The Americans and Russians crossed the border around 8:30 Eastern European Time, each seeking to establish contact with the lawful government in Minsk. The Belaya Revolutsiya was already in control of most of the corridor between Poland and the capital, but Minsk itself remained a no-man’s-land, too embroiled in chaos to respond militarily to the entry of foreign rapid-insertion forces. Three Spetsnaz and two USMC choppers made their way immediately for the Presidential Palace.

The ad-hoc agreement on Belarus had just been struck in Brussels when it was tested: that military involvement in the explosive conflict - favored by Germany, Greece, Italy, France, and the US but opposed or not actively favored by most of the remainder - would be discretionary until any foreign power made an active effort to militarily expel NATO forces. At 7:48 European time, confirmation arrived that Russian special forces had opened fire on a US task-force sent to secure the President of Belarus.

Lithuania, Norway, and Spain declared neutrality - and were summarily expelled. As of 7:53 EUT, a NATO police action had formally begun in Belarus.

-

Kaliningrad had become a paranoiac fortress over the course of a little more than an hour. Official confirmation that war on Belarus had begun meant that the Russian exclave would be the first Russian target for NATO operations against Belarus. Worse, direct communication with Russia had been astoundingly difficult.

Surveillance and recon had yet to reveal any aggressive Polish troop movement toward the border; the sea was a more disquieting possibility, as the conquest or isolation of Kaliningrad meant that naval operations would have greatly extended range.

At 9:25 Eastern European time, reconnaisance and surveillance made their worst fears real: a large fleet moving at more than 20 knots directly towards them had cleared Thiessow. By the time closer recon had revealed submarines, extended radar showed cruise missiles heading in at a glancing trajectory.

Communication with main command could not be established permanently, and reconnaisance had positively identified the Barracuda-class Duquesne as the Triomphant-class Terrible - an error which falsely confirmed the feared presence of nuclear weapons in the NATO sea taskforce.

-

Sarah Palin quietly thanked God that France was under nuclear bombardment rather than the United States, and actually had to be talked into getting onto Marine One to the Stockwell Valley Facility under Spruce Knob. She had expected something like War Games; the facility looked like nothing so much as the top floor of an office building, albeit deep underground. There were even taps for Starbucks and Budweiser, and just above the half-filled red curve streaking from Yakutia to the Mat-Su Valley she could make out a Google copyright.

-

The President of the United States stumbled arm in arm with Mayo’s best laproscopists; it was as bright as dusk out but not much later than 1 AM. His Secret Service rushed from gurney to gurney rendering assistance as they could, leaving him more helpless than any President in the last century could have been. His head was in the clouds and his chest felt fit to explode, and it seemed the only thing he could do while fully conscious was feel enough searing agony to come close to vomiting. An olive-skinned nurse younger than Bridget passed by, iron-faced, holding a truncheon and pistol. Her scrubs had ‘TRIAGE’ on them in fresh yellow paint. He felt cold, even though it was over a hundred outside and there weren’t enough burn beds on Earth to hold the Phoenix metro’s victims.

People recognized John sitting there in his gown, and eventually they noticed he was crying. There were a thousand reasons they thought of for why. But it was only pain.

It was only pain.

Alec

The first man to pick up the phone in Cvetkovich’s office at 6:32 heard a frantic, almost hyperventilating voice running fast in Russian. The callers grew more important and their messages less informative, and the news spread quickly; by 6:35 most of the high officials of Serbia and Russia were now aware that the government of Belarus had come under attack by hard-right insurgents in its largest cities. Lukashenko quickly assumed complete control over the Belarusian army and state and appealed to Russia for military assistance.

It took five more minutes for Medvedev to prepare a state of emergency, and each neighboring government had already begun vigorous debate over taking the same measure.

By 7:50 Eastern European time, Russia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine had already declared states of emergency; the government of Latvia was still debating the issue and Warsaw had decided to wait for word from NATO - in which the panic was only beginning.

At 1 AM Washington time, a runner for Secretary Petraeus knocked on the Lincoln Bedroom door, and the acting President was informed as of 1:02 AM that the situation in Belarus had come to a head, with Lukaschenko seizing complete power and mobilizing the Army to deal with protestors. The almost instant Russian diplomatic response - compared to the fairly sluggish military reaction - indicated that Lukashenko made prior preparation to violate the Tallinn Framework. Within five minutes, the Tallinn Framework - an agreement under which Lukaschenko would draw his presence in government down to an advisory role and leave pro-US democratic forces to take formal power - had been fully explained to the President.

“Sounds like we’d better call the Russkies’ bluff. What do we have ready to rumble?”

“We’ve got a detachment of the First Airborne ready in Ramstein, Madame President.”

“Keep an eye out on the current situation, and let’s see how far it goes.”

“With respect, the Russians are right on the border. If we wait for them to act, they’ll be in Minsk before we’re in Poland.”

“OK then. Is it them who’re the good guys or am I thinking of someone else?”

“They’re our allies, Madame President.”

“Get ‘em on the phone and put our birds in the air. If nothing happens, they land as close to Belarus as they can. If something does, they keep going.”

“I’ll call the Joint Chiefs. I’d assemble a full Cabinet but they’ve got the Karate Kid squared away for security reasons - we’ll get who we can otherwise.”

As of 9:00 Moscow time, the Army received visual confirmation that communications with the Indian Ocean fleet had gone dead, White infiltrators had destroyed vital apparatus not only in Belarus but in Russia, and contact had yet to be reestablished with the 2nd ObrSpN, the Spetsnaz unit which the Belarus crisis was closest to. Frantic efforts had begun to find replacements, and an ad-hoc team had already been assembled and launched from Kaliningrad. The destruction of Russian property within Russia meant that military action against the White insurgents was now urgent, and also that the Russian expedition would be conducted under the legal aegis of Russia rather than Belarus.

Contact was established by a Spetsnaz officer at 9:15 seeking permission for immediate launch towards Minsk. Permission was granted, and a minute had not passed before their first helicopter made its way out of Pskov.

Alec

In the 1950s and 60s, the top marginal tax rates were in the range of 70-90%. During this time, the average executive salary was roughly 50 times that of the average non-executive employee.

Today, the top marginal tax rates are somewhere in the mid-30% range, and the average executive salary is roughly 450 times as much as the average non-executive employee, with some making thousands of times more per year than the minimum wage.

In other words, the wealthiest in this country are making more than they ever have in the history of America, and being taxed less than they’ve been since the early 1900s. Yet they demand even more and to be taxed even less, whining incessantly about it like a bunch of needy crybabies, and somehow it’s the poor who are being unreasonable for wanting to earn a living wage. Somehow the poor are the problem, even though over that same time span from the 1950s, the minimum wage has actually decreased, from, as I’ve mentioned before, an average of around $6.00 in the 50s and 60s to an average of around $4.50 from 2000-2007 (in 1996 dollars).

Here’s a news flash for all you Libertarians and laissez-faire economists: The wealth has already been redistributed — to the people at the top, more and more every year, via the inherent power imbalance of business over employee. The wealth growth that should have benefited every American has been siphoned off by those with the clout to do so, and just because they had the opportunity and the power to leech wealth out of the system, that doesn’t mean they “earned” it, any more than a mugger “earned” the money he or she stole just because they had the right opportunity and were stronger and had better tools at their disposal than the person they robbed.

Financing social programs through taxes is just a way of attempting to remedy this grievous injustice (though, an imperfect solution; much better would be to tie executive salaries to those of the average employee — say, 70x as much — such that if they themselves want to make more money, they have to give everyone else raises as well), and is no more “theft” than returning a stolen car to its rightful owner. Anything less is simply welfare for those who need it the least, at the expense of those who need it the most.

Jabberwock

Cities, Politique claimed, were against the Maoist ideal of peasant self-sufficiency, which he took for the purest possible interpretation of communism. They were a legacy of the priests and the French and had to be destroyed.

-

At 7:15 local time, a crack squadron of irregular saboteurs closely associated with the Belarus Conservative Christian Party radical group White Revolution rode American-manufactured rail sleds over a disused spur of Soviet industrial track into the Smolensk Oblast, planting a series of synchronized time bombs on military and infrastructure targets and several targets of opportunity and severing, searing with strong acid, and otherwise disabling a wide range of telecom apparatus; they crossed into Belarus again at 6:45 local time, in the process giving an all-clear signal to be relayed to a team around 150 kilometers west in Vileyka; their operations, too, were conducted without incident; the garrison and vital personnel of the long-haul communications base located there - who realized only too late that they were now mute, and lacked the time to reroute signals usefully - were slaughtered to a man, and five minutes before planned Zero Hour (in actuality, fifteen), they had finished rigging charges to implode the facility.

-

Phnom Penh had several world-class hospitals, and they were emptied at a moment’s notice. Burn wards, intensive care, even surgical theaters. At gunpoint - at once.

-

Calls had just then begun to flood the cellular towers in and around Belarus. In town after town, men and women answered their phones curtly and went to retrieve their jogging outfits from their dressers. Cars, loaded heavy with small arms, rolled out of parking garages and remote facilities. On the other side of the world, a woman woke up Vice-President of the United States and ate breakfast President.

-

They’ve yet to fully count the dead.

-

The police noticed the occasional circling car, but they did not notice anything else suspicious. They did not have the aerial surveillance necessary to show the large population of joggers making brisk time away from downtown, in the case of Minsk at even greater and more regular speed.

Rudimentary safe areas were established; the ten minutes of delay increased the risk of early exposure but made it easier for every growing cell to find houses, shacks, garages, and makeshift bases.

A bald man told another over the phone in English that the Eagle slumbered and the other man just laughed. His clock said 7:15; it was a minute fast. Sarah Palin, two rooms over, was wondering whether to write a letter to her children or simply spend the evening with Todd; the night had been chosen for this procedure specifically because it was unlikely anything would happen, and nobody outside of the White House knew it was happening - as was normal procedure.

A man in a rented Toyota watched the streets of Minsk roll by. The Serbs, officially, had suggested that the retirement of Lukaschenko would provide a good opportunity to warm up relations with Europe. That was why he was here, or the official reason. The unofficial reason was that he suffered a spreading stomach cancer and the delusion that Lukaschenko was a Jew. His twelve-year-old boy saluted him as he pulled out of the Barysaw alley at 5:45 local time, not a moment late.

It was 7:20 Eastern European Time and the Toyota had caught fire. People stared and ran in each direction. Sasha only realized in his last conscious moment that the police officer at the front of the onrushing throng had his gun holstered, his gloved hand empty.

Alec

Ed: This should have gone up before the election, but I didn’t notice it was pending review. In any event, it’s still an awesome and amusing short story written by Alec about what things might have been like for us in the near future had the election gone the other way.

“Mister President, count back from a hundred for me,” said the fat woman. “One hundred,” said the fat man, “ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety.”

John McCain had a number of severe health problems, all aggravated by his experience as a prisoner of war for the bulk of the conflict in Vietnam. Downed after his twenty-third bombardment mission against North Vietnam, he could do little but cheer as Nixon, elected on the promise to end the war honorably, stepped up the bombardment of Vietnam, extending it quietly to Cambodia.

Some wiseass knew they could count on her when the old man went under, and it hadn’t been fifteen minutes before Belya Revolutsiya had sent out texts to all of its members. The leak, who would remain anonymous to history, honestly thought something good would come of this; that freedom would be spread and the Bear’s iron heel caught in a steel trap.

John McCain’s chest had been punctured and trocarred and inflated. He would be unconscious for two and a half hours; the medication was supposed to last eight. It was 10:15 PM in Scottsdale and the weather had been getting balmier by the year, so it was just barely too warm to frost your breath.

-

In April 1975, as John McCain was finally recovering from his failed military career and his dreary civilian life and wife, a short man with surreal ideas who called himself Politique Potentielle marched under the blessing of the People’s Republic of China - sworn enemy of the USSR and its client North Vietnam, and sometime bedfellow of the United States - into Phnom Penh, a city of two and a half million souls with a history longer than that of much of Europe. He then ordered every man, woman, and child to leave.

-

It was fifteen minutes past midnight in Washington and Sarah Palin was wide awake, later than she liked to be but today she had to sit in the hot seat. Of course, her official duties were ostensibly very important, but Dave and Condi were probably going to be calling any shots that needed to be called.

The President, who was in the process of making a booty-call to the Marriott in which Todd Palin was sleeping, only half-noticed the phone ringing in the other room. It rang three times before being picked up.

It was 7:20 AM in Minsk, too early in the year for that to mean daylight, and a car had just exploded in front of the Serbian embassy, killing two dozen people and injuring scores more. The land-lines were buzzing in every direction; the mobile phones were even more wildly active. At 8:40 local time, orders from Moscow had every cellular tower and satellite under its control shut down as an emergency measure.

The Prime Minister’s intern was finishing the Serbian government’s mourning expression of sorrow and vow to spare no effort with the Belarussian government to bring the perpetrators to justice when, at around 6:32 AM local time, a commotion broke out in the phone room.

Alec

For the first time in a long, long while, I’m feeling proud to be an American. I know Obama isn’t going to fix every problem in the world, and that having a rather immense majority in Congress, while nice, isn’t necessarily going to bring about all the necessary reforms and things that we so desperately need, but it’s finally — at long last — a step in the right direction, an indication that there is still hope for us and that we are capable of learning from our experiences. So thank you, America, for not completely fucking things up.

In Michigan, a medical marijuana initiative passed by a landslide, surprisingly, and restrictions on stem cell research were loosened.

There is, however, some bad news out in California, where cruel, bigoted morons managed to triumph over morality and decency and Civil Rights and human kindness by passing Proposition 8. I’m feeling such a profound hatred for so many people right now in an Ahab-style “chest/cannon heart-fire” way that if my wrath could somehow manifest itself, millions of humanity’s most bigoted members would suddenly find themselves immortal with instant regenerative capabilities, roasting ceaselessly and inescapably on the surface of the sun. It really is a shame that we have so little protection against the use of democracy as a tool of oppression.

If these people, these immoral cretins, are going to piss-parade around the ever-increasingly-laughable idea of the “sanctity of marriage”, then I’m going to have to demand that they outlaw divorce, and, further, that people (with much overlap with those who voted “yes”, here, I’m sure) stop dressing up their hideous little inbred monstrosities of pets in tuxedos and dresses and giggling in embarrassing, anthropomorphizing glee about how Pongo and Perdita are getting “married”.

Shame on you, California. Words cannot possibly express the profundity of my disappointment in so, so many of you. To every one of you who voted “yes” on Proposition 8: May every misfortune and tragedy that has the opportunity to befall you succeed in doing so, so that you may yourselves sample the misery you’ve inflicted (and will likely continue to inflict) on so many of your fellow human beings — people who have done you no wrong, yet you persist in your baseless sadism and cruelty.

Let the outcome of Proposition 8 serve as a reminder that we cannot ease up after this one victory, however major — as meaningful and amazing this election may have been, it’s only one battle in what will assuredly be a long, difficult struggle to drag the ignorant kicking and screaming (and perhaps kicking them and screaming at them) into enlightenment.

Jabberwock

This election will be an illustration of how America deals with having taken a wrong turn: We’re seeing signs ahead saying “ASS RAPE: 2 MILES” and “PRIVATE ROAD: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT”, and so the question is, do we turn around and try to get back onto a road that might actually take us somewhere, or do we just speed up and wrap our car around a tree? It’s alarming that we actually have to wrestle over the steering wheel with the other passengers in order to keep the car on the road.

Which is why I’m probably going to be depressed even if Obama wins, because I’ll still have to come to terms with the fact that the 40%+ of American voters who’ll be casting their ballot for McCain/Palin are gleefully voting for one of the worst tickets in history after eight years of one of the worst administrations in history. Granted, I don’t think Obama is going to revolutionize the world the way many people think he is, but it’s at least a step in the right direction after years of plodding ever deeper into a bog of radioactive, tar-like shit.

Jabberwock

Funny, campy, over-the-top. This Halloween tract by Jack Chick starts with a vampire story, but ends with a straight gospel message.

Storot:Yeah, “campy”…concentration campy.

nepphi: I don’t know, I think less ‘intense, soulless horror’ and more ‘awkward teenage years’ when I read this one, so maybe…bible campy?

Storot: I was just looking for a pun on the sheer awfulness of the tract. Or Jack’s Jewy arch-villains.

J: You know, isn’t Jack kind of disobeying his own moral guidelines, here, by telling a vampire story? If other forms of fantasy are all evil and will lead people to demonic possession, does it really matter if they tack a gospel message onto the end of it? By this logic, if D&D guidebooks included some random passage from Mark at the end of it, would Jack retract Dark Dungeons?

Storot: When reading the following tract, enhance your experience with an audio track. We at Consolidated Incorporated (our slogan “If you need it, talk to someone else. We can’t help you”) recommend “Fingernails on a Chalkboard”, “Cats In Heat”, or “Rosanne Barr’s Rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’”. Anything to distract you from the pain before you.

(more…)

Jabberwock

It’s strange to me how so many Americans get so easily lured into this trap, along the campaign trail, of caring so much about how much money about three percent of the population makes that they lose sight of the importance of the quality of their own lives.

First, let’s address the subject in question, and then we’ll get to the obsession with “redistribution of wealth” as some kind of ideological profanity.

There’s something very wrong with the fact that Person A is paid maybe $12,000 a year to successfully flip hamburgers while Person B is paid $58,500,000 a year (at least for the first year) to unsuccessfully run AIG, to the point of nearly destroying the American economy. I’m sure we can all agree about the problem with paying executives large amounts regardless of performance. Where our paths may diverge, however, if you subscribe to laissez-faire and trickle-down economics, is that I see something tremendously wrong with Person B receiving 4,875 times the yearly income of Person A regardless of whether they’re not running the business into the ground.

No one could credibly argue that Person B is doing 4,875 times the work as Person A. Granted, it’s more stressful a job in certain ways, and one’s decisions regarding the direction of a company will have much greater an impact than deciding how much salt to put on the fries when you take them out of the deep fryer, but the difference certainly isn’t enough to warrant that much of a pay disparity. Surely those decision-making skills aren’t equivalent to the mind power of thousands of people.

In the 1950s-60s, the average executive salary was roughly 20 to 50 times as much as the average employee. Over the last half-century, it’s gone up into the hundreds and thousands, averaging out at around 411. Have executive positions become that much more valuable over that span of time? Doubtful, especially when you consider how many business-damaging executive scandals, abuses, and mismanagements there have been over the last eight years alone — and those are just the ones we know about. Meanwhile, the minimum wage has, adjusted for inflation, decreased on the whole over that same period of time, from an average of around $6.00 in the late 50s and through the 60s to an average of around $4.50 from 2000-2007 (in 1996 dollars).

So, executives, on the whole, are making far more than ever before, and — especially those performing poorly — far more than their jobs actually warrant. Yet, the biggest concern seems to be ensuring these executives and other Americans making millions of dollars a year will be able to keep everything they made, or at least not pay any more in taxes than Americans making only tens of thousands or a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, since imposing greater taxes on those who make more is somehow “unfair”. Hey, after all, the guy with eight houses has precisely as much to lose by the failure of American social programs as the guy living in a trailer park, right?

See, some people have a problem with wrapping their minds around why the rich need to pay more in taxes than the poor. One of the primary reasons by far is that the rich have far more to lose when government programs fail. Either you directly have more to lose when, say, the military or the police force or the fire department fails and you lose one or all of your houses and/or are robbed, or you have more to lose indirectly when those whose work your wealth is dependent on no longer have, say, a bus system to get to work, or access to a working medical system to keep them healthy. (Of course, beyond that, there’s the fact that “what’s mine is mine” is a really rather primitive way of thinking, but I’ll get to that in the “The Case Against Economic Liberalism” essays.)

We also run into the illusion that higher taxes on those with higher incomes is somehow a disincentive for success, but that’s rather a specious assertion when you consider that A) People who make $12,000/year don’t all just pack it in and shoot themselves and still do their best to make as much as they can; B) It’s not like life is going to be miserable if you’re taking home $6 million out of $10 million per year. I don’t see any of those people packing it in and shooting themselves, either, because their success is somehow “limited”.

There’s also the claim — also mostly specious — that “I EARNED that! It’s MINE!” which is laughable when you consider that many people in the wealthiest category of Americans make a large amount of money simply from capital gains. It’s like leaving a piece of bread out on the edge of the sink and congratulating yourself months later for all the hard work you put into getting mold to grow. (Here’s another place where the “disincentive” argument is ridiculous: Are people going to suddenly say ‘well, fine, I won’t make more money just from having more money’ and take their balls and bats and go home?) But even for the wealth that doesn’t come from capital gains, if you’re making more than a few million dollars a year, you have to have one hell of an ego to claim you actually earned all of it, compared to all the work done by those making less than even $100,000/year. You’re delusional or in denial if you don’t think that a large portion of what you’re making at that point is just an added bonus for being one of the elite.

Yet the fairness of putting soft, flexible limits on exorbitant salaries and amassments of wealth in order to better the lives of the vast majority of us who didn’t have the same opportunities is considered this vile, terrible concept, and referred to in a snide and disgusted tone as “redistribution of wealth” as though it were the ideological equivalent of a profanity. And somehow, there are Americans who eat that up even though what they’re all clamoring to drag out with pitch forks and lynch is something that when implemented benefits them tremendously at the minor inconvenience of 2% of the population, and when unimplemented makes hundreds of millions suffer and fall into poverty and credit cesspools so that 2% of the population can ultimately keep even more money than the immense amounts they already rake in — numbers so large that any difference is almost arbitrary and serves no purpose but bragging rights.

What in the fuck, America? Wake up!

Jabberwock

My sense of reality has been absolutely shattered. It’s… I mean… if this isn’t real, then what is? Now I feel like anything could happen! Pigs raining from the sky… hats growing teeth and developing an appetite for human brains… light waves from the sun turning into water on contact with the color green. I mean, how could this have been a fabrication?

Well, it turns out that it was. That’s right, the woman with the fake-looking shiner and the “knife wound” that looked like fingernail scratches and the tale of the amazing gigantic scary black liberal who was able to somehow psychically figure out which car belonged to her on a crowded street apparently made up the whole thing.

Gee. Shocker.

Jabberwock

I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”

Then you’ll see this man or woman — someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

You can find the full essay at the other end of this link.

Jabberwock

While I’m all in favor of dogs receiving treatment for injuries and overwork, it’s a little fucked up to me that there are a bunch of dogs getting better healthcare treatment than hundreds of millions of human Americans, all on the taxpayers’ dollar. It’s not that I don’t support a single-payer healthcare system or anything — I’m all for socialized healthcare, since I strongly believe that being alive and healthy should be a right and not a commodity — but it’s infuriating that government officials are green-lighting this kind of shit while letting vast numbers of the uninsured suffer because of ridiculous “everything needs to be privatized” ideologies that would be horrific if fully implemented but are even worse when some of their so-called proponents are actually corporatists who spend even more of taxpayers’ money than socialist-capitalists ever would.

Jabberwock

The term ‘Libertarian’ encompasses several schools of thought, all of them devoted to the essential idea of liberty (as we might expect,) otherwise known as freedom. This is a fine thing; most of us hold the idea of freedom in fairly high regard.

Things get tricky, though, in the matter of defining what, exactly, liberty is. There are two main big categories most people invoke here, negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from things, such as the freedom from conscription or taxation. Positive liberty is the freedom to do things, such as the freedom to eat chocolate right now or take a vacation to the Grand Canyon.

The common libertarians with which most of us are acquainted here in the US (we may call them vulgar libertarians or Vultarians,) limit themselves to a negative conception of liberty. They go on to formulate their philosophy of governmental non-interference as based on property rights, contracts, and the free market. The government, they say, should limit itself to enforcing property rights and contracts, without interfering with the free market.

There are several problems with this formulation, which I will explore through these three questions.

1. What is government?
2. What is a free market?
3. What is property?

1. Firstly, government is not, as many seem to think, merely the structures and people appointed by law to rule over a given piece of territory. Many Libertarians apparently labor under the misapprehension that if by some magical effect all of the official federal, state, and local governmental employees disappeared tomorrow, we would have no more government. This is hogwash.

“Government” is an emergent property of human society. All peoples have government, and everyone is at some point along the spectrum of governmental power, though most of us are very near the bottom. Church leaders are part of the government. High school cliques are government. Gangs are government.

Government is nothing more than the structure of the distribution of power throughout society. Power is the ability to control people and resources.

So this is the first important misconception of Libertarianism, that ‘freedom’ means freedom only from the official, federal government. If we replace a democratically elected master with a corporate master, we have not freed ourselves, but possibly made our freedom even more difficult to obtain.

2. The ‘free market’, as glorified in much of Libertarian thought, does not exist. The government, both official and not, does a great deal to shape and assist corporate America. Without tax breaks, subsidies, protectionist laws, monopolies, bullshit contracts, etc, corporate America as we know it would not exist.

Libertarians mistake corporate America for a ‘free market’. It’s not. For us to truly have a ‘free market’ society in which people are actually free to buy and sell labor, commodities, enter into business with each other, make contracts, etc., then we need to actually have a free market.

This is the biggest hypocrisy of the Vultarians. They complain about the horrors of being taxed to provide food for the destitute, but are perfectly okay with government policies which give millions of dollars to major corporations.

Moreover, as explored above, corporations are a form of government. Power is the ability to control resources, and government is the distribution of power, not just the investiture of laws. Liberty, therefore, must also mean the freedom from coercion of all forms, including corporate coercion. It is a fine thing to be free of coercion from Washington, but if you must in exchange rise at a set hour every morning, work under the foreman’s constant supervision for 8, 9, 12 hours a day, dress as required, HAVE YOUR WIFE TAKE A BLOOD TEST BECAUSE YOUR BOSS SAYS SO, and in all other matters set your day by your bosses’ dictates, then you have no freedom at all.

Contracts, which Libertarians hold up as an ideal way to arrange matters in society, are especially problematic in light of the governmental power of corporations. Contracts between free and independent equals are fine, but when one party to the contract is significantly more powerful than the other, then we are operating under the threat of coercion. We cannot honestly say that a contract has any legitimacy if one party faces starvation if they don’t sign. Likewise, in our present society, one cannot get a credit card, buy a car, go to college, obtain credit, buy insurance, deposit money at the bank, buy a house, or do a great number of other things without being first required to sign a contract. The alternative–to do without these things–is almost impossible. These contracts, then, are compulsory and supported whole-heartedly by the official government, which sees no reason not to increase the power of the corporate government at the expense of the people.

A true libertarian, therefore, must look to protect the people no only from the coercion of the official government, but also from the coercion of all forms of power.

3. “If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required… Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?”

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?

Property is the most sacred principle of Libertarians; the idea of ‘get off my land and let go of my money and leave me alone,’ in short. But much of the current distribution of property is unjust, or stems from unjust beginnings. Most of us here in the US live on stolen land–land stolen from the Native American Indians. How can we make any claim to ‘ownership’ when we got the land from people who got it from people who murdered the people who had it first?

The history of land is a history of dispossession and murder, not just in the US. Much of what is now regarded as ‘private property’ was once public–common grazing areas, common forests, etc. The idea that an individual, rather than a community, can ‘own’ a piece of land which they themselves are not cultivating or otherwise maintaining is of relatively recent vintage, and was invented for the sole benefit of the wealthy.

The enclosure of the common spaces has deprived the common people of what was once regarded as their right–the right to graze their cattle, to raise their crops, and roam at will.

The imposition of one person’s ‘rights’ with regard to the land has come at the expense of the rights of all other persons to that land. One person’s freedom to do as they wish with their land comes at the expense of everyone else’s freedom to do as they wish with the land.

If we regard it as the proper duty of the government to protect the property rights of individuals, as Libertarians do, then the government must first ensure that the distribution of property is fair and just, not based on theft and murder, and not unduly imposing upon the liberties of the rest of the bulk of the population. The liberty of the majority must come before the liberty of the few, for the obvious reason of thereby maximizing liberty.

There are other kinds of property we may mention besides land, of course. Patents and Copyrights are obvious ones. These are property rights to monopolies on ideas. They were originally instituted for the common good, in order to promote creativity and development through monetary incentives. However, the IP system has become little more than a bludgeon with which major corporations extract money and energy from each other and bully minor corporations. Rather than encouraging innovation and growth, corporations use patents to block and inhibit innovation and growth, contrary to the public interest for which they were first created. Through patents, corporations (and their lawyers) get rich without developing anything, creating anything, or otherwise contributing to the public good.

The idea of owning an idea is, at best, specious. No idea comes entirely from itself; every idea has its roots in previous ideas.

Locke describes the right of property ownership as deriving from effort expended by the owner–that is, if I gather seeds and plant and water them and they sprout into trees, I may claim those trees as mine, due to the effort put into them.

But if you first tilled the soil and dragged in heavy bags of fertilizer, dug wells on the land, and built an irrigation system, and all I did was collect a few seeds from the fruit trees you had planted a few years back, then planted those seeds in the soil and watered them with the water you had provided, what right would I have to claim those fruit trees as mine? They ought, justly, to be the common property of both of us, for we have both expended effort on their creation.

Likewise, the same is true of ideas. The government can arbitrarily declare that this idea is this person’s property, and that idea is another’s, and so on and so forth until they have divided up the entirety of land and sky, but this does not make the distribution just, nor should the government therefore enforce it.

Liberty, then, as the object of libertarianism, cannot be regarded as simply residing in protection of property, freedom from government interference, or the unfettered workings of the market. We must start from the idea of liberty itself, and then evaluate how each things may impose upon it, and oppose them in turn where their imposition is unjust. To do any less–to allow people to be oppressed by the rich, coerced into unfair contracts and deprived of their natural rights of movement and of their common property by laws enacted by the rich, is an utter betrayal of liberty.

After spending the last week or so riling up American prejudice and hatred with ridiculous accusations that push all the right fear buttons for a particular variety of Americans — the type who subsequently chant violent sentiments that terrify Americans like myself — McCain is now scrambling desperately to figure out a way to weasel out of being called on his shit.

I still don’t quite get why anyone would want to vote for this asshole.

Jabberwock

So, the McCain campaign has been stirring up a snake pit of reactionary morons in order to incite hatred against Obama over his working on an educational board with a guy who set off some bombs in Washington D.C. almost half a century ago, who has since had the charges dropped against him, become a professor, and won Chicago’s Citizen of the Year award.

Either McCain and Palin are just so profoundly goddamned dumb that they had no clue that there are many particularly ignorant Americans who would react this way, working themselves up into a terror tizzy wherein anything that sets off even the remotest neuronal association with 9/11 puts them into a kind of irrational base-brain panic mode where clear facts and logic can be suspended so that the witch hunt they feel is necessary to protect their families can continue unabated and the perceived danger — however illusory — can be eliminated, or they actually want to get an angry mob to lynch Barack Obama.

On that note, it makes me so confident for a better, brighter future that over 40% of American voters plan on casting their ballot for the ticket that’s either extremely just profoundly fucking dumb and out of touch with the people, or incredibly evil and manipulative and willing to incite lynch mobs and keep children from finding out what “bad touch” means so long as it helps them get into office. (And don’t give me any shit about “well, the McCain campaign is urging people to be respectful” — if you take a basket full of snakes and shake it as hard as you can, release it in a preschool and then sing a lullaby, you don’t get points for trying to calm the snakes.)

One would think that inciting an angry mob against an individual would fall under the definition of “terrorism”. I am genuinely afraid that one of these stupid pieces of shit is going to take it upon themselves to assassinate Obama.

But no, that’s not terrorism — actually inciting terror like that by stirring up violence and hatred. Geez, what was I thinking? Terrorism is serving on some education board with a jumped-up hippie asshole who set off some non-fatal bombs half a century ago and making it clear that you detested what the man did back when you were eight years old.

Somehow, eventually, these hatred-mongering motherfuckers will reap exactly what they are sowing, and I assure you it will be one incredibly ugly potato.

Jabberwock