Dear Mr. Snowden: Don't Let Them Get Their Bloody Hands On You

The conviction of Bradley Manning: A travesty of justice

A Small Victory...If You Can Call It That

In the Bradley Manning case.

R.I.P.

Man of No Nation.

What We Can Learn from Southeast Asian Hillbillies

Anarchism's Time Is Approaching

And with the likes of Jim Scott, David Graeber, and Marina Sitrin providing intellectual grounding, what's left of the American Left would do well to begin paying attention.








James C. Scott

Everybody Get Ready

The militarization of America

"Both America’s ruling oligarchy and the Pentagon command recognize that profound social polarization and deepening economic crisis must give rise to social upheavals. They are preparing accordingly."

Snowden: My Take

My take on Edward Snowden is that he's one of those guys who drank the kool-aid and wanted to do his part--very much like Dan Ellsberg. While doing it, he began to see the discrepancies between the narrative of the Land of the Free and the reality of what he was being asked to do by his government in order to "secure" that vaunted freedom. His conscience began to bother him. He decided to talk.


The government (the military especially) takes advantage of the energy and idealism of youth. On rare occasions, that energy and idealism can come back to haunt the powers that be. Every now and then, a G.I. comes back from the war and writes The Naked and the Dead. Every now and then, a Pentagon official decides to photocopy pages and pages of classified documents that contradict the official government spin. Even so, the risk to the government is really pretty low, considering the high degree of conformity that many Americans exhibit. But every now and then...

The price of democracy is access to information the government considers proprietary. The Bill of Rights was composed with that in mind. "Just trust us, we know what we're doing" doesn't cut it. Read your Orwell.

Snowden is a hero in my book. I don't expect him to be a saint or a genius or anything extraordinary. In fact, I expect him to be quite ordinary. The more ordinary the better. When John Q. Public wakes up and begins to have doubts, real freedom has an opportunity to break out. I'm not holding my breath, though. As Yeats wrote, "The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity."

End the Corporatocracy!

Begin the republic! Overturn Citizens United!

Brief on the Legality of Extra-Judicial Killings Ordered by the White House

A Federal Judge with a conscience? How far can this go? I'm guessing: no farther than the usual political theater. But time will tell...

Can You Tell Me Who To Contact Here, Senor?

James H. Cone on the Cross and the Lynching Tree

Bruce Springsteen: American Skin (41 Shots)

This Machine Kills Fascists

Was Woody Guthrie an anarchist? Beats me. Would he have approved the following statement of Anarchist goals? Again, it beats me, but I think he would have found much in this statement that resonated with his own brand of Left-wing populism:

The anarchist conception of power is in opposition to the Marxist conception of the seizure and adaptation of coercive, vertical, centralised [sic], bourgeois power. Instead, anarchists argue for, and in their innumerable revolts and their four main revolutions have practiced, a free, horizontal, federalist, proletarian counter-power that would equitably distribute decision-making powers and responsibilities across liberated communities. In particular, anarchist theorists have grappled with how to construct a real, living libertarian communist praxis, thereby encountering the key question facing all revolutionaries: how does the militant minority transmit the ideas of a free society to the oppressed classes, in such a way that the oppressed makes those ideas their own, moving beyond the origins of those ideas into the realm of libertarian autogestion.

--Michael Schmidt, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism, AK Press (2013),
6.

Moreover, I think Woody might answer the "key question facing all revolutionaries" with one word: music.

Hope For An American Spring

We, as anarchists, know that people, even the bourgeoisie, are not inherently bad; we all merely conform to our class interests. Given the right conditions, conditions of true equality and freedom, a powerful spirit of mutual aid and co-operation has been demonstrated to come to the fore in the popular masses...

How we act is related to the structure of society. When oppression and exploitation are forcibly removed by directly-democratic, horizontally-federated organizations operating under the guidance of the popular will, then the "goodness" that is in most of us comes through and flourishes as it did when the workers held the reigns in Argentina, Macedonia, Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Manchuria, China, Iran, Cuba, France, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Algeria, and elsewhere.

--Michael Schmidt, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism, AK Press (2013), 128.

Is This A Rhetorical Question?

Can American democracy survive its betrayal by the government? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Faulknerian Criticism

In his late novel Intruders in the Dust, William Faulkner characterized the United States as "a mass of people who no longer have anything in common save a frantic greed for money and a basic fear of a failure of national character which they hide from one another behind a loud lip-service to a flag."

On July 4th, 2013, declare your independence from all of that.

Faulkner on Mob Rule vs. Man

"...there is a simple numerical point at which a mob cancels and abolishes itself, maybe because it has finally got too big for darkness, the cave it was spawned in is no longer big enough to conceal it from light and so at last whether it will or no it has to look at itself...Or maybe it's because man having passed into mob passes then into mass which abolishes mob by absorption, metabolism, then having got too large even for mass becomes man again conceptible of pity and justice and conscience even if only in the recollection of his long painful aspiration toward them, toward that something anyway of one serene universal light."

"So man is always right," he said.

"No," his uncle said. "He tries to be if they who use him for their own power and aggrandisement let him alone. Pity and justice and conscience too--that belief in more than the divinity of individual man (which we in America have debased into a national religion of the entrails in which man owes no duty to his soul because he has been absolved of soul to owe duty to and instead is static heir at birth to an inevictible quit-claim on a wife a car a radio and an old-age pension) but in the divinity of his continuity as Man..."

[William Faulkner, Intruder In The Dust, LOA edition, 436].

We Could All Use A Little More...

Faulknerian integrity:

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just to refuse to bear them.

[William Faulkner, Intruder In The Dust, LOA edition, 439].

The Two Faces of the Democratic Party

On the left: craven capitulation. On the right: moral and ideological bankruptcy. If you continue to stand for this, it is because you have given yourself no choice.

Shame on you.