Brad DeLong — Abigail Adams (1776): "I long to hear that you have declared an independency...

Abigail Adams quote.

From Wikipedia:

Abigail Adams (née Smith; November 22, [O.S. November 11] 1744 – October 28, 1818) was the closest advisor and wife of John Adams, as well as the mother of John Quincy Adams. She is sometimes considered to have been a Founder of the United States,[1] and is now designated as the first Second Lady and second First Lady of the United States, although these titles were not used at the time.

Adams's life is one of the most documented of the First Ladies: she is remembered for the many letters she wrote to her husband while he stayed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the Continental Congresses. John frequently sought the advice of Abigail on many matters, and their letters are filled with intellectual discussions on government and politics....

Grasping Reality
Abigail Adams (1776): "I long to hear that you have declared an independency...Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

Peter Radford — Natural Liberty or Democracy?

There seems to be a lot of angst as to why standard macroeconomics ignores the government in its analysis. Or, rather, that when the government slips into the picture it is almost invariably in the form of an evil presence mucking up the sweet operation of market magic and thus stalling us all on our way to the happy place economists love to call equilibrium. 

This is quite simple to answer: economists of the standard ilk are opposed to democracy.
Why? 

Because, since its very inception, modern economics in most its forms has been the study of the private economy...

Once this hostility to the state found its way into the bedrock of economics it stayed there. Moreover this anti-government perspective, that colored all subsequent economic theorizing, attracted to it analysts who were like minded. We thus find a positive feedback between the anti-state foundations of economics and those who then carry the theory forward.

In contemporary terms this has profound consequences. One of which, as I mentioned at the beginning, is that standard economists are openly and brazenly opposed to democracy.

Why?

Because, apparently unbeknownst to economists, the social and political milieu within which the economy sits, has undergone radical change since the 1700’s. We nowadays have far fewer autocratic monarchs prone to meddling in popular affairs, and significantly more democracies where the people who are the erstwhile agents of the economy are also the agents of self-government. Regular people, unlike economists, admit of more than one social domain. They operate in many all at once. The notion that we the people actually govern ourselves has been born and adopted around the world. But it hasn’t seeped into economic theory, where the government is resolutely presented as a hostile and incompetent force just as it was two hundred or more years ago.

What this implies is that economics is stuck in the 18th and 19th centuries while the rest of the knowledge world has moved on for the most part. This begs the question why? Could it be that business is naturally adverse to government, which it views as a competitor, on one hand, and a potential tool in the hands of a rabble under popular sovereignty?

The Radford Free Press

Natural Liberty or Democracy?
Peter Radford

David Graeber — Two notions of liberty revisited - or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery

The modern liberal concept of liberty has roots in Roman law and the Roman understanding of the master and the slave. We need to unpick that heritage to imagine a better basis for our political aspirations.

Our idea of human freedom, with its origins in Roman law, is permeated through and through with the institution of slavery. But its links to slavery twisted the meaning of "freedom" from an empowering notion of what it is to live with dignity in a society of equals to one of mastery and control. Understanding the history of the concept should help us to regain the first and fight the second of those notions....

To understand the history and, ultimately, incoherence of the notions of liberty grounded in Roman notions of dominion is to potentially free ourselves to re-imagine liberty. For example, to recognise the forgotten "obligations owed everyone in the entire world" inherent in our freedoms; but also to resurrect the older notion of liberty as the state achieved by citizens acting together in determination of a common good.

Open Economy

Two notions of liberty revisited - or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery
David Graeber
(h/t Charles Hayden)

Gaius Publius: IRS is Using NSA Data Too. Who in Town Isn’t?

Summary of the sorry state that has come to pass in the US by trading faux security for liberty and constitutional rights.

Naked Capitalism

Gaius Publius: IRS is Using NSA Data Too. Who in Town Isn’t?

Washington's Blog — The Fact that Mass Surveillance Doesn’t Keep Us Safe Goes Mainstream

Top Terrorism Experts Say that Mass Spying Doesn’t Work to Prevent Terrorism

Washington's Blog
The Fact that Mass Surveillance Doesn’t Keep Us Safe Goes Mainstream
WashingtonsBlog

Corey Robin — Rights of Labor v. Tyranny of Capital

There you have it. The government requiring an employer to hang a poster informing workers of their rights is a violation of the employer’s liberty.

Employers requiring employees to attend a rally in support of Mitt Romney—or otherwise instructing employees how to vote in an election—is an exercise of the employer’s liberty.

Rights of Labor v. Tyranny of Capital
Corey Robin

Prelude to life in a Libertarian paradise, where ownership rights trump human rights and civil rights in world where those who own more are better than others owing to meritocracy.

David Graeber — Two notions of liberty revisited - or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery

Some background on the development of the concept of liberty in the West. We need to examine the concept of liberty-freedom closely in light of the current conflict in economics over the market state based on the right to unlimited acquisition of property and the welfare state based on the distribution of property between private use as "utility" advocated by neoliberalism and public use for public purpose advocated by social democracy. These are based on two different notions of freedom, the first being the master of oneself and the second that of the citizen of a polis.

Resilience

Two notions of liberty revisited - or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery
David Graeber

Frances Coppola — The extent of evil

Weekend philosophy club.

Coppola Comment
The extent of evil
Frances Coppola

Nadir of liberty?

On the eve of 2012, President Obama is facing a backlash from civil libertarians that is more widespread and intense than anything he's yet seen. He has previously been subject to complaints about his war on whistleblowers, the humanitarian and strategic costs of his drone war, the illegality of the war he waged in Libya, his use of the state secrets privilege, his defense of Bush-era warrantless wiretapping, and his assertion of the power to kill American citizens accused of terrorism. But news that Obama plans to sign rather than veto a bill enshrining indefinite detention into U.S. law and failing to exempt American citizens is provoking unprecedented ire.

The significance of the backlash is perhaps best understood by looking at what people and organizations who supported Obama's 2008 bid for the presidency are saying about his actions now. The head of the ACLU's legislative office insisted that Obama is poised to damage "both his legacy and American's reputation for upholding the rule of law," and noted that "the last time Congress passed indefinite detention legislation was during the McCarthy era." 

Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch says that "By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law." Says the New York Times editorial board: "Mr. Obama refused to entertain any investigation of the abuses of power under his predecessor, and he has been far too willing to adopt Mr. Bush's extravagant claims of national secrets to prevent any courthouse accountability for those abuses. This week, he is poised to sign into law terrible new measures that will make indefinite detention and military trials a permanent part of American law. This is a complete political cave-in, one that reinforces the impression of a fumbling presidency."

Read the rest at The Atlantic
The Zenith of Civil Libertarian Anger at President Obama
Conor Friedersdorf
(h/t Kevin Fathi)

The indictment gets worse are it goes on.

Kevin also calls attention to
This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression

at The Guardian (UK) 

For those interested in the underlying philosophy.

The noose tightens

The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, if signed into law, will signal the death knell of our constitutional republic and the formal inception of a legalized police state in the United States. Passed by the House on May 26, 2011 (HR 1540), the Senate version (S. 1867) was passed on Dec. 1, 2011. Now only one man -- Barack Obama, a scholar of constitutional law -- will make the decision as to whether the Bill of Rights he went to Harvard to study will be superceded by a law that abrogates it.

First, let's be clear what is at stake. Most critical are Sections 1031 and 1032 of the Act, which authorize detaining U.S. citizens indefinitely without charge or trial if deemed necessary by the president. The bill would allow federal officials to take these steps based on suspicions only, without having to demonstrate to any judicial official that there is solid evidence to justify their actions. No reasonable proof will any longer be required for the government to suspend an American citizen's constitutional rights. Detentions can follow mere membership, past or present, in "suspect organizations." Government agents would have unchecked authority to arrest, interrogate, and indefinitely detain law-abiding citizens if accused of potentially posing a threat to "national security." Further, military personnel anywhere in the world would be authorized to seize U.S. citizens without due process. As Senator Lindsay Graham put it, under this Act the U.S. homeland is considered a "battlefield."

What is at stake is more than the Constitution itself, as central as that document has been to the American experiment in democracy. What is a stake is nothing short of the basic fundamentals of western jurisprudence. Central to civilized law is the notion that a person cannot be held without a charge and cannot be detained indefinitely without a trial. These principles date back to Greco-Roman times, were developed by English common law beginning in 1215 with the Magna Carta, and were universalized by the Enlightenment in the century before the American Constitution and Bill of Rights were fought for and adopted as the supreme law of the land.For more than two centuries of constitutional development since then, the United States has been heralded as the light to the world precisely because of the liberties it enshrined in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution as inalienable. It now seems as if the events of 9/11 have been determined to be of such a threatening magnitude that our national leaders feel justified to abrogate in their entirety the very inalienable principles upon which our Republic was founded.

At the heart of this Act is the most fundamental question we must ask ourselves as a free people: is 9/11 worth the Republic? The question screaming at us through this bill is whether the war on terror is a better model around which to shape our destiny than our constitutional liberties. It compels the question of whether we remain an ongoing experiment in democracy, pioneering new frontiers in the name of liberty and justice for all, or have we become a national security state, having financially corrupted and militarized our democracy to such an extent that we define ourselves, as Sparta did, only through the exigencies of war?

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

Obama's Most Fateful Decision

by Jim Garrison

President, State of the World Forum and Wisdom University; Author, 'America as Empire'

Of course, it is already OK to assassinate US citizens, commit war crimes, and torture with impunity. What next?

UPDATE:

 Imagine my surprise this morning when, without warning, my shiny new Twitter account (@d_seaman) was suspended and taken offline.

No more tweets for you. You now have 0 followers.

My crime? Talking too much about Occupy Wall Street (I'm not an Occupier, but as a blogger and journalist it strikes me as one of the most important stories out there -- hence the constant coverage), and talking too much about the controversial detainment without trial provisions contained in the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which would basically shred the Bill of Rights and subject American citizens to military police forces. The same level of civil rights protection that enemy combatants in a cave in Afghanistan receive!

But no, my tweets were 'annoying our users,' according to Twitter's suspension notice.

Read the rest at Business Insider
Welcome To The United Police States of America, Sponsored By Twitter
David Seaman, Credit Card Outlaw

Bizarre!