no third solution

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Category Archives: World Politics

Wikileaks: The Only Talking Point You Need

November 29th, 2010

When discussing Wikileaks, there is only one talking point which you absolutely must commit to memory (if you need more than another, it might help to discuss the big picture). This is really the only argument you need. It also works perfectly well as a rebuttal to whatever arguments someone might come up with in order to try and criminalize Wikileaks:

Revealing crimes committed by the State or its agents (under the euphemism of “State secrets”) does not hurt American interests, endanger American lives, nor is it treasonous or otherwise criminal. What hurts American interests, continually endangers Americans both at home and abroad, and is criminal to the highest degree, is committing those crimes in the first place.

wikileaksEver hear that old adage, “don’t shoot the messenger”?  Yeah. Same thing. There are only two reasons why anyone would react with hostility when an organization like Wikileaks makes these secrets public:  Either they are criminals afraid of being brought to justice, or they are in ignorant denial.

For your entire life you’ve been duped in to believing and supporting those crimes. You’ve been told that they weren’t crimes, and with the truth hidden from view it was easy to believe. You’ve been taking that blue pill all your life but when the truth comes out, you snap because you have so much invested in believing in and perpetuating the lie.

Just swallow another pill and when you wake up you can go on believing whatever you want to believe.

It is important to mind the nature of these secrets: They are kept by and between criminals, with criminal intent, to hide the fact that crimes have been committed. Revealing the truth behind these crimes, of course, will further endanger some of their co-conspirators and some unknowing accomplices.  Anyone who is knowingly involved in keeping evidence of those crimes a secret is an enemy to liberty.

If you are concerned about the safety and well-being of friends and family who may be unknowing accomplices, I can understand and sympathize.  A certain number of unknowing accomplices will likely be placed in more danger than they already find themselves, but the genesis of this danger all goes back to the crimes to which they are accomplices.

They are already in danger because of their involvement.

They alone are responsible for the consequences of their actions.   They alone, are ultimately responsible for the moral judgment that leads them down whichever path they’ve chosen in life. And they alone are responsible for their ignorance.

Let them know it. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.

It serves no justice to join that conspiracy, to suppress the truth and keep those crimes secret.  Instead, you need to do whatever is justly within your power to get them to take the red pill, instead.

Destroying Wikileaks will not reduce the danger to which Americans and American interests are exposed.  Silencing the whistleblowers does not make the crimes disappear from anywhere except public knowledge, but like the tree falling in the forest when nobody is there to hear it, these crimes still happened.  Burying your head in the sand will not make America safer, it will not make the world safer, it will not end tyranny or spawn liberty. Anywhere.  You can take that to the bank.

In order to end the danger, it is necessary to end the criminal acts which motivate others to threaten “us”:

Stop exploiting the third world’s resources for corporate greed. Stop exploiting the people who were born in to those countries for cheap labor.  Stop installing puppet governments in the banana republic remnants of European colonialism and its aftermath, American Imperial Hegemony and transnational-capitalism. Stop using the most powerfully destructive military in the world to secure and defend corporate interests abroad while despots you put in power (“to keep the world safe for democracy” or some other such nonsense) commit crimes against humanity. Stop blitzkrieging the poorest countries in the world after you fail to reign in the despots that you previously installed.

It’s that simple: to get people to stop hating you, just stop hurting them.

h/t Brad Spangler for the inspiration.

What About Off-shoring?

November 17th, 2010

So just a few days after I said “don’t expect regular updates any time soon,” I hammer out a handful of posts… Well, the smart money still says I’m not likely to continue at this pace, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Off-shoring is not a black and white issue.

It’s neither categorically wrong, nor categorically acceptable. In its purest form, off-shoring is simply the international division of labor, and although I prefer to think of things not in terms of nations and borders, the concept of divided labor really is morally neutral: no better or worse than the division of labor between you and your barber, or your butcher, or your ISP or the guy who changes your oil. Smith noted that you could open a vinyard in Scotland, but the grapes would be awful and the wine terrible unless you spent an enormous sum on greenhouses. But why do that when you can grow perfectly good grapes in California, the Loire Valley in France, Traverse City MI, etc.

What about profits going overseas and vice-versa?

On both sides of the aisle people complain about “profits going overseas”.  For instance, they don’t want you to buy Toyota cars because the “profits go to Japan”.  Hypocritically, many people (let’s call them Republicans) also consider “free markets” the environment in which American giants of industry can continually exploit cheap labor in developing economies while slashing labor in the US. You can’t have your cake, and eat it, too.

There’s nothing necessarily bad about someone (foreign or otherwise) who’s willing to sink millions/billions in to capital investments, creating jobs, infrastructure, and productive capacity. So even if you buy in to the argument that the “profits are going overseas”, the infrastructure, the knowledge base, and the employment is happening here and you need to reckon that. Besides, they created the jobs and opportunities, and so they are entitled to profit (there are serious objections to why we depend upon the grace of a privileged few when it seems we ought be able to provide for our own well-being; these are presently outside of scope). That’s how it works.

But the last I checked, Toyota was publicly traded. If you want a slice of Toyota pie, just call your broker and place an order.

But that’s not how off-shoring really works. Is it?

So far we’ve been talking about off-shoring in its purest form. Actually existing offshoring is quite often another story altogether and this is where we need to start examining those objections to which I alluded, above.  A critical examination would fill many volumes.

The reader’s digest version is: transnational companies are able to offshore mostly because of US imperialism and the remnant of European colonialism which basically pillaged the resource-rich countries now known as “the third world”.

When you start peeling back the layers of this rotten onion, what you’ll see (if you can fight back the tears) is a system in which you and I are expendable.  On the backs of our labor, Uncle Sam bails out the banks that caused so much havoc.  We pay for their mistakes, but don’t profit from their success, instead we chase higher and higher prices caused by inflation.  It is a system in which you & I pay taxes to fund a military force which keeps the volatile “third world” safe — safe for the very same profiteering corporations (which our taxes also subsidize) who continue to off-shore the jobs that used to be ours.

We’re paying for (and many of us don’t even know it) an empire which is jeopardizing our well-being, our livelihoods, and our security.

Pentagon vs. WikiLeaks: The Big Picture

August 6th, 2010

wikileaksThe other day, an obnoxious Pentagon spokesperson issued formal threats (essentially: destroy everything, or else!) against WikiLeaks, the organization which received thousands of classified documents from Bradley Manning and has since made many of those available for public consumption.

WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, responded in an interview on Democracy Now. Amy Goodman, conducting the interview, quoted Admiral Mike Mullen from a news conference earlier in the week

ADM. MIKE MULLEN: Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family. Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we’ve been given, but don’t put those who willingly go into harm’s way even further in harm’s way just to satisfy your need to make a point.

Hear? We’re allowed to “take issue with the policy” and “challenge” the tactical decisions made by the commanders, as long as we leave “the mission” out of the equation, because, you see, they’re just following orders (and so should you). But following orders isn’t an excuse.

“Following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either.” — Andrew Williams (addressing Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, legal advisor to Guantanamo Bay prison)

About those who “willingly” go in to harm’s way? They would rather be driving their kids to soccer practice, finishing college, working their 9-to-5, etc.  How many would’ve “willingly” gone to fight for Empire if the Pentagon had put a C-130 at every airport in the country with suitable runway and said, “Anyone who wants to go to Afghanistan and fight, the door is open!”? My guess: they wouldn’t fill a high school gymnasium.

Assange points out that when, e.g., Robert Gates or Mike Mullen implies that WikiLeaks and its collaborators might have blood on their hands, that these statements “all together, are designed to distract from the big picture,” which is of course the same big picture which Mullen craftily sidesteps in the blockquote above. The big picture is “the mission” itself, the objective consequences of which include the deaths of 20,000 civilian, non-combatant Afghans.

Mr. Mullen can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his forces are doing, but the truth is, they already have on their hands the blood of 4,000 American soldiers, some 20,000 innocent Afghans, and (conservatively) over 100,000 innocent Iraqis. Including “accidents” wherein 150+ children were bombed to death.

Collateral murder, indeed.

Assange and WikiLeaks are exposing the crimes and the criminals like Mullen, Gates, et. Al, who are responsible. If you want to pretend that all that shit never happened, then I guess you can get on your high horse and start spouting off about the “potential” blood Assange might someday be responsible for.  But you’re definitely light-years ahead of him in terms of destroying human lives.

Mr. Mullen & Mr. Gates, You pay lip-service to keeping the troops out of harm’s way, you may fret over tactics, the specific actions you take towards the accomplishment of “the mission you’ve been given”, but tactics do not exist in a fucking vacuum. They exist only in the context of “the mission.”  Every second of your pitiful existence which passes without questioning the morality of the orders you’ve been given, the orders you’ve accepted to undertake, is another second in which you are responsible for the harm those people face, and the harm they may commit.  And if “the mission” is rotten (to the goddamned core), then nothing else matters.

Releasing “secret” military files does not endanger the troops. Putting them in unconstitutional wars and keeping them there for a decade does.

no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics