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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Rowan Berkeley
Published Letters: 176
When I rounded off comment with the suggestion that he could just have condemned FFF as a "corporatist rat trap disguised as a libertarian think tank" I was being a bit too hasty. Calling it "corporatist" really sounds wrong. I suppose what I had in mind was a point I think you made a day or two ago, to the effect that in the absence of the much hated "big government" the USA would simply be run by private enterprise, the country would break down into a network of company towns, and the companies would necessarily be big.
This fantasy of a nation owned and managed by private companies does seem to exist in recent American history, but I find it quite hard to focus. The British version of the fantasy would have been classified as "socialist," because our own "company towns" were owned and run by capitalists who saw themselves as top-down socialists, in a sort of Fourierist mould, I think. Some of the results of their efforts still exist, like the town called "Port Sunlight," which was built by the cocoa entrepreneur, Joseph Rountree., I am just going to check this befor proceeding ... ah, he was in fact a Quaker: http://www.josephrowntree.org.uk/
The US "company towns" were a lot nastier, I expect. One can imagine the sort of "company towns" that Ayn Rand fans would build. Then there is yet another aspect, which I must admit I would find exciting, myself, partly because I spent a couple of years at architectural school in the 1970s, and was something of a Buckminster Fuller fan : technocracy. I know so little about this that I shall leave it there.
I want to get this in here even if it extends the thread unduly, because I feel that the religiously inspired guerrilla movements now known as "Islamist" would have done better to stay with the older ideologies of pan-nationalism and anti-neo-colonialism, and I want to ask, who is really responsible for the reframing of the issues as religious, anyway? Who decided that, in this case, pan-Arab movements should be regarded, not as regional resistances to neocolonialism, but as "wars of civilisations"? Was it "them," or "us"? And if it was "us," was that because "we" were being pushed rightwards anyway, towards a sort of crusader mentality of our own? I don't want to just list individual neocon writers, starting with Bernard Lewis, since examples by themselves don't really answer the question. Neocon ideology grew out of anti-communism, when Trotskyites met Scoop Jackson democrats, but who was really behind the change towards evangelical anti-Islamism? To claim that "Israel" or "the Jews" were behind this change in the US's geopolitical ideological theories is just plain ignorant.
It's somewhere in Murray Rothbard's online work at the Mises Institute, where he calls for the privatisation of the police force.
the trouble is, I am not going into that site to look for it. It's probably in the pdf files of "Left and Right" which was a magazine he was involved with some time back in the Vietnam era. When libertarianism is sufficiently wacky, as it seems to have been in his version of it, it's kind of entertaining to look at from afar, it's sort of scenic. But seriously, to call for the privatisation of the judicial system is to attempt to abolish politics altogether in favour of economics. It's the suicide of political thinking as such. It makes me rather angry when I think about the implications for a massively armed global super-power, and I can only thank heavens that the dollar is collapsing at long last. If it was an individual, rather than a state, that was flirting with this sort of thing, I would call it a psychosis.
try to read something from these guys - it isn't all hefty tomes, there are some short articles there too, but the point they all make is that the relative profitability of the oil business is higher when oil prices are high. This means that Bush's trips to Saudi to supposedly plead with the Sheikhs to open the oil spigots are just window dressing:
http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
