Sunshine Recorder

With the muzzling of scientists, Harper’s obsession with controlling the message verges on the Orwellian.

… Since taking power in 2006, Stephen Harper’s government has rarely been caught on the wrong foot. Disciplined on the hustings, in the House, and above all with the media, Tory ministers and MPs have largely avoided the gaffes and unvarnished opinions that used to plague the conservative movement. But to many of its critics, Ottawa’s obsession with controlling the message has become so all-encompassing that it now threatens both the health of Canada’s democracy and the country’s reputation abroad.

And the principal battleground—where the micromanaging impulse seems to have taken on a zeal fuelled by ideological distrust—is the environment. Since Harper pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, citing skepticism about the cost and efficacy of international efforts to halt climate change (and saving the country as much as $14 billion in penalties for non-compliance) his government has been stuck with an unenviable sales job: trying to promote the expansion of Alberta’s oil sands—a significant driver of the national economy—while downplaying the sector’s rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions and the government’s own inaction. One strategy was to brand the bitumen as an “ethical” alternative to oil from corrupt or repressive regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. Another was to go on the attack. Environmental groups opposing pipeline plans have been denounced as “radicals,” accused of taking funding from “foreign special interests” and subject to special audits regarding their charitable status from the Canada Revenue Agency. And just this past week, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver picked a fight with NASA’s James Hansen, accusing the recently retired climate scientist of “crying wolf all the time” and exaggerating the oil sands’ contribution to global warming.

Neither approach has borne much fruit. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would pump Canadian crude to refineries along the Texas Gulf coast, remains mired in the U.S. approval process, while activists and even some policy-makers make it the focal point of their fight against “dirty oil.” Meanwhile Canada’s global reputation on green issues has taken a beating. (A January 2013 report card on international environmental performance based on indicators like air quality and biodiversity ranked Canada 15th among the world’s 17 most developed nations.) And all those audits—almost 900, at a cost of $5 million—resulted in just one group, Physicians for Global Survival, losing their tax-deductible status for exceeding the limits on political spending.

But if Ottawa hasn’t found a way to manage the activists or foreign public opinion, it’s shown remarkable resolve—and success—in denying its opponents federally funded ammunition. According to internal Environment Canada documents, obtained by Climate Change Network Canada via Access to Information, the amount of attention the media paid to federal climate change research dropped precipitously—80 per cent fewer stories—once the procedures for gaining access to government scientists were tightened during Harper’s first mandate. In the first nine months of 2008, for example, the department’s four leading researchers were quoted in a total of 12 newspaper stories, versus 99 over the same period the year before.

Meanwhile, the list of cases where government scientists have been effectively gagged from speaking about peer-reviewed research—sometimes even after its publication in prestigious international journals—grows.

Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al. December 15, 1967.

ROBERT B. SILVERS: … Under what conditions, if any, can violent action be said to be “legitimate”? …

NOAM CHOMSKY: My general feeling is that this kind of question can’t be answered in a meaningful way when it’s abstracted from the context of particular historical concrete circumstances. Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the consequences of such action are to eliminate a still greater evil. Now there are people of course who go much further and say that one must oppose violence in general, quite apart from any possible consequences. I think that such a person is asserting one of two things. Either he’s saying that the resort to violence is illegitimate even if the consequences are to eliminate a greater evil; or he’s saying that under no conceivable circumstances will the consequences ever be such as to eliminate a greater evil. The second of these is a factual assumption and it’s almost certainly false. One can easily imagine and find circumstances in which violence does eliminate a greater evil. As to the first, it’s a kind of irreducible moral judgment that one should not resort to violence even if it would eliminate a greater evil. And these judgments are very hard to argue. I can only say that to me it seems like an immoral judgment.

Now there is a tendency to assume that a stand based on an absolute moral judgment shows high principle in a way that’s not shown in a stand taken on what are disparagingly referred to as “tactical grounds.” I think this is a pretty dubious assumption. If tactics involves a calculation of the human cost of various actions, then tactical considerations are actually the only considerations that have a moral quality to them. So I can’t accept a general and absolute opposition to violence, only that resort to violence is illegitimate unless the consequences are to eliminate a greater evil.

With this formulation, however, one moves from the abstract discussion to the context of concrete historical circumstances where there are shades of gray and obscure complex relations between means and ends and uncalculable consequences of actions, and so on and so forth. Formulated in these terms, the advocates of a qualified commitment to nonviolence have a pretty strong case. I think they can claim with very much justice that in almost all real circumstances there is a better way than resort to violence. Let me mention a couple of concrete instances that may shed some light on this question. I read in the Times this morning an interview with Jeanette Rankin, who was the one member of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on December 8, 1941, to the accompaniment of a chorus of boos and hisses. Looking back, though, we can see that the Japanese had very real grievances, and that the United States had quite a significant share of responsibility in those grievances back in 1941. In fact, Japan had rather a more valid case than is customary to admit.

On November 6, 1941, just a month before Pearl Harbor, Japan had offered to eliminate the main major factor that really led to the Pacific war, namely the Closed Door Policy in China. But they did so with one reservation: that they would agree to eliminate the closed door in China, which is what we’d been demanding, only if the same principle were applied throughout the world — that is, if it were also applied in, say, Latin America, the British Dominions, and so forth. Of course, this was considered too absurd to even elicit a response. And Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s answer simply requested once again that they open the closed door in China and he didn’t even deign to mention this ridiculous qualification that they had added. Now that qualification was of the essence and had been fought about for the preceding ten years. And it was one of the factors that led to Pearl Harbor and the war. Of course, it was politically impossible after Pearl Harbor for the United States not to declare war; we know how very difficult it is to restrain from striking back, even when you do know that the guilt is distributed. But we’re talking about what is legitimate and what is moral, not what is a natural reflex. And the advocates of nonviolence are really saying that we should try to raise ourselves to such a cultural and moral level, both as individuals and as a community, that we would be able to control this reflex.

Now what were the consequences of striking back and what was our own role in creating the situation in which the violence took place? On December 8, we struck back quite blindly, quite unthinkingly, and I’m not at all sure in retrospect that the world is any the better for it. It’s quite striking to read the dissenting opinion at the Tokyo tribunal of the one Indian justice who was permitted to take part, and who dissented from the entire proceedings, concluding himself that the only acts in the Pacific War that in any way corresponded to the Nazi atrocities were the dropping of the two atom bombs on Japanese cities. A.J. Muste in 1941-2 predicted that we would adopt the worst features of our adversaries, of the object of our hatred, and that we would replace Japan as a still more ferocious conqueror. And I think it’s very difficult to deny the justice of that prediction. So even after Pearl Harbor, I would accept advocacy of nonviolence, not as an absolute moral principle, but as conceivably justified in those particular historical circumstances. In short, there may well have been alternatives to the Pacific War.

A second case, which I guess is the one everybody’s got on their mind, Vietnam, raises interesting and difficult questions in this regard. I’m not going to discuss the situation post-February 1965 but rather the earlier period. From 1954 to 1957 there was large scale terror instituted by the Saigon government, and the reason was pretty simple, it wasn’t just blind and wild. The reason was — this is Buttinger’s theory and I think accurate — that any democratic institutions that would have been created would have been taken over by the Vietminh and therefore it was impossible for the Saigon regime to allow any sort of democratic expression. It was necessary to resort to violence and terror.

Then, in the period from 1957 to 1965, there were two sorts of violence, roughly. There was the mass violence conducted by Saigon and the United States; Bernard Fall estimates about 160,000 killed during that period. And there was also the selective violence, selective terror carried out by the Viet Cong as part of a political program which succeeded in gaining the adherence of a good part of the population. During both of these periods, Americans tended to accept and condone the violence that was conducted by the United States and the Saigon government, reserving their indignation for the much more limited Viet Cong terror.

For my part, of course, there’s no question about justifying the American and Saigon government terror. But what about the harder question, that of the terror practiced by the National Liberation Front? Was this a legitimate political act? The easiest reaction is to say that all violence is abhorrent, that both sides are guilty, and to stand apart retaining one’s moral purity and condemn them both. This is the easiest response and in this case I think it’s also justified. But, for reasons that are pretty complex, there are real arguments also in favor of the Viet Cong terror, arguments that can’t be lightly dismissed, although I don’t think they’re correct. One argument is that this selective terror — killing certain officials and frightening others — tended to save the population from a much more extreme government terror, the continuing terror that exists when a corrupt official can do things that are within his power in the province that he controls.

Then there’s also the second type of argument … which I think can’t be abandoned very lightly. It’s a factual question of whether such an act of violence frees the native from his inferiority complex and permits him to enter into political life. I myself would like to believe that it’s not so. Or at the least, I’d like to believe that nonviolent reaction could achieve the same result. But it’s not very easy to present evidence for this; one can only argue for accepting this view on grounds of faith. And the necessity of releasing the peasant from this role of passivity is hardly in question. We know perfectly well that, in countries such as North Korea and South Vietnam and many others, it was necessary to rouse the peasants to recognize that they were capable of taking over the land. It was necessary to break the bonds of passivity that made them totally incapable of political action. And if violence does move the peasantry to the point where it can overcome the sort of permanent bondage of the sort that exists, say, in the Philippines, then I think there’s a pretty strong case for it.

An interesting sidelight to this issue in the Vietnam situation is a recent Rand Corporation study which claims that the areas in which American control is most firm are the areas in which there has been least disruption of the old feudal social order, where the peasants are docile, where they don’t raise political issues, where they don’t cause trouble and then begin to act politically — which in Vietnam means acting as members of the Viet Cong, apparently.

There’s also a third argument in favor of violence which on the surface sounds pretty abhorrent, but I’m afraid it has a point, from the point of view of the revolutionary guerrilla groups. That is the idea that violence, say by the Viet Cong, will lead to reprisal, often overreprisal, and reprisal will win adherents to the Viet Cong. Of course, that’s what happens, in fact. The first year of the massive American bombardment of South Vietnam, the number of recruits for the Viet Cong increased enormously, tripled at least.

With all these arguments in favor of this type of violence, I still think there are good grounds to reject it. It seems to me, from the little we know about such matters, that a new society rises out of the actions that are taken to form it, and the institutions and the ideology it develops are not independent of those actions; in fact, they’re heavily colored by them, they’re shaped by them in many ways. And one can expect that actions that are cynical and vicious, whatever their intent, will inevitably condition and deface the quality of the ends that are achieved. Now, again, in part this is just a matter of faith. But I think there’s at least some evidence that better results follow from better means.

For example, the detailed studies of Viet Cong success, like those of Douglas Pike, indicate quite clearly that the basis for the success, which was enormous, was not the selective terror, but rather the effective organization which drew people into beneficial organizations, organizations that they entered out of self-interest, that they to a large extent controlled, that began to interlace and cover the entire countryside. Other studies also show that it was the attractiveness of their programs for rural Vietnam that led to the NLF successes, which by 1965 had led in effect to their victory. I think the course of collectivization in China and the Soviet Union can also be instructive. It’s clear, I believe, that the emphasis on the use of terror and violence in China was considerably less than in the Soviet Union and that the success was considerably greater in achieving a just society. And I think the most convincing example — the one about which not enough is known and to which not enough attention is paid — is the anarchist success in Spain in 1936, which was successful at least for a year or two in developing a collective society with mass participation and a very high degree of egalitarianism and even economic success. Its successes, which were great, can be attributed to organization and program, not to such violence as occurred, I believe.

Such examples seem to suggest that there is a relationship between absence of terror and the degree of organization, meaningful programs and spontaneity, on the one hand, and success in achieving a just society on the other. This is a sort of Luxembourgian and anarchist conception, that a just society cannot really be imposed on the masses of people but must arise out of their own spontaneous efforts, guided by their own developing insight. I think that this is a valid conception which has some support from modern history. A final case I’d like to refer to is the anti-war movement in the United States, where I think the argument for nonviolence is overwhelming — so overwhelming that I don’t think I need argue it here.

A couple of days ago I was rather despairingly trying to think of something illuminating that I might say about this subject, and I decided to turn back to some of Tolstoy’s essays on civil disobedience. I’m not sure I found anything very deep there, but I was surprised to discover a note of optimisim that I hadn’t expected, and, since that’s a kind of a rare treasure these days, I’d like to quote a couple of remarks just to relieve the prevailing gloom. He has an interesting essay that was written in 1897 called “The Beginning of the End” [audience laughter] in which he points out that until recently men could not imagine a human society without slavery. Similarly, one cannot imagine the life of man without war. “… a hundred years have gone since the first clear expression of the idea that mankind can live without slavery; and there is no longer slavery in Christian nations. And there shall not pass away another hundred years after the clear utterance of the idea that mankind can live without war, before war shall cease to be. Very likely some form of armed violence will remain, just as wage labor remains after the abolition of slavery, but at least wars and armies will be abolished in the outrageous form, so repugnant to reason and moral sense, in which they now exist.

“Signs that this time is near are many. These signs are such as the helpless position of governments which more and more increase their armaments; the multiplication of taxation and the discontent of the nations, the extreme degree of efficiency with which deadly weapons are constructed, the activities of congresses and societies of peace; but above all, the refusal of individuals to take military service. In these refusals is the key to the solution of the question.”

We live in a society which is the most aggressive in the world, and we live under conditions of almost unparalleled freedom. We therefore have the opportunity to eradicate a good part of the illegitimate violence that plagues our lives and that is destroying the lives of many who are much less fortunate. I think we have no choice whatsoever but to take up the challenge that’s implicit in this prediction of Tolstoy’s. If we do not take up this challenge, we will help to bring about a very different state of affairs which was reportedly predicted by Einstein, who was once asked his opinion about the nature of a third world war and replied that he had nothing to say about that matter, but that he was quite certain that the fourth world war would be fought with clubs and stones.

ROBERT SILVERS: I think that we now will have discussion by the panelists.

HANNAH ARENDT: … I very much agree with Mr. Chomsky’s assertion that the nature of new societies is affected by the nature of the actions that bring them into being. And our experiences with such new societies are, of course, by no means encouraging. It would be really fooling ourselves if we looked upon them with enthusiastic eyes, with which I sympathize but which, I am afraid, simply do not see the truth. As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it, just as we couldn’t agree with the terror of the National Liberation Army in Algeria. People who did agree with this terror and were only against the French counter-terror, of course, were applying a double standard…

…I have the impression that many people today — at least a number of people in the so-called New Left — who are against our country’s intervention in Vietnam (as I am, too) would like us to interfere, only in favor of the other side. And though I do not think this would be as horrible as what we are doing now, I definitely think that it would be very wrong indeed…

… American political attitudes are known as “moralistic” all over the world; in this country we seem not to be aware of the seriousness of this reproach. Moralistic attitudes in politics tend to provide moral justifications for crimes, quite apart from leading into pseudoidealistic enterprises which are obviously to the detriment of the intended beneficiaries….

The difference between legal and illegal drugs is about history and business, but not science.

Back in grad school, I took my daily SSRI and departed for the archives to write a history of the War on Drugs. I imagined it was going to be a sensational account of Latin American cartels, corrupt DEA officers, and deadly side effects in the highest echelons of foreign policy. Two years later, here’s what I have: a confusing mix of hypochondria and iatrophobia and a story of bureaucracy, businessmen slapping each other on the back, and nationalized morphine production during WWII. I found war, and there were drugs. But instead of the Nixonian counteroffensive, in looking for the origins of the War on Drugs I was led to the birth of the modern pharmaceutical industry.

The current distinction between drugs classes as legal and illegal has little to do with their substance per se and everything to do with a confluence of court rulings, prison expansion, and business interests. It developed side-by-side with the pharmaceutical industry and the federal drug policing apparatus, then known as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, in the early part of the twentieth century. Each used the other to fortify its own positions of power. But the useful il/legal distinction was nearly destroyed during the Second World War, due to the urgent necessity of opium stockpiling for use by the Army, only to emerge stronger and more politically potent than ever.

In a time of war, the FBN began the first in a long series of collaborations with pharmaceutical conglomerates and drug cartels, which continued in some form throughout the twentieth century. To achieve national security objectives, the drug enforcement agencies that divided cartels from corporations by legal fiat collaborated to produce drugs for which they otherwise threw people in prison. These alliances strengthened the power of these agencies to determine the public understanding of what was legal and what wasn’t. They also allowed the feds to work with drug companies and cartels alike during the Cold War to develop various chemical military technologies and leverage on-the-ground power. But this double-dealing led to schizophrenic outcomes. Most spectacularly, during the Second World War, the U.S. Treasury Department gold vaults held 3,000,000 pounds of raw Macedonian opium, while the military was court-martialing G.I.s for marijuana use.

At the turn of the century, the U.S. had no federal drug-policing agency. Pharmaceutical manufacturers were dispersed into small independent businesses that produced and prescribed as they saw fit. But as a public drug reform movement denouncing the widespread sale and use of opiates gained steam, drug manufacturers were forced to define and defend the realm of “legitimate” production and sale of pharmaceuticals. Scandalous paper headlines related the horrors of drug addiction and adamant reformers began condemning the medical profession as a whole. Previously dispersed drug manufacturers, pharmacists, and medical practitioners were forced to come together and defend their legitimacy in the public eye to ensure continued profits and to preempt undesirable legal or government intervention. This collusion proved good for some and fatal for others — “quacks” were weeded out and, when the dust cleared, a handful of self-proclaimed professional drug producers controlled the market.

Once “legitimate” drugs had been clearly defined for the public, a whole other category of drugs became not only illicit but, for the first time, illegal. The innocuously named Harrison Act of 1914 was the first piece of national anti-narcotic legislation passed in the U.S. Although the Harrison Act only regulated drug sales through a poorly-enforced system of record-keeping, it codified the distinction between “dangerous” drugs and drugs “for medical or scientific purposes.” While the categories of medical or “ethical” drugs and illegal/“criminal” drugs quickly came to acquire a powerful moral currency, both were hasty products of negotiations over laws like the Harrison Act. The two categories were united at birth, only taking on meaning and material power in relationship to one another. In particular, they were expedient agreements between the government and the newly united pharmaceutical industry, as the latter worked to ensure that narcotic regulation (now inevitable thanks to the scandals raised by the reform movements) would take a shape that was convenient to business.

Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war’s indefinite continuance.

The twentieth century is hardly behind us but already its quarrels and its achievements, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory. In the West we have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise. In the wake of 1989, with boundless confidence and insufficient reflection, we put the twentieth century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar American moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market.

The belief that that was then and this is now embraced much more than just the defunct dogmas andinstitutions of cold war–era communism. During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.

Perhaps this is not surprising. The recent past is the hardest to know and understand. Moreover, the world really has undergone a remarkable transformation since 1989 and such transformations are always unsettling for those who remember how things were before. In the decades following the French Revolution, the douceur de vivre of the vanished ancien régime was much regretted by older commentators. A century later, evocations and memoirs of pre–Word War I Europe typically depicted (and still depict) a lost civilization, a world whose illusions had quite literally been blown apart: “Never such innocence again.”

But there is a difference. Contemporaries might have regretted the world before the French Revolution. But they had not forgotten it. For much of the nineteenth century Europeans remained obsessed with the causes and meaning of the upheavals that began in 1789. The political and philosophical debates of the Enlightenment had not been consumed in the fires of revolution. On the contrary, the Revolution and its consequences were widely attributed to that same Enlightenment which thus emerged—for friend and foe alike—as the acknowledged source of the political dogmas and social programs of the century that followed.

In a similar vein, while everyone after 1918 agreed that things would never be the same again, the particular shape that a postwar world should take was everywhere conceived and contested in the long shadow of nineteenth-century experience and thought. Neoclassical economics, liberalism, Marxism (and its Communist stepchild), “revolution,” the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, imperialism, and “industrialism”—the building blocks of the twentieth-century political world—were all nineteenth-century artifacts. Even those who, along with Virginia Woolf, believed that “on or about December 1910, human character changed”—that the cultural upheaval of Europe’s fin de siècle had utterly transformed the terms of intellectual exchange—nonetheless devoted a surprising amount of energy to shadowboxing with their predecessors. The past hung heavy across the present.

(Source: sunrec)

BBC journalist Paul Mason asks, are we still witnessing a global revolt against neoliberalism?

Two years on from the Arab Spring, I’m clearer about what it was that it inaugurated: it is a revolution. In some ways it parallels the revolutions of before – 1848, 1830, 1789 – and there are also echoes of the Prague spring, the US civil rights movement, the Russian ‘mad summer of 1874’ … but in other ways it is unique. Above all, the relationship between the physical and the mental, the political and the cultural, seems to be inverted. There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible, that a great change in the world’s priorities is within people’s grasp. 

What is underpinning the unrest that has swept the globe? In reality it’s reducible to three factors. Firstly, the neoliberal economic model has collapsed, and this has then been compounded by persistent attempts to go on making neoliberalism work: to ram the square peg into the round hole, thereby turning a slump into what looks like being a ten year global depression. Secondly there has been a revolution in technology that has made horizontal networks the default mode of activism and protest; this has destroyed the traditional means of disseminating ideology that persisted through two hundred years of industrial capitalism, and has made social media the irreversible norm. Thirdly, there has been a change in human consciousness: the emergence of what Manuel Castells calls ‘the networked individual’ – an expansion of the space and power of individual human beings and a change in the way they think; a change in the rate of change of ideas; an expansion of available knowledge; and a massive, almost unrecordable, revolution in culture. 

What we are seeing is not the Arab Spring, the Russian Spring, the Maple Spring, Occupy, theindignados. We’re seeing the Human Spring. We are seeing something that reminds us, long after the historians reduced it to a list of battles and constitutions, why they called 1848 the springtime of the nations; and why Hegel, in the aftermath of the first French revolution, wrote: ‘Our epoch is a birth-time.  The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation (Phenomenology of Mind, 1807) 

As an economic model neoliberalism died on 15 September 2008. Alan Greenspan’s words in the subsequent House Committee hearing were prophetic: ‘I found a flaw’, he said: ‘A flaw in the model that I perceived [to be] … a critical functioning structure that defines how the world works… That’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I’ve been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well’ (October 2008). Neoliberalism told us that the market was self-regulating; that the self-interest of the deal participant was a better policeman than the regulator. It created a dominant finance sector and told that sector to enrich itself – and that sector has now crashed the world economy. 

We are left with what Nomura economist Richard Koo calls a ‘balance sheet recession’ – in which fiscal stimulus, zero interest rates and a $6 trillion global money printing operation can only keep the patient alive. The Western elite can’t address this prolonged stagnation because it can’t bear to do any of the things that would end the depression: write off the debts, inflate them away, or step back from globalisation to protect their own populations from its depressive effect on living standards. So they’re left staring at the old model: and not only is the dynamo of it knackered, it is rapidly losing social legitimacy. All attempts to make the old model work without solving the global imbalances on which it rests lead to the policy of austerity: not just fiscal austerity, as in Britain and southern Europe, but a long-term strategy of reducing the wages, welfare benefits and labour rights of the workforce in the West. 

And there is one massively important group that has been dealt not just a tactical setback but a strategic one. In Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere I called these ‘graduates without a future’ – the first generation in the West since the 1930s who will be poorer than their parents.[1] They will leave college with £30, 40, 50k debts. The jobs on offer are – as the famous Santa Cruz ‘Communiqué from an Absent Future’ told us in 2009 – the same jobs you do while on campus: interning, barista, waiting tables, sex work. The first post-college job is often working for free or for the minimum wage. There is no way onto the housing ladder, the ladder is now horizontal; and in retirement, pension schemes will be gone. 

You can add in further specific grievances, country by country: medieval attempts to roll back reproductive rights; endless small wars conducted against civilians; racism everywhere; torture as the default option not just in anti-terrorism but in the policing of minorities. In Europe there is relentless austerity – of the kind that forces you to eat or pay the rent. A whole generation is being forced to live as drifters – to relive the plots of 1930s movies: to get on a bus to look for work, to migrate, to sofa-surf, to enter relationships that are stark compromises between love and economics. 

For this generation it is not a question of simple economic grievance but of the theft of the promised future. And I’ve become sick of hearing that the movement has ‘petered out’. No. It has been massively repressed. Tear gas fired indiscriminately into crowds in Athens, rubber bullets in Madrid, tasers and pepper spray on campuses across America. Non-lethal policing is highly effective against non-violent protests. It tends to clear them away. But do not think it has cleared away the grievances in people’s minds that led them to demonstrate in the first place. What it does is push those who don’t want to get their heads broken into a more sullen, silent, passive resistance: a resistance of ideas; or a resistance of small, granular social projects; or, as in Greece, anomie – where people just embrace the beauty of being hopeless, roll a joint, stare into each other’s eyes. 

The crisis of neoliberalism, compounded by the total failure to emerge of any alternative within official politics, simply leaves unanswered the next generation’s question: how does capitalism secure my future? 

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has only been in custody a few days, and at least two U.S. senators have already called for him to face the death penalty. It is difficult indeed to imagine a crime more deserving of society’s most severe sanction than the one allegedly committed by Tsarnaev and his brother. The brothers built bombs, targeted a public event packed with spectators, and, as a final cruelty, attacked the finish line of a marathon — guaranteeing that many of their victims would be too exhausted to flee after just completing a 26 mile run. One of their victims will not see his ninth birthday. Another victim, who they allegedly murdered during their failed effort to escape justice, had barely begun his career as a police officer. We still do not know what motivated the Tsarnaevs to such meaningless destruction, but it’s hard to see their actions as anything other than pure evil.

So Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may present one of the strongest possible cases for the death penalty. And yet, even in this case, the argument for pursuing a death sentence against Tsarnaev does not hold up.

The best argument for the death penalty is that it deters people from committing homicides in the first place, an argument that suggests we should execute far more people than just Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. If you think the death penalty is about deterrence, then you need to have it as an available option for all crimes you want to deter with it.

The deterrence argument, however, is doubtful at best. According to Dartmouth University statistician John Lamperti, “an overwhelming majority among America’s leading criminologists [have concluded that] that capital punishment does not contribute to lower rates of homicide.” While some studies do claim a deterrent effect, these studies are based on tiny data samples that yield doubtful results. As Yale Law Professor John Donohue explains, death sentences are “applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors.” Murder rates in states without the death penalty are consistently lower than those in states that do sentence people to die.

Meanwhile, few institutions expose the hazards inherent in government-mandated punishment more nakedly than the death penalty. Capital cases are difficult and incredibly expensive for prosecutors. As a consequence, the wealthy and privileged, who have the resources to hire outstanding legal counsel, are very rarely executed. The people that are convicted, by contrast, tend to be poor and disproportionately non-white. Nor is such arbitrariness limited to the way we distinguish among defendants, as the way we dole out death sentences also gives the lie to any claim that America values all human life equally. According to one study, defendants who kill high-status white people with college degrees are six times more likely to be sentenced to die than defendants who kill black victims closer to the margins of society.

Indeed, there is simply no escaping the role that race plays in determining death sentences. To take one demonstrative statistic from an ocean of them, six percent of murders in Alabama involved black defendants and white victims, but ten times that percentage of black death row inmates were convicted of murdering whites.

The death penalty also kills innocent people. Roughly 139 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973, 61 percent of whom were people of color. At least ten innocent peoplethat we know of have been executed — and these are only the ones that we know of.

These three realities — the impact of wealth, the disparate treatment based on race, and the risk of killing innocents — are themselves reasons why the death penalty should not exist. But are they arguments against applying it, so long as it does exist, in the most heinous of cases? Though Tsarnaev may well face prejudice on the basis of his religion, the fact that this is such a high profile case means he will likely receive excellent legal counsel, and his guilt is hardly in doubt. Though not quite as “hard” a case for anti-death penalty advocates as, say, Aurora shooter James Holmes — who was white, wealthy, and also almost certainly a mass murderer — Tsarnaev is one of the cases where the death penalty appears most likely to be applied fairly and justly.

The Boston Marathon bombing is as horrible a crime as one can imagine, so Tsarnaev’s case raises the difficult question of whether America can limit executions to only the most heinous crimes — at least under circumstances where the defendant’s guilt isn’t in question and there’s no evidence that his trial will be conducted unfairly in any fashion. Can we limit death sentences only to people as evil as Tsarnaev appears to be?

The simplest answer to this question is that we are a nation of laws, and our most fundamental law says we cannot create a brutal, rarely applied punishment targeting just a handful of crimes. The Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishments. So as a punishment becomes more “unusual” — or, in the Supreme Court’s words, as it no longer can be squared with “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” — it stands on increasingly weaker constitutional ground.

Indeed, it is likely that the death penalty is already unconstitutional under this rule. The number of death sentences has been on the decline in the United States, but not principally because of legal reforms limiting the death penalty to a small number of cases: it’s a combination of full legal abolition in some jurisdictions and the spread of anti-death penalty norms among citizens and prosecutors in others. 60 percent of U.S. counties have stopped seeking the death penalty entirelyas a punishment for any crime. One study of death sentences and executions from 2004-2009 discovered that just 10 percent of counties returned a single death sentence, and only 1 percent of counties produced more than one death sentence. Just four states made up 65 percent of national new death penalty convictions. In 2011, there were an estimated 14,612 murders in the United States, but only 43 executions. These data strongly suggests that executions no longer comport with our “evolving standards of decency.” We are increasingly uncomfortable with death sentences, and unwilling to execute people.

But beyond the cold language of the law, there is a deeply personal reason why we should not preserve the death penalty simply for the most heinous criminals like Tsarnaev. If you think the death penalty is a just response to murder or important to provide victims’ families with closure, then trying to limit it to a small number of multiple murders makes no sense. Why does taking one life not merit death, while taking two, three, or any other arbitrary number does? Why is the pain of one victim’s family any less important to address than the pain of families whose loved one was part of a multiple murder? There are many families that deserve the satisfaction of knowing their loved one’s murderer received society’s stiffest sanction for their crime, and it’s far from clear that the death penalty fills that need better than life without parole — indeed, it may even prolong a families’ grief. Yet the moment we say one victim, or set of victims, must be avenged by death, we lose the ability to consistently limit the death penalty’s application to rare cases — and the uncertainty and arbitrariness that plagues capital sentencing generally comes flooding back. When life without parole is the harshest penalty our courts dole out, such a sentence will stamp everyone who receives it as among the very worst criminals without opening the door to an unjust and unconstitutional policy.

So the death penalty is arbitrary. It discriminates on the basis of race and income. It kills the innocent. It is unconstitutional. And it may even deepen the wounds of families already grieving from the most terrible tragedy imaginable.

I. The Libertarian/Right Wing Attempted Appropriation of Smith

Down in South Carolina, at the College of Charleston, Adam Smith Week is held every spring. We read on their website that it is “sponsored by the Initiative for Public Choice and Market Process (IPCMP) that was founded in 2008 with a generous gift from the BB&T Charitable Foundation and the Charles G. Koch Foundation.”

“Adam Smith is one of the most recognizable figures in economics, and his contributions to the fields of philosophy and economics are still relevant today,” says Pete Calcagno, Ph.D., associate professor of economics and Director of the IPCMP. “His concept of the invisible hand is considered the classic statement on laissez faire capitalism” (emphasis in original).

Meanwhile, over in the United Kingdom, there is a self-described “independent libertarian, free market think tank that engineers policies to create a freer, more prosperous world” which calls itself the Adam Smith Institute. Up in Michigan, Mark Skousen, organizer of the popular libertarian  “FreedomFest: Keep the Revolution Alive” conferences held yearly in Las Vegas, lectures to the students at the “Center for Constructive Alternatives” at Hillsdale College, that Adam Smith was basically a libertarian.  Skousen explains that his history of economic thought book, The Making of Modern Economics,  is organized around  judging how much all other economists either add to or subtract from this libertarian reading of Adam Smith’s position.[1]

Libertarian and far right-wing readings and attempted appropriations of Adam Smith are not new. For example, a generation ago, the highly esteemed University of Chicago economist George Stigler, in “The Adam Smith Lecture”, told the gullible National Association of Business Economists that,

“It is hard to believe that any task, no matter how great its magnitude, is so large that the market cannot deal with it, if it is capable of being dealt with by man.  Did not Great Britain in Smith’s time leave the governance of India, already a nation of several hundred million beings, to a corporation called the East India Company?  Was not the early economic development of Canada entrusted primarily to the Hudson’s Bay Company?” (1988: 7-8, emphasis in original)

What a bad Smithian joke. Certainly, according to Smith, you can let the governance of a great nation such as India be in the hands of a corporation: if you want mass starvation, a shrinking economy, and looting on a gross scale by management!

What is behind these narrow one-sided right-wing readings of Smith (or, in the case of Stigler, a certified economic Nobel Laureate, a crass misrepresentation of Smith’s views)? There are various causes which I have discussed in other publications (Pack, 1991; 2010). Yet, I think the most important cause or reason, is what Aristotle called the final cause or goal.  I believe this essential goal is to use the luminous legacy of Adam Smith to aid in the smashing of the liberal welfare state; the elimination of state rules and regulations which impinge upon the freedom of big business (or, as Marx would say, capital) to use its power and property completely uninhibited; and the brutal destruction of all labor unions. As John Kenneth Galbraith explained a generation ago, big government and big strong labor unions acted as countervailing powers to the power of big business. What I believe is happening is big business and its representatives are  currently using  Smith’s legacy as an ideological, persuasive tool in their well endowed fight to eliminate these potential countervailing powers. By the way: note that some of capital’s hired heads are no doubt simply cynical intellectual mercenaries striving to maximize their pecuniary income; but many others are indeed “true believers”.  Be that as it may, to the extent big business, capital, is successful in pursuing it goals of eliminating all countervailing powers, there will be continued stagnating and indeed lower wages for most U.S. workers (Pack 2009). There will also be ecological and hence economic chaos in the unfortunately all too seeable future as the manmade causes of destructive global climate change and global warming continue unabated.

The narrow one-sided libertarian and general right wing readings of Smith’s work also serve to cover up and obscure a more critical, radical side of Smith. This important aspect of Smith’s work  encouraged Karl Marx in his critique of political economy (Pack 2013).  It was also quite critical of what Smith called commercial society (or, what we may call capitalist society); it is this critical side of Smith that I will now discuss.

II. Smith on Taxation

Taxation in modern societies for Smith is necessary and a sign of freedom.  For Smith,  “Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery, but of liberty.  It denotes that he is subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master” (Wealth of Nations [WN], 808).  Smith was the son of a tax collector, and Smith himself became a tax collector after he wrote the Wealth of Nations:  that would be quite an odd position for Smith to acquire if he really was a libertarian!

As opposed to most libertarians and right wing economists, Smith was not in favor of regressive taxation or any attempts to redistribute income from the poorer to the economically more advantaged members of society. Taxes are needed to support the state, and they should be proportional, or actually slightly progressive.  Therefore, Smith calls a tax upon silver one of the most proper of taxes, since silver is a “mere luxury and superfluity” (683). Similarly, in discussing toll roads,  he recommends that when  tolls upon luxury carriages  be “made somewhat higher in proportion to their weight, than upon carriages of necessary use, such as carts, wagons, and etc. the indolence and vanity of the rich is made to contribute in a very easy manner to the relief of the poor …”(683). So, go ahead and tax the indolence and vanity of the rich.  Similarly, the government or its agents should estimate the imputed rent of a house and tax that, since “A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable.  It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion” (793-794). Or simply tax ground rents in general.  Frequently, rents are a form of income derived from the mere ownership of property, not from hard work. Hence, they are a worthy object of taxation: “A tax upon ground-rents … would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist …Both ground rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own… Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land, are, therefore, perhaps the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them” (795-796). So, unlike the contemporary right-wingers, Smith did not advocate taxing property income at a lower rate than non-property income. Indeed, other things being equal, property income should probably be taxed at a higher rate!

III. Smith was not a Dogmatic Proponent of Laissez Faire Capitalism

According to Smith, most of the government rules and regulations in his day were made by and for the benefit of the rich and powerful; it was these rules which Smith vehemently argued against. Yet, Smith was not necessarily against all government rules and regulations, particularly those designed to help the workers and the poor. Hence, “whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counselors are always the masters.  When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters” (142). Regulations favoring the workmen are always just and equitable – you will not find this thought in most libertarian and right wing writings. Moreover, again contrary to most of these interpretations, Smith was also not some kind of Burkean conservative. This is because the second key reason Smith argued against the government rules and regulations in his day is  they were archaic and outdated. Due to historical change, “Laws frequently continue in force long after the circumstances, which first gave occasion to them, and which could alone render them reasonable, are no more” (362). In his Lectures on Jurisprudence Smith told his students “it is absurd to preserve in people a regard for their old customs when the causes of them are removed” (529).

III.i. Special Rules for the Financial Services Sector

III.ii. Other Rules and Regulations

IV.  Character Problems

V. Problems with Managerial Capitalism

VI. The Undue Influence of Businessmen on the Government

VII.  Conclusion

On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Also in attendance was Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, Director of Speechwriting for Ambassador Susan Rice at the US State Department and current Communications Director of the International Crisis Group, and Lisa Shields, Vice President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for “The New Digital World”, their forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.

We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.

….

JA: Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world. Which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts.

ES: OK.

JA: And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort of say, well what are your philosophical axioms for this? And I say I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way. And so that avoids, then, getting into further unhelpful discussions about why you want to do something. It is enough that I do. So in considering how unjust acts are caused and what tends to promote them and what promotes just acts I saw that human beings are basically invariant. That is that their inclinations and biological temperament haven’t changed much over thousands of years and so therefore the only playing field left is: what do they have? And what do they know? And “have” is something that is fairly hard to influence, so that is what resources do they have at their disposal? And how much energy they can harness, and what are the supplies and so on. But what they know can be affected in a nonlnear way because when one person conveys information to another they can convey on to another and another and so on in a way that nonlinear and so you can affect a lot of people with a small amount of information. And therefore you can change the behaviour of many people with a small amount of information. So the question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce behaviour which is just? And disincentivise behaviour which is unjust? So all around the world there are people observing different parts of what is happening to them locally. And there are other people that are receiving information that they haven’t observed first hand. And in the middle there are people who are involved in moving information from the observers to the people who will act on information. These are three separate problems that are all coupled together. I felt that there was a difficulty in taking observations and putting them in an efficient way into a distribution system which could then get this information to people who could act upon it. And so you can argue that companies like Google are involved, for example, in this “middle” business of taking… of moving information from people who have it to people who want it. The problem I saw was that this first step was crippled. And often the last step as well when it came to information that governments were inclined to censor. We can look at this whole process as the Fourth Estate. Or just as produced by the Fourth Estate. And so you have some kind of… pipeline… and… So I have this description which is… which is partly derived from my experiences in quantum mechanics about looking at the flow of particular types of information which will effect some change in the end. The bottleneck to me appeared to me to be primarily in the acquisition of information that would go on to produce changes that were just. In a Fourth Estate context the people who acquire information are sources. People who work information and distribute it are journalists and publishers. And people who act on it… is everyone. So that’s a high level construct, but of course it then comes down to practically how do you engineer a system that solves that problem? And not just a technical system, but a total system. So WikiLeaks was and is an attempt - although still very young - at a total system.

ES: For all three phases?

JA: To deal with… not for all three phases but for the political component, the philosophical component and the engineering component in pushing out first component. Politically that means anonymizing and protecting… Sorry. Technically that means anonymizing and protecting sources in a wide variety of ways. Politically that also means protecting them politically, and incentivizing them in a political manner. Saying that their work is valuable, and encouraging people to take it up. And then there is also a legal aspect. What are the best laws that can be created in the best jurisdictions to operate this sort of stuff from? And practical everyday legal defense. On the technical front, our first prototype was engineered for a very adverse situation where publishing would be extremely difficult and our only effective defense in publishing would be anonymity. Where sourcing is difficult. As it still currently is for the national security sector. And where internally we had a very small and completely trusted team.

ES: So publishing means the question of the site itself? And making the material public?

JA: Yeah. Making the primary source material public. That is what I mean by publishing.

ES: So the first step was to make that correctly.

JA: It was clear to me that all over the world publishing is a problem. And… Whether that is through self censorship or overt censorship.

ES: Sorry, just you’re gonna have to… is that because of fear of retribution by the governments, you know? Or all…

JA: It’s mostly self censorship. In fact I would say it’s probably the most significant one, historically, has been economic censorship. Where it is simply not profitable to publish something. There is no market for it. That is I describe as a censorship pyramid. It’s quite interesting. So, on the top of the pyramid there are the murders of journalists and publishers. And the next level there is political attacks on journalists and publishers. So you think, what is a legal attack? A legal attack is simply a delayed use of coercive force.

ES: Sure.

JA: Which doesn’t necessarily result in murder but may result in incarceration or asset seizure. So the next level down, and remember the volume… the area of the pyramid…. volume of the pyramid! The volume of the pyramid increases significantly as you go down from the peak. And in this example that means that the number of acts of censorship also increases as you go down. So there are very few people who are murdered, there are a few people who suffer legal… there is a few number of public legal attacks on individuals and corporations, and then at the next level there is a tremendous amount of self censorship, and this self censorship occurs in part because people don’t want to move up into the upper parts of the pyramid. They don’t want to come to legal attacks or uses of coercive force. But they also don’t want to be killed.

ES: Right. I see.

JA: So that discourages people from behaving… and then there are other forms of self censorship that are concerned about missing out on business deals, missing out on promotions and those are even more significant because they are lower down the pyramid. At the very bottom - which is the largest volume - is all those people who cannot read, do not have access to print, do not have access to fast communications or where there is no profitable industry in providing that. Okay. So we decided to deal with the top of this censorship pyramid. The top two sections: the threats of violence, and the delayed threats of violence that are represented by the legal system. In some ways that is the hardest case. In some ways it is the easiest case. It is the easiest case because it is clear cut when things are being censored there, or not. It is also the easiest because the volume of censorship is relatively small, even if the per event significance is very high. So in… Before WikiLeaks had… although of course I had some previous political connections of my own from other activities, we didn’t have that many friends. We didn’t have significant political allies. And we didn’t have a worldwide audience that was looking to see how we were doing. So we took the position that we would need to have a publishing system whose only defense was anonymity. That is it had no financial defense, it had no legal defense, and it had no political defense. Its defenses were purely technical. So that meant a system that was distributed at its front with many domain names and a fast ability to change those domain names. A caching system, and at the back tunnelling through the Tor network to hidden servers…

With the news this week that gun control efforts in the Senate have failed, even though a majority of Americans want stronger curbs on weapons, attention has turned once again to how democracy works—or doesn’t—in America. David Graeber, bestselling author of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” has written a new book, “The Democracy Project,” and in this essay for Bookish he casts a stringent eye on the state of the D-word in America.

The American system was never designed to be a democracy.

For the framers of the U.S. constitution, “democracy” meant “the exercise of the powers of government by the people,” and they made clear, over and over, that they were explicitly against this. This is not to say that significant democratic elements have not managed to work their way into the system—but insofar as they have, it was despite the Founders’ intentions, not because of them. Starting with the Bill of Rights, the most cherished aspects of our system—the ones we think of when we think of ourselves as a “democracy”—were fought for and won through mass mobilization, civil disobedience and even the prospect of outright revolt.

We’ve had moments of movement toward great democracy in the U.S., and we’ve had moments of retreat, and at the moment, we’re very definitely in the latter. One reason we can’t see this is we have no sense of where we stand in relation to other countries that call themselves “democracies”—whether it’s Holland, Uruguay or Zambia. Most Americans automatically assume that we must be much more democratic than other countries. In fact, we’re decidedly less. Here’s why:

1. Our constitution is fundamentally anti-democratic

The US, unlike almost any other country on earth, continues to maintain an antiquated 18th- century constitution designed to severely limit democracy. This guarantees, for example, that in Presidential elections tw thirds of voters—the ones who don’t happen to live in a swing state—will have no effect the outcome at all. In other words, a supermajority of the electorate is effectively disenfranchised. Yet few seem to find this scandalous. Even in the House, which is supposed to be the most “democratic” branch of government, a situation can still exist where one party can win the overall popular vote and the other party still ends up with a majority of Representatives. This happened in 2012 and failed to spark any significant reflection on what this means for U.S. claims to be the world’s leading democracy. The fact that such outcomes are calmly accepted by the political classes demonstrates at best indifference to—and at worst contempt for—the very principle of majority rule.

2. Two parties aren’t nearly enough

Even when voters are actually in a position to affect the outcome of elections, the U.S. two-party system—a system that, again, exists in almost no other country in the world—gives voters the narrowest political choice possible. Even during primaries, most voters don’t vote for the candidates whose views on policy issues most closely reflect their own, since they are constantly and aggressively reminded that voting for anyone who does not cleave to an extremely narrow mainstream consensus is tantamount to “throwing away one’s vote.”

3. Popular opinion is routinely ignored

The “mainstream consensus,” however, has nothing to do with the policy views of the majority of voters. To take a famous example, roughly two thirds of Americans would favor creation of a single-payer health insurance system, but in mainstream politics, this position has never even been considered. So if it’s not based on popular opinion, where does this “consensus” come from? Well, it’s established through what most countries would consider a system of outright bribery. It is donors and lobbyists, not voters, who determine the range of publicly acceptable (“serious”) positions that can be presented in political campaigns.

4. Pundits are just paid mouthpieces

Even within the extremely narrow range of “acceptable” positions there is almost no public debate about policy issues. Political journalism instead focuses almost exclusively on the game of politics itself (performance, “gaffes,” scandals) rather than those issues that directly affect voter’s lives. In most parts of the world, whether it’s Latin America or Eastern Europe, intellectuals (few of whom are personally rich) play a role in shaping public debate; in the US, intellectuals are almost entirely excluded, their places taken by professional “pundits” (most of them millionaires), and even basic facts available for debate are pre-selected, “spun,” and often overtly fabricated by professional PR firms pursuing some political or economic interest.

5. One rule for citizens, another for corporations

Lobbyists representing corporations often write the very legislation by which those corporations are “regulated,” reducing the government to little more than an enforcer for corporate interests. Increasingly, for instance, policy is designed to ensure that more and more Americans fall more and more into debt to financial interests: debts which are then backed up by the full force of the legal system, even as the financial interests themselves are now allowed to operate entirely outside the law. Ordinary citizens can now be jailed for a few hundred dollars of unpaid debt while their creditors can do business in the knowledge they will not be seriously punished even for billions in fraud.

6. Dissent now equals treason

In most parts in the world, ordinary citizens will likely have at least some experience in taking part in democratically organized political groups: trade unions, neighborhood groups, community assemblies, political parties and clubs and so forth. Most Americans have no idea what participating in grassroots democratic decision-making would even mean. Similarly, in most countries other than the most authoritarian, popular political action such as rallies, strikes, marches, and civil disobedience are considered a normal and expected part of democratic life—just as they once were in America—and are allowed to take place without significant interference from police. In the U.S., since the rise of the labor movement in the 1880s and ‘90s, constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly, previously held sacrosanct, were legislated away, to the point where citizens are now forbidden even to hold a rally in a park or public square without government permission, and those who defy such laws can expect to be greeted with extreme militarized violence.

7. Democracy or police state?

The US far more resembles a police state than ordinary democracies like Holland, Uruguay, Zambia, even the U.S. itself in previous periods of its history. Even the most trivial government documents are routinely classified, the rate of surveillance on political dissidents and citizens in general is far higher than it ever was even in East Germany at the height of the Cold War, and the U.S. has a larger proportion of its population in prison than the Soviet Union did at the height of the gulag, indeed, than any known society ever. Soldiers and police are endlessly glorified in the media, and the most extreme forms of state-directed sadism including (prison) rape, torture, and murder regularly justified and even celebrated in popular entertainment. The branches of the U.S. government that operate largely through violence or the threat of violence—military, prisons, police, homeland security—continually to receive more funding and expand, even as other aspects of the U.S. government shrink.

Americans continually say they love democracy—and they do. But they also show great antipathy and skepticism toward politicians, bureaucrats, elections and the idea of the government itself. How can both be true? It’s simple: We love democracy, but we don’t live in one.

Around 400 B.C., Socrates was brought to trial on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and “impiety.” Presumably, however, people believed then as we do now, that Socrates’ real crime was being too clever and, not insignificantly, a royal pain to those in power or, as Plato put it, a gadfly. Just as a gadfly is an insect that could sting a horse and prod it into action, so too could Socrates sting the state. He challenged the moral values of his contemporaries and refused to go along with unjust demands of tyrants, often obstructing their plans when he could. Socrates thought his service to Athens should have earned him free dinners for life. He was given a cup of hemlock instead.

We have had gadflies among us ever since, but one contemporary breed in particular has come in for a rough time of late: the “hacktivist.” While none have yet been forced to drink hemlock, the state has come down on them with remarkable force. This is in large measure evidence of how poignant, and troubling, their message has been.

Hacktivists, roughly speaking, are individuals who redeploy and repurpose technology for social causes. In this sense they are different from garden-variety hackers out to enrich only themselves. People like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates began their careers as hackers — they repurposed technology, but without any particular political agenda. In the case of Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak, they built and sold “blue boxes,” devices that allowed users to defraud the phone company. Today, of course, these people are establishment heroes, and the contrast between their almost exalted state and the scorn being heaped upon hacktivists is instructive.

For some reason, it seems that the government considers hackers who are out to line their pockets less of a threat than those who are trying to make a political point. Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known as “Weev.” When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not “hack” anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google Web crawlers do every second of every day — sequentially walk through public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole.

For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying its customers of its own security failure.

When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in Plato’s “Apology.” “You consider yourself a hero of sorts,” she said, and noted that Weev’s “special skills” in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence. I was reminded of a line from an essay written in 1986 by a hacker called the Mentor: “My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.”

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, told this story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call.

ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.

When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.

I was wrong to trust him. There was no work. I wanted to leave, but had no money to fly home. After the American invasion in 2001, I fled to Pakistan like everyone else. The Pakistanis arrested me when I asked to see someone from the Yemeni Embassy. I was then sent to Kandahar, and put on the first plane to Gitmo.

Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray.

I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.

I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping.

There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren’t enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings; nothing is happening at regular intervals. They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up.

During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily. I called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was being done correctly or not.

It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity.

When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding.

The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.

Where is my government? I will submit to any “security measures” they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.

I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.

The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.

And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.

11 of the most used techniques during wartime, in advertising & politics.

Assertion: Assertion is commonly used in advertising and modern propaganda. An assertion is an enthusiastic or energetic statement presented as a fact, although it is not necessarily true. They often imply that the statement requires no explanation or back up, but that it should merely be accepted without question. Examples of assertion, although somewhat scarce in wartime propaganda, can be found often in modern advertising propaganda. Any time an advertiser states that their product is the best without providing evidence for this, they are using an assertion. The subject, ideally, should simply agree to the statement without searching for additional information or reasoning. Assertions, although usually simple to spot, are often dangerous forms of propaganda because they often include falsehoods or lies.

Bandwagon: Bandwagon is one of the most common techniques in both wartime and peacetime and plays an important part in modern advertising. Bandwagon is also one of the seven main propaganda techniques identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1938. Bandwagon is an appeal to the subject to follow the crowd, to join in because others are doing so as well. Bandwagon propaganda is, essentially, trying to convince the subject that one side is the winning side, because more people have joined it. The subject is meant to believe that since so many people have joined, that victory is inevitable and defeat impossible. Since the average person always wants to be on the winning side, he or she is compelled to join in. However, in modern propaganda, bandwagon has taken a new twist. The subject is to be convinced by the propaganda that since everyone else is doing it, they will be left out if they do not. This is, effectively, the opposite of the other type of bandwagon, but usually provokes the same results. Subjects of bandwagon are compelled to join in because everyone else is doing so as well. When confronted with bandwagon propaganda, we should weigh the pros and cons of joining in independently from the amount of people who have already joined, and, as with most types of propaganda, we should seek more information.

Card stacking: Card stacking, or selective omission, is one of the seven techniques identified by the IPA, or Institute for Propaganda Analysis. It involves only presenting information that is positive to an idea or proposal and omitting information contrary to it. Card stacking is used in almost all forms of propaganda, and is extremely effective in convincing the public. Although the majority of information presented by the card stacking approach is true, it is dangerous because it omits important information. The best way to deal with card stacking is to get more information.

Glittering Generalities: Glittering generalities was one of the seven main propaganda techniques identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1938. It also occurs very often in politics and political propaganda. Glittering generalities are words that have different positive meaning for individual subjects, but are linked to highly valued concepts. When these words are used, they demand approval without thinking, simply because such an important concept is involved. For example, when a person is asked to do something in “defense of democracy” they are more likely to agree. The concept of democracy has a positive connotation to them because it is linked to a concept that they value. Words often used as glittering generalities are honor, glory, love of country, and especially in the United States, freedom. When coming across with glittering generalities, we should especially consider the merits of the idea itself when separated from specific words.

Lesser of Two Evils: The “lesser of two evils” technique tries to convince us of an idea or proposal by presenting it as the least offensive option. This technique is often implemented during wartime to convince people of the need for sacrifices or to justify difficult decisions. This technique is often accompanied by adding blame on an enemy country or political group. One idea or proposal is often depicted as one of the only options or paths. When confronted with this technique, the subject should consider the value of any proposal independently of those it is being compared with.

Name Calling: Name calling occurs often in politics and wartime scenarios, but very seldom in advertising. It is another of the seven main techniques designated by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. It is the use of derogatory language or words that carry a negative connotation when describing an enemy. The propaganda attempts to arouse prejudice among the public by labeling the target something that the public dislikes. Often, name calling is employed using sarcasm and ridicule, and shows up often in political cartoons or writings. When examining name calling propaganda, we should attempt to separate our feelings about the name and our feelings about the actual idea or proposal.

Pinpointing the Enemy: Pinpointing the enemy is used extremely often during wartime, and also in political campaigns and debates. This is an attempt to simplify a complex situation by presenting one specific group or person as the enemy. Although there may be other factors involved the subject is urged to simply view the situation in terms of clear-cut right and wrong. When coming in contact with this technique, the subject should attempt to consider all other factors tied into the situation. As with almost all propaganda techniques, the subject should attempt to find more information on the topic. An informed person is much less susceptible to this sort of propaganda.

Plain Folks: The plain folks propaganda technique was another of the seven main techniques identified by the IPA, or Institute for Propaganda Analysis. The plain folks device is an attempt by the propagandist to convince the public that his views reflect those of the common person and that they are also working for the benefit of the common person. The propagandist will often attempt to use the accent of a specific audience as well as using specific idioms or jokes. Also, the propagandist, especially during speeches, may attempt to increase the illusion through imperfect pronunciation, stuttering, and a more limited vocabulary. Errors such as these help add to the impression of sincerity and spontaneity. This technique is usually most effective when used with glittering generalities, in an attempt to convince the public that the propagandist views about highly valued ideas are similar to their own and therefore more valid. When confronted by this type of propaganda, the subject should consider the proposals and ideas separately from the personality of the presenter.

Simplification (Stereotyping): Simplification is extremely similar to pinpointing the enemy, in that it often reduces a complex situation to a clear-cut choice involving good and evil. This technique is often useful in swaying uneducated audiences. When faced with simplification, it is often useful to examine other factors and pieces of the proposal or idea, and, as with all other forms of propaganda, it is essential to get more information.

Testimonials: Testimonials are another of the seven main forms of propaganda identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. Testimonials are quotations or endorsements, in or out of context, which attempt to connect a famous or respectable person with a product or item. Testimonials are very closely connected to the transfer technique, in that an attempt is made to connect an agreeable person to another item. Testimonials are often used in advertising and political campaigns. When coming across testimonials, the subject should consider the merits of the item or proposal independently of the person of organization giving the testimonial.

Transfer: Transfer is another of the seven main propaganda terms first used by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1938. Transfer is often used in politics and during wartime. It is an attempt to make the subject view a certain item in the same way as they view another item, to link the two in the subjects mind. Although this technique is often used to transfer negative feelings for one object to another, it can also be used in positive ways. By linking an item to something the subject respects or enjoys, positive feelings can be generated for it. However, in politics, transfer is most often used to transfer blame or bad feelings from one politician to another of his friends or party members, or even to the party itself. When confronted with propaganda using the transfer technique, we should question the merits or problems of the proposal or idea independently of convictions about other objects or proposals.

Today, the same arguments once used against Jews, and then against South Asian and Caribbean immigrants, are now raised against Muslims and east Europeans. However, Kenan Malik finds some comfort in reviewing the facts of the matter. He then tackles the illusions.

At the heart of the current debate about immigration are two issues: the first is about the facts, the second about the public perception of immigration.

The facts are relatively straightforward. Immigration is a good thing and the idea that immigrants come to Britain to live off benefits laughable. Immigrants put more money into the economy than they take out^[1] and have a negligible impact on jobs and wages. An independent report on the impact of immigration commissioned by the Home Office in 2003, looked at numerous international surveys and conducted its own study in Britain. “The perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, or that immigrants depress the wages of existing workers”, it concluded, “do not find confirmation in the analysis of the data laid out in this report”.^[2] More recent studies have suggested that immigration helps raise wages^[3] except at the bottom of the jobs ladder where it has a slight negative impact.^[4] That impact on low paid workers matters hugely, of course, but is arguably more an issue of labour organization than of immigration.

Immigrants are less likely to claim benefits than British citizens. According to the Department for Work and Pensions, of the roughly 1.8 million non-British EU citizens of working age in this country, about 90,000, or around five per cent, claim an “out of work benefit”, compared with around 13 per cent of Britons. Migrants from outside the EU are also much less likely to claim benefits.^[5]

The most comprehensive study to date of East European migrants in Britain concluded that “A8 immigrants who arrived after EU enlargement in 2004 […] are 60 per cent less likely than natives to receive state benefits or tax credits, and 58 per cent less likely to live in social housing”. The study also discovered that “in each fiscal year since enlargement in 2004, A8 immigrants made a positive contribution to public finance despite the fact that the UK has been running a budget deficit over the last years”. This was because “they have a higher labour force participation rate, pay proportionately more in indirect taxes, and make much lower use of benefits and public services”. They paid around 30 per cent more in taxes than they cost our public services.^[6]

Whatever the truth about immigration, it is clear that there exists widespread popular hostility to immigrants. For some, often on the right, the hostility makes sense because, irrespective of its economic benefits, the social impact of immigration is destructive. For others, often on the left, such hostility exists because people are irrational and take little notice of facts and figures. Both arguments have little merit.

Immigrants, the critics insist, disrupt communities, undermine traditional identities, and promote unrestrained change. David Goodhart, director of Demos, whose book on immigration, The British Dream, is published on Monday, claimed last week that “Large-scale immigration has created an England that is increasingly full of mysterious and unfamiliar worlds”. As a result, “for many of the white people […] the disappearance of familiar mental and physical landmarks has happened too fast”. He quotes one man from Merton in south London: “We’ve lost this place to other cultures. It’s not English any more”.^[7]

Had Arthur Balfour been able to read that, he would undoubtedly have nodded in agreement. Balfour was the Prime Minister in 1905 when Britain introduced its first immigration controls, aimed primarily at European Jews. Without such a law, Balfour claimed, “though the Briton of the future may have the same laws, the same institutions and constitution […] nationality would not be the same and would not be the nationality we would desire to be our heirs through the ages yet to come”. Two years earlier, the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (an “alien” was, in the early twentieth century, both a description of a foreigner and a euphemism for a Jew) had expressed fears that newcomers were inclined to live “according to their traditions, usages and customs” and that there might be “grafted onto the English stock […] the debilitated sickly and vicious products of Europe”.

The sense that Jewish immigration was uncontrolled and that “We’ve lost this place to other cultures. It’s not English any more”, was palpable in the discussions. “There is no end to them in Whitechapel and Mile End”, claimed one witness giving evidence to 1903 Royal Commission. “These areas of London might be called Jerusalem”. The Conservative MP Major Sir William Eden Evans-Gordon expressed the same sentiment through a quite extraordinary metaphor. “Ten grains of arsenic in a thousand loaves would be unnoticeable and perfectly harmless”, he told Parliament, “but the same amount put into one loaf would kill the whole family that partook of it”.

By the 1950s, the Jewish community had come to be seen as part of the British cultural landscape. The same arguments used against Jews half a century earlier were now deployed against a new wave of immigrants from South Asia and the Caribbean. A Colonial Office report of 1955 echoed Arthur Balfour, fearing that “a large coloured community as a noticeable feature of our social life would weaken […] the concept of England or Britain to which people of British stock throughout the Commonwealth are attached”. There were worries, too, about the uncontrolled nature of immigration. “The question of numbers and of the increase in numbers”, Enoch Powell insisted, lie at “the very heart of the problem”. “Whole areas, towns and parts of England”, he claimed, were being “occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population”. A decade later Margaret Thatcher gave a notorious TV interview in which she claimed that there were in Britain “an awful lot” of black and Asian immigrants and that “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. The echoes are unmistakable both of the debate about Jews before and of the contemporary immigration debate.

Just as Jews became an accepted part of the cultural landscape, so did postwar immigrants from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, though the acceptance was more grudging, and often not extended to Muslims. Today, the same arguments that were once used against Jews, and then against South Asian and Caribbean immigrants, are now raised against Muslims and East Europeans.

The idea that immigration is disruptive of culture, identity and social cohesion is, in other words, as old as immigration itself. Whether it is Irish or Jews coming to Britain, Italians or North Africans to France, Catholics or Chinese to America, every wave of immigration is met fear and hostility and a sense of being overwhelmed.