Review of “Masters of Deceit” by J. Edgar Hoover

by Foseti
http://foseti.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/review-of-masters-of-deceit-by-j-edgar-hoover/

Communism in the US has a long history. Let’s set aside the earliest bits and focus on the two most recent periods. These periods are the US-Russian Alliance period and the modern progressive period.

The US-Russian Alliance period was characterized by – unsurprisingly – an alliance between American Communists and Russian ones. This story is relatively well documented, if still not exactly well known.

Cameron Off With The Fairies Again

by Dick Puddlecote
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DickPuddlecote/~3/Z6LoctlDORM/cameron-off-with-fairies-again.html

Cameron Off With The Fairies Again I want to tell you a story.

I once knew a guy who was a very well-paid buyer for a major supermarket. He wasn’t around much, mostly taking flights to places like Brazil and the Philippines, and occasionally very hard-to-reach places like Senegal. Hard-to-reach because he was entitled to fly business class and some of the backwaters he went to involved tortuous journeys in economy. Oh, the inhumanity!

Poverty and Libertarians, Old and New

by M. George van der Meer
http://c4ss.org/content/15343

Poverty and Libertarians, Old and New

Early last week, one of many creepy U.S. bureaucracies reminiscent of the Ministry of Truth released new statistics on poverty, among various other metrics that it sees fit to keep track of. If we’re to accept the government’s data as true (and this is hardly an argument for that conclusion), nearly a third of all American counties saw a “significant increase in poverty” during the four years leading up to 2012.

On Dissolving the State, and What to Replace It With

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/content/15333
On Dissolving the State, and What to Replace It With

The following article was written by Kevin Carson and published on the Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, March 8th, 2008.

You may have noticed the neat little quote I put at the head of this blog:

To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. –P. J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the XIX Century.

That’s a theme I’ve been writing on since I started blogging, starting with this post: “Building the Structure of the New Society Within the Shell of the Old.”

On crutches and crowbars: toward a labor radical case against the minimum wage

by Rad Geek
http://c4ss.org/content/15389

On crutches and crowbars: toward a labor radical case against the minimum wage

The following article was written by Charles Johnson and published on his Rad Geek People’s Daily, March 6th, 2008.

First they taught us to depend
On their Nation-States to mend
Our tired minds, our broken bones, our failing limbs;
And now they’ve sold off all the splints,
and contracted out the tourniquets,
And if we jump through hoops, then we might just survive.

—Propagandhi, The State Lottery

There has been some interesting discussion among Jim Henley (2008-02-21), Tom Knapp (2008-02-29), and Kevin Carson over left-libertarian political programmes, strategic priorities, gradualism, and the welfare state. The debate began with an argument over Knapp’s World’s Smallest Political Platform for the Libertarian Party, and Henley’s worries that the platform, as expressed, doesn’t allow much room for gradualist approaches to repeal, or nuance in strategic priorities. Now, I don’t have much of a dog in that fight, because I’m not a gradualist, but I’m not in the least bit interested about limited-statist party-building or political platforms, either. At the level of moral principle, I have a very simple approach to taxation, government welfare programs, regulation, etc. If I had a platform, it would be three words — Smash the State — and the programme I favor for implementing that is for each and every government program to be be abolished immediately, completely, and forever, whenever, wherever, in whatever order, and to whatever extent that we can, by hook, by crook, slingshot, canoe, wherever the political opportunity to do so presents itself. Political coercion is an evil against which it may sometimes be prudent to retreat, but with which there can be no negotiated compromise. (All such compromises, so-called, are really just conditional surrender.)

Sea Changes

by Andy Nowicki
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/zeitgeist/sea-changes/

Note: Derek Turner and I have been friends for many years. I haven’t yet had time to read and review his novel, but will do do over Christmas. In the meantime, here is a review and interview by somebody else. SIG