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US Justice Department lawyers are refusing to argue the governments cases against detainees at Guantanamo.

Writes Scott Horton on his blog at Harpers:

“Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. Under the Code of Professional Responsibility, there are certain circumstances when a lawyer is not ethically permitted to appear and advance arguments that a client wants him to make. One is when the client is appearing in court advancing claims of fact that the lawyer knows to be untrue.”

Hat tip: FishOutofWater.

From Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution: "The Congress shall have Power ...To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

From Wikipedia:

The founders' understanding of the word "commerce" is unclear. Although commerce means economic activity today, it had non-economic meanings in late eighteenth century English. For example, in 18th century writing one finds expressions such as "the free and easy commerce of social life" and "our Lord's commerce with his disciples". Interpreting interstate commerce to mean "substantial interstate human relations" is consistent with much additional primary source evidence concerning the meaning of commerce at the time of the writing of the Constitution. This interpretation also makes sense for the foreign and Indian commerce clauses as one would expect Congress to be given authority to regulate non-economic relations with other nations and with Indian tribes.

John Marshall wrote: "Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more--it is intercourse."

But does that give Congress virtually unlimited power in our human relationships?

William Watkins of the Independent Instititute say no:

Obviously, Congress cannot regulate the crops grown in foreign countries or in Indian territory. And because “commerce” must mean the same thing in relation to the states, Congress cannot regulate state agriculture either. (Congressional regulation of the interstate traffic in agricultural commodities or the importation of such commodities from foreign countries would be consistent with Madison’s and Hamilton’s emphasis on goods crossing state borders, however.)

I think that is the key. Congress can only regulate things that enter the United States, and things that cross state lines. It has no jurisdiction over economic exchanges and "intercourse" within states, no more than it has jurisdiction over other nations.

I suppose the tricky part is discerning if production and intentions fall into the jurisdiction. A federal minimum wage law is unconstitutional, but can Congress prevent goods from crossing state lines that were produced by laborders paid below a minimum Congress set?

If something can cross state lines normally, can Congress prevent it from crossing state lines if it will be used for a purpose Congress doesn't like? For example, it's fine for a person to carry wads of cash over state lines, but can Congress prevent him from carrying it across state lines if he intends to use it to buy drugs?

These questions underscore the fact that the Constitution goes only so far in protecting our liberty. Some things Congress prohibits - such as growing medical marijuana for personal use - is outrageously unconstitutional, so that if the federal government respected Constitutional limits, that liberty would be restored. But friends of liberty generally can't rely on the Constitution to protect them. Crossing state lines with yourself and any possessions you may own, or sending your property across state lines, is potentially the subject of Congressional regulation under the Constitution.

A few months ago, I wrote that repealing the 16th Amendment will NOT "liberate" us or kill the income tax, because the definition of Constitutional "excise tax" includes taxes on wages. In the same way, returning to a correct and narrower view of the Commerce Clause may still leave Congress with overly-broad powers. The case for smaller government should be based mostly on moral and economic arguments. Citing the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, may help. But in the end, even placing Constitutional limits on the federal government will still leave open the possibility for all kinds of bad and counter-productive legislation.

I forgot to mention this long weekend and throughout the next seven days is the period of the next Carnival of Anarchy discussion forum. For the third time Shag is hosting this roundrobin and "we" would like readers new and old to join the throng. Below (again) is a cross post from COA announcing our discussion which this month centres around anarchism and work, labour, life or what-have-you.

There seems to be a consensus that our next topic should cover the connection between anarchism and the employment universe. Some of you are particularly interested in dealing with labour organizations from a libertarian point of view. My guess is a minority tend more towards the social psychology of work. I'm also interested in this area, in general the range of issues that come up when dealing with fellow workers and employers. So let's try this approach. There is a long weekend to come
in North America at the beginning of September so many contributors may be busy with other things. Let's aim for the period of September 4th to 9th, in other words the Tuesday following the Canadian labour weekend to the following Sunday.

Wilt Alston on why it matters little to him how the government is run because he now grasps that government itself is the problem — Is It Wrong If I Just Don’t Care?

I have concluded something very important recently. (OK, so maybe not very important, but mildly interesting anyway!) I just don’t care about a lot of stuff that used to really excite me. For instance, I don’t care:

* That Karl Rove resigned;
* That Alberto Gonzales resigned;
* That they haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet;
* Who gets selected for the Supreme Court;
* If George Bush (or any other President) gets impeached;
* Who gets elected President of the United States.

…

Why don’t I care about the things I list? I could take each of these separately, and I will embellish on a few of my reasons, but basically it comes down to this. I’m an anarchist.

Yet another example of state capitalism smashing small business… From Jeffrey Tucker at the Mises Institute blog:

Last night, a lady from my neighborhood just delivered her last pint of chicken salad to my door. Her chicken salad–made by “The Chicken Salad Chick”–has been all the rage, with everyone in the neighborhood forking over for this stuff. It’s a classic case of a suburban food hysteria.

But she is shutting down, not because of her failures but her success. The Health Department of the County called her home. They were very nice and sweet in a Southern sort of way. But they explained that it is not fair to those who have complied with all the regulations for selling retail that she should be allowed to bake and sell from her domestic kitchen. You have to have industrial ovens. You must comply with all food regulations. You must cook and sell only from an area zoned for commercial purposes. And yes, someone called to complain: not a customer but a competitor who does comply with all these regs.

It’s just fairness right? Well, call it what you want but note that this action was taking for motives having nothing whatever to do with the health of the public. It was driven by a competitor wanting to drive up her costs and therefore hurt her business. The regs are being used to clobber competition — which is precisely why they were created and precisely the way they work in the real world, all civics-texts pieties aside.

The matter is instructive, regardless of what your cognitive framework leads you to call state capitalism — “capitalism”, “socialism”, “corporatism”, “mercantilism” or “fascism”. The centralizing tendency of state intervention in the market to support an unproductive plutocratic oligarchy at the expense of authentically voluntary market relations is the principal economic point of pain. Almost all other misery derives from that.

Those of you who continue to call yourselves “anarcho-capitalists” would be wise to use other labels. Otherwise, you’re throwing away the opportunity to demonstrate to earnest socialists that the phenomenon they refer to as “capitalist accumulation” is a necessarily statist phenomenon deriving from market intervention by the state on behalf of the political class. And since all states are demonstrably inherently oligarchical… well, you hopefully get the picture.

Black and grey market chicken salad? They do it with bread.

Anarchist Report Back from the Midwest GOP Convention - They’ll let just about anyone into these things.

“I make my way out of the reception room, shaken up and sweating. I sit down and text one of the outside crew, coordinating more of the plan. At this point I’m extremely frightened. Look at all these Republicans! And I’m able to walk in their midst with no problem! The guy next to me on the bench starts to mutter about how Ron Paul supporters are hoodlums. I solemnly agree…”

Hat tip: Smygo

Below is an item from a recent issue of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. I've edited this slightly for clarity. A PDF file is available here. The author Dr. Joanna Moncrieff is arguing against the usual position of the shrinks although it surprises me that this debate even made it into any medical journal. Her straight forward response targets previous contributors in what appears to be an ongoing debate in the pages of CJP. Obviously things are changing. Reminds me of that time, about five years ago, when I sent a email to the author of the Quackbusters website ... another psychiatrist who seems to think "skepticism" only applies to more obvious nuts like chiropractors ... and asked him what was the scientific basis for that "other" scam Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD. I also pointed out that claiming everyone who opposes psychiatry is working for the Scientologists wasn't going to wash. I actually received a reply, believe it or not. In his attempt to excuse frying the brains of kids with amphetamines the good doctor said " It (ADHD) was a good place to start". Start? Holy shit, so where does it end? Also click the title link for an interesting take on the debilitating influence of money on otherwise educated people.

Psychiatrists have been trying to construct a biological theory of depression for decades. Numerous candidates have been proposed, from noradrenalin and serotonin abnormalities to cortisol excess, hippocampal insufficiency, and neurotrophic factor. In all cases, results are inconsistent, and where abnormalities are found, they have not been shown to be specific or causal. For example, contrary to Dr Ravindran and Dr Kennedy’s suggestions, the evidence on hippocampal volume is weak. Numerous studies show no difference between subjects with depression and control subjects, and I could not find studies supporting their assertion that duration of untreated illness correlates with volume reduction. In contrast, studies show that duration of treated illness predicts volume reduction.This raises the possibility that drug treatments for depression reduce brain volume in the same fashion as antipsychotics have been shown to do in patients with psychosis. In addition, loss of hippocampal volume is also found in first-episode psychosis and post traumatic stress disorder (shagnote: what used to be called 'shell shock' in more honest times) and was recently shown in women diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. (The DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders, grows bigger every year. There is even a " refusal to obey authority" and a " refusal to realize that your sick" syndrome now. Scary stuff.) Abnormalities sometimes found in depression are also not specific. For example, acute psychosis is also associated with increased hypothalamo–pituitary–adrenal axis function. Even if biochemical or structural abnormalities were found to be associated with depression, this would not imply that they were causal. If I experience an adverse event, I will feel sad, and if this emotion is strong enough, there are likely to be associated biochemical changes—but it is the event that has made me sad, not the chemical fluctuations. They are best viewed as an accompaniment, or a biological correlation, of the emotional state. In my first piece, I concentrated on placebo-controlled studies because it is difficult to show any real-world benefits from the use of antidepressants. In fact, their increased use is associated with increasing prevalence and duration of depressive episodes. The naturalistic Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression trial found remission rates that are unimpressive in a naturally remitting condition, although the fact that this study did not include a placebo group means this valuable opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of antidepressants was wasted. The study on absence due to sickness quoted by Ravindran and Kennedy actually found that individuals treated with antidepressants were less likely to return to work than those who were not treated with them.

Here are some sources for people fighting psychiatric bullying. The Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault has a page of links which I found, in turn, over at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) site. Both references have been included in Shag's sidebar. These sites contain many links helping in the battle against psychiatry and in defence of the poor. Also see my posting derived from New Scientist on the roots of moral consciousness.

Assuming everything the Bush administration says about al Qaeda is true, what's a better way for us to keep safe: a plodding, bumbling, centralized monster bureaucracy led by devious unaccountable politicians, or a decentralized, entrepreneurial network of organizations whose existence depends on satisfying customers who can take their business elsewhere anytime?

In the past, I've written on the need for all the diverse facets of the alternative economy to coalesce into a coherent counter-weight to the corporate economy. I've argued that although the numerical weight of people and resources engaged in alternative economic and social institutions (cooperatives, complete or partial self-employment, LETS and other alternative currency and barter systems, household and informal production, community supported agriculture, homeschooling, radical unionism, alternative media, the open-source movement, Konkinian counter-economics, etc.) were cumulatively a huge portion of the total society and economy, they were still ineffectual in bringing their cumulative weight to bear.

The overall structure of the system is characterized by the hegemony of the large corporation and the centralized government agency; the character of the system as a whole is still determined by the corporate-state nexus, and the commanding heights of the system are controlled by state capitalist elites. Cooperatives and other alternative economic ventures find themselves swimming in a capitalist sea; because of their fragmentation from each other, their minimal systemic influence bears no relation to their actual numerical importance.

In an early blog post, "Building the Structure of the New Society in the Shell of the Old," I wrote:

The solution is to promote as much consolidation as possible within the counter-economy. We need to get back to the job of "building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." A great deal of production and consumption already takes place within the social or gift economy, self-employment, barter, etc. The linkages need to be increased and strengthened between those involved in consumers' and producers' co-ops, self-employment, LETS systems, home gardening and other household production, informal barter, etc. What economic counter-institutions already exist need to start functioning as a cohesive counter-economy.

As Hernando de Soto has pointed out, the resources already available to us are enormous. If we could leverage and mobilize them suffiiciently, they might be made to function as a counterweight to the capitalist economy....

A key objective should be building the secondary institutions we need to make the resources we already have more usable. Most people engage in a great deal of informal production to meet their own needs, but lack either access or awareness of the institutional framework by which they might cooperate and exchange with others involved in similar activities. Expanding LETS systems and increasing public awareness of them is vital....

Ultimately, we need a cooperative alternative to the capitalists' banking system, to increase the cooperative economy's access to its own mutual credit.

One problem in achieving such consolidation is the sheer volume and diversity of the networked society: the information overload involved in keeping track of just what movements and ventures are out there. The only possibility for overcoming this, in my opinion, is 1) a common technical architecture for communications and exchange; and 2) organizationally, some sort of clearinghouse function for bringing the myriad bits and pieces of the alternative economy together, or at least facilitate their finding each other.

Unfortunately, the problem is not the absence of such technical architectures and umbrella organizations, but the proliferation of them. No single framework has emerged as the standard. For example, there are more concrete projects out there than I can account for providing encrypted electronic alternative currencies, P2P credit systems outside of the state capitalist banking system, etc. Just about any of them, if it could come to the top through some sort of invisible hand mechanism and become widely known among all the sub-movements out there, would be serviceable as a structure for exchange within the alternative economy. But none of them has. There are lots of good projects based on promising technology, that are largely unheard of outside a small subculture of devotees. Likewise, there are lots of attempts at creating federal organizations of worker cooperatives, intentional communities, LETS systems, and the like, many of them self-consciously aimed at providing an umbrella organization for the larger alternative economy. But again, they coexist as dozens of separate ghettoes.

One thing that might make a difference is the united support of some particular federal organization by a number of major movements within the alternative economy, so that together they might emerge as an organizational core around which the rest of the movement could coalesce. That was the approach taken by the I.W.W.'s Chicago organizing convention in 1905--otherwise known as "The Continental Congress of the Working Class." Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, which formed the actual labor nucleus of the movement, was joined by De Leon of the Socialist Labor Party and Debs of the American Socialist Party, along with representatives of other radical unions--not to mention the charismatic figure of Mother Jones, whose presence provided the movement with something like "the Pope's divisions" in moral weight.

Given all this prefatory material, you can understand why I was heartened to learn of this new attempt at creating an umbrella organization for the alternative economy: the Solidarity Economy Network. It emerged as a relatively low-visibility movement from a series of Solidarity Economy caucuses at the June U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta. But there's reason to hope it will emerge from its obscurity.

For example, I'm heartened in part by some of the names and organizations represented on the Coordinating Committee. Among many others are these that I recognized:

Dan Swinney of the Center for Labor and Community Research
Jessica Gordon Nembhard and Ethan Miller of Grassroots Economic Organizing
Melissa Hoover and John Parker of U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives
Cliff Rosenthal of the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions

Also heartening is the fact that I received the news of this organization from Steve Herrick, a leading figure in the fair trade movement.

Here are some of the stated goals of the new organization:

1. Global movement: to join with and build the movement for transformative
social and economic justice. To develop strong relationships and exchange
between U.S. and global organizations, practitioners and solidarity economy
networks such as NANSE (N. American Network for the Solidarity Economy) and
RIPESS (Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of the Solidarity Economy).

2. Common vision and framework: To create a structure and vision that can
promote a common identity and agenda among the currently fragmented elements of
the U.S. solidarity economy. SEN will build a learning community on issues
relevant to the solidarity economy, including discussing and debating
strategies and practices, and helping each other to uphold the principles of
the solidarity economy.

I do agree that this particular point is important: there is some use for a broad, widely shared ideological vision uniting the various cooperative and economic democracy movements, like that of the solidarity economy. But the basic principles of that vision should be general and broadly stated enough to leave a wide range for intepretation; it should not be so strident or doctrinaire as to impair the basic structural function of the organization, in providing a clearinghouse for ideological diverse movements within the alternative economy. There should be room enough for Wobblies, for fundamentalist homeschoolers and Crunchy Cons, for left-leaning market anarchists and agorists, and for anarcho-capitalists like Eric S. Raymond. In other words, a highly visible venue for people trying to increase economic control over their own lives, to network and establish mutually beneficial relationships with others trying to do the same--without fear of too much ideological sermonizing.

For example, to take just one quibble I have with this item in the list of principles in their Background Statement:

recognizes the primacy of social welfare over profits and the unfettered rule of the market.

To me this begs a question, and if pushed too heavily might needlessly alienate a lot of left-leaning market anarchists who reject the unspoken assumptions behind the statement. Some of us market anarchists believe the reason the economy is presently dominated by large corporations, and characterized by pollution, waste and great disparities of wealth, is precisely that the market is fettered by corporate capitalists using the state to protect themselves from the competition of a free market. The present domination of GM, Wal-Mart, Disney, Monsanto and other corporate behemoths did not emerge from the "unfettered rule of the market." It's precisely because of the fetters imposed on the market by those privileged monopolists, that we live with an economy dominated by a few hundred corporations, instead of by a few million cooperatives. And as New Left historian Gabriel Kolko's account of the Progressive Era shows, whenever politicians start making laws with the avowed purpose of promoting "social welfare over profits," you can be sure the legislation was actually drafted by corporations with a view to their own profits.

Of course, unless pushed in a doctrinaire and divisive manner, it's not really an obstacle to collaboration. To take a parallel example, I endorse the Wobbly preamble's call to "abolish the wage system" with considerable mental reservations: namely, my understanding of the "wage system" as a system in which wage labor not only predominates, but is artificially predominant and exploitative because of the state's privileges to capital and its shackles on the bargaining power of labor. In an economy without such a wage system, wage labor would no doubt exist on an individual basis--it would just be a less prevalent arrangement, and a bargain between true equals.

Anyway, the statement continues with what I consider the most important function of all:

3. Collaboration: To investigate and develop ways to build collaborative support systems for solidarity economy development. Examples might include: coordination between solidarity economy producers, suppliers and distributors; collaborative marketing, branding and distribution; group purchasing of insurance, energy, supplies; peer support & tech. assistance.

But such a large network, with its enormous resources, can perform another very important function:

4. Visibility and public support: To raise the visibility, legitimacy and public support for solidarity economy practices through public education and media coverage.

Ideally, in my opinion, this would eventually entail the funding of a think tank, issuing position papers, pamphlets, posters, podcasts, and so forth.

I encourage anyone involved in the larger movement for cooperative economics, economic democracy, human scale technology, and the like, to pass this news along to other leading organizations in the movement, and encourage contact with the SEN. For my own part, I plan to forward this material to Dave Pollard of How to Save the World, Pierre DuCasse of EcoDema, Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives, the School of Cooperative Individualism, Brad Spangler of Agorism.Info, and the I.W.W. (and maybe more--that's just off the top of my head).