Rent Strikes: ‘together we can defeat the housing market’

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Matt Broomfield

As they revive a long-dormant form of protest, rent strikers in London and San Francisco must learn lessons from the great strikes of the 20th century.

When you can no longer afford to pay your rent, only one course of action remains: stop paying it. On both sides of the Atlantic, tenants are militating against the unbearable pressure of the housing market via the only locus of power available to them — going on rent strike.

Midtown Apartments, San Francisco

Jose LaCrosby was an African-American hair stylist to the stars. Nina Simone, James Brown and Miles Davis all frequented his San Francisco salon. Terminally ill at the age of 89, LaCrosby was told by his doctors that he should return to die among his friends in Midtown Apartments.

But the City of San Francisco had just hiked rents by up to 300 percent. If the Korean War veteran wanted to move back in to a ground-floor apartment it would now cost him $3700 a month. LaCrosby had lived in Midtown for two decades, but he spent the last 7 months of his life under fluorescent lights in an anodyne hospice ward, unable to afford the grossly inflated rent.

LaCrosby’s treatment is symptomatic of the way Midtown is being used as an asset to be stripped for cash, says long-time resident and Save Midtown organizer Jay Majitov. “This community is being displaced by the greed and avarice of property pimps preying on the weak and the disenfranchised,” he explains. Many of Majitov’s neighbors moved into Midtown after being socially cleansed from other areas of San Francisco in the 1960s, on what they understood was a rent-to-buy agreement.

But though Midtown paid off its collective mortgage in 2007, the city reneged on its agreement to hand the building over to the tenants. Instead, Midtowners were hit with a threefold increase in rent, far outstripping the maximum increase set by San Francisco rent controls. Appalled by this betrayal of trust, the tenants of 65 Midtown apartments have been withholding their rent increase since August 2015.

University College London

On the face of it, LaCrosby’s working-class neighbors in Midtown have little in common with the primarily middle-class, primarily white students of University College London. But the price of UCL accommodation has risen by 56 percent in the last six years, and the university extracts £16 million annually in pure profit from their residences. The halls remain shabby, cramped and infested with cockroaches.

As a result, around 150 students are currently striking for a 40 percent rent decrease. “UCL call residents in halls customers, not students,” says David Dahlborn of UCL, Cut The Rent (UCL-CTR). “It’s sheer exploitation.”

There have been rumblings about wider rent strikes across the British left for months, while US activists in Portland and elsewhere are now looking to copy Midtown’s example. Yet until a couple of years ago, no one was talking about rent strikes at all.

The problem(s) with rent strikes

Once a cornerstone of tenants’ rights activism, since the 1980s the rent strike has largely been absent from the arsenal of the left. The most famous rent strike in history occurred in 1915, when the fear of a Bolshevik insurrection forced the UK government to appease strikers in Glasgow by introducing rent controls. As the Communist threat faded after the second Red Scare, so too did the need to form housing policy with one eye on the Kremlin, and the government’s attitude toward rent strikers hardened accordingly.

Given that many rent strikes occurred in mutual relation with industrial strikes, their decline in popularity can partially be ascribed to the decimation of workers’ right to strike by Thatcher and her successors. The UK now loses a tenth as many days to industrial action as it did in the 1980s, and “strike” has become a politically toxic term. (UCL-CTR advise their activists to avoid the word altogether when door-knocking.) The fragmentation of the left and the castration of the trade unions have left Britain without left-wing superstructures capable of amplifying wildcat rent strikes into a broader social movement.

There are also delocalized issues inherent in the mode of protest. The vulnerable people who stand to gain the most from a reduction in rent are also those most imperiled by eviction: working-class people, people of color, single mothers and the disabled, often living in social housing. According to Jay Majitov, many Midtowners will be forced out of state or onto the street if their strike is broken. There is no legal protection for rent strikers in the UK or the USA.

Recrimination can be brutal: after the arrest of rent strikers in Kings’ Cross in 1960, crowds of protesters were baton-charged and violently dispersed by mounted police. Mary Barbour and her army of Glaswegian housewives were forced to fight off heavy-handed bailiffs with wet clothes, rotten food and flour-bombs. Barbour would stomp round the tenements whirling a football rattle to summon her troops as the “factor” moved in.

Midtown property managers Mercy Housing have kept up an aggressive campaign of intimidation, towing residents’ cars for minor infractions and muscling into pensioners’ homes. “They came in as an occupying force, a colonizer. There’s no regard for cultural sensitivity or the long-term tenants,” says Majitov. Tenants have been told they face eviction if their grandchildren visit more than twice a week, or if they hold barbecues on their own property. “I’m sorry, man, but barbecues are what we do,” Majitov adds.

Making rent strikes work

An industrial striker does no work and so loses her pay, but rent strikers actually save money while they agitate, as astronomic rents stop crippling working people and start depreciating from the profits of housing companies. The more unbearable the financial burden on the renters, the keener the loss suddenly felt by the landlord, in an efficacious reversal of power dynamics.

Last year, UCL-CTR organized students from UCL and SOAS in a successful strike, securing £400,000 compensation after the university conceded it had left students in unlivable conditions among cockroaches, rats and incessant building works. London’s first genuine rent strike for 40 years only involved 50 students, but each individual striker made a tangible, measurable impact on the university’s finances. Glasgow 1915 and UCL-SOAS 2015 are century-spanning testaments to the fact that a well-executed rent strike can be devastatingly effective.

Historically, successful mass rent strikes have benefited from a united left providing the infrastructure to exponentially increase the strike’s effect across multiple homes and into the industrial sphere, rather than leaving isolated strikers at the mercy of the bailiffs. A New York strike in 1907 relied on the backing of a strong, active Socialist Party, and the Glasgow strikes would not have succeeded without union support.

As noted above, the male-dominated superstructures traditionally capable of supporting mass direct action have diminished in size and power. If they want to achieve this vital escalation, 21^st century rent strikers must look to alternative, grassroots networks of activists.

Alternate support networks

Most successful rent strikes have been led by women. The distinction between rent strikes and industrial strikes should not be collapsed into a crude dichotomy between the male public sphere and the female domestic sphere. In 1907, 16-year-old Pauline Newman led strikes which secured rent reductions for 2000 New York families. She worked till 9pm in a textile factory before campaigning all night in the slums of Manhattan. Working-class women have always worked formally in the marketplace, as well as informally (and unpaid) in the home.

But Newman, the “East Side Joan of Arc”, was supported by housewives who spent the day going from tenement to tenement urging other families to join the strike. Working-class shop-floor networks intermeshed with female-dominated domestic networks. The Glasgow rent strike was sparked by landlords seeking to cow women into submission while their husbands were away fighting in the war. Again, Mary Barbour and her army rapidly spread information through the slums whenever the factor descended, militating via a social infrastructure which their landlords grossly underestimated.

Half of all British housing benefit recipients are single women. The average female flat-sharer in London earns £4236 less than her male counterpart, and twice as many women as men spend over half their salary on rent. Women have a disproportionate stake in the housing crisis, and male politicians continue to underestimate their ability to organize and resist. Though not a rent strike per se, the success of the Focus E15 mothers in resisting eviction attempts by Newham Council illustrates the continued power of localized, female, working-class support networks.

Interlocking working-class communities and communities of color have proven similarly capable of disseminating information and resistance. Rent strikers in 1930s Peckham relied on a rolling guard of unemployed laborers to defend their homes while successfully agitating for an improvement in living conditions. Majitov repeatedly emphasizes the importance of working-class solidarity in Midtown: “We don’t build apps, we don’t code. We drive buses and we deliver mail. And if this working-class community of color hadn’t stood together we would have been out a long time ago. ”

African-American Jean King (another woman) secured rent controls in St Louis after a year-long strike in 1969, while Majitov proudly notes that Save Midtown has the support of civil rights luminary Andrew Young, who successfully organized a rent strike alongside Martin Luther King in 1960s Chicago. Just like in Glasgow in 1907, Save Midtown have appointed tenant organizers with responsibility for contacting strikers across the development, and they are now reaching out to other African-American communities being abused by Mercy to launch a nationwide class action against the housing company.

The university bubble

A rent strike is a very different proposition for students, who are typically more privileged than the general population — a state of affairs maintained by the inaccessible rent conditions UCL-CTR are striking against. Many students have family homes to return to, and this can be leveraged against universities.

David Dahlborn explains: “When nothing had happened by the end of summer 2015, the international students who were on strike said ‘well, fuck it, I’m going home’. The university realized they couldn’t really send bailiffs to Mexico.” UCL capitulated soon after. Again, rent strikes reverse a power dynamic familiar to anyone who has tried to secure the return of a deposit from a suddenly evanescent landlord.

Students can also leverage the disjuncture between the public face of the academic university and its profit-making operations. “They say they’re concerned with education,” says UCL striker Aleksandra Tomaszewska. “But they’ve cut funding and bursaries while raising rent and tuition fees.”

Where housing companies are not hugely concerned with positive public relations, university authorities are at pains to emphasize that they provide a caring, nurturing environment. It would be a PR disaster for UCL to forcibly evict white, well-spoken, middle-class students. As with much student activism, student rent strikers can trade on their privilege to enjoy a much greater degree of security than their counterparts in council housing.

Universities constitute a ready-made network for the expansion of a strike. A successful rent strike at Sussex University in 1972-3 rapidly spread to 23 other universities. UCL-CTR is sharing advice and materials with student activists from SOAS, Imperial and Goldsmiths, as they seek to expand the current rent strike across the capital.

“Anyone could do it,” says Dahlborn, who repeatedly emphasizes the lateral organization of UCL-CTR. “Everybody on the strike is a potential organizer.” Students have more free time than workers; they have access to condensed bodies of left-leaning tenants paying vastly excessive rent; and they are keyed in to networks of information exchange between these bodies.

Rent strikes for the 21^st century

Paradigms established by 20^th century rent strikers could be instructive for those on the radical left wrangling about their relationship with Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Newman and Barbour instigated their strikes alone, but willingly worked alongside hierarchical, party-rooted structures to replicate these actions on a wider scale.

But as Dahlborn argues, a successful general rent strike must ultimately emerge from coordinated grassroots action, as multiple localized organizations “replicate and generalize” tactics that have worked well elsewhere. An emphasis on the dispersal of power underpins much recent left-wing strategizing, and rent strikes can operate particularly effectively through decentralized, lateral organization.

“Together we are powerful, and united we can defeat the market,” Dahlborn says. The unity he describes is not monolithic but dispersed, varied and multiple. Strikes should be generated through grassroots networks, not mandated by top-down frameworks.

Networks of university activists provide one such structure. London’s Radical Housing Network, which unites housing co-ops, community action groups and union representatives, is another. (This organization could also facilitate liaison between university students and working-class activists).

Roger Hallam’s concept of “Conditional Commitment” involves assuring potential strikers that a strike will only go ahead once a certain number of other tenants have committed to the action. Successfully implemented by UCL-CTRE, this system of collective responsibility would function well in enabling dispersed networks of rent strikers to operate in unison.

Industrial strikes expose the gulf between the evaluated worth of employees’ labor and the evaluated worth of the products they manufacture. The fact that a rent strike is even tenable as a concept illustrates the fact that tenants, like workers, are treated as profit-making organs.

Historically, the establishment has therefore reacted ferociously to rent strikes, which expose the cruelty of market logic. A general rent strike called by a hypothetical national tenants’ union would likely meet with overwhelming opposition. But it would be much more difficult for the establishment to defeat a network of localized, coordinated strikes breaking out on university campuses and council estates across the country.

A Phony Victim, and a Lot of Real Ones

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Reid Mukai

Justin Kelly’s cinematic doppelgänger: Fancy Lad from the film “Cabin Boy”

By Kevin Carson

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

In a recent open letter to the mayor (Julia Carrie Wong, “San Francisco tech worker: ‘I don’t want to see homeless riff-raff,’“ The Guardian, Feb. 17), entitled tech bro Justin Keller whined that the sight of homeless people ruins his enjoyment of the local atmosphere in San Francisco. And when his family comes to visit, it just brings everybody down. Keller, owner of the Commando.io startup, added

I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it…. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.

But a closer look at the history of class privilege and ethnic cleansing in San Francisco suggests that “free market reality” isn’t as obvious as Keller makes it out to be.

About three days after reading about Keller’s traumatic encounters with the homeless (I can’t help thinking of “Cabin Boy” Chris Elliott — the Fancy Lad in a powdered wig — screaming in terror as a rabbit runs across his path), I learned of some other people in San Francisco with problems of their own.

Back in the ’60s, under the “Civic Redevelopment” program — San Francisco’s version of Urban Renewal — over 100 city blocks of black residential neighborhoods, businesses and churches deemed “slum areas” were bulldozed and their residents forcibly relocated. Under the cumulative effect of such Urban Renewal policies, in the ’60s and ’70s, the black population of San Francisco declined from 13.4% to less than 6% of the total. In 1968 the Midtown Park Apartments were opened to house residents “relocated” from one of the demolished neighborhoods, the Fillmore-Western Addition (“Petition — #BlackHomesMatter: Stop the displacement of long-term San Francisco residents at Midtown” Change.org).

Today, Midtown is a close-knit working-class community of long-time Black residents as well as immigrants from all over the world, including fixed-income seniors, disabled veterans, and children. Some tenants have lived at Midtown for over 40 years.

Despite decades of promises to convert the apartments to cooperative ownership by the residents, the city is once again collaborating with local real estate interests to rack rent the tenants, drive them out, and — ahem — “redevelop” the property.

Midtown residents have been working for decades towards the co-operative ownership of their homes and even paid off the mortgage for the Midtown property. Despite repeated promises from the City of San Francisco that Midtown residents would be eventual owners of their homes, two days before Christmas Eve in 2013, the City terminated the lease with the tenant’s association and without warning awarded it to Mercy Housing, a national Catholic affordable housing nonprofit. Since then, Mercy has raised the rent on many tenants (some up to 300%), implemented restrictive and discriminatory new rules, and has put forth plans to eventually demolish the entire Midtown property. Mercy Housing has also begun a program of harassing tenants – targeting seniors and tenants with low English literacy, cutting locks to enter apartments illegally and other tactics meant to intimidate tenants from fighting back.

The residents of 65 of the apartments have declared a tenant strike and are withholding rent in protest.

I guess that’s pretty small potatoes compared to the horror of having Mumsy and Daddy see a homeless person on their way to the grand tour of your new luxury condo.

Keller makes it clear, by the way, that his own idea of a “free market society” is fully compatible with such ethnic cleansing by the government. In his meltdown over the injustice of sensitive people like himself having to look at homeless people, he made positive reference to “street sweeps” by local government as a positive example:

I don’t have a magic solution … It is a very difficult and complex situation, but somehow during Super Bowl, almost all of the homeless and riff raff seem to up and vanish. I’m willing to bet that was not a coincidence. Money and political pressure can make change. So it is time to start making progress, or we as citizens will make a change in leadership and elect new officials who can.

So we live in the kind of “free market society” where local government, working on behalf of local real estate interests, can ethnically cleanse 100 city blocks of their inhabitants, in the process reducing the city’s black population by more than half, and then send uniformed thugs to drive people off the streets by the thousands for the crime of being homeless in public.

More generally, just about any city government is nothing but a showcase property of the local real estate interests, and its central function is to serve what Harvey Molotch called the “urban growth machine” by driving up real estate prices. And most of the many billions of dollars of wealth in Silicon Valley — with which tech bros like Keller are driving rents into the stratosphere — result from a business model centered on state-enforced “intellectual property” monopolies.

But it’s not as though these things are some kind of departure from the “free market” ideal, or that there has ever been a “free market society” at any point in history. Right-wing libertarians celebrate the 19th century Gilded Age as some kind of near laissez-faire utopia. But it never even remotely approached such a thing.

The so-called “laissez-faire” Gilded Age was heir to four centuries of land enclosure and other nullifications of customary peasant tenure rights in the land, mass enslavement, and the colonization and robbery of half the planet. Capitalism never emerged from a “free market”; it was a direct outgrowth of the “bastard feudalism” of the late Middle Ages, in which a major segment of the old landed classes reinvented themselves as agrarian capitalists and, in alliance with absolute monarchies and large mercantile interests, converted their own countries into prison societies and then forcibly conquered most of the world. The so-called “lassez-faire” 19th century was built directly atop the structure of inequality and concentrated property resulting from these centuries of robbery.

And the political centerpiece of the Gilded Age was the Great Betrayal of 1877, in which Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction in return for the electoral votes of the southern states, despite his having a minority of the popular vote. This was a devil’s bargain in which the agrarian capitalists of the former Confederacy were allowed to institute a regional system of Apartheid, in return for giving industrial capitalists uncontested control the American state. Once this control was secured, the national government immediately began imposing a top-down corporate transformation of the economic system, and using the full power of the federal government to suppress the workers’ and farmers’ movements.

This groundwork having been established, the twentieth century saw an alliance between large corporations and the American state so massive that the very distinction between “public” and “private” ceased to have meaning. The tech industry itself was a direct outgrowth of the corporate state, as even a cursory overview of the role of the military-industrial complex in creating the cybernetic revolution and building the Internet backbone should tell you.

So no, Justin — this is not a “free market society,” and you and your ilk did not earn your wealth. As Ann Richards said of George Bush, “you were born on third base and thought you hit a triple.” But I like even better a saying of Martin Luther King Jr’s: “When you see a turtle sitting on a fencepost, you know he had help getting up there.”

If there’s anybody in the tech industry pushing for something resembling a genuine “free market society,” it’s not the venture capitalists and start-ups. It’s the people trying to free information work from the legacy of its origins in the bureaucracy of a total war state, and rebuild it on the basis of horizontalism, self-organization and p2p, rather than allowing it to fall under the control of new corporate bureaucracies through government-enforced “intellectual property” enclosure; the drivers unionizing Uber and Lyft; the people jailbreaking proprietary apps or developing open-source, cooperative versions of them; the hackers doing their best to destroy proprietary information culture; and the people organizing freelancers’ unions, cooperative temp agencies and other cost- and income-pooling platforms for precarious labor. If a “free market society” actually means anything, it also encompasses the struggles of the people rendered homeless by government collusion with capital, for the right to exist in public spaces. And above all, it includes the people displaced from their homes by brutal ethnic cleansing schemes, who are fighting to maintain occupancy of apartments of which they, by any acceptable moral standard, are the rightful owners.

So to tie this all up, let’s break the power of the real estate interests and tech monopolies in alliance with local government. I call on everyone reading this to support the Midtown rent strikers, to express unconditional solidarity for their resistance to eviction, and to unconditionally condemn local government, law enforcement, and the real estate interests that stand to benefit from this robbery. Force the city government to honor its promises and immediately transfer ownership to the residents of Midtown Park Apartment. At the very least, sign the petition in support of them and circulate the story of this injustice as widely as possible.

The glorification of Antonin Scalia

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Tom Carter

Source: WSWS.org

The sickening tributes across the official US political and media spectrum to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 79, are a barometer of the putrefaction of American democracy.

The universal deference towards Scalia from what passes for the “liberal” faction of the establishment is particularly repulsive. The statements of the Democratic presidential candidates, the supposed “socialist” Bernie Sanders no less than Hillary Clinton—echoing similarly sycophantic drivel from the likes of the New York Times—are monuments to political cowardice.

One would say these people lack the courage of their convictions if they had any convictions to lack!

They have sprung into action to join their Republican counterparts in hailing Scalia as a towering figure in American jurisprudence. Virtually every description of the deceased justice includes the words “brilliant” and “intellectual.” One is reminded of the programmed acclamation of Sergeant Raymond Shaw recited by his brainwashed fellow soldiers in the film The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Sanders took time off from his hollow calls for a “political revolution” to demonstrate his political obeisance to the ruling class, declaring, “While I differed with Justice Scalia’s views and jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme Court.”

Clinton praised Scalia as “a dedicated public servant who brought energy and passion to the bench.”

President Obama called Scalia a “towering legal figure.” The New York Times’ Ross Douthat hailed Scalia for “putting originalist principle above a partisan conservatism,” and for his “combination of brilliance, eloquence, and good timing.”

No one dares say what needs to be said. The object of their veneration was a black-robed thug and sadist who used his position on the bench to attack the basic civil liberties laid down in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights—separation of church and state; due process; protection from arbitrary arrest, search and seizure; the right to trial by jury; protection from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to vote.

His supposed juridical brilliance boiled down to starting with the political outcome he desired (invariably reactionary) and then cobbling together pseudo-legal arguments to justify his ruling—often with flagrant disregard for legal precedent and the unambiguous language of statutes and constitutional provisions.

In one case last year, Scalia argued that a police officer did not use “deadly force” when he climbed onto an overpass and used an assault rifle to kill an unarmed man fleeing in a car. According to Scalia’s reasoning, it was not deadly force because the officer claimed to have been aiming at the car, not the person in the car.

Perhaps the most infamous example of this method—absurdly described in the media as “constitutional originalism”—was the 2000 Supreme Court decision Scalia engineered to halt the counting of votes in Florida and hand the White House to the loser of the election, Republican candidate George W. Bush.

The 5-4 decision to steal the election all but acknowledged its own speciousness when it declared that the justifications it advanced could not be applied to any future cases. In his separate concurring opinion, Scalia declared that the Constitution did not give the people the right to elect the president.

At the time of the theft of the 2000 elections, the World Socialist Web Site wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the counting of votes, and the acceptance of that ruling by the Democrats and the entire political establishment, demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency for democratic rights within the American ruling class. The reaction to Scalia’s death is a measure of the further erosion of democratic sentiment in the ruling elite.

Scalia personified the decay of bourgeois democracy in the United States over a protracted period of time. Appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, he flourished and exerted increasing influence in the decades of political reaction, militarism and Wall Street criminality that ensued, continuing without a hitch under Obama. Not only in the anti-democratic substance of his rulings, but also in his methods and bearing, he embodied the promotion by the ruling elite of backwardness, prejudice and outright cruelty.

He was corrupt and made no bones about his corruption, proudly voting to remove limits on corporate bribes in elections and flaunting his private outings with Vice President Dick Cheney while the latter was a party in a case before the court. He was a bully, making a practice of baiting and harassing lawyers who came before him.

Throughout his career, Scalia consistently advocated positions that can only be described as barbarous and fascistic. Fittingly, his last judicial act was to deny a stay of execution. He was a figure who relished the power and trappings of the state, openly defending torture and internment camps.

Scalia worked tirelessly to break down constitutional and democratic limits on state power, infiltrating fascistic doctrines into Supreme Court jurisprudence. His theory of executive power, according to which the American president has unlimited and unreviewable powers for the duration of the “war on terror,” resurrects Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” doctrine in all but name.

Scalia’s mere presence on the court testified to the advanced decay of American democracy. That decay is linked, on the one hand, to the extreme growth of social inequality, accompanied by the rampant parasitism and criminality of the ruling class, and on the other hand to unending war, which has its domestic reflection in the build up of the repressive state apparatus that Scalia championed.

The bitterness of the disputes over his replacement is a reflection of the importance of his role in American politics over three decades during which the political establishment shifted violently to the right.

The deference shown to such a figure from all quarters of the political establishment should be taken as a warning by the working class. The ruling elite fears above all the growth of social opposition and class struggle. It exalts the legacy of Scalia because it is preparing police state methods to defend its power and property against an insurgent working class.

Should Taxpayers Be Subsidizing Obscene Salaries?

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Adnan Al-Daini

Source: Dissident Voice

An article in the Guardian on bosses’ pay by the director of the High Pay Centre, Deborah Hargreaves, presents the disparity between bosses’ pay and the average wage in the UK thus:

“Chief executives in the FTSE 100 companies took home £4.96m in 2014 compared with average wages of £27,645. And, if anything, the pay gap is getting wider. A typical incentive award for a top boss increased by 50% of salary compared with the previous year, while workforce wages were up by £445. Bosses’ remuneration has risen from around 47 times average wages in the 1990s to around 180 times today.”

The pay gap shown by the above figures will be even wider if the salaries of bosses are expressed as a multiple of the median wage instead of the average wage. The average wage is skewed towards the top, thus most workers will earn below the average. The median wage is a better measure as it means half of the workers will earn below it and the other half above it.

Free-market ideologues would argue that salaries are fixed by market forces, and questioning such a disparity in income is tantamount to the politics of envy and interference in the freedom of markets. Such an argument is not really sustainable.

A company is a joint enterprise, and for it to be successful all its employees need to feel valued and justly rewarded. Such a disparity in income sends the wrong message to the many people who are working hard to make the company successful. It will lead to dissatisfaction and low morale amongst the workforce, and will eventually negatively impact the success of the company. A good boss will not accept such an obscene disparity in income between himself and his employees. Such salaries have become a virility symbol for bosses to compete with each other. It shouts – I am more important than you; just look at the size of my package!

If the wages paid by a company to its poorest employees are so low that it requires the state to top up their wages to provide them with the basics of life, then inflated salaries paid to the bosses are effectively being subsidized by the taxes we pay. It is a transfer of wealth from the many to the very few at the top. How can that be right? Where is the free-market in such practices?

If the income distribution is more equitable, the subsidy by the state to the low paid will be reduced, leaving more money for the government to spend on the NHS, infrastructure, police etc., things that are necessary for a civilized, functioning society.

Surely, then, that gives our elected government the right to enact laws and regulations to fix maximum salaries of bosses as a multiple of the lowest wage in that particular company. This will incentivize the bosses to increase the pay of their poorest employees to increase their own pay. The multiple should be certainly much lower than the figures quoted above.

Our taxation system needs to be overhauled to reflect the huge disparity in incomes; it is too narrowly set. Currently, we have a tax-free allowance of £10,600 and then a jump to 20% up to £42,385 then 40% up to income of £150,000, and a tax rate of 45% on income above £150,000.

A more progressive taxation system would start at a much lower rate and continue to rise incrementally well beyond the 45%. I am not a tax expert, so I leave it to those with the expertise to set the rates in such a way that we as a society ensure that the wealth of the nation is more equitably distributed.

Fairness and justice are the pillars on which successful, happy societies are built. The present system that siphons so much wealth to the top 1% to the impoverishment of the rest is neither fair, nor just. Failure to take action will result in the whole of society becoming the poorer; we will all suffer rich and poor.

Adnan Al-Daini (PhD, Birmingham University, UK) is a retired University Engineering lecturer. He is a British citizen born in Iraq. He writes regularly on issues of social justice and the Middle East. Read other articles by Adnan.

The West Is Reduced To Looting Itself

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

I, Michael Hudson, John Perkins, and a few others have reported the multi-pronged looting of peoples by Western economic institutions, principally the big New York Banks with the aid of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Third World countries were and are looted by being inticed into development plans for electrification or some such purpose. The gullible and trusting governments are told that they can make their countries rich by taking out foreign loans to implement a Western-presented development plan, with the result being sufficient tax revenues from economic development to service the foreign loan.

Seldom, if ever, does this happen. What happens is that the plan results in the country becoming indebted to the limit and beyond of its foreign currency earnings. When the country is unable to service the development loan, the creditors send the IMF to tell the indebted government that the IMF will protect the government’s credit rating by lending it the money to pay its bank creditors. However, the conditions are that the government take necessary austerity measures so that the government can repay the IMF. These measures are to curtail public services and the government sector, reduce public pensions, and sell national resources to foreigners. The money saved by reduced social benefits and raised by selling off the country’s assets to foreigners serves to repay the IMF.

This is the way the West has historically looted Third World countries. If a country’s president is reluctant to enter into such a deal, he is simply paid bribes, as the Greek governments were, to go along with the looting of the country the president pretends to represent.

When this method of looting became exhausted, the West bought up agricultural lands and pushed a policy on Third World countries of abandoning food self-sufficiency and producing one or two crops for export earnings. This policy makes Third World populations dependent on food imports from the West. Typically the export earnings are drained off by corrupt governments or by foreign purchasers who pay little while the foreigners selling food charge much. Thus, self-sufficiency is transformed into indebtedness.

With the entire Third World now exploited to the limits possible, the West has turned to looting its own. Ireland has been looted, and the looting of Greece and Portugal is so severe that it has forced large numbers of young women into prostitution. But this doesn’t bother the Western conscience.

Previously, when a sovereign country found itself with more debt than could be serviced, creditors had to write down the debt to an amount that the country could service. In the 21st century, as I relate in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, this traditional rule was abandoned.

The new rule is that the people of a country, even a country whose top offiials accepted bribes in order to indebt the country to foreigners, must have their pensions, employment, and social services slashed and valuable national resources such as municipal water systems, ports, the national lottery, and protected national lands, such as the protected Greek islands, sold to foreigners, who have the freedom to raise water prices, deny the Greek government the revenues from the national lottery, and sell the protected national heritage of Greece to real estate developers.

What has happened to Greece and Portugal is underway in Spain and Italy. The peoples are powerless because their governments do not represent them. Not only are their governments receiving bribes, the members of the governments are brainwashed that their countries must be in the European Union. Otherwise, they are bypassed by history. The oppressed and suffering peoples themselves are brainwashed in the same way. For example, in Greece the government elected to prevent the looting of Greece was powerless, because the Greek people are brainwashed that no matter the cost to them, they must be in the EU.

The combination of propaganda, financial power, stupidity and bribes means that there is no hope for European peoples.

The same is true in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK. In the US tens of millions of US citizens have quietly accepted the absence of any interest income on their savings for seven years. Instead of raising questions and protesting, Americans have accepted without thought the propaganda that their existence depends upon the success of a handful of artificially created mega-banks that are “too big to fail.” Millions of Americans are convinced that it is better for them to draw down their savings than for a corrupt bank to fail.

To keep Western peoples confused about the real threat that they face, the people are told that there are terrorists behind every tree, every passport, under every bed, and that all will be killed unless the government’s overarching power is unquestioned. So far this has worked perfectly, with one false flag after another reinforcing the faked terror attacks that serve to prevent any awareness that this a hoax for accumulating all income and wealth in a few hands.

Not content with their supremacy over “democratic peoples,” the One Percent has come forward with the Trans-Atlanta and Trans-Pacific partnerships. Allegedly these are “free trade deals” that will benefit everyone. In truth, these are carefully hidden, secret, deals that give private businesses control over the laws of sovereign governments.

For example, it has come to light that under the Trans-Atlantic partnership the National Health Service in the UK could be ruled in the private tribunals set up under the partnership as an impediment to private medical insurance and sued for damages by private firms and even forced into abolishment.

The corrupt UK government under Washington’s vassal David Cameron has blocked access to legal documents that show the impact of the Trans-Atlantic partnership on Britain’s National Health Service. http://www.globalresearch.ca/cameron-desperate-to-stop-scandal-as-secret-plans-to-sell-the-national-health-service-are-discovered/5504306

For any citizen of any Western country who is so stupid or brainwashed as not to have caught on, the entire thrust of “their” government’s policy is to turn every aspect of their lives over to grasping private interests.

In the UK the postal service was sold at a nominal price to politically connected private interests. In the US the Republicans, and perhaps the Democrats, intend to privatize Medicare and Social Security, just as they have privatized many aspects of the military and the prison system. Public functions are targets for private profit-making.

One of the reasons for the escalation in the cost of the US military budget is its privatization. The privatization of the US prison system has resulted in huge numbers of innocent people being sent to prison, where they are forced to work for Apple Computer, IT services, clothing companies that manufacture for the US military, and a large number of other private businesses. The prison laborers are paid as low as 69 cents per hour, below the Chinese wage.

This is America today. Corrupt police. Corrupt prosecutors. Corrupt judges. But maximum profits for US Capitalism from prison labor. Free market economists glorified private prisons, alleging that they would be more efficient. And indeed they are efficient in providing the profits of slave labor for capitalists.

Here is a news report on UK Prime Minister Cameron denying information about the effect of the Trans-Atlantic partnership on Britains’ National Health.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/26/anger-government-blocks-ttip-legal-documents-nhs-health-service

The UK Guardian, which often has to prostitute itself in order to maintain a bit of independence, describes the anger that the British people feel toward the government’s secrecy about an issue so fundamental to the well being of the British people. Yet, the British continue to vote for political parties that have betrayed the British people.

All over Europe, the corrupt Washington-contolled governments have distracted people from their sellout by “their” governments by focusing their attention on immigrants, whose presence is a consequence of the European governments representing Washington’s interests and not the interest of their own peoples.

Somthing dire has happened to the intelligence and awareness of Western peoples who seem no longer capable of comprehending the machinations of “their” governments.

Accountable government in the West is history. Nothing but failure and collapse awaits Western civilization.

Leviathan and Behemoth

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Shaw

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

Introduction

The capitalist economy has gone through another shock, and the potential for another, larger one is on the horizon. While it’s seemingly in its death throes, capitalism continues to fuel growth. Under such a system we have seen a vast improvement in general living standards across the globe, despite rigged markets and the omnipresent power of the state. However, who is this growth for? While absolute poverty has been rolled back, and in many Western nations completely eliminated, we still see a large, indebted underclass, a Global South regularly sold out to the interests of capital and a system of vast wealth that only seems accessible to a privileged few. Economists may say that if we look at BRIC countries we see an equalisation of wealth and growth with the West, but these BRIC markets are used as cogs in a hegemonic state-corporate machine. Third World entrepreneurship isn’t encouraged, but rather sidelined for corporate dominance. This is a system that needs to end. The debt economy, big government, the corporate-state partnership and modern globalisation all need to end. In their place we need truly free markets, where cooperation and exchange are paramount and aren’t controlled by corporate or government interests.

Our neoliberal society is composed of corporate hegemony backed by state power. By corporate hegemony I mean the power modern capital has over governance. This isn’t just found within corporations, but within guild-like occupational boards (Lawyers and Doctors and their licencing requirements) and corporate trade unions that support the maintenance of wage labour at the expense of worker independence from the structure of capital. Any markets we see are rigged in favour of corporate interests. The major monopolies of government control make sure that markets are a tool of big business and the ability of workers to break free from this paradigm is limited if not impossible. The entry barriers to markets, the restrictions on self-employment and the continued lobbying of government for patronage and favourable legislation leads to a corrupt, crony system that relies on the indenture of the poor in favour of employers and business.

There are many libertarians who unfortunately see this system as just and fair. They see sweatshop labour as an excellent solution to Third World poverty. The idea of growth is given religious prescience, without realising cultural antecedents and the importance of community within the realm of the individual. They don’t understand the power dynamics at play, and the continued collusion of corporate and state interests. They fail to see the monopolisation of social institutions and the commodification of culture and life. The destruction of livelihoods all in the name of GDP growth. This is not a free market, but rather capitalism at work. To move away from this we need to understand that free, or freed, markets are economic organisations free from coercive control, where the individual and community are the key players and profit is not reliant on its exploitative features, but rather the ability to meet real demand.

We need to look at the current capitalist system from the anarchist perspective that I put forward in this paper. Modern capitalism is a state-based system, reliant on enforced hierarchies and the provision of false choice. Real choice would confer power on individuals and communities, while under today’s system real choice is in the hands of bureaucrats and corporate oligarchies. Chartier’s definitions of capitalism, “capitalism: an economic system that features a symbiotic relationship between big business and government”[1] and “capitalism: rule—of workplaces, society, and (if there is one) the state—by capitalists (that is, by a relatively small number of people who control investable wealth and the means of production)”[2] shines light on this conception. Rather than capitalism being a system of free markets as posited by some libertarians (Block, Mises, Hayek, etc.) it is instead a system reliant on big government and its institutions and the control of said institutions via capital.

The vulgar libertarians who view the capitalist economy as some form of free market do not understand the forms of power present. If a worker wants to start a collectively-owned business, can he? Not without huge capital requirements and regulatory hoops to jump through. How about setting up a mutual credit system with a different currency? Well there are legal tender laws that in the United State are enforced with more brutality than the punishments given for heinous crimes[3]. When talking of free markets, we need to understand that freedom is only relative to where the power lies. If it lies with the state and its subsidiaries, then freedom is conferred on large employers and corporate unions whom receive forms of state funding and favourable regulation. If it lay with individuals and communities, we would most likely see a move away from one-size-fits-all regulation, the processes of commodification through rentierism and arbitrary entry barriers.

The Regulatory Apparatus

The regulatory apparatuses found within the economy also benefit the capitalist structure. While generally seen as a bulwark against corporate power, the regulations found in an economy create entry barriers to markets and a form of implicit subsidy to big business, as these businesses rent-seek government for more regulation, allowing for a monopoly within particular economic sectors. We can see in the banking, energy, manufacturing and retail sectors that this is the case. Childs noted this in relation to the development of monopoly power in American business during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He states “this, then, was the basic context of big business; these were the problems that it faced. How did it react? Almost unanimously, it turned to the power of the state to get what it could not get by voluntary means”[4]. In particular Childs saw this occurring in the rail industry in America during the late 19th century. Massive competition had begun in the rail industry, which massively sunk profits for established companies and encouraged many start ups and smaller competitors. As large rail companies weren’t competitive enough in this environment, they came to rely on government intervention, where regulatory boards were created staffed mostly by executives from the large rail companies.

This is what regulation is really about. It isn’t a way of protecting the hapless consumer from the ravages of a free market, but is rather a tool of corporate power that forms entry barriers and enforces particular dichotomies of ownership and organisation in an economy. Capitalism becomes a system of patronage, where corporations gain favour due to their money and power, which itself comes from the state in the first place. As Paul notes “the rich are more than happy to secure for themselves a share of the loot – for example, in the form of subsidised low-interest loans…bailouts when their risky loans go sour, or regulatory schemes that hurt their smaller competitors”[5]. Rifkin shows a similar process, describing how “the critical industries that made up the infrastructure…banded together in a mega lobby to ensure…financial underwriting, as well as industry-friendly codes, regulations, and standards to ensure market success”[6].

The regulatory apparatuses also have the effect of distorting economies of scale, decoupling supply from demand and favouring largesse in business and ownership models. Thus we see the development of high overhead costs which restrict market entry to best capitalised of entrepreneurs. By limiting competition, we see perverse operations occurring that favour the interests of business over the worker and consumer. Thus things like planned obsolescence, guaranteed markets and a continuation of private gain and socialised loss. As had been noted by Childs, private cartels were difficult to maintain. Even the rail trusts, themselves built in contrived, government-produced markets, were ravaged by competition from smaller rail providers[7] that favoured more local economies of scale. So these corporations looked to the government, who enshrined their demands into acts and legislation which created cartels that were much more easily enforced. We just need to look where wage laws, licensure laws and planning/zoning laws are coming from and who lobbies for them. Invariably its dome by corporations and their lobbying arms. We also forms of legal privilege, as in the case of limited liability and corporate personhood, which are really only accessible with very high capital costs and a developed shareholder clientele. These systems are purely artificial, and whether they would work voluntarily is not the question. Rather it is, if they are efficient, why do they need the government to provide these privileges and apparatuses. The answer is simple, they aren’t efficient.

Even when there are laws supposedly to ameliorate the effects of marketisation, as in the case of welfare and government-provided services, they are usually built on the back of resilient communities who developed their own systems, and usually end up allowing employers to pay subpar wages and benefits and lessen the strength of community relations. It builds layers onto a poor foundation. Or to put it another way, the corporate-state nexus is putting a cinderblock on toothpicks. Bureaucrats don’t fully understand the problem with this but realise it is unstable. So to stabilise it, they put more toothpicks under the cinderblock, thinking it will stabilise. However, the system is inherently unstable and propping it up denies the inevitable.

This assurance of market success shows that under a truly free market they wouldn’t exist, or if they did it would be on a much smaller scale. The regulatory web is just another power dynamic that allows for capture and control. To describe this as a free market is laughable. These processes are completely involuntary, reliant on extortion through taxation and allow for the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich and privileged.

The Money Monopoly

While regulation, which “far from coming against the wishes of the regulated interests, was openly welcomed by them in nearly every case”[8], is an important part of the corporate state, the original four legal monopolies (as identified by Tucker), money, land, tariffs and patents, allowed for the development of rent-seeking corporations. These four monopolies, or as I see them structural monopolies as they create the structure of the socio-economic paradigm, are fundamentals of capitalism.

The money monopoly allows for the restriction of credit and the development of debt-based models that destroy stores of value and make individuals slaves to the desires of governments and banks through modern forms of debt peonage. As Dowd notes, over the 20th century “the US dollar has lost almost 85 per cent of its purchasing power even by official government statistics; for its part, sterling has lost 98 per cent of its value over the last century”[9]. The restriction of credit coupled with the inflationary tendencies of modern fiat currencies mean the poorest are effectively forced into wage labour, as they rely on pitiable increases in nominal wages and are unable to gain any real credit for self-employment or collective worker-owned enterprises. What happens is a redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest. Long shows that “inflationary monetary policies on the part of central banks also tend to benefit those businesses that receive the inflated money first in the form of loans and investments, when they are still facing the old, lower prices”[10]. The pre-inflation money allows investors and banks to capitalise on new production and investment while the poorer elements of a society receive minimal benefits as the inflationary course makes its run, with prices rising and wages following later.

This also leads to massive levels of debt found currently throughout the globe, as credit instruments are used to make up for stagnant wages that can’t afford increasing land prices and subsequently rent prices, as well as an increase in the price of consumer goods that are a significant chunk of working people’s wages. The process of rent extraction via high interest rates follows from this, as “the money monopoly also includes entry barriers against cooperative banks and prohibitions against private issuance of banknotes, by which access to finance capital is restricted and interest rates are kept artificially high”[11]. Carson notes further that the elimination of controlled interest rates would lead to “significant numbers (of workers) retiring in their forties or fifties, cutting back to part-time, or starting businesses; with jobs competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would be revolutionary”[12]. The current banking system leads to the necessitation of wage labour through restricted credit dissemination and debt-based forms of finance.

The Land Monopoly

The land monopoly is another lynchpin of capitalism. Most modern land is either nationalised or corporatised through state structures, leading to massive land centralisation and the process of land expropriation that is visible in much of the Third World. Alternative land arrangements, such as those organised by tribes and local networks, are swallowed up in this process. Many commons regimes that have existed for centuries are being eliminated in favour of the interests of capital. This process of enclosure of common lands began at “the end of the Medieval Age, when royal and feudal landowners began to enclose common lands, especially in Tudor England and Trastamara Spain. Through legal and political manoeuvres, wealthy landowners marked and hedged off sections of the commons for their own profits, impoverishing many villagers and ultimately destroying their communitarian way of life”[13]. The enclosures have continued into the 20th century, where “common lands have suffered a third, global wave of commodification and enclosure, ‘land grabbing’ spurred by the dominant neoliberal doctrine and competition for non-renewable natural resources and supported now by the evolutionary theory of land rights”[14]. The modern enclosures of land occur most noticeably in Africa and South America. We see the elimination of common land owned by native tribes and the raping of natural resources. The Niger Delta and its oil reserves show this acutely, with oil spills being common and almost no compensation to the farmers and workers who rely on the Delta for their livelihoods.

In effect this is a process of neo-colonialism pushed through via the Washington Consensus that is epitomised in international groups like the IMF and WTO. The plight of Bangladeshi workers is caused by this problem of neocolonial practices. In Bangladesh “wealthy and influential people have encroached on public lands…, often with help of officials in land-administration and management departments”[15] which has led to a result of “Many of the rural poor in Bangladesh are landless, have only small plots of land, are depending on tenancy, or sharecropping”[16]. What follows is a continuation of the development of a landless mass of cheap labour as a result of the nationalisation and corporatisation of land.

Then there are planning and zoning laws and property laws which act as a form of implicit land nationalisation in many Western countries. Among their many effects, they artificially inflate land prices, which has a knock on effect of making housing unaffordable and making the purchase of land extremely difficult for small businesses. This further encourages the process of rentierism and indebtedness as individuals have to get out mortgages or rent accommodation, and individuals looking to start a business are priced out, thus favouring large corporations. If you want to self-build a home or business, it becomes impossible. Instead a series of state-favoured land developers are able to land bank and rent out at extortionate rates. They aren’t subject to competition and making new land isn’t possible, so you create a system of patronage and favouritism, simply adding to the enforced necessitation of wage labour.

These processes of land appropriation lead to the development of land speculation via government-favoured industries, creating artificially high land prices which price out small businesses, community groups and anyone who isn’t able seek rent from the state. This speculation also fuels boom-bust cycles, with much of the credit used by investors and businesses being put into the easy investments of land and housing. This creates economic bubbles through the wide diffusion of mortgages and an increase in house and infrastructure building that isn’t necessarily needed. In London, we see this playing out with high-price apartments and high-rises that don’t address the needs of the wider population and are fueled, at least partially, via QE-induced credit. The development of a rentier society occurs. With land prices held artificially high, rich landowners are able to rent out their properties at high prices, creating economic precarity and stimulating the larger wage labour monopoly that is caused by a combination of this monopoly and the money monopoly.

The Larger Wage Labour Monopoly

As previously mentioned, credit is restricted thus funding options are limited for workers. Add to this high land prices, and the ability to buy a house or develop a business are severely restricted, developing the large pool of wage labour seen today. This obviously favours large-scale employers such as corporations who are able develop to their current size due to this wage labour monopoly. It leads to a means of surplus value, or rent, extraction. As Solow notes “one important reason for the failure of real wages to keep up with productivity is that the division of rent in industry has been shifting against the labor side for several decades”[17].

Alongside the two monopolies, the increase in precarious wage labour is compounded by the restriction of collective action and the development of monopolist unions that complement the centralised economic actors. The legislation governing strikes and the ability to make a union add to this problem, making it difficult for freelance workers to unionise and stopping the development of radical trade unions and company unions. Thatcher’s trade union reforms in the UK created such a problem as the majority of private sector unions are part of the corporate system of economic centralisation. The final nail in the coffin is the minimum wage. This creates a wage ceiling and simply allows corporations to price smaller competitors out of the market while subsequently limiting the hours and benefits workers receive. As most minimum wages aren’t enough to live on, many workers rely on debt-based credit which pushes individuals further into wage labour, creating debt-led wage slavery and maintaining a massive, centralising economic monopoly on the choice of workers.

As Solow explains, in the US “in the past 10 years productivity has increased 12.3 percent in the non-farm business sector of our economy while real compensation of labor has increased by only 5.1 percent”[18]. So what we see is a form of surplus value extraction, whereby the excess product of labour is captured by the interests of capital and removed from the compensation of labour. This can’t simply be explained away by using the marginalist critique. The value of a product is at least partially informed by its labour input. Marshall’s analysis shows that “price was determined, at any given time, by the balance between the demand and supply that actually existed at that moment. As the time factor came into play…price approached closer and closer to cost”[19] thus showing that the equilibrium of supply to demand moves from subjective criteria of value toward the input of labour in that value. Again looking at Solow’s productivity figures, the compensation of labour isn’t in proportion to production.

Hodgskin’s idea of a market artificially privileged with rents, profits and interest becomes a reality in the modern context. The increase in freelancing and labour market individuation means the expropriation of rent and the limitation of choice, particularly as unions are simply a representation of the corporate interest, particularly since the Wagner Act in America and the trade union reforms in Britain. The individualisation of labour serves to increase these artificial privileges, meaning can be paid less and thus become more reliant on debt instruments such as mortgages and credit cards to simply earn a living and have a roof over their head. This system is even more acute in the Global South, with the restriction of choice via the structural monopolies being almost explicitly enforced via the government as land in enclosed and regulations used to restrict microeconomic activity that doesn’t serve the interests of global value chains. Their human capital is monopolised, wages restricted, collective action completely banned and working conditions extremely poor. The main profit garnered from this is simply the mark-up created by internal tariffs and intellectual property (to be discussed later in this paper), which limits domestic market production and serves only the interests of capital and big business, as both the workers and consumers are given low wages and higher prices respectively.

What happens then is the construction of a monopsony situation in wages and labour, where the product of labour isn’t adequately paid, becoming widespread due to companies paying below this level. This is compounded by wage laws favoured by corporate interests, and an inability for the worker to capture this value through collective bargaining or through the means of owning one’s productive capacities due to market entry barriers that restrict self-employment and worker or community ownership. It constrains the real choice of workers and puts the power dynamics upon employers and bureaucrats.

Tariffs

The next two monopolies that Tucker highlighted further the centralisation of economic power toward corporations. Tariffs are simply a form of direct state intervention to favour domestic industry over foreign competitors. There are arguments favourable to this position, such as those by List and Chang. However, there is a significant time limit on the ability of tariffs to produce any sort of growth (usually artificially induced by state policies), and eventually many of the protected industries become bloated and begin to rely on further government subsidy.

The use of tariffs today is much more limited than it was during the mercantile years of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, one area where tariffs are still largely used is modern agriculture in the West, particularly the US and the EU. The Farm Bill in the US creates price distortions within food markets that favours large agribusiness over small, family farms. As Reitzig explains “the farm bill perpetuates the myth of cheap food. It subsidizes Big Ag so that BA can sell its food to the market cheap and you find it at the grocery store for less than you’d pay for it from your local farmer”[20]. However as “it costs the small local farmer about the same to produce the same food as the Big Ag farmer”[21], all the Farm Bill does is redistribute tax money toward large agricultural firms. The economies of scale thus get changed, with farmers forced into retail sector bulk sell offs that are increasingly inefficient and perpetuate the agricultural tariffs and subsidies.

There also forms of internal tariffs that protect large industry through direct subsidisation. For example “between 1973 and 2003, the US government paid out $74 billion in energy subsidies to promote R&D in fossil fuels and nuclear power”[22]. This was despite these companies having huge profit margins, which shows the actual profitability of these industries. They are reliant on institutions of theft to simply develop critical infrastructure as a result of their internal unproductiveness and their falling foul of the economic calculation problem. It creates a system of perverse incentives as these firms aren’t induced to work and develop in smarter, cleaner ways and instead produce the same limited output. This is corporatism at its finest, with government purposefully favouring large firms over small firms, and thus encouraging wasteful practices. Returning to farming, the EU holds similar policies, which in many ways restrict crop diversification and mean that certain farmers are favoured over others. This leads to artificially low prices which allows for retail monopolisation due to farmers being unable to sell their own product due to EU regulations which create this system. It is a continuation of the obstinate incentives that leads to overproduction, false demand and the entrenchment of economic disadvantages and inefficiencies.

Patents

Patents act in a similar way. They privilege large businesses in rigged markets and allow for centralisation and monopolisation. “The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it”[23]. Patents act to lock up innovation in a legal quagmire. It puts new technology into the hands of capital, limiting its distribution and creating a rentier system, where the privilege to use new technology and even knowledge is commodified by large corporations in collusion with the state.

This inability to access new technologies and knowledge creates a form of entry barrier, with smaller competitors being unable to afford this access. Most modern tech companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) are in effect monopolists of knowledge and technology, limiting its accessibility and collecting the rent they charge on these products. Their market position becomes entrenched with restrictive data laws and copyrights that mean the passage of information is blocked by virtual, artificial toll gates that wouldn’t exist if not for coercive legislation.

Then there is the direct government subsidisation of research and development (R&D) spending that allows for large companies to reap “monopoly profits from technology it didn’t spend a penny to develop”[24]. Modern tech companies then are not only monopolists of patented of knowledge but also rentiers of technology they had no real part in developing. So while small inventors and start ups toil away trying to create a product that can only be sold on a rigged market, large firms benefit purely because of their power and the revolving door of government benefaction. Similar processes occur in military-based R&D spending, where corporations are given large grants and procurement contracts to develop military hardware and weaponry that on a freed market would not even necessarily be required by any customer or business. As Chomsky notes, in the US “the Pentagon system has long been the country’s biggest welfare program, transferring massive public funds to high-tech industry on the pretext of defense and security”[25]. These companies’ profits and growth are not then created in a market mechanism of competition and demand-led supply, but rather in a bubble of government-led protection, where they ride on the coattails of stolen innovation and forms of theft AKA patents and taxation respectively. “If they had to face the market, they’d be out selling rags or something, but they need a nanny state, a powerful nanny state to pour money into their pockets”[26].

Further, this process of patenting becomes a pure form of commodification as they remove products and ideas from their cultural origins. For example, the Human Genome Diversity Project used DNA from certain indigenous tribes in Central and South America. Some of this DNA was patented, and thus removed from the culture it came from without any sort of compensation by the HGDP and the beneficiaries of this knowledge. Biocolonialism and biopiracy are the best terms for this occurrence. By extracting culturally sensitive information and knowledge, a process of commodification occurs, and the whole concept of property, that of the sovereign ownership of the individual or collective, becomes redundant. Further the innovative capacities that supposedly come from intellectual property are limited if not completely negative. In fact the information that was patented was found to be 30% less innovative than the information released for full public use[27].

This analysis is backed by evidence from Scherer, who showed “a survey of 91 companies in which only seven ‘accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments.’ Most of them described patents as “the least important of considerations.’ Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be ‘the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales”[28]. Thus patents and intellectual property “eliminate ‘the competitive spur for further research’ because incremental innovation based on others’ patents is prohibited, and because the holder can ‘rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent.’ with no fear of a competitor improving his invention”[29].

Transport Subsidies

The fifth monopoly, transport subsidies, is one that has been identified by Carson. As Carson describes, “spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to ‘externalize its costs’ on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses”[30]. These transportation subsidies allow for the development of large business operations, particularly in the retail and manufacturing sectors. By subsidising the movement of goods by heavy duty vehicles, it means they are given a state-based competitive advantage against smaller, local competitors.

Companies like Wal-Mart and Tesco are able to price their goods artificially cheaply as a result of not adding the transportation costs. Many of these companies actively lobbied for such infrastructure projects. When the interstate system was being built, it “had both an immediate stimulus effect on the industries that participated…oil companies, general contractors, cement manufacturers, steel companies…were among the dozens of industries involved in the building of the great interstate highway system”[31] showing the degree of corporate-state cooperation. It was because these infrastructure projects benefitted their products and models that they lobbied for them.

Of course Carson’s view of this quite US-centric. In much of Europe, particularly the UK, we see other regulations that create a very different kind of transport subsidy. While these nations do subsidise transport via taxation to pay for roads rather than using user fees or road pricing, they also have high fuel duties and regulation on forms of transport, such as regulations on truck design and usage. The fuel duties act as a subsidy in the sense that they destroy small transport firms and simply monopolise the transport industry as only larger companies can afford the higher prices. The forms of regulation mentioned mean that innovation into new vehicle design and competition between firms is limited and simply continues the dominance of particular transport and production companies that aren’t subject to market competition. Thus what we see are two different types of transport subsidies that both act to continue the current economic paradigm.

These subsidies serve to amplify economies of scale, creating national and international markets largely in the control of corporate interests. These large markets create systems of disequilibrium, with monopoly interests being able to develop oligopoly markets from which rents can be extracted. A modern example of this is the creation of HS2 in the UK. It serves as a vanity project for political and bureaucratic elites, who can gain well-paying jobs as political advisors and construction directors. It also allows for the continuation of the North-South divide, with large London-centric firms sucking out talent from the North and Midlands, at little expense to themselves. As Wellings describes it, it’s an example of externalised costs and internalised benefits, with vested interests serving to gain[32]. Economies of scale are created artificially, with competition in local markets suffering due to a project only favourable to London-based businesses. Local economies of scale, which are more natural and more open to individual considerations and supply and demand, are priced out by government intervention. Local transport projects, like roads linking market towns and local rail infrastructure, are ignored due to a lack of political prestige for politicians and their donors and lobbyists.

Road and rail subsidised by the state leads to the current economies of scale that favour large, centralised business entities. It also prices out and discourages private infrastructure projects that could actually make an economic difference by increasing competition and lowering prices, while maintaining local economies of scale which benefit large swathes of areas that currently don’t benefit from the subsidised corporate model. These three monopolies further the wage labour monopoly, by erecting entry barriers against small business and self-employment and by creating feudalistic patent regimes and transport systems that create favourable economies of scale. National markets serve larger companies and hierarchical organisation, and international markets continue to serve and enlarge this. It pushes real costs onto the consumer/taxpayer, and further creates illegitimate profits taken from oligopoly markets.

The Corporate Infrastructure

This wage labour monopoly, with the five structural monopolies feeding it, is the basis of the modern corporate dominated economy. As a result, modern corporations act as oppressive actors on the world stage, using wage slaves and forms of indebtedness to develop the massive growth seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Carson states “in a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else’s labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery”[33].

Then there is the system of incentives created by this corporate-state monopoly. Infrastructures are developed that maintain the inefficiencies. Rifkin’s analysis of a series of Industrial Revolutions shows this to be the case. The Second Industrial Revolution, the current economic system we live in according to Rifkin, is reliant on state-invested infrastructure and subsidisation[34]. The subsidisation of natural capital is one example of this. Roberts shows that “the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP”[35]. The term natural capital is obviously a broad, all-encompassing term. The specifics are those of the production of pollutants that is subsidised by specific tax breaks and forms of limited liability. These follow from elements of the land monopoly which means pollution becomes an externalised cost upon taxpayers, furthering the inefficiencies of a particular economic paradigm, which Rifkin calls the Second Industrial Revolution but what I would call capitalism.

The maintenance of this system means most companies that are reliant on fossil fuels and the energy and transport infrastructures that follow from them have no incentive to divest into new market ventures, but instead have an interest in resource and capital accumulation. It creates ‘revolving door’ government, where lobbyists persist in convincing policy makers for subsidies here and tax breaks there all the while relying on the rent extraction they gain from state intervention.

This process within resource extraction and energy use is more widely seen in the general production processes of capitalism. The levels of overproduction and continued consumption are fed by the structural monopolies, as well as justifying the wage labour monopoly. To fund the levels of consumption needed to continue production means people are put into a paradigm of working longer to buy more things to enjoy. Its paradoxical as you spend more time at work, thus limiting the amount of time you have to actually enjoy consumer goods. Further, as goods become more expensive due to increasing cost mark-ups and inflationary policies, and housing prices and rents go up due to land speculation and monopoly ownership, more people become reliant on debt instruments to fund their everyday lives and their increasing consumer spending. This has created a precipitous debt bubble as Steve Keen’s work has shown. It has also meant that much of the current growth seen since the Great Recession has been on the back of consumer spending, as Blanchflower has documented.

Incentives are created which lead to increasing, unnatural growth and increasing levels of debt. In particular, levels of corporate debt have skyrocketed during the recession of 2008. This is due to systemic overproduction and waste that has developed due to mass production systems used by most multinationals. The structural subsidies create this system where large production facilities with forms of guaranteed profit are needed for massive market areas, usually on a national or international level. Carson has pointed out that modern markets are hardly an example of spontaneous order and aren’t reliant on supply and demand[36]. Rather the system is reliant on a system of planning, with codified relations between suppliers and distributors and systems of guaranteed consumption through external market control in the form of internal sales tariffs and the financialisation of the economy.

Internal sales tariffs limit what stores/areas products can be sold in, and are only viable as a result of intellectual property regimes that allow for increased costs and a further disconnect between production and consumption. Financialisation on the other hand simply maintains the production systems as well as processes of commodification. It makes corporate debt a commodity, and puts value into meaningless products, which allows for more accumulation and overproduction as business isn’t rewarded for genuine wealth production and creation, which comes from artificial processes, but is rewarded rather by debt financialisation, unsustainable growth in bureaucracy and the continued expropriation of surplus value, or human capital. This also represents a commodification process, as the social relation of debt, as identified by Graeber and Martin, is put into an economistic context, with debt serving the purposes of profit and capital. The debt relationship, that’s shaped by community relations and gift-giving and receiving[37], is taken as a value of capital. And this debt is allowed to build up and shape other economic activity. Consumer purchase after consumer purchase represents this. It is encouraged, and when it slows the government takes over and funds through quantitative easing programs, allowing for the construction of bigger, more complex bubbles. It shows that corporation and government are two sides of the same coin.

We have to remember that as much as governments, corporations are just as likely to be effected by the knowledge problem. To get around, every relationship and process is effectively planned. Business to business relations, as seen in distribution and supply chains, are maintained for decades by large manufacturers so as to continue guaranteed buyers of their products. In other cases, the supply and warehousing operations are subsumed by the manufacturer, owning every process from production to sale. Global value chains are an outgrowth of this hierarchalised control and planning, with much of their success being guaranteed by government. It is dictatorial governments in the Global South (who usually have the backing of the US government and its interests) that ban collective action among labourers through extraordinarily harsh measures, it is trade agreements with their backing by Western governments that maintain artificial property rights such as patents and it is government that externalises the cost of global transportation of these goods onto the taxpayer, thus distorting economies of scale to favour the large corporations and forms of state-corporate economic planning. In other the words, the commodification and Sovietisation of the economy.

Culture Under Capitalism

A paradigm that enforces this economic hierarchy is created, where life is work and your main identity is around the soul-crushing job you inhabit. Social relations are commodified and local economic activity is strangled. The whole idea of community in the 21st century is being replaced by a centralised state and economic activity that has no interest in that community, but is inward looking, determining profit margins rather building strong societal relations. The ability to escape this paradigm is extremely limited by the coercive hand of the state. It restricts collective organising, eliminates common and private property and develops extremely insufficient systems of economic organisation.

What we’ve seen is the disembedding of markets from their cultural and social origins[38]. Relations of debt and consumption, which were as much in political institutions and based around social relations, have been expropriated by capital. Thus instead of markets forming one of many different idea of economic organisation of which it could complement, we see the neoliberal discourse of praising markets and even seeing marketisation in what have been social relations up to this day. Thus public services such as health and energy are wrapped in discourses of competition and corporate ownership. However, markets aren’t actually like this. If we look to genuinely free markets, which are few and far between, we don’t see large production and corporate ownership. Instead we see markets crafted around local institutions and genuine demand for certain goods and services. Ownership is much more decentralised. However, due to government-based price and scale distortions, culture and its institutions are brought into the marketised economy, creating the marketised society.

It leads to the development of modern consumerism, creating warped identities based around products. It kills culture and intelligence in favour of an advertised individual. Carson shows that “mass production divorces production from consumption. The rate of production is driven by the imperative of keeping the machines running at full capacity so as to minimize unit costs, rather than by customer orders. So in addition to contractual control of inputs, mass-production industry faces the imperative of guaranteeing consumption of its output by managing the consumer”[39]. The consumer is separated from the producer. Mass production means a consumer culture. Rather than supply meeting demand, demand is made to compensate for oversupply. It also creates forms of consumer inequality that mean Third World workers have almost no access to the products they help produce. The development of domestic markets in consumer goods is massively restricted via patents and tariffs.

Within the Western world there is similar consumer inequality, with a creation of an underclass who desire consumer goods that their limited wages can hardly afford. Bauman’s analysis of the London Riots in 2011 saw an element of this consumer yearning, with products like high-end trainers and flat-screen TVs being taken. Bauman notes that “from cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension”[40]. The cultural backwater caused by modern consumerism creates a form of stigmatisation and symbol status, with haves and have nots developing into distinct classes in a consumer culture. As Bauman states “for defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled — and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning”[41].

The processes of commodification amplify this systemic crisis. The divorcing of production from consumption leads to the most atomistic forms of individualism. It becomes a process of overconsumption and hoarding, without any appreciation of the product development. Cultural and societal obligations and considerations get uprooted by what is wanted and what can be bought. It puts value squarely into the hands of capital, with the determination of worth being decided in social hierarchies that follow from the enforced economic hierarchies of modern capitalism. It is a symptom of the false choice of employment or death, of work creating one’s value in life and of a market shaped not by workers, communities and cultures but by the interests capital and the state that props it up.

Conclusion

This system is massively unsustainable, and becomes more and more reliant on tax revenues to make it profitable. The price system becomes distorted, encouraging the mass production that “leads to ever-increasing demands on state services”[42]. This then shows the inefficiency of large corporations. They are as much subject to the economic calculation problem as the state. Their reliance on the theft of individual income via the taxation system means in anarchist society they are completely unviable. As a system of economic organisation “capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer’s market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market”[43].

In systems of anarchy, there would be an end to corporate dominance due to their inability to seek state rent and thus collapsing in their inefficiencies. As noted by Carson, there were two paths that could have been taken to organise industry and the economy. The one that was followed was “centralized production using expensive, product-specific machinery in large batches on a supply-push basis”[44]. However a better system was possible. One of “decentralized production for local markets, integrating general-purpose machinery into craft production and governed on a demand-pull basis with short production runs and frequent shifts between product lines”[45]. This would have required localised industry, networked communities and what Rifkin calls lateral, distributional, collaborative markets. Workers would be independent of capital, and have an ability to take back their surplus value. It would involve voluntary governance structures and self-organised communities. It would be an end to the corporate-state nexus.

By having this centralised system, we open the floodgates to the continuation of boom-bust cycles through monopoly government control. Since the delinking of production from consumption, there has been a development of mass production and the apparatuses that prop it up. Marx noted this particular phenomenon, with “the birth of large-scale industry this true proportion had to come to an end, and production is inevitably compelled to pass in continuous succession through vicissitudes of prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on”[46]. This process in the end favours the capitalists. It destroys real value in an economy and allows for more government involvement. Further, it leads to capital accumulation through government subsidisation and the monopoly position many modern corporations hold within their respective markets.

It’s a process of artificial wealth accumulation and creation, backed by the five monopolies previously mentioned. High land prices, restrictive credit access and the use of interest rates to effectively distort the value of currency, the use of market entry barriers through regulations and patents and the use of transport subsidies all favour the main monopoly, that of wage labour. Because of the diminishing returns that many of these companies are finding, they are becoming increasingly reliant on the extraction of surplus value from their workers. As mentioned earlier, wage laws allow them to eliminate smaller competitors and the development of varied, precarious work contracts mean a diversification of their workforce, which allows them to reduce hours paid and thus reduce their labour costs. However, the compensation of a worker’s product isn’t necessarily met. Thus the accruing of capital simply means the extraction of rent from workers, which is enforced by the limitation of worker’s to pool their labour value and capital and develop their own industry in a truly free market.

Government is the glue which holds capitalism together. Without it, the economies of scale, the appropriation and centralisation of land and the distortion of inputs and outputs would be impossible. Without a central bank, the destructive tax of inflation wouldn’t be feasible in a competitive currency market. The redistribution of wealth and malinvestment couldn’t occur on the same scale as markets would act as a corrective against these activities. The use of tariffs and patents to lock up technology and create artificial wealth couldn’t happen without the state’s coercive power. Economic organisation is a fluid concept, that changes from place to place and people to people. What is right for one community or tribe is not what is necessarily right for another. A freed market would reflect this, as it would embed markets in pre-existing cultural/social structures and stop the developments of commodification and neo-colonialism that persist presently. This is a world free of state-action and corporate control. This is anarchism.

Bibliography

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Notes:

[1] Chartier, G. 2010, 1

[2] Chartier, G. 2010, 2

[3] Dowd, K. 2014

[4] Childs, R. 1971

[5] Paul, R. 2009, 70

[6] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[7] Childs, R. 1971

[8] Childs, R. 1971

[9] Dowd, K. 2014, 85-86

[10] Long, R. 2008

[11] Carson, K. 2002

[12] Carson, K. 2002

[13] Vivero Pol, L. 2015, 9

[14] Vivero Pol, L. 2015, 9

[15] Richman, S. 2013

[16] Richman, S. 2013

[17] Solow, R. 2015

[18] Solow, R. 2015

[19] Carson, K. 2007, 50

[20] Reitzig, L. 2014

[21] Reitzig, L. 2014

[22] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[23] Carson, K. 2002

[24] Carson, K. 2002

[25] Shorr, I. 1996

[26] Shorr, I. 1996

[27] de Ugarte, D. 2015

[28] Carson, K. 2002

[29] Carson, K. 2002

[30] Carson, K. 2002

[31] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[32] Wellings, R. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r94VP3USOuE

[33] Carson, K. 2002

[34] Rifkin, J. 2011

[35] Roberts, D. 2013

[36] Carson, K. 2010

[37] Martin, F. 2013

[38] Polanyi, K. 2002

[39] Carson, K. 2010, 50

[40] Bauman, Z. 2011

[41] Bauman, Z. 2011

[42] Carson, K. 2010, 111

[43] Carson, K. 2002

[44] Carson, K. 2010

[45] Carson, K. 2010

[46] Carson, K. 2010, 256

15 News Stories from 2015 You Should Have Heard About But Probably Didn’t

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Carey Wedler

Source: AntiMedia

In 2015, the iron fist of power clamped down on humanity, from warfare to terrorism (I repeat myself) to surveillance, police brutality, and corporate hegemony. The environment was repeatedly decimated, the health of citizens was constantly put at risk, and the justice system and media alike were perverted to serve the interests of the powers that be.

However, while 2015 was discouraging for more reasons than most of us can count, many of the year’s most underreported stories evidence not only a widespread pattern that explicitly reveals the nature of power, but pushback from human beings worldwide on a path toward a better world.

1. CISA Pushed Through the Senate, Effectively Clamping Down on Internet Freedom: For years, Congress has attempted to legalize corporate and state control of the internet. First, in 2011, they attempted to pass PIPA and SOPA, companion bills slammed by internet and tech companies and ultimately defeated after overwhelming public outcry. Then they passed CISPA — which the president had threatened to veto, having caught wind of the public’s opposition to heavy regulation of the internet (earlier this year, Obama reversed his position). However, corporate interests, like Hollywood’s studio monopoly, kept lawmakers’ tenacity afloat.

In October, Congress passed CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, but as the Electronic Freedom Foundation explained: “CISA is fundamentally flawed. The bill’s broad immunity clauses, vague definitions, and aggressive spying powers combine to make the bill a surveillance bill in disguise. Further, the bill does not address problems from the recent highly publicized computer data breaches that were caused by unencrypted files, poor computer architecture, un-updated servers, and employees (or contractors) clicking malware links.” Just before Christmas, Congress went even further, adding an amendment to the annual omnibus budget bill that strips CISA’s minimal privacy provisions even more. That budget bill was approved, though Representative Justin Amash of Michigan has vowed to introduce legislation to repeal the CISA provisions when Congress reconvenes.

But CISA wasn’t the only attack on citizens’ privacy this year. Though lawmakers touted the USA Freedom Act as a repeal of the mass surveillance state, in reality, it simply added a bureaucratic step to the process by which government agencies obtain private information. Further, a hack on Italian security firm, aptly called Hacker Tools, revealed that various agencies — including the DEA, NSA, Army, and FBI — possess software that enables them to, as Anti-Media reported, “view suspects’ photos, emails, listen to and record their conversations, and activate the cameras on their computers…” At the same time, the United Kingdom and France moved to tighten their already comprehensive surveillance States in the wake of multiple terrorist attacks. Though governments claim systematic surveillance is necessary to protect citizens — and Snowden’s leaks endangered that safety — the United States government has been unable to produce sufficient evidence the programs work. Instead, the documents the Department of Defense released this year as proof of the alleged endangerment were entirely redacted.

2. CIA Whistleblower Sent to Prison for Revealing Damning Information to a Journalist: While the government has no problem invading the privacy of its citizens, it offers swift backlash for those who attempt to violate its own clandestine operations. Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent, had his first altercation with the CIA when he sued for racial discrimination in 2001. He was subsequently fired. Years later, the CIA filed espionage charges against him for speaking with New York Times journalist, James Risen. Sterling had revealed a botched CIA scheme, Operation Merlin, to infiltrate Iranian intelligence that ultimately worsened the situation, gave Iran a nuclear blueprint, and was deemed espionage, itself. Rather than acknowledge the woeful misstep, the CIA arrested him, charged him, and ultimately sentenced him to 42 months in prison. The trial was reportedly biased, but nevertheless, was severely underreported by the media. Sterling’s conviction reflects the ongoing war on whistleblowers, which Obama has successfully expanded during his presidency. Sterling joins the ranks of Edward Snowden, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, and others, including a whistleblower who worked for OSHA’s Whistleblower Protection Program and was fired for exposing dysfunction and incompetence within the ranks.

3. Press Freedom Continued to Deteriorate: An annual report from the World Press Freedom Index saw the United States slip 29 spots from last year, landing 49th out of 180 total. Investigative journalist Barrett Brown was sentenced to five years in prison for exposing the findings of hacker Jeremy Hammond. Brown was charged with obstructing justice, aiding and abetting, and separate charges of allegedly threatening the FBI in a rant. Hammond, who exposed severe violations of privacy on the part of Stratfor, a CIA contractor, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Brown’s experience was not an isolated incident. Journalists around the world, like several journalists who were killed while investigating ISIS in Turkey, faced increased danger. One small-town journalist in India was burned alive after exposing a corrupt politician.

4. Multiple Activists Arrested, Charged with Felonies for Educating Jurors About Their Rights: In an ongoing trend, otherwise peaceful, non-violent individuals were harassed by police and courts — not for exposing clandestine information, but for providing information to potential jurors about their rights in the courtroom. One Denver jury nullification activist, followed by another, was charged with multiple felonies for handing out pamphlets that explain a juror’s right to vote “not guilty” in a verdict, even if the defendant is clearly guilty. This right was established to allow jurors to vote with their conscience and question the morality of laws, from the 19th century’s Fugitive Slave Act to Prohibition, both of alcohol in the 1920s and of marijuana today. The Denver activists are awaiting trial, while more recently, a former pastor was charged with a felony for the same reason.

In other unjust convictions and failings of the “justice” system, an African-American man was sentenced to seven years in prison for barking at a police dog, a Kansas mother faces decades in prison for using marijuana to treat her debilitating Crohn’s disease, and a mentally ill man died in jail after being held for stealing five dollars worth of snacks from a convenience store. He was inexplicably awaiting transfer to a medical facility. Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark web marketplace, the Silk Road, was sentenced to life in prison in spite of the fact that he committed no violent crimes — though the FBI attempted to paint a false picture that he did, albeit without filing formal charges. The prosecution was rife with corruption and scandal; two FBI agents involved in the case were charged with stealing Bitcoin during the investigation. In July, one admitted to stealing $700,000 worth of the digital currency.

5. Six-year-old Autistic Boy Killed by Police: 2015 established not only that the justice system remains broken, but the the enforcement class — police officers — continues to terrorize citizens. In one underreported case, a six-year-old boy was fatally caught in the crossfire of a police shootout against his father, who was unarmed. In another case, an African-American motorist was shot and killed by University of Cincinnati police over a missing front license plate. While high-profile cases of misconduct, including Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland, rightly dominated the news cycle, many more cases of police brutality received little attention. In fact, in 2015, it was revealed not only that the media-propagated “War on Cops” in America was a myth, but that American police kill exponentially more people in weeks than other countries’ police kill in years. On the bright side, many police officers did face charges — and even prosecution — in 2015, including one repeat rapist who cried upon being convicted of his crimes. The officers involved in the shooting of the six-year-old boy were also charged with murder.

6. Earth Enters Sixth Mass Extinction: 2015, like many years before, was disastrous for the environment. Researchers from Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton determined Earth is entering its sixth mass extinction, citing that species are disappearing at a rate 100 times faster than the normal rate between mass extinctions. Further, thanks, in part, to the widespread use of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide, populations of bees and Monarch butterflies dwindled — though, happily, the Monarchs appear to have bounced back. Polar bears also met continued endangerment.

The much-anticipated Paris Climate Conference yielded what many environmental activists deemed weak, if not fraudulent, solutions. Meanwhile, man-made environmental catastrophes endangered humans. In Flint, Michigan, lead levels in the water led to increased rates of contamination in children’s blood, prompting the mayor to declare a state of emergency. A massive methane gas leak in the San Fernando Valley, located just north of Los Angeles, has sickened residents and forced countless families to relocate. Authorities have been unable to stop the leak.

Thankfully, some measures to help the environment were taken, including creative solutions to stop animal poaching, the first flight of a solar-powered plane, the launch of a solar-powered airport in India, and Costa Rica’s successful effort to draw 99% of its energy from renewable sources.

7. Civilian Casualties in Western Wars Continue: Though ISIS and other terrorist groups were rightly condemned for killing civilians in 2015, the West pointed fingers while committing the same crimes. In fact, one U.N. report released in September found U.S. drone strikes have killed more civilians in Yemen than al-Qaeda. Another analysis released this year proved Obama’s drone wars have killed more people than were murdered during the Spanish Inquisition. Though the U.S. military’s bombing of a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital received global attention and outrage, many other incidents went underreported. In May, one U.S. airstrike on Syria killed 52 civilians in one fell swoop. Additionally, U.S.-backed coalitions have bombed civilian populations, like in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia killed at least 500 children, not to mention thousands more adult civilians. In other egregious misdeeds, it was revealed that the U.S. military sanctions pedophilia in Afghanistan.

8. Insurrection at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency Over Misleading Reports on ISIS: Over the summer, dissent grew within the ranks of the DIA, the Pentagon’s internal intelligence agency. In September, news broke that 50 intelligence analysts filed a report with the Department of Defense’s Inspector General to expose their superiors’ alleged manipulation of intelligence. The intention of the coverup was to downplay the threat of ISIS and the U.S.’s losing effort to fight it, all to maintain the Obama administration’s narrative the bombing campaigns have been successful.

Similar mishandlings of foreign affairs plagued 2015. It was revealed that the Pentagon had no idea what it did with $8.5 trillion, lost track of $500 million worth of weapons and equipment, and spent $43 million on a single gas station in Afghanistan. A DIA report released in June intimated the military was aware of the rising threat of ISIS, and not only allowed it, but welcomed it. The program to train moderate rebels in the fight cost half a billion dollars but yielded only four or five fighters. Further, multiple generals spoke out this year about the U.S. military’s role in creating ISIS. Additionally, news broke in 2015, that one ISIS recruiter had previously been trained by infamous Iraq War profiteer, Blackwater.

9. Activists Inch a Small Step Closer to Exposing the Actors Behind 9/11: Though few Americans heard about it, in August, a New York judge allowed a trial to move forward that could expose a potential government cover-up in the notorious terrorist attack. The ruling was tepid, allowing a 60 to 90 day window for the case to be dismissed or proceed. A later ruling hindered the effort, citing a reported lack of evidence; but activists have not stopped fighting for the release of 28 redacted pages from the 9/11 commission report that allegedly implicate Saudi Arabia (a majority of the hijackers on 9/11 were of Saudi origin).

Whatever the truth may be, 2015 witnessed growing doubts about the Saudi government, which beheaded more people than ISIS this year. It also sentenced a poet to beheading for writing poetry about his experience as a refugee from Palestine, sentenced a young man, Ali al-Nimr, to crucifixion for participating in anti-government protests, attempted to issue 350 lashings to a British man in possession of wine (though the U.K. intervened on his behalf, and that of al-Nimr; neither will be punished), and initiated a punishment of 1,000 lashings for a pro-democracy blogger, Raif Badawi.

10. The FDA Approved OxyContin for Use in Children: Though the approval of the powerful, addictive painkiller for use in 11-year-olds and younger children was unsurprising, the FDA’s justification was shocking. After lawmakers wrote a letter expressing concern to the FDA, the agency’s spokesperson, Eric Pahon, said the news was, in fact, not that serious because it was already standard practice. “It’s important to stress that this approval was not intended to expand or otherwise change the pattern of use of extended-release opioids in pediatric patients,” Pahon said. “Doctors were already prescribing it to children, without the safety and efficacy data in hand with regard to the pediatric population.”

However disturbing, the FDA’s decision comported with other events this year: President Obama appointed a pharmaceutical lobbyist Deputy Commissioner of medical and tobacco products, a study found swaths of heroin users graduate from prescription painkillers, and similarly, 75% of high school students who used heroin had previously abused pharmaceuticals.

In other stories regarding the misconduct of agencies tasked with keeping people safe, the FDA continued to allow meat companies to use a pharmaceutical additive banned in 150 countries, while whistleblowers at the USDA revealed several plants were producing pork filled with fingernails, hair, bile, and feces.

11. The Federal Government Finally Admitted Cannabis May Help Fight Brain Cancer: Though the government has long known about the medical benefits of cannabis — it holds patents on several medicinal qualities — the National Institute on Drug Abuse made waves this year when it published a document acknowledging the healing properties of cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive endocannabinoid. In particular, it noted “[e]vidence from one animal study suggests that extracts from whole-plant marijuana can shrink one of the most serious types of brain tumors.” Though more research is needed, the government’s admission was unexpected, albeit welcomed by many cannabis enthusiasts. Other studies this year revealed cannabis may help heal broken bones and is associated with lower rates of obesity.

Though many Americans still faced criminal prosecution for treating themselves and their children with cannabis, 2015 demonstrated the long-term trend of decriminalization and legalization will not be reversed. Nations around the world, from Ireland to Costa Rica to Canada laid groundwork to legalize marijuana to various degrees, while a majority of Americans now support legalization.

12. Nestle Paid $524 to Plunder the Public’s Water Resources: This year, Anti-Media reported on the insidious relationship between Nestle and the Forest Service in California. The investigation found not only that Nestle was using an expired permit to turn exponential profit on 27 million gallons of water, but that a former Forest Service official went on to consult for the company.

While corporate exploitation ran rampant in 2015, many countries around the world fought back. India banned one Nestle product for containing lead, while nations around the world banned Monsanto and GE products. Scotland, Denmark, and Bulgaria, among others, all moved to ban GE crops, while multiple lawsuits highlighted the serious potential health consequences of the widespread use of pesticides. Though corporate power remains all but monolithic, 2015 saw humans across the world rise up to resist it. Most recently (and comically), a proposed initiative in California is about to enter the next phase — signature gathering — to place it on the 2016 ballot. If placed on the ballot and passed, it will force California legislators to wear the logos of their top ten donors while they participate in legislative activities. The effort has drawn widespread praise and enthusiasm.

13. Establishment Caught Manipulating News to Fit Narratives: Following the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, contentious protests broke out, eventually resulting in limited rioting and looting. However, while the media attempted to paint protesters as aggressive, it failed to report officers’ systemic prohibition of their physical movement, to say nothing of the riot gear police showed up wearing. After being unable to move, a brick was thrown, but the media failed to reporting the instigation and discrimination law enforcement imposed that ultimately led the students and protesters to grow unruly.

In other manipulations, it was revealed that one Fox News contributor lied about his experience as a CIA agent; he had never been employed at the agency, and only obtained later national security jobs by lying about his CIA experience. Further, CBS edited out comments from Muslims, who discussed U.S. foreign policy as a driver of Islamic extremism during a televised focus group.

A study by fact checker, Politifact, revealed that all the major outlets surveyed — Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC— consistently report half-truths and lies. It is little wonder, then, that another survey found only 7% of Americans still harbor “a great deal of trust” in the mainstream media.

Still, it wasn’t just the media that lied. On multiple occasions, government agencies were caught attempting to distort facts. In March, news emerged that an IP address linked to the NYPD had attempted to edit the Wikipedia page on Eric Garner. Computers inside Britain’s parliament were linked to attempted edits on pages detailing sex scandals, among other transgressions. In a related story, the FBI reported it had foiled yet another terrorist plot, and once again, it was revealed the culprits were provided support from an informant working for the bureau.

14. TPP: In one of the most widely-contested pieces of legislation in recent memory, the Trans-Pacific Partnership moved forward, often in secret. The TPP has been condemned as a corporate power grab that ensures profit for pharmaceutical companies, among many other loathed industries. From clamping down on internet freedom to effectively sanctioning sex trafficking, TPP signals an ominous fate for the future of freedom.

15. Sharp Uptick in Islamophobia: Amid the carnage of the Paris terror attacks, the recent shooting in San Bernardino, and the surge in Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Western nations, attacks against Muslims skyrocketed in 2015. In the United States, Muslims have been attacked for praying in public, wearing traditional head scarves, and for simply being out in public. Sikhs have been caught in the crossfire for the crime of being brown and wearing cloth on their heads — and thus being confused with Muslims — while at least one Christian has been terrorized as a result of the unmitigated hate currently permeating modern society. Many European nations and U.S. states have rejected the influx of refugees from war-torn Syria.

Amid the increased hate against Muslims, however, has come an outpouring of love and tolerance. Muslim groups across the world have condemned terror attacks, raised money to help the families of victims, and promoted programs to discourage extremism. At the same time, citizens across Europe and throughout the United States have welcomed Syrian refugees with open arms.

2015 was a year of chaos, violence, hate, and an ongoing struggle of freedom versus oppression. In many ways, it was like the years, decades, and even centuries and millenia that came before. But amid the conflict and often discouraging headlines, humanity has continued to persevere, offering resistance to seemingly all-powerful forces and paving the way for, if nothing else, potential peace, freedom, and respect for human life.

There is No Pipeline, Schools are Prisons

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Ryan Calhoun

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

We are told there is a pipeline in the United States that travels from our school system to our criminal justice system. Correct as the data corroborating the pipeline’s existence may be, it is a flawed way of conceptualizing the issue. There is no pipeline out of schools and into prisons, because schools and prisons in this country are not conceptually separable.

Every child is mandated to receive an education with the threat of reprisal by the judicial system if they fail to. Children are thus coerced into attending a learning center, almost none of which adequately meet the educational needs of children. Some opt for public school “alternatives” like homeschooling or private schools, but the model of education is still generally the same and attendance is vigorously enforced. Through forced schooling, children are largely deprived of the ability to engage with the world and learn by means of play. They must cease the process of seeking fulfillment of genuine desires and begin one of alienation from their natural curiosity.

The consequences are shockingly apparent in a case out of Columbia, South Carolina where a police officer at a public high school physically manhandled a young black girl. The scene: A female student sits passively in her chair while the officer demands she stand. The lead-up to the incident is irrelevant. Insubordination to authority in schools is an inevitability for any child with a mind and drive of her own. For having such a mind and drive of her own (“resisting” in law enforcement-speak) the student was grabbed by the neck, slammed to the ground and dragged across the classroom, all while still partially connected to her desk.

Once again, this is not abnormal behavior. Disobedience is something youth do well and often. The response to disobedience, insubordination, and general independent-streaks at any school usually boils down to authoritative command and punishment. Physical assault on children is not legal in all schools, but it is in 19 states. Each year, over 800 children are assaulted legally and as a matter of policy at their schools. In South Carolina, it is legal to handcuff students for simply being loud.

In addition to the female assault victim in the South Carolina incident, the classmate who filmed the shocking video was also later arrested and held on bail. She was kidnapped for filming what was, by any reasonable standard, child abuse. Why was this allowed to happen? Her charge was “Disturbing school.” Please allow this to fully register. Non-violent, peaceful actions by children are construed as attacks on the supposed civility of school.

This officer’s assault is not an aberration; it is how schools treat students. They have no freedom to leave. Anyone who escapes is treated as a fugitive. They are permitted to go home, but this does not change the striking similarities between prisons and schools. It is now regular for schools to have guards — some are cops hired out and some are the schools’ own security staff. Students are filed along corridors and into rooms in such a way as to surveil and control their flow of activity.

People of color are far more likely to find themselves physically assaulted by staff in schools. They are more likely to receive punishment than their white counterparts for the same behavior, and as a result, they begin to recognize the system’s perception of them as marked criminals. Eventually, many are sent to even more coercive penal environments, where the violence and authoritarianism from the administration only escalates. Many students are lucky enough to avoid the transition from educational to criminal detention centers. But far too many either aren’t able to successfully navigate the educational-police state, or have the deck stacked against them from the outset. Their fate is a sad and unnecessary one.

There is no pipeline from school to prison. Some are just forced to stay in class.

Citations to this article:

Ryan Calhoun, There is No Pipeline, Schools are Prisons, Delaware Black, 2015-11-02
Ryan Calhoun, There is No Pipeline, Schools are Prisons, DC Black, 2015-11-03
Ryan Calhoun, There Is No Pipeline, Schools Are Prisons, Wyoming Network, 2015-10-30
Ryan Calhoun, There Is No Pipeline. Schools Are Prisons, Information Liberation, 2015-10-30
Ryan Calhoun, There is no pipeline: Schools are prisons, Augusta Free Press, 2015-11-02

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