LEFT IN EAST DAKOTA

It seems like a month can't go by without us being able to watch a revolution unfold. They are unsurprisingly chaotic, and completely and utterly destroying the idea that a spontaneous, leaderless, movement can take (or abolish) state power. That's the formula right now. Camp out in the city square and soon enough there will be a confrontation which eventually might create enough havoc to shutdown your country. Sure, this sort of "general strike," if we want to call it that, can throw state power up for grabs, but that just makes it easy for any organized social force with even a tad bit of popular support to step in and snatch it. Often times it is simply the opposition political party that has positioned itself to be at the right place at the right time. (If this is the case, you guys might as well have a "managed" democracy like us. Sure it's boring, but less people die. You need not ask who controls the state if you just want to know who controls th...

The NYT profiled Dread Pirate Roberts, the alleged founder of the infamous "Silk Road" website: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/business/eagle-scout-idealist-drug-trafficker.html The most interesting part about people like Dread Pirate Roberts (aka Robert Ulbricht) is their bizarre view of liberty. Aside from his alleged willingness to murder people (one would think murdering someone would be an attack on their liberty on a much grander scale than forcing them to pay income tax), he seems genuinely disgusted by the idea of some level of democratic oversight of basic societal functions: For centuries, consumers have been taxed by governments or overlords of one type or another, rendering unto Caesar for as long as there have been Caesars. But if Silk Road were scalable, that era was over. Or at least imperiled. Anyone would have the option to sell goods undisturbed by regulations and without sharing a percentage of revenue with the state. And why stop at drugs? Th...

                                         (credit: mnhs.org)    In very general terms, I talked a tad bit of shit about Minnesota's "greatest" governor Floyd B. Olson in CounterPunch a couple weeks ago (see post below). Somewhat surprisingly (I assumed most people thought of Olson as the name of a highway), I received a few emails, in state and out, informing me I pretty much had no clue what I was talking about. True, if you compare Olson to Mark Dayton (who I find likable), he comes off as a scary Bolshevik. But that's hardly a correct comparison. Olson was governor when labor was at the peak of both its consciousness and political power. In that context, he was more like a brake than a spearhead. He was a check on power. (He threw labor leaders in jail during the '34 Tea...

I wrote a brief history on an important, and relevant, part of our history for Counterpunch. Read it here!

"The Atlantic" and "Harper's" are both iconic magazines that are responsible for promoting the careers of many prominent writers. I have been reading them for years. They also both have a profile of John Kerry in their December issue. David Rohde did a individualist profile of Kerry, lauding him as an "activist" diplomat shaking up the stuffy old foreign policy establishment in "The Atlantic." In "Harper's," Andrew Cockburn rejects this sort on analysis completely and challenges the idea that there is such a thing as foreign policy at all. Kerry comes off as a power hungry but powerless hack who owes his position to back room politics much more than shrewd determination. Cockburn was actually communicating original thoughts and I turned each page with a new morsel of knowledge. Rohde's fluff would have fit nicely after a top ten vacation spot list on Delta's in-flight magazine. Reading the whole thing felt ...

I wrote a piece on the trainwreck that is Obamacare for Counterpunch. Read here!

The following is a passage from the late Alexander Cockburn's last book, A Colossal Wreck. It is available here . May 2 "A loan-at-interest is the only known thing in the entire universe that does not suffer entropy. It grows with time. All other things, ourselves included, fade and die." Those of you maxed out on your credit cards but still making those monthly payments at some outrageous rate know this as well as I (who have learned by dint of bitter experience not to have credit cards at all). Those first three sentences came from an informative letter that Stan Lusby of Otago, New Zealand, sent to one of my favorite newspapers, Catholic Worker , a while back. Lusby commenced his discussion of capitalism with some personal disclosures. He had, Lusby confided, known all his life that lending money at interest was intrinsically wrong. "I came late in life to Christianity, and it was a great source of comfort to verify my intuition through scripture, although I...