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It’s Time For Local Communities to Take Charge and Experiment – Decentralize or Die (Part 2)

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And when we mark the progress already accomplished in that direction, in spite of and against the State, which tries by all means to maintain its supremacy of recent origin; when we see how voluntary societies invade everything and are only impeded in their development by the State, we are forced to recognize a powerful tendency, a latent force in modern society.

– Peter Kropotkin

Before I get started, I want to emphasize that while the ideas in this three-part series focus on the U.S. and its particular structure of governance, the basic concepts can and should be applied throughout the world. If I believe in anything at all, it’s the idea that concentrations of power, whether government or corporate, represent the greatest threat to human freedom and liberty, and this must be understood and resisted by all of us. Let’s get started.

Although many crucial functions are centralized, the U.S. still provides its citizens with various ways to exercise local power and we’ve already started to see a resurgence of such efforts across the nation. Whether or not we agree with the various state proposals out there trying to shake things up, we should all encourage the efforts. We all win from local populations experimenting with different ideas. Some will fail spectacularly, while others will pave the way for more reasonable policies across the nation.

Perhaps the greatest success of localized action in my lifetime was initiated by my adopted home state of Colorado, as its residents led the way with cannabis legalization in 2012, following the passage of Amendment 64. If we had continued to wait for the feds to do something we would have ended up waiting forever. Instead, Coloradans put the measure on the ballot and the public overwhelmingly supported it (it passed with a wider margin than Obama won against Romney). The enormous success of the initiative led to a cascade of other states adopting similar measures. Local action led to national change and will result in far more humane drug polices across massive swaths of the country, as D.C. fossils like Jeff Sessions continue to spew clownish and failed drug war narratives.

The success of Amendment 64 should be repeated on a variety of issues across the nation. We can then see what works and what doesn’t. People end up responding more rationally when they’re allowed to try things out for themselves.

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The Center Cannot Hold – Decentralize or Die (Part 1)

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

Today’s release of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails with Rob Goldstone could very well represent a crucial turning point in American history. Not because I think they will lead to Trump’s impeachment, or because they represent some sort of treasonous offense, but because I think from this point forward an increasing number of us will come to the conclusion that America may no longer work as the largely centralized, semi-cohesive unit it has been for our entire lives.

In order to understand the long-term implications of these emails on the future of the nation, you need a good understanding of the primary warring factions in American politics today. We have Donald Trump supporters/voters, Hillary Clinton supporters/voters, and a resurgent left inspired and energized by the principles and ideals espoused by Bernie Sanders. The first two have absolutely zero overlap and pretty much hate each other, while the third group can sometimes identify with either camp depending on the issue, but pretty much think they’re both crazy and dangerous. The key point I’m trying to make is that there is no “center” in American politics anymore, and any discussion of this is pure fantasy. Moreover, any remaining center that still exists, is unlikely to exist at all in a year or so as more and more people feel forced to choose sides. When you create an environment as charged as this one where everyone is accusing their political opponents of treason, this is what you get; and it’s only going to get worse. A lot worse.

The reason it’s going to get worse, is because the charged environment that’s been created in which everyone is suspicious of everyone else can only lead to awful outcomes. Let’s start with Hillary supporters/voters. They will honestly see the Don Jr. emails and expect impeachment proceedings to begin tomorrow. Since they were already convinced of treason, they will see treason here. Most importantly, because they believe so passionately that Trump is the root of all evil as opposed to a symptom of a rotten, oligarch-owned empire in decline, they will expect other people to see things the same way. They will genuinely believe that America will unite against Trump’s “treason” and boot him out of office. This is not going to happen.

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New Study Suggests War Lust May Have Cost Hillary Clinton the Election

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Late last week, I came across a fascinating article published at Mondoweiss highlighting a recent study positing that Hilary Clinton may have lost the election to Donald Trump partly as a result of her well documented lust for imperial war and aggression.

Here are a few excerpts from the piece:

An important new study has come out showing that Clinton paid for this arrogance: professors argue that Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year’s presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate.

By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars.

The study is titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?” Authors Francis Shen, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Dougas Kriner, a political science professor at Boston University, strike a populist note.

And here are the authors themselves on the moral hazard at work here. The people who decide are not suffering as much.

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How Google Rigs Search and Hurts Consumers

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I’m sure all of you heard about the $2.7 billion fine imposed by the EU on Google as a result of its anti-competitive behavior, but not many of you probably know exactly what the search giant did to earn it. To shine some light on the topic, let’s take a look at a few excerpts from a recent article written by Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer Gary Reback.

Below are some choice excerpts from the piece, You Should Be Outraged at Google’s Anti-Competitive Behavior:

Before 2007, if a user searched for a product on Google, other sites listing prices for that product would appear among the general search results, ranked in the order of their quality to users. These “comparison shopping sites” were designed to identify merchants with the lowest prices. The more accurate and comprehensive their results, the higher they were ranked and the more traffic they generated.

But the more successful that comparison shopping sites became, the more they threatened Google’s business plan. Google makes money by selling ads placed next to its free search results, and merchants could not be expected to bid for ad placement if the listings in comparison shopping sites on the same search undercut their prices.

To address this, Google developed a cunning plan, the first phase of which was documented in a report by the FTC. Portions of the report were published by the Wall Street Journal more than two years ago.

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The Story of the Journalist and Her Truck Driver Husband

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On July 4th, journalist Heather Bryant published an important article on Medium that I think everyone should read and think about. Her story should make all of us uncomfortable, not just about the state of journalism, but also about how each of us thinks about class and the people around us doing under-appreciated, but vital work.

Below are some excerpts from the piece, but it’s worth reading the entire thing.

I was talking to this person whom I’d just met. They told me about their job and where they worked. They asked me about mine. I told them I’d worked in public media in Alaska before moving to the Lower 48. I was a couple of months from wrapping up my time as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford. They asked about what I worked on and I explained my research around collaboration in journalism and that I intended to continue working in this space after the fellowship ended.

“Well, what does your husband do?”

“He’s a truck driver and a mechanic.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, right now he drives for a trash company.”

“That must be…an interesting perspective to have around.”

While they didn’t explicitly say it, the person was very much thrown off by the nature of my husband’s work. I was left with a very strong feeling they were expecting a more middle-class answer than a garbage worker. Their facial reaction has been stuck in my head for a while now. Surprise. A little confusion. And just enough distaste to notice. Obviously, this one instance isn’t representative of an entire industry. But it is a symptom.

Journalism has a class problem. We know this. The best internships are for students with the resources to work unpaid or with low pay in some of the most expensive cities in the country. Conferences are expensive and often hosted in expensive cities making it difficult for smaller newsrooms to send reporters. The bulk of the jobs are clustered in major metropolitan areas. That’s not to say people without means don’t make it into journalism. They do. But it’s a longer, rougher road with far fewer people making it to the end.

She touches on something truly fundamental to journalism these days. Why is it that so many of the fellow journalists she interacts with have a similar reaction when they find out what her husband does? It’s partly because so few of them have spouses, parents, siblings or close friends who perform these sorts of jobs. For instance, let’s say Heather one day bumps into a journalist whose brother who is also a truck driver. Think about how differently that conversation would go. There’d be an instant connection and understanding. Instead, it appears most other journalists she comes across react with near shock that someone who drives trucks somehow could be married to a journalist who went to Stanford. This is in fact, pretty troubling.

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My Latest Interview – Talking Crypto Currency with Adam Meister

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Today will be largely dedicated to catching up after spending several days hanging with the family and paying very little attention to the increasing collective insanity around us. Last week, I was interviewed for the second time by Adam Meister about all things crypto currency. Since such a small percentage of my posts focus on … Read more

A New Way to Support Liberty Blitzkrieg – Launching Patreon

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Before I get started, I want to thank everyone who has donated to Liberty Blitzkrieg over the years. I’ve been very encouraged by the generosity and kindness of so many people from all over the world. I’ve received contributions from readers in many different countries, including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and more. I try to send a personal thank you note to everyone, but I’m definitely behind schedule and I apologize if I haven’t reached out to you recently. You are greatly appreciated.

There is absolutely nothing more gratifying and empowering than reader-supported work, which is why I want to move more and more in that direction. Those of you who have been reading me for years have probably noticed a bit of a change in the website over the course of 2017. That change has been intentional. Whereas I used to try to put up as much content as possible, I am now only publishing one post per day. By centering my focus in this manner, I’ve been able to publish far more proprietary and thoughtful content, while avoiding the temptations of clickbait chasing. I think this strategy has resulted in some of the best work I’ve ever created, and I would like to continue to focus my time and energy in this way.

Seeing so many of you make one-time donations freed me up and permitted me to stop obsessing about how many page views I was generating. These donations, in addition to the wonderful partnerships I have with several businesses/organizations, put me in a position where I felt more able to focus on quality over quantity. To take things to the next level, I want to move further away from having third party corporate behemoth ad networks on my site, and Google Adsense is the really big one.

This desire has inspired me to launch a Patreon page, where readers can pledge a certain dollar donation per month and the site will take care of the rest. I know that some readers feel awkward about making a small one-time donation of only $5, but would gladly give $5 every month. Patreon is the perfect medium for this sort of donor, and has been recommended to me on several occasions.

My initial goal is to reach $1,000 per month, and I recognize this could take a while. To provide a bit of an incentive, I have pledged to remove all Google Adsense ads from my site once the $1,000 per month threshold is reached. I will not be offering any rewards to patrons at first, but if it proves successful, this is certainly something I will consider doing in the future.

If you have any interest in learning more about this new option to support my work, please check out my Patreon page.

When you go to support, you’ll see a default like this below. You can change the dollar value to whatever you want.

Meanwhile, absolutely nothing will change about the site. All content will remain free, and support will be completely voluntary. I am simply adding another option for those of you who are inclined to contribute.

If Patreon isn’t your thing, and you prefer to donate via Bitcoin, cash, check or PayPal, all of those options remain available. If you are interested in donating via another crypto coin, let me know and I will consider it.

Details are below:

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It’s Never Been More Important to Support Independent Content Creators

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When I first started this website I didn’t have a plan for monetization. While I certainly believe people should be compensated for hard, useful work, all I wanted to do was read, write and think. The “business side” of running a blog felt like a nuisance and wasn’t something I had much passion or energy for. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is passively putting third party code like Google Adsense on your website doesn’t really earn someone like me any money. While it was never a significant amount of cash in the first place, it wasn’t totally worthless. At this point it has become basically worthless, but that’s ok. I’m not going to complain about Google. Google doesn’t owe me anything and neither do the corporations that use the network. It was never a smart way for writers, particularly anti-establishment type writers highly critical of our economic system based on cronyism and fraud, to earn money. It never really made any sense, but I went down that road anyway because it was easy and allowed me to focus on what I really cared about, my work. But things have changed.

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The Most Dangerous Fake News of All is Peddled by the Corporate Media

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This is not the sort of thing you see in a confident, brave, and civilized nation, it’s the sort of stuff you’d expect to see toward the end. It’s the stuff of craven war-mongers, of dishonest cowards, of a totally deranged and very dangerous media. The signs are everywhere; imperial decline is set to accelerate rapidly in the coming years.

– From the April post: Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire

Fake news, propaganda and garbage information is everywhere and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. That being said, the key thing to understand is fake news from obscure websites you’ve never heard of is not what represents the real, global danger of rampant dishonest information. The real danger of fake news is the stuff that’s consistently being vomited onto the pages of “respectable,” billionaire-owned corporate media.

Obscure blogs and independent thinkers such as myself aren’t influencing foreign policy, domestic policy or anything that really matters (look around you). While alternative media did indeed play a monumental role in the election of Donald Trump, how much really changed when it comes to the true power centers?

Not much, not much at all. Goldman Sachs and Wall Street are more in control than ever before, and neocons and other assorted interventionists seem to be running foreign policy.

All of this reminds me of the famous saying, “if voting made any difference, they’d make it illegal.” Indeed, the time has come for all of us to own up to the very real and present danger of corporate media, which seemingly exists to provide public relations for oligarchs and the foreign policy establishment. Not that this should be surprising, you’d have to be the most naive creature on earth to think newspapers owned by billionaires are going to tell the public the truth. Indeed, I made the following observation earlier today on Twitter.

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Seymour Hersh Reports How Trump Bombed Syria on Completely False Pretenses

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Part of Trump’s appeal to many of his voters was, at least ostensibly, the idea that he would employ a less hawkish/neocon foreign policy than his opponent Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton. While it’s still too early to decisively say that Trump will usher in yet another foreign policy disaster for these United States and the world, it’s certainly not looking good.

The lobbing of tomahawk missiles into Syrian based on the fairytale that Assad launched a chemical weapons attack was the first sign that Trump is easily manipulated and impulsive. In fact, the episode bothered me so much I wrote a post detailing the dire ramifications titled, Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire.  I suggest taking a read if you missed it the first time, it’s my most popular post of the year.

While that was bad enough, Trump’s cozying up to the barbaric, terrorist-supporitng leaders of Saudi Arabia has been by far the most concerning aspect of his foreign policy (if you can call it that) so far. This policy has become even more dangerous now that the 30-year old princeling who is leading the Saudis’ increasingly aggressive stance in the region has been named crown prince. It appears Trump is willing to let the Saudis do whatever they want in the region, which is guaranteed to have disastrous implications for America and the Middle East.

I wrote two important articles on this topic, which I have linked to below.

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