The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world it didn’t exist. The drone strikes and wars being perpetuated by the same groups of people regardless of political affiliation made the idea of a deep state seem more and more an acceptable topic to discuss in 2016. But a major fault that parts of the US Left made, most blatantly by Jill Stein, was to assign Hillary Clinton as the sole, anointed candidate of the imperial state.
International Law
The Legal Deduction of the Proletarian State
I. Division On The Question Of The State
First off the idea for this post largely comes from a, believe it or not, somewhat civil and productive discussion about anarchism vs. Marxism. Particularly a member of the Commune for Distributing Agitprop (CDAP) asked me this question:
What exactly are the institutions you would use to characterize a proletarian state? What do they look like, and how are they operated?
I think this is such a crucial and oft-ignored question even by many socialists. Worse still, both some anarchists and socialists will respond with the non-answer that destroying the bourgeois state, abolishing private property, and facilitating direct participation by the proletariat will inherently create communism, that ideal state of cooperative equality and liberation. We are faced with “What is Step 1?” and answer with a description of Step 76.
RebLaw Day 1
The Rebellious Lawyering Conference (RebLaw) began yesterday at Yale Law School, bringing together law students, lawyers, and community organizers to discuss a plethora of social justice issues. The author attended two of the sessions, which were amazing and yielded interesting legal perspectives and strategies worth elaborating on (and of course there were many simultaneous sessions which you can check out here). And tomorrow I’ll give a similar summary of the sessions I attend today.
Mossack Fonseca and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
“A blind domination founded on slavery is not economically speaking worthwhile for the bourgeoisie of the mother country. The monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose policy is solely that of the sword. What the factoryowners and finance magnates of the mother country expect from their government is not that it should decimate the colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic conventions their own “legitimate interests.”” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
“I did a lot of infrastructure development in my life. To fund them with foreign currency is madness. OK? Madness.” – Tidjane Thiam, CEO of Credit Suisse
Jürgen Mossack has had a good run. While Mossack and the firm he co-founded, Mossack Fonseca, will deny the illegality of their actions until the bitter end, it really does not matter. Their purpose, their utility to some of the most powerful and wealthy people of the world, was to keep their information and the information of their clients in the shadows. To not just protect capital from the oversight and taxes of the various applicable governments, but to protect these safe havens from scrutiny. While many of these accounts or the funds within them were illegal, what really matters here is that the capital has been exposed, and with that exposure it will be expected to re-enter various cycles of accumulation and consumption. The jig is up.
Habeas Quaestus 