That’s why the FBI has labeled sovereign citizens a “domestic terrorist movement,” and it’s why the White House established a new “Interagency Working Group to Counter Online Radicalization to Violence” in February of this year. The group organizes efforts to crack down on potentially violent individuals and movements, like sovereign citizens, ”who use the Internet to recruit others to plan or carry out acts of violence.”
That’s also why local police departments have been taking additional measures to instruct officers on how to deal with sovereign citizens, including hiring specialized trainers like Detectives Rob Finch and Kory Flowers. Finch and Flowers have been making the rounds across the country, training approximately 15,000 police officers and 5,000 public officials in how to recognize and deal with a sovereign citizen who might, when pushed, resort to violence. ”To them, a police officer is just a man in a Halloween costume,” Finch recently told the Los Angeles Times.AlterNet
What is Paper Terrorism? Anti-Gov't Nuts File Tens of Thousands of False Docs as "Sovereign Citizens"
Jillian Rayfield | Salon
Libertarianism taken to the extreme.
That's probably part of why a some of these far rightists were profiled for special scrutiny by the IRS. Who knows how many of these alleged political organizations are juts tax evasion schemes.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid these folks are far more than tax evasion scheme.
ReplyDeleteThe entire right libertarian "movement" are part of what has been called the "underground reich" i.e. American crypto-fascism from the 1930s morphed into 1950s anticommunism and then into "Libertarianism" in the 1970s, Christian Identity/Patriot Movement in the 90s, , Tea Party/ Ron Paul etc....
These are Southern Secessionist and American Tories still working the ideologies of the defunct British Empire i.e. "Free Trade," "Classist Malthusianism, and Eugenics.
They are have always hated this country despite the "superpatriot" guise.
The reason they keep turning is because there is an organized "Underground Reich" formed by European "Former Nazis" allied with American/British Think Tank types funding these though folks like Roger Pearson (Pioneer Fund).
Look under the lid of all this anti-government stuff and you will always find an British Asshole in love with Eugenics for the glory of Empire, Monarchy, and the English Race, or some other European feudalist Eurogarch trash.
Classist Market Fascism aka Libertarianism is not to be debated. It is to be smashed.
"The entire right libertarian "movement" are part of what has been called the "underground reich" i.e. American crypto-fascism from the 1930s morphed into 1950s anticommunism and then into "Libertarianism" in the 1970s, Christian Identity/Patriot Movement in the 90s, , Tea Party/ Ron Paul etc....
ReplyDelete.......Classist Market Fascism aka Libertarianism is not to be debated. It is to be smashed."
septeus7 - Fascinating commentary. Full disclosure: My leanings in political economy are an eclectic blend of Marxist, Supply Side, Libertarian and MMT influence.
If you want some context, have a look at the GQ article in the following link......
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race/2012/07/whos-afraid-of-these-ron-paul-delegates.html
Just out of curiosity, in your mind does this make me a fascist, a terrorist, and someone that needs to be smashed? I am keenly interested in this subject, because under the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law by President Obama, US citizens who are suspected of being associated with terrorism can be arrested by the US military on US soil and detained in facilities like Guantanamo without access to a lawyer for an indefinite amount, without due process and writ of habeas corpus.
No Rombach, you aren't a fascist.
ReplyDeleteYou're someone like me who has a history of being influenced by the "popular" libertarian culture who may find plenty of individual issues that may we have in common with popular libertarianism such as patents, lower taxation, concerns about our growing police state, etc...
The problem is that the philosophic core of libertarianism i.e. that mankind is subject to apriori "objective property" relations given to us by all knowing markets is the is the root all our problems i.e. the rejection of science or natural philosophy.
By science, I mean that idea that mankind can learn and created knowledge in principle about what we must do in order to increase our ability to live in the world increasing our comfort, standards of relations with our fellow man, and our general ability to act a more moral purpose.
We don't need to turn off our minds and have blind faith that the monetary-market system is "bestest system that is, was, and and will ever be cause and we humans are merely limited to forever be soldiers in a "free market" version of Tennyson's "Light Brigade" where the way to live is
" Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die."
That ideology of "shut up slave" and get with the program and don't question way things are" is what the first western scientist of the modern era Cusanus called "Docta Ignorantia" (Learned Ignorance) and it alone is what has kept humanity enslaved to the various forms of oligarchism and it's attendant tyrannies and oppressions.
All forms of liberalism at their root reject the idea that we can scientifically know and improve ourselves which ultimately must destroy the basis of our common humanity and thus the "liberal" becomes the tyrant when they seek a liberation to the point where we become so "free" as to be reduced to "animal spirits" in the "free market."
Fascist must be smashed because it is beastial, insane, and inhuman. Market Fascism/ Libertarianism must be smashed because it is beastial, insane, and inhuman.
For example of how Libertarianism is beastial, insane and inhuman is in claiming that we need to wait for a "market" to decide that someone can contribute to society and be acknowledged enough to have access to a basic standard of living.
We can do it now and we can free people from the evils of unemployment and poverty and any claim to the contrary is anti-human irrational stupidity no matter how much sophist bs about market rigidity, crowding out, or other learned ignorance about how "nobody knows how build a pencil" crap these apologists for evil use to get us to simply "shut up" and do your capitalist masters tell you to do.
Mont Pelerin Society
ReplyDeleteNeoliberalism
Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009)
From the reviews at Amazon:
The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective
By M. A. Krul
"The Road from Mont Pèlerin" is the first work since the in-house history of the society by Hartwell to trace the origins, meaning, and development of the Mont Pèlerin Society and its role in the making of the neoliberal thought collective, as the editors call it. This collection is therefore first and foremost a work of modern history of ideas. While many people have written critical histories of the meaning and origins of neoliberalism, this work is perhaps the most academic and most strongly researched of them all, and goes beyond the more popular level of discussion of the effects of neoliberal policy in practice and the ways of political power, instead focusing more on the way in which 'neoliberalism' has become a strong and identifiable political philosophy. As the authors of this collection emphasize, it is first and foremost that: not an economic theory, nor simply an old laissez-faire doctrine in a new jacket, but an entire political philosophy and world outlook that is all the more powerful for the obscurity of its real content. Whereas other authors have at times simply sufficed to identify neoliberalism with particular politicians (Thatcher, Reagan, Blair) or with 'free market' policies, as co-editor Mirowski explains in his excellent postface, the philosophy of neoliberalism as it originated as an integral whole at Mont Pèlerin is quite distinct in several ways.
It is characterized by Mirowski in a number of important differentia specifica, useful to consider: Neoliberalism, contrary to the classical liberalism, believes that its vision of society is not the product of a natural development as long as the government is kept out of the way, but that it must be consciously constructed as a free society; this free society is based on the notion that the free market is the best and only competent processor of knowledge, which is partial and embodied in individuals; therefore, despite propaganda for political purposes, the actual neoliberal goal for the state is not to disempower it, but to empower it to create a free market state rather than its current functions; neoliberalism therefore operates within and through state power; the ultimate goal of the free market is to be a mechanism to advance freedom; the freedom of market actors must therefore be as absolute as possible, with this freedom defined solely as a negative freedom to be free of interference in acting within this market, making freedom the freedom to use one's personal, partial knowledge; and therefore, finally, in the last instance the free market as an exchange of individual knowledge, not democracy or well-being, is the ultimate moral goal.
[continued]
[continuation]
ReplyDeleteThese points are in clear contradistinction to classical liberalism from Smith to Mill onwards, with its rather traditionalist view of the paternal state, its concern about inequality, its distrust of joint-stock companies and monopoly power, and its belief in social contract order and the 'natural' results of limited government. But, as Mirowski, Plehwe and the other contributors make clear, this neoliberal programme is inherently full of contradictions in its intellectual thought. Its greatest thinker, Hayek, made his entire career on promoting the notion that all knowledge of society is partial, that the course of society cannot be foreseen and the effects of individual action are always subject to unintended consequences, that only through the market system information can be processed efficiently, and that any attempt to change society according to a preconceived plan must therefore fail. But of course for neoliberalism's ideas to be true, it requires Hayek c.s. to be able to do just all these things: plan a free society, oversee the causes and consequences of individual action in current and the desired society, intellectually comprehend the whole, and then set about politically implementing their ideas. In this way, neoliberalism as an intellectual program is effectively refuted by the success of neoliberalism as a practical program, which is why its talk of freedom is always such hypocrisy and its effects have always been the opposite of its claims, even to the point where the neoliberal hegemony of the last 30 years has not anywhere in the developed world actually reduced the size of the state.
The contributions to this volume trace not only the origins of Mont Pèlerin as such, but also delve deeper into specific issues often not explored fully in more introductory works. Yves Steiner analyzes the neoliberal ideas about the trade unions, Ralf Ptak very usefully outlines how neoliberalism and German 'ordoliberalism' reach similar political conclusions through a somewhat different route, Dieter Plehwe briefly goes into neoliberal talk of Third World development (a subject really worth a book on its own), and Timothy Mitchell traces the way in which Hernando de Soto's neoliberal property rights project in Peru was presented as a victory for neoliberal thought, and its real background. Some of these contributions are decidedly too long and detailed, however, and some boredom is inevitable. There is also very little on the influence of neoliberal ideas today, particular on current day politics, and the role of the MPS, which is somewhat surprising. Nonetheless, for understanding the intellectual meaning and background of neoliberalism, rather than its immediate political mode of appearance, one could do no better than this volume.
See also Philip Mirowski:
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013)
Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (2002)
More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics (1991)
Against Mechanism (1988)
Philip Mirowski's Postface: Defining Neoliberalism is available to read through the Amazon preview at "click to look inside." Go to the Table of Contents and click on Postface.
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