BroadSnark

A couple weeks ago, I went to a forum at Cato called Are Liberty and Equality Compatible?.  (Cato, meh.  Free lunch, score!)  The short story is that James P. Sterba was trying to find a way to squeeze a liberal philosophy into a libertarian mold.  What he came up with was this:

1.  Libertarians believe in negative liberty.  Nobody should be aggressed against/interfered with.

2.  If the rich should have the liberty to enjoy their excess without being interfered with, then the poor should have the liberty to take what they need from the rich without being interfered with.

And presto chango, a positive liberty becomes a negative liberty.

Clearly, nobody at Cato was buying this, not even the leftists in the room. But if anyone had been buying it, Sterba would then have tried to convince them that what we are really talking about is a conflict between different equal liberty principles.

The rebuttal was from Jan Narveson.  I’m not going to go into the whole back and forth.  You can watch it on Cato’s site if you are interested.  I just want to talk about one of the core elements of Narveson’s (common) argument.  He believes that we need to look for principles that all people can agree to, based on their rational self interest.  And he thinks the non-aggression principle is the bees knees.

But can everyone really agree to that principle?

In the context of our argument of rich v. poor, non-aggression only goes so far.  At some point, non-aggression no longer serves the rational self interest of the poor.  Non-aggression against United Fruit Company was an absurd prospect for a land-starved Guatemalan.  Sterba could have made a stronger case that a certain amount of equality (or at least basic needs being met) is a prerequisite to widespread adoption of the non-aggression principle.

More importantly for this discussion, define aggression.  There are some people who think it is aggression to break a bank window (even though the only consequence is a few hundred dollars from the bank’s coffers).  But some of those same people don’t think it is aggression to pay off corrupt officials in order to buy huge swaths of productive farmland in Africa and then ship the products to Dubai while the Africans in that country starve.

And there are people who think the exact opposite.

Of course, the six hundred pound elephant in the room during that discussion was property.  One of the reasons we can’t agree on a definition of aggression is that we can’t agree on who gets to use what resources.  Land is one of the most contentious issues in the world, as is what lies below it.  Those conflicts are not going away any time soon.  Maybe never.

I like principles.  I spend a lot of time trying to root out what principles people are operating from.  But I’m not sure we are going to get very far if the plan is to convince 7 billion people to define aggression the same way and agree not to do it.  And while I pick on the core libertarian principle here, I could write this post about universal human rights and come up with an equally skeptical conclusion about universality.

Universal may not be possible.  And if it is true that universal is not possible, then what?

So here is a fascinating chart from Pew. It shows trust in government by administration, starting with Kennedy and Johnson.

During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, most democrats and republicans trusted the government. After Tricky Dick, trust in government plunged and never really came back. But whereas trust in government (or lack thereof) stays fairly consistent for democrats and independents, for republicans it shoots up when one of their own is in the Whitehouse.  I mean look at the difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  Holy crap.

I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around these figures.  Republicans – who are always talking about small government and keeping the government out of your business and how evil politicians are – have absurdly high trust in government when its one of “their own.”  If they see themselves reflected back, then they just figure, what?  They’re good people and we should just trust them?  Evidence be damned.  But if it’s the scary other, then all bets are off and it’s time to march out with guns?

Meanwhile democrats, who don’t trust government worth a damn, insist that every problem can only be solved with legislation and government enforcement.  How’s that for schizophrenic?  Why on earth would you time and again willingly give your power to people you don’t trust to use it wisely?  And how is it that I, as an anarchist mistrustful of power, am often treated like I’m out of my mind.  I’m just taking your own mistrust to its logical conclusion.

The survey also asked whether it was the members of congress or the political system that was broken.  Unfortunately, they asked it in such a way that, if you wanted to say it was the system, you had to say that congress people have good intentions.  What kind of choice is that.  I’ll take D. none of the above.

You can see the whole pew poll here

By now you have surely heard about Rand Paul’s interview with Rachel Maddow.  Paul slimed around for twenty minutes trying not to admit that he does not support the provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that made it illegal for a private business to discriminate.

On Rachel’s next show, she had a segment on why Rand Paul’s views were so important to get out in the open.  You can watch it here.

Around minute 6, Rachel made the claim that the civil rights act “ended, for example, Woolworths lunch counter practice of only serving white people.”

Actually, no it didn’t.  Four college students – Ezell A. Blair, Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond -  took it upon themselves to take that lunch counter.  And a whole lot of other people sat at that counter day after day until Woolworths changed their policy.

You can watch a segment about the Woolworth protest here (excuse the hokey, travel channelish soundtrack).

It wasn’t government action that integrated Woolworth’s, it was direct action.

One of the most frustrating things about the liberal narrative is that it gives presidents, congress, and the supreme court credit for things that they have no business getting credit for.  Elites did not lead the way.  They did things kicking and screaming, if they did them at all, after massive mobilization by everyday people.

And the worst thing is not even that people like Ezell A. Blair, Jr., Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond don’t get credit for what they do.  The worst thing is that the liberal narrative makes it appear that our only option is to vote every four years and spend the rest of the time screaming at our television screens.

It makes you feel powerless.

But we aren’t any less powerful than Ezell A. Blair, Jr., Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond.  They didn’t wait for the government to ride in on a white horse and save the day.  They didn’t sit at home watching Tweedledee Democrat and Tweetledum Republican play political ping pong.  They made it happen.

Want jobs?  Take over a factory.  Neighborhood school an underfunded prison that isn’t teaching you shit?  Start your own damn school.  Pissed that banks are raking in millions while they foreclose on people’s houses?  Put your body between those houses and the sheriffs trying to evict those people.

And the next time someone tries to tell you that those benevolent politicians swooped in and saved black people, remind them who the real heroes are.

Here in the United States, the idea of secession is inextricably tied to slavery.  And there is damn good reason for that.  Despite what some putrid politicians may claim, the civil war was very much about slavery.  But the Confederacy didn’t invent the idea of secession.  They aren’t the only people in the world who have seceded or want to secede.  And the people who want to secede aren’t always the bad guys.

Those of us who are horrified by slavery (and I hope to hell that means you) have a tendency to see the Civil War in very simplistic terms.  The Southerners wanted to own people.  The Northerners wanted to stop them.  But I would like you to ask yourself this -  How badly did the Northerners wanted to stop them?

Northerners consistently compromised any principles they claimed to have in order to appease slave owners.  When slaves escaped to non-slave states in the North, Northern officials helped to capture those slaves and return them to their enslavers.  Not exactly the actions of the good guys.

What if the Northerners had really been passionate about the human rights of those slaves?  What if they had been so appalled by slavery that they refused to make compromises with the South any longer?  What if, rather than continue to compromise their principles, the North had seceded?

In this fictional world, the adamantly anti-slavery North would not have returned runaway slaves.  They would have given them asylum.  Perhaps the North would have helped freedom fighers like Nat Turner to procure weapons and overthrow the plantation owners.  Perhaps slaves would have gotten their 40 acres and a mule, rather than a post reconstruction sellout of Jim Crow and the KKK.

One thing is for certain, what we associate with the idea of secession would be much different. And then perhaps it would not be so difficult for us to speak about the principle underlying the idea of secession.  Secession is about self-determination.  Every anti-colonial and nationalist struggle in history has been about self-determination.  Democracy is about self-determination.  If you think that secession is only for neo-nazis, but have a “Free Tibet” bumper sticker on your car, I have news for you.  Tibet is trying to secede from China.  Tibet wants self-determination.

It’s asking a lot to separate the idea of self-determination from the context in which it was used.  We cannot ignore history for the sake of principle.  But nor can we ignore principle because of history.

Secession is back in the news lately.  And often it is on the lips of exactly the kind of white supremacists that you expect to talk about it. Undoubtedly, many of these people would not be talking secession if the president were not black.  But, as Chris Hedges laid out in his recent article, it isn’t just racists who are thinking about seceding.

Many people are disillusioned precisely because they thought electing Barack Obama was meaningful change.  He is an extraordinary person with an incredible life story.  He galvanized communities.  He inspired even the jaded.  We elected an African American community organizer.  From the perspective of the mainstream left, Barack Obama is quite likely the best we can do.  And the best we can do isn’t good enough to get out from under the rule of Goldman Sachs and the Military Industrial Complex.

I’m not writing this to argue for secession.  I don’t think a new state would be, ultimately, better than the old state.  And I’m sure as hell not trying to defend racist separatist movements.  I’m just trying to point out that it is completely possible to be a rational and decent person and believe that a government, our government, any government is beyond hope.  I’m just trying to say that it is not such a bad idea to imagine what real self-determination, out from under the power of Exxon and Halliburton, might look like.

Everyone is talking about Supreme Court nominations again.  I agree with those people who think that the court is going to be more conservative with the loss of Stevens.  But I’m looking at that a different way these days.

I’ve always paid close attention to Supreme Court picks.  Partly that was because I believed that the courts had been leaders in social change.  Like a lot of people, I had the impression that the courts were defenders of social justice.  I thought cases like Brown v. Board of Education were exemplary.

In this really fascinating lecture, Michael Klarman challenges the idea of the Supreme Court as an agent of positive social change relating to racial discrimination.  He talks about how Brown v. The Board of Education (and a set of subsequent progressively decided cases in the 1960s) gave the impression of the court being an agent for racial justice.  Then he shows how, outside of those few cases, the court has far more often stood in opposition to progressive change in racial policy.

Looked at as a whole, those cases we admire now were only blips in the history of the court.  When you add to that the reality of our criminal justice system, it is actually shocking that anyone who is anti-racist would see the Supreme Court (or any court) as being a primary vehicle of change.  So why do we?

Klarman suspects part of the reason is that it is much easier to posit Brown v. Board as the spark of the civil rights movement.  It is much less complicated than an evaluation of the interlocking factors of internal migration, World War II service by blacks, and international embarrassment.  And Klarman sort of infers, but doesn’t quite get there, that there is some paternalism going on there.  These benevolent arbiters of justice are going to make it all o.k.

In other words, a handful of powerful elites are once again given credit for changes that actually occurred at the grass roots and worked its way up.

Once again, our attention is focused on elites.  It is focused on who gets one of those seats instead of on the hard work of organizing in our communities.  We are given the impression that the courts lead the way.  But they don’t lead, we do.

Or, as Thoreau put it in Slavery in Massachusetts:

The law will never make men free, it is men who have got to make the law free.

My friend posted this article the other day.  And I just had to comment, because it is such a clear example of cherry picking facts – not only by Glenn Beck (who is clearly one slice short of a sandwich), but also the people who respond to him.

So here is the map that started it all.

Of course, Beck is inferring that the federal government is taking over, as though this land has not been under federal control since long, long before the current administration.

The response to Beck, in the article I linked to above, focuses on national parks and makes federal land seem like nothing but majestic redwoods and butterflies.

The truth, of course, is more complicated.  While I cannot confirm that those red splotches are all federally controlled.  I do know that Beck’s map includes national parks.  It also includes Native American reservations and military bases.  I’m not sure what Beck is suggesting here.  If he wants to invade Native American reservations (again), I’m going to have to object.  If he wants to tear down those military bases brick by brick..shit…I’ll put on a tin foil hat and join him for that.

I just love this map and response because it is the perfect demonstration of how one side makes everything sound like a new and sinister plot that you haven’t heard of.  Meanwhile, in response, the other side acts as though there’s nothing in the least bit problematic going on.  Nothing to see here people, just a little nuclear test site.  Move along.

Also interesting to me though is how Glenn Beck cut off his map.  Notice that he does not show any red on Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota…  All those places have plenty of military bases and Native American reservations too.  How come he doesn’t show the whole U.S. map?  It doesn’t look as ominous with the rest of the country included?  Maybe his loyal fans in Oklahoma would put two and two together if he included their bases and reservations?

Information is so easy to manipulate.

Politics are like team sports.

You pick a team based on some random fact like an accident of birth or the personal charisma of one of the team players.  Then, knowing little about the lives or beliefs of the people on your team, you put all your energy and quite a bit of your money into rooting for them.

The players on the field, like politicians, play the game because they sometimes win.  And even if they don’t win, they get money and benefits far out of proportion to their worth.  The owners, like corporate boards, win no matter what.  All the money you spend rooting for your team, like campaign contributions, really ends up going to owners in the end.  We build them stadiums or give them subsidies with our tax dollars, and those charismatic player/politicians make sure we do it.

We are just spectators.  We can buy a team jersey.  We can pay the salaries of the players.  We might even get an autograph or a rush when our team wins.  But we will never benefit from that win.  We will only pay for it.  And no matter how many scandals there are we keep on paying, because we are addicted to the game.

What if we stopped being spectators?  What if we took off the team jerseys and actually spoke to the other people in the stands?  Even better, what if we left the stadium and started talking to the people who can’t even afford to be spectators?  What if we all invented a new game that was just as entertaining, but that everyone could play and everyone could benefit from?

People have, apparently, lost their minds.  There seems to be a panic that we have lost the fabric of our society and I’m having trouble getting a handle on what has happened that is so drastic that people would think its tyranny or fascism or hitleresque or stalinesque (Jon Stewart)

That quote is from Stewart’s interview with Lou Dobbs (video below).  Dobbs never really answered Jon’s question, so I’m going to try.

There is a certain segment of the American population that really believes in the American foundational myths.  They identify with them.  They believe that America was built by a handful of white, Christian, men with exceptional morals.  Their America is the country that showed the world democracy, saved the Jews in World War II, and tore down the Berlin wall.

These people have always fought changes to their mythology.  They have always resented those of us who pushed to complicate those myths with the realities of slavery, Native American genocide, imperial war in the Philippines, invasions of Latin American countries, and secret arms deals.

And we have been so busy fighting them to have our stories and histories included in the American story that we sometimes forget why the myths were invented in the first place.

No myth illustrates the sleight of hand behind our national mythology quite like the myth of the cowboy.  In the mythology, the cowboy is a white man.  He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization.   He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian.  He is free and independent.  He is in charge of his own destiny.

Read Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas and you will get a very different picture.  In reality, the first American cowboys were indigenous people trained by the Spanish missionaries.  In reality, more than 30% of the cowboys on Texas trail drives were African American, Mexican, or Mexican-American.

And cowboys were not so free.

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs.  Many did not even own the horse they rode.  Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la Bonanza).  The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

So what does all this have to do with Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, teabaggers and white panic?

Marginalization and myths have always been about economic exploitation.  White supremacy is not simply personal bigotry.  It is the systematic exclusion, dehumanization, and erasure of the majority in order to preserve economic dominance for the wealthy minority.  And while white men may be in most positions of wealth and power to this day, only a very few of them really benefit from our current economic system.  White supremacy helped distract poor and working class whites from targeting their economic exploiters.  White supremacy helped mask the lie of equal opportunity.

When you know the real history of the cowboy, it makes the selling of Reagan and Bush as cowboys seem like an inside joke.   The mythological cowboy is the heroic figure that many Americans wish they were.  The fact that the cowboy was actually an exploited worker is virtually unknown.

When Americans vote for a president, they want to see that heroic version of themselves looking back at them.  They want to see that free cowboy of the mythology.  No matter how poor or exploited white people were, they could always take subconscious comfort in the fact that, when they looked at the highest power in the land, they saw an idealized version of themselves.

And then came Barack Obama.

Pop.

It’s a powerful thing to be able to identify with the people who are your leaders, to feel like they are one of you.  It’s a feeling that many people in the United States felt for the first time when Barack Obama was elected.  It’s equally powerful when your elected leaders are clearly not like you, when the fact that they do not represent you is glaringly obvious.

I had my whole life to get used to the idea that the government was never made to really represent my interests.  Many of these angry people are the very white, Christian, men that this country was supposedly built by and for.  And this is the first time the myth of America has been unmasked for them.

Undoubtedly, there are some bigots out there who are just angry that they have a black president.  Clearly, even for those who don’t feel motivated by personal bigotry, there is a healthy dose of racism underlying the fact that it took a black president for them to realize that their government is as dysfunctional as it is.  But I doubt the people we are talking about have an understanding of the difference between bigotry and racism.

And I don’t believe it is just blackness that makes Barack Obama different and symbolic.  It is also his intellectual cosmopolitanism.  He is a symbol of the privilege that is replacing whiteness – the educated professional/managerial class.  And there is a significant amount of animosity directed towards those people who justify their privilege by virtue of their intellect.

And so these people who have lost their foundational myths are out in the streets.  They are using all the synonyms for “bad” that our pathetic school system and media have taught them – communist, fascist, totalitarian, socialist, nazi.  All the words are interchangeable.  They all mean not American.  They all mean not them.

An incident happened at my friend’s job the other day that perfectly demonstrates why liberals and conservatives are ultimately doomed to fail in their efforts to resolve conflicts.

One of the employees is a very young woman.  She’s not particularly mature.  It’s her first job.  She was getting upset because some of the other employees were showing up late in the mornings, leaving her the only one there.

To give you a bit of background.  This business was run by a woman who had only one rule, that there were no rules.  Employees had been led to believe that they had a very chill policy about being a few minutes late in the morning.  Nobody had ever been spoken to about tardiness.

This young woman, rather than speaking to her coworkers, went to the new management.  Management instituted a litany of draconian new policies for people who are late.  These policies don’t effect everyone equally, as some people have children or live farther away.  And one employee has an illness that makes things particularly hard.

I have no doubt that the manager primarily responsible for the new policies had good intentions.  In her mind, no doubt, she is looking after the complaining employee – a very sweet girl who I’m sure made a compelling case for paternalism.

The problem is that every other employee was feeling beat down.  Moral sunk.  A small wall was put up between the other employees and the complainer.  A wall was put up between the employees and the management.  They’ve gotten over that incident, but their relationships will always be a little bit different.

It didn’t have to be that way.  The people at this place are all kind and conscientious.  Had the unhappy employee went directly to them, I have no doubt they would have changed their behavior.  They could have worked something out.  But that opportunity was lost.

If you believe, as I do, that the management had good intentions and were just trying to look out for the person they thought taken advantage of, then this is a great example of how liberals go wrong.  Liberals have good intentions, but they are constantly erecting walls with their paternalism.

If you are more skeptical and think that the new management was just exercising their authority, imposing discipline to get people in line, then this is a great example of how conservatives go wrong.  Conservatives think people are only motivated by consequences.  But all they create is fear, distrust, and resentment.

Liberals and Conservatives have been unable to resolve any of our fundamental problems, because nobody can solve somebody else’s problems.   The longer we rely on mommy or daddy to deal with things for us, the fewer problem solving skills we develop.

It doesn’t matter if you are approaching an issue with the intention to help people or to scare the piss out of them.  Putting a third party representative or authority in the middle of conflict degrades relationships and ensures future conflict.

Bolivian president Evo Morales says that exports to the U.S. have decreased 8% due to Bolivia’s decertification under The Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA).  However, Morales expects that agreements with Venezuela, along with demand from Arab countries, will make up for the loss.  (Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been strengthening his ties with Bolivia and Venezuela.)

Supposedly, the U.S. government frowns on the increasing influence of Chavez in Latin America.  Supposedly, the U.S. government is worried about Iranian power around the world.  Supposedly, the Obama administration is trying to turn over a new leaf with Latin America.  So why would the U.S. government do something that alienates Latin American countries and sends them into the warm embrace of the very people they are trying to isolate?

It’s inexplicable, at least to any rational person, but U.S. drug policy has never been rational.

The United States is the leading consumer of cocaine.  Rather than dealing with U.S. addiction and its related problems, our policy has been to go after the “source.”  Now it takes many ingredients to make cocaine – sulfuric acid, kerosene, lime, sodium carbonate – but we have focused on going after the coca leaf.

Going after coca leaves may seem to make some sense, as the coca leaf is where the alkaloids that make you high are found.  But coca is a bush grown by subsistence farmers, campesinos, who often have no other viable cash crop.  And the coca leaf is an integral part of Andean culture and has been since at least 1800 B.C.

Unfortunately for Andeans and their traditions, a German chemist named Friedrich Gaedcke isolated the alkaloids in coca leaves.  Andean coca growers were everyone’s best friend when coca was used in legal products like Coca Cola and cocaine laced wine.  But once a handful of U.S. drug warriors decided that cocaine had to be stopped, we expected Andean people to turn their backs on thousands of years of culture and to just give up an integral part of their economy.

As the drug war ratcheted up, Andean people in Bolivia and elsewhere suffered the consequences.  Bolivia was pressured to eradicate coca crops using herbicides and fungicides that damaged food crops, contaminated water sources, and made people sick.  Human rights abuses escalated as pressure was put on Bolivia to militarize their anti-drug efforts and to impose increasingly draconian penalties on people involved in the coca and cocaine trades.

In addition to interdiction and eradication, drug warriors from the U.S. promoted crop substitution programs.  Loans were provided to farmers to grow crops other than coca and special trade deals were arranged to help open up U.S. markets to legal Andean goods.  The ATPDEA was part of that effort.

All of our efforts to stop drugs at the “source” have been an abysmal failure.  Substitute crops were no replacement for coca bushes which need little care and bring in far more money.  The only things U.S. imposed drug policies were effective at was alienating Andean people.  Nobody knows that better than Evo Morales, former head of the Chapare coca growers union.

Morales has taken the position that Bolivia should say no to cocaine, but yes to coca.  His refusal to acquiesce to all U.S. demands when it comes to drug policy has contributed to a testy relationship with the U.S. and to Bolivia’s continued decertification.

Now the decertification doesn’t really matter much.  It effects only a small amount of trade.  And the U.S. officials know damned well that, even if Morales did everything they want, it wouldn’t do anything to resolve the drug problem in the United States.  So it makes absolutely no sense that we would take action to piss off Bolivians (and their allies) and drive a further wedge between the U.S. and other countries of the Americas.

But sense and drug policy don’t seem to go together in the United States.