Category Archives: Social policy

Yasha Levine Released From Jail, Exposes LAPD’s Appalling Treatment Of Detained Occupy LA Protesters…

By Yasha Levine, an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.. Cross posted By Yasha Levine, an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.. Cross posted from The eXiled

I finally got home Thursday afternoon after spending two nights in jail, and have had a hard time getting my bearings. On top of severe dehydration and sleep deprivation, I’ve got one hell of pounding migraine. So I’ll have to keep this brief for now. But I wanted to write down a few things that I witnessed and heard while locked up by LA’s finest…

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Michael Hudson: Debt and Democracy – Has the Link Been Broken?

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

A longer version of this article in German was published in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011 [the FAZ provided this anachronistic note].

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

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Journey into a Libertarian Future: Part IV – The Journey into a Libertarian Past

By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience.

Simulposted at The Distributist Review

This is the fourth installment of a six-part interview. For the previous parts, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Red indicates exact quotes from Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed.”

ANDREW: The GLOs in your future libertarian society will be continuations of GLOs that exist now – basically large corporations and high net worth individuals. And the modern GLOs are continuations of GLOs that existed in the past.

CODE NAME CAIN: True – GLOs have a long and proud history.

ANDREW: In our society and in the past, both GLOs and regular governments have certain legal rights.

CNC: That’s right. But the legal rights of the governments are all completely illegitimate, whereas the legal rights of GLOs are all completely legitimate. That’s why I act morally when I hide my assets from the U.S. government.

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Journey into a Libertarian Future: Part III – Regulation

By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience.

Simulposted at The Distributist Review

This is the third installment of a six-part interview. For the previous parts, see Part 1 and Part 2. Red indicates exact quotes from Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed.”

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Journey into a Libertarian Future: Part II – The Strategy

By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience.

Simulposted at The Distributist Review

This is the second installment of a six-part interview. For the previous part, see here. Red indicates exact quotes from Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed.”

ANDREW: Do other libertarians agree with your idea of a libertarian society?

CODE NAME CAIN: Well, we do have our differences. For example, the Cato Institute is severely compromised by numerous left-leaning libertarians such as David Boaz. The Cato tag-alongs and certain other prominent libertarians imagine that an extremely small government would be better than no government at all. They are, of course, wrong.

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Journey into a Libertarian Future: Part I –The Vision

By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience.

Simulposted at The Distributist Review

Recently journalist Philip Pilkington has interviewed authors with unconventional perspectives on economic issues, including Satyajit Das and David Graeber. I thought it would be fun to interview someone too – but the man I interviewed uses a pseudonym. This is a six-part series.

ANDREW: Some people say that you represent a fringe view, and so interviewing you is a waste of time.

CODE NAME CAIN: If people obsessed with inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom underestimate libertarians, so much the better.

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Philip Pilkington: The Coming Age of Neocla

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

We stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for the strongest state power that has ever existed. Is this “contradictory”? Yes, it is contradictory. But this contradiction fully reflects Marx’s dialectics.

– Josef Stalin in remarks to the Soviet Party congress in 1930

Such is the contorted nonsense that flows from doctrine and dogma when these become institutionalised. When dogma is confined to the armchair of the intellectual or the blackboard of the social scientist it is innocuous – simply an attempt by one individual to make sense of a world that they will never, in truth, ever make sense of. But when it comes to occupy a seat of power it becomes like a steamroller that can crush common sense and practicality in a misled attempt to change the world for the better.

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Peak Life Expectancy?

Yves here. This post from MacroBusiness points to a development that has (predictably) gone largely unreported in America, namely, that life expectancy is declining. The article discusses some of the probable causes and implications. It interestingly omits rising income disparity as a culprit. We quoted Michael Prowse on this topic in early 2007:

Those who would deny a link between health and inequality must first grapple with the following paradox. There is a strong relationship between income and health within countries. In any nation you will find that people on high incomes tend to live longer and have fewer chronic illnesses than people on low incomes.

Yet, if you look for differences between countries, the relationship between income and health largely disintegrates.

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An Open Letter to the Winter Patriot

By Mitch Green, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

The following letter reflects my view on the subject of civil disobedience…I offer my opinion as an Army veteran, student of the economy, and critic of an ongoing effort to wage economic war on the vast majority the population. If these words move you, I urge you to consider honestly the consequences if you decide to act.

As the Occupy movement continues to grow in defiance of the heavy-handed police action determined to squelch it, a natural question emerges: What point will the military be summoned to contain the cascade of popular dissent? And if our nation’s finest are brought into this struggle to stand between the vested authority of the state and the ranks of those who petition them for a redress of grievance, what may we expect the outcome to be?

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Mark Ames: Libertarian Liars: Top Reagan Adviser, Cato Institute Chairman William Niskanen: “Deficits Don’t Matter”

By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted at The eXiled

Another Monday, another “deficit crisis” panic. If you haven’t got the feeling yet that you’re being played like a sucker over this alleged “deficit crisis,” then let me help you cross that cognitive bridge to dissonance. It comes in the figure of the recently-deceased William Niskanen, the embodiment of how Reaganomics and the Koch brothers’ libertarian movement were joined at the hip.

This is a brief story about how the 1% transformed this country into a failing oligarchy, and their useful tools, starting with A-list libertarian economist William Niskanen, Chicago School disciple of Milton Friedman, advocate of the rancid “public choice theory.”

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Matt Stoller: Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto Cracks Open the Financial Crisis

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Learn the name Catherine Cortez Masto, because she just took a big leap in front of every public servant in the country in terms of restoring faith in government. As Nevada AG, she actually indicted someone for blowing up our housing system. Specifically, she handed down 606 counts of felony or gross misdemeanor indictments on robo-signing against two employees of big bank subcontractor Lender Processing Services.

It’s pretty clear from the indictment that these are mid-level employees, one level up supervisors of fraud rather than top CEOs. And yet, even if this were as far as it goes, it would still be a big deal. These would be the only charges served involving the housing crisis and its link with the structurally corrupt securitization chain so far. By itself, these indictments signify that the fraudulent foreclosure game is over for the big mortgage servicers in Nevada, which is the center of the foreclosure epidemic. It says the rule of law matters, in at least one corner of the country.

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Was the New York Times Embedded with the NY Police Department Prior to the #OWS Raid?

A longstanding NC reader and lower Manhattan resident e-mailed me:

I was curious about the first couple of pictures in this set from the NY Times. How were they able to get pictures of the NYPD gathering by South Street Seaport, before the raid?

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Video of Police Assaulting #OWS Protestor and Punching Woman in the Face

We’ve commented how the police kept the media far away during the crackdown in Zuccotti Park last night so as to prevent capture of images of the efforts to clear the square. There were reports at the time via the live feed of protestors being tear gassed and dragged away by their arms and legs, and later of the use of pepper spray and batons.

This video was from this morning, when the police were keeping protestors out of the park, an illegal violation of a court injunction. The protestors show a copy of the court order and are (predictably) denied access to the park. The woman was punched at around 1:45; the footage does not show the actual blow, but you can pretty clearly infer from her suddenly being on the ground in obvious pain what happened.

If this is what you see, imagine what happened last night, with no cameras and videos to constrain police aggression.

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Police State: #OWS, Other Crackdowns Part of National, Coordinated Effort; Bloomberg Defies Court Order to Let Protestors Back into Zuccotti Park [Update: Judge Rules in Favor of City]

The crackdowns on the Occupations around the US are as ugly as they seem.

The area around Zuccotti Park was subject last night to a 9/11 level lockdown over peaceful, lawful protests by a small number of people. No credible case has been made by the officialdom that the protestors had violated any laws. Martial law level restrictions were in place. Subways were shut down.Local residents were not allowed to leave their buildings. People were allowed into the area only if they showed ID with an address in the ‘hood. Media access was limited to those with official press credentials, which is almost certainly a small minority of those who wanted to cover the crackdown (the Times’ Media Decoder blog says that journalists are describing the tactics, as we did, as a media blackout). Moreover, reading the various news stories, it appears they were kept well away from the actual confrontation (for instance, the reported tear gassing of the Occupiers in what had been the kitchen, as well as separate accounts of the use of pepper spray and batons). News helicopters were forced to land. As of 10 AM, reader Wentworth reported that police helicopters were out in force buzzing lower Manhattan.

Gregg Levine tells us, based on a BBC interview of Mayor Quan of Oakland, that as some readers and this blogger speculated last night, the 18 police action was a national, coordinated effort. This is a more serious development that one might imagine.

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