealth of those who lived by claiming ownership over the right to use ideas.
The Mandarins of the Celestial Kingdom, on the other hand, envisioned a high-tech neo-Confucian order in a China “freed from the yoke of the foreign Feed,” in “the coming Age of the Seed.”
“Peasants tended their fields and paddies, and even in times of drought and flood, the earth brought forth a rich harvest: food, of course, but many unfamiliar plants too, fruits that could be made into medicines, bamboo a thousand times stronger than natural varieties, trees that produced synthetic rubber and pellets of clean safe fuel. In an orderly procession the suntanned farmers brought their proceeds to great markets in clean cities free of cholera and strife, where all of the young people were respectful and dutiful scholars and all of the elders were honored and cared for.”
The book ends, as the victorious Fists surge through the coastal claves, with the destruction of the near-complete design for the Seed. The clear implication is that, absent any alternative to the Feed, the Fists’ uprising will collapse and the hegemony of the CEP will reassert itself over China. At the same time there is also a hint—but perhaps this is just my wishful thinking—that the setback to development of the Seed is only a temporary postponement.
]]>“…not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free arrangements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”
To elaborate on this working definition, I would add that a democracy, understood in this way, attempts to maximize the agency of individual people, and their degree of perceived control over the decisions that affect their daily lives. In keeping with the principle of equal liberty, democracy seeks to maximize the individual’s control over the forces shaping her life, to the extent that such a control is compatible with a like degree of control by others over their own lives.
This means a social decision-making process that is permissionless, or stigmergic, insofar as this is possible. The ultimate in democracy, in the sense of a positive-sum maximization of individual agency and control over their lives to the greatest extent possible short of anyone’s agency infringing on anyone else’s, is universal consent of the governed. And in this sense, a permissionless, stigmergic organization, in which all individual activity is self-chosen, is the ultimate in democracy.
In some areas, however, agreement on a common policy for a unitary social body may be necessary. In this case, the next best thing to unanimous consent is that all individuals involved in the decision encounter each other as equals, and seek the closest approximation possible to a unanimous consensus, with no one in a position to use force to impose their will on anyone else.
Viewing democracy in these terms will rid us of some negative habits that usually creep in when considering democracy in conventional terms. For example, it’s common for conventional treatments of democracy to frame it as some kind of institution created by especially gifted people at a few outstanding points in history.
But in reality “democracy” isn’t something that was invented by a bunch of oversized brains in the Athenian agora, or Philadelphia in 1787. It’s something that ordinary people have been doing everywhere throughout history, and long before the beginning of recorded history, whenever they met one another as equals to solve a common problem through discussion and cooperation. In anthropologist David Graeber’s words:
“In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself. No one could possibly own it. I suppose…one could argue it emerged the moment hominids ceased merely trying to bully one another and developed the communication skills to work out a common problem collectively. But such speculation is idle; the point is that democratic assemblies can be attested in all times and places, from Balinese seka to Bolivian ayllu, employing an endless variety of formal procedures, and will always crop up wherever a large group of people sat down together to make a collective decision on the principle that all taking part should have an equal say.1
We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have been plenty of egalitarian societies in history— many far more egalitarian than Athens, many that must have existed before 500 BCE—and obviously, they must have had some kind of procedure for coming to decisions for matters of collective importance. Yet somehow, it is always assumed that these procedures, whatever they might have been, could not have been, properly speaking, “democratic.”2
The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic”—well, aside from simple racist reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity was quite on the level of Pericles—is that they do not vote. Now, admittedly, this is an interesting fact. Why not? If we accept the idea that a show of hands, or having everyone who supports a proposition stand on one side of the plaza and everyone against stand on the other, are not really such incredibly sophisticated ideas that they never would have occurred to anyone until some ancient genius “invented” them, then why are they so rarely employed? Again, we seem to have an example of explicit rejection. Over and over, across the world, from Australia to Siberia, egalitarian communities have preferred some variation on consensus process. Why?
The explanation I would propose is this; it is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to convince those who do not to go along with it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision, either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has nothing to do with local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, and in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored.
Majority democracy, we might say, can only emerge when two factors coincide:
For most of human history, it has been extremely unusual to have both at the same time. Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will.3
Another harmful tendency, especially prevalent on the libertarian right, is to take the democratic pretensions of the modern state at face value, and accordingly frame “democracy” in terms of reactionary cliches like “tyranny of the majority,” “mob rule,” and so forth. “Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner” is a particularly egregious example.
Formally “democratic” states and “representative democracies” are not, in fact, democratic or representative. To the extent that popular majorities exert any control over states at all, it is largely as a check imposed by popular pressure from the outside to limit or counteract the normal class tendencies of the state.
The idea of a limited, laissez-faire state being succeeded by a mass-democratic state, through which the popular majority looted the public treasury and the property of the rich to fund redistributive programs, is utter nonsense. State robbery and looting–on behalf of the propertied classes–has been integral to capitalism since its origins in the early modern era. And 20th century social welfare programs have been passed largely at the instigation of the propertied classes’ representatives themselves, in order to redistribute downward a small fraction–just enough to stave off depression or revolution–of what the state had previously distributed upward to those same propertied classes. And insofar as social welfare programs have actually been, in part, a response to mass pressure, they have amounted at most to a partial offset of the larger-scale state intervention on behalf of the rich.
And finally, to the extent that government can be pushed to become more democratic in nature, particularly at the local level, to that same extent it is also pushed to become less state-like, as in Michel Bauwens’s Partner State model.4 To that extent, the governance functions of government will be characterized the old Saint-Simonian cliche of transition from “legislation over human beings to administration of things,” and take on the character of a support platform. Whether this can be done is debatable, although I think it is worth trying.
At the very least the new citizen coalitions, offshoots of the M15 movement, that have taken over local governments in Spain like Barcelona and Madrid, and attempted to implement a commons-based political agenda, are pushing things in the right direction. How far they can take it remains to be seen.
But the idea that anything remotely resembling genuine democracy can be achieved through the government of a nation-state of tens or hundreds of millions of people is beyond the bounds of credulity. At best, the nation-state will be a class state whose aid to ruling class rent extraction is limited and partially offset by mass pressure.
There is some hope, in my opinion, that the nation-state may be be bypassed by horizontal linkages between commons-based local polities, and that such confederalism can serve as a platform for resistance to the nation-state: especially as traditional nation-states fall under the sway of authoritarian political movements.
Parallel to this cluster of values centered on unanimous consent and permissionlessness is another value: equal right of access to things which are rightfully governed as a commons, like land and natural resources, aquifers, culture, and information. To the extent that such common goods are replacing large quantities of accumulated physical capital as the main productive forces in society, commons governance means equal access to the commons as a productive asset by all members of society, and the ability to meet a growing share of subsistence needs outside the capitalist wage system.
Going back to our discussion above of the Partner State and commons-based local political agendas, I would suggest a concrete program based on:
Taken together, all of these things would amount cumulatively to the kernel of a commons-based economy providing independent access to a major share of people’s livelihoods on a post-scarcity basis.
So ultimately the concept of democracy makes sense as something that ordinary people have actually done, and continue to do when they can create spaces of possibility in which they can act as equals to solve their common problems. The vast range of institutions that people have created for themselves throughout history, when able to carve out such free spaces outside the authority of states and ruling classes–folkmotes, governance bodies for natural resource commons, guilds, friendly societies and bodies for mutual aid, radical unions, networks for commons-based peer production–are all examples of democracy.
If we understand democracy in this way, it is not only indispensable to anarchy: it is anarchy.
References
(1) David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Spiegel & Grau, 2013), p. 184.
(2) Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), p. 87.
(3) Ibid., pp. 88-89.
(4) “Partner State,” P2P Foundation Wiki <http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Partner_State> (accessed April 26, 2017).
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