Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky demolish one of the central tenets of our political culture, the idea of the "liberal media." Instead, utilizing a systematic model based on massive empirical research, they reveal the manner in which the news media are so subordinated to corporate and conservative interests that their function can only be described as that of "elite propaganda." "If you want...
Go to the average mainstream libertarian venue on any given day, and you’re likely to see elaborate apologetics for corporate globalization, Wal-Mart, offshoring, Nike’s sweatshops, rising CO2 levels, income inequality and wealth concentration, CEO salaries, Big Pharma’s profits, and Microsoft’s market share, all based on the principles of “the free...
Q. In a freed market, who will stop markets from running riot and doing crazy things? And who will stop the rich and powerful from running roughshod over everyone else? A. We will. Sheldon Richman put up a nice piece last week for The Goal Is Freedom called Regulation Red Herring: Why There’s No Such Thing as an Unregulated Market . (Incidentally, while you’re...
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky demolish one of the central tenets of our political culture, the idea of the "liberal media." Instead, utilizing a systematic model based on massive empirical research, they reveal the manner in which the news media are so subordinated to corporate and conservative interests that their function can only be described as that of "elite propaganda." " If you want...
Disambiguation: According to the capitalist lexicon, the “Free Market” is the economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. Any sensible person can recognize immediately that neither human beings nor resources are free in such a system; hence, a “Really Really Free Market” is a market that operates...
The Freeman editor Sheldon Richman, speaking at George Mason University, raised the question of just what mainstream libertarians mean when they call a country “capitalist.” What qualifies a country as “capitalist”? A lot of countries with relatively low indices of economic freedom (including those ranked as “mostly unfree”) are conventionally regarded as...
The food industry is no longer a free market. In fact, I'd go as far as saying it's becoming the most glaring example of corporate-government fascism in America. Actual monopolies fully control the basic building blocks of the food that makes up the majority of the American diet -- and no one seems to care. Simply put, those who control the corn, wheat, and soybeans control all food, since...
The free markets are completely discredited. There is significant political space to build a broad consensus for a 21st-Century New Deal that would stop spending our tax dollars on war and Wall Street, and instead help struggling homeowners and build affordable housing; fund job-creating projects for clean energy and rebuilding our infrastructure; and fund a universal health-care system that...
Defenders of freed markets have good reason to identify their position as a species of “anti-capitalism.”[ 1 ] To explain why, I distinguish three potential meanings of “capitalism” before suggesting that people committed to freed markets should oppose capitalism in my second and third senses. Then, I offer some reasons for using “capitalism” as a label...
Free enterprise is often associated with the past. This perception puts the market’s champions, seen as hopeless reactionaries, on the defensive. A typical narrative follows: America had an insufficiently active government under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution expanded government to meet society’s needs. In this climate, where property rights continued to trump...
Neoclassical economics has severe flaws. But since the field is captive to the monopolistic money and banking system, it is very difficult for economists who are aware of this to speak up. If they were to speak about the flaws, their careers would be severely limited. Only the most narrow economists who reinforce the status quo of the debt-based monetary system get rewarded. But they are...
For more than three decades, transnational corporations have been busy buying up what used to be known as the commons -- everything from our forests and our oceans to our broadcast airwaves and our most important intellectual and cultural works. In This Land is Our Land, acclaimed author David Bollier, a leading figure in the global movement to reclaim the commons, bucks the rising tide of...
In a privatized American Internet, is big business “Big Brother” or does the free market protect and serve the needs of the average citizen with its invisible hand? With the simple act of swapping files, barbershop quartet baritone Robb Topolski finds himself at ground zero of a landmark case whose outcome will affect the rights of every American citizen. Following one...
Talk by Naomi Klein author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" given September 27, 2007 at Town Hall Seattle. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman’s free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement’s peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and...
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can't take "no" for an answer. They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways - basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to...
Left-libertarianism in the relevant sense is a position that is simultaneously leftist and libertarian . It features leftist commitments to: engaging in class analysis and class struggle; opposing corporate privilege; undermining structural poverty embracing shared responsibility for challenging economic vulnerability; affirming wealth redistribution; ...
Carson indicts historically existing capitalism as a betrayal, rather than a manifestation, of free-market libertarian principles. He points out that libertarians have typically focused on the role of state coercion in the present-day capitalist market, neglecting what he calls the “subsidy of history” — the role of past state coercion and robbery, including selective state...
One of the quickest and simplest ways to gloss what Left-Libertarian, or the Libertarian Left part of ALL , means, is just to say that we are for left-wing social ends through libertarian means . This inevitably involves a certain amount of oversimplification — does through libertarian means just mean by getting rid of government controls and letting social outcomes emerge...
This film was created by New York City public school teachers and parents in response to Davis Guggenheim’s highly misleading film. Waiting for "Superman would have audiences believe that free-market competition, standardized tests, destroying teacher unions, and the proliferation of charter schools are just what this country needs to create great public schools. The...
HEIST: Who Stole the American Dream? is stunning audiences across the globe, as it exposes the real truth behind the worldwide economic collapse, tracing its origins to a 1971 secret memo entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System. Written over 40 years ago by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, at the behest of the US Chamber of Commerce, the 6-page memo, a free-market...
A John Pilger documentary. Apartheid based on race is outlawed now, but the system always went far deeper than that. The cruelty and injustice were underwritten by an economic apartheid, which regarded people as no more than cheap expendable labor. It was backed by great business corporations in South Africa, Britain, the rest of Europe, and the United States. And it was this apartheid based...
As seen on Fox Seuss, the conservative Lorax schools a naive boy on the virtues of free-market capitalism. Note from the Ed: The only thing we didn't like about this is the brief but seemingly irrelevant inclusion of "End the Fed" just because it's a book by Ron Paul. The goal of abolishing the Federal Reserve is a fairly obvious solution that both progressives and libertarians are in...
Left-libertarians differ from the (current) libertarian mainstream both in terms of what outcomes they regard as desirable , and in terms of what outcomes they think a freed market is
Revisiting American History Part 1 documents the conversion of the US into a monolithic financial empire as the Federal Reserve Act created a monopolized cartel of private interests, ie "Wall Street," which controls all money in the system. Revisiting Economics 101- Debt Discusses the power of debt-based money, embodied in the bond market, and its...
Chances are if you are reading this, you have spent a fair amount of time discussing the [Occupy Wall Street movement]. Anyone with a basic familiarity with the protests is aware that the demonstrators represent a broad spectrum of ideologies, beliefs and goals. Ordinarily, there is nothing inherently negative about his fact. Since the 1970′s, America’s top capitalists have...
As of January 26, it’s illegal to unlock your cell phone and switch to a different service plan without the permission of your current provider . This comes as the result not of a new law, but of the opinion of the Librarian of Congress (who apparently has authority to interpret the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). This is just one more example of an old problem. In all areas of...
In recent years, populist explanations for world events have become common and often taken the form of anti-establishment conspiracy theories. The contradiction between how people believe the world should be, according to the mainstream propaganda pertaining to liberty and democracy, and how it is in this time of crisis leads people to search for easily digestible answers. It’s easy...
Being a libertarian means opposing the use of force to restrain peaceful, voluntary exchange. That doesn’t mean it should be understood as involving support for capitalism. Whether this claim makes any sense at all depends, of course, on what you mean by “capitalism.” For some people, perhaps, the term just refers to free exchange. And if that’s all you intend when...
INTRODUCTION. Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation, including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It...
A couple years back when I was working toward a philosophy major in college, I wrote a rebuttal on the section of The Anarchist FAQ that covers anarcho-capitalism . I removed the rebuttal from the web because I didn't have the time or inclination to continue to maintain it or expand upon it. Three years later, I've come to find myself disagreeing with my old rebuttals and agreeing...
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice. Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its...
I'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of. The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the...
Critics of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement complain that the protesters don’t have a policy agenda and, therefore, don’t stand for anything. They're wrong. The key isn’t what protesters are for but rather what they’re against -- the gaping inequality that has poisoned our economy, our politics and our nation. In America today, 400 people have more wealth than...
IF YOU'RE EXPERIENCING PROBLEMS WITH THE VIDEO ABOVE, YOU CAN WATCH THE FILM AT THE OFFICIAL PBS FRONTLINE WEBSITE. If you think Mitt Romney’s recent threats against PBS were actually about budgets or Big Bird, think again. The reason the right hates PBS is that sometimes it commits the unpardonable sin of journalism. “Climate of Doubt,” a...
In 1888, at the height of the Gilded Age, a rather prominent American said some startling things. First he observes: Our cities are the abiding places of wealth and luxury; our manufactories yield fortunes never dreamed of by the fathers of the Republic; our business men are madly striving in the race for riches, and immense aggregations of capital outrun the imagination in the...
Anarchy and Distribution On the LeftLibertarian2 Yahoo! group, we’ve been experiencing some disagreements about the likely consequences of an anarchist society. There are so many aspects of our current culture, economy, infrastructure, etc. that have been distorted by privilege. Civil society has become so confused with the institution of the State that it’s hard to extricate...
Information has been leaked about the Trans Pacific Partnership, which is being negotiated in secret by US Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Six hundred corporate “advisors” are in on the know, but not Congress or the media. Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate trade subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the TPP, has not been permitted to see the text or to know the content. The TPP...
You have read Valve’s survival manual for new employees . You have read Michael Abrash’s wonderful account of working at Valve. Now read my political economy analysis of Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do. Can useful lessons be drawn about not only Valve’s...
Power is not to be conquered, it is to be destroyed. It is tyrannical by nature, whether exercised by a king, a dictator or an elected president. The only difference with the parliamentarian ‘democracy’ is that the modern slave has the illusion of choosing the master he will obey. The vote has made him an accomplice to the tyranny that oppresses him. He is not a slave because...
A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work (Part 1) Last year in Lansing, Michigan, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union leadership fought a pitched battle with the Lansing City Council to push capitalist real estate developers to use union labor. When discussing the fight, Joe Davis, the union representative, proclaimed, “It’s important to...
Editor's Note: Fossil fuel companies have spent millions of dollars to get you to believe that a tax on *them* would really be a tax on *you.* Their money has bought mouthpieces to propagate their myths in both mainstream and alternative, anti-establishment outlets. But don't be fooled. We're already paying a tax on carbon , while they continue to profit in the billions. ...
Carbon Markets: Trading with our Future offers a rare and damning glimpse into the collapsing markets from the vantage of some of the leading architects and designers of climate finance. In the film Tim Yeo, Chair of the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Select Committee acknowledges that the carbon markets have never capped carbon emissions: “In the first four years of the EU...
IF YOU'RE EXPERIENCING PROBLEMS WITH THE VIDEO ABOVE, WATCH THE FILM FOR FREE AT THE OFFICIAL PBS WEBSITE In the midst of the 1990s bull market, one lone regulator warned about the derivatives dangers that would cause an economic meltdown nearly a decade later in the housing market. Frontline investigates the story of Brooksley Born, who saw the systemic risk in the virtually...
Started in late 2008, The Zeitgeist Movement exists as the communication and "Activist Arm" of an organization called The Venus Project. The Venus Project was started many decades ago by Social/Industrial Designer Jacque Fresco and his life's work has been to address and overcome the lack of sustainability existing currently across the world and to work to incorporate new methods and values...
A leader in the revolutionary left in the US should feel like a fox in a chicken coop. Increasingly large capitalists (Walmart, Enron, Wall-Street) are being exposed as so destructive to our society. The Bush administration created global chaos and suffering. Attacks on democratic rights are expanding. Thoughtful people in all strata of our society realize that there are dangerous trends that...
CONSUMING KIDS throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth...
Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth...
The problem: We wake up every day to go to work , taking orders from a manager. We sit at work counting down the minutes until we go home, counting down the days until the weekend, counting down the weeks until our next holiday, wishing our lives away. Or worse, we can't find a job, so we have to scrape by on benefits . We worry about paying the bills and making rent and we always...
Although it's pretty safe to say that no canonical definition of left libertarianism exists, there is a growing consensus around a certain body of concepts, priorities, and attitudes towards the State. Here is a collection of different perspectives from individuals who identify as left libertarian: Jake Freeman Smith Left-libertarianism is a growing tendency amongst...
Every once in a while you may hear politicians, union leaders and ordinary citizens demand fair wages or fair pay for work. While this is surely a noble goal, the fact that people still struggle for fair wages clearly shows that they have not yet been realized. Women are still paid less than men, black and Latino workers are statistically paid less than white workers, and corporate executives...