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|Patriots Look Poised For Another Super Bowl Run
|Bruins Trade For Drew Stafford
|Black and Gold Bruins Turn Yellow On Parade Day
|Inconsistency Will Continue For Bruins Unless A Change Is Made
It was inevitable.
The Boston Bruins dismal play with a man advantage has finally ended their defense of a championship they won in spite of their ability to capitalize on power play opportunities. For two years, the Bruins have been less than impressive when opposing teams have one fewer man on the ice. For two years, the Bruins have been utterly inept in every facet of their power play offense. And it's finally caught up to them.
We will no longer hear about how the Bruins' power play isn't that important because their even strength play is strong. We will no longer hear about how the Bruins can win without a top tier offensive power play system. Instead, we will hear about how this team's top six forwards and their "puck moving, offensive" defensemen have let them down against an inferior team.
Sure, their power play was ranked in the middle of the NHL this season, but don't let their mediocrity fool you. As we have come to find, their moderate power play success has bee nothing more than a façade, a sham, a charade.
Why is the power play so bad? Two reasons:
There's no easier play to defend – in any sport – than one that is standing still. The foundation of a power play is that one team has to cover the same amount of space with fewer players. In the Bruins' case, there is space available, but it is never utilized.
Instead of creating passing lanes, the Bruins wait for them to appear. Instead of moving into space, and forcing the disabled defense to move with them, they work for seconds and seconds against the boards only to get the puck back to the point for a slap shot. A slap shot, I might add, that a goalie and his defenders can see coming before it even happens.
Typically, when a team is granted a man advantage, they see it as an opportunity to score. Typically, to score, players need to be on the ice that have the ability to possess the puck, pass the puck, and shoot the puck somewhere other than into the chest of the goalie.
If we can collectively think of one player that can do all three of those things, we would probably all arrive at Tyler Seguin. But it took until the seventh and final game of this series for Seguin to be on the first power play line. In Game 5, as a matter of fact, Seguin played less than half the minutes of Brian Rolston and Rich Peverly on the power play.
Once again: typically, when a team is granted a man advantage, they see it as an opportunity to score.
Tags: Boston Bruins, Power Play, Powerplay, Tyler Seguin, Washington Capitols


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Both Brains Were Fried
(In this case, both the cashier AND I were idiots. I'm a product demonstrator buying supplies for my next demo: 12 bags of French fries. I get to my car and realize the cashier only charged me for 10. So I go back in and explain the problem.)
Cashier: Thank you so much! I'd have been in so much trouble."
Me: *feeling sheepish, I brought the receipt but NOT the un-scanned bags back in* "Should I go get them to scan again?"
Cashier: "Nah, just grab two more from the cooler. I'll scan those and charge you for them."
(I run and get them. I get back and she's explaining to the entire line what a tool she is and how grateful she is to me for my honesty. As such, she's working distracted and on autopilot… It's 10 pm and I've had a long day myself, so I'm not precisely paying attention either.)
Cashier: *scans bags* "Okay, that'll be $4.99."
(She automatically bags them and hands me the bag. I automatically take them, say thank you, and leave.)
Me: *10 minutes later at home, un-bagging groceries into my freezer* "Oh, lord! Now I've paid for 12 and have 14!"


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Gas Pains
Tom grew up in Milwaukee, bartended in Wauwatosa in the '70s and moved here in 1984.
Commentary, observations and musings about the outdoors, life in general and maybe Tosa politics and personalities will be the order of the day. He savors a lively debate as much as terrific cooking.
Friday Morning Music
It's the start of the weekend people.
Bring it on with a classic country blast from the past - It's Cheating Situation.
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NJ Colonial - Family Remodel
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I have been creeping on the forum for a while and have asked some questions and gotten good feedback, so I have decided to go a little further and start a project showcase.
Our house was built in 1910's sometime, although my deed says 1932. I found newspaper in the house from the 1914, so that is my guess but I guess I may never know.
Here are a few pics of what the home looked like when we first got it.
It is a 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath house with a finished attic. The entire house was plaster. In addition, approx. 5 out of the 12 circuits were knob and tube wiring.
We knew when we purchased this house in a small town outside of Philly that we would be in for work. Something about the house just screamed "buy me" to us (by us I mean my wife). However, I felt up to the challenge.
That was September. It took me approx. 2 months to demo the house, at which time we uncovered some unsettling structural problems, which we knew would happen (to be discussed in later posts).
So three months later and 60 tons of plaster and debris later, we are finally getting to putting things back in.
Here are some photos. Hope you all enjoy and feel free to post any advice, recommendations, suggestions, or anything else you would like to throw my way!
*Disclaimer: I have obtained all necessary permits and have consulted a structural engineer, promise!*
Here are a few more of the original pics...
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And yes, in the one bedroom that is just carpet samples which were nailed (yes, nailed) directly to the hardwood floor....
Demo Time -
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From the pictures you can tell that something drastic had to be done.
As I stated, two stinkin' months of tearing this place down, and 3 30 yard dumpsters.
After having it tore down, it became evident that there were two renovations done to the house, one in the 50's (again found from the newpapers) and one in the 80's or early 90's. When they did these renovations they compromised a lot of the structure, which I fully intend to fix with a little help from you guys (and the SE).
Anyway, attached is some of the same views in the before pics. We made a bunch of changes by just knocking down some of the partition walls and drop ceilings. With the 9 ft. ceiling height, (they dropped to about 7 ft. 6 inches), it made a huge difference.
We loved the bannister and had to keep it for some of the charm. We also kept all the trim from the windows so that we can put it back on at the end of the project. We wanted to keep as much of the original as possible, which ended up being just trim and a bannister, haha.
The bathroom, (on the second floor), was completely suspended by studs that were attached to the stairs. The renovations in the past had completely notched through three floor joists including the header those joists were toenailed to! Amazing that it was still standing.
And for whatever reason, we had to keep that fireplace in there.
Thanks for looking and I will post more as the progress continues and I get my pictures organized.
Til next time,
Just a few more...
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Here are a few more pics after we finally got done the demo work (sorta).
Holy Smokes, that kitchen!! Wow! You could get vertigo walking in there....
You are pretty daring for taking on a project that huge! Hope you have fun with it. Should look great when it's all done.
If you try using that fire place you'll soo see why you see so few of them.
Very little heat output and will use wood as fast as you can load it.
Replace it with an airtite wood stove and get some real heat and fraction of the wood.
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Is the exterior as nice as it looks?
Wow! can only imagine the look on visitors faces when they went from charming Colonial on the outside to Psychedelic era late 1960's explosion on the inside! Some very nice styles of decor came out of the 60's and that house saw NONE of it.
As for the actual age. It seems kinda hard to tell. I could see it being built before 1925. Were there any traces of gas lighting at one point? An early 1910's house may very well have had gas lighting, or electric and gas together (as was the case with our 3 story 3 unit apartment building in Chicago built in 1915)
Sometimes but not usually the heating system is a clue. Is that hot water or two pipe steam I see?
and that fireplace, I think those have come back in fashion...
Joe - the fireplace is actually a gas fireplace, so I believe once we get it all checked out and it is good to go we will keep it. If not, a wood burning stove would be a great option, especially as in that area (kitchenette and kitchen) there will be vaulted ceilings, so it could get cold. Something to look at in the future for sure.
Eplumber - Yes, the outside is truly as good as it looks. There is relatively new siding, brand new roof (including the plywood), and all of the doors are functioning and seem in pretty good shape. We are replacing about 13 of the 20 windows as they are the original wood windows with the counterweight system, pretty cool stuff. They actually all still work too!
Gusher - We certainly have the gas lighting traces in there (actually all of the piping still). We had the knob and tube as well, which has been ripped out. Yes, those fireplaces are actually very expensive and trendy right now! We will ride that until the trend ends and maybe in the future replace with a wood burning to get some more heat if needed. We will see I guess.
Touring that place was very comical. It is in a very nice area and was an estate sale, so we feel that we definitely got a steal on it comparison wise. Although I am a newbie as far as a lot of this stuff goes, this is our second house and we did the same thing to the first one (which we sold in December), just on a much smaller scale. We were excited as to what challenges this house would bring...which it certainly already has!
I am sure that tons of people came through this house b/c of the great exterior, park like yard (which actually backs into the park), and dead end street. I will tell you it was difficult to get past the 7 ft. ceilings, horrible carpet, god awful kitchen, etc. but for some reason the wifey just had to have it!
Hopefully I can get some more pics up today and share some of the things I am currently working on.
First Structural Project
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Our first structural project was the entranceway. You can see from the original pictures how the entranceway first looked. When we removed the plaster we noticed a few things:
1) The entrance way "bump out" was an addition put on. Instead of putting any sort of support in to cut four or five studs out of the existing exterior of the house, they thought it would be a swell idea to leave them as is, simply hanging. I guess they figured the 1x header they have running through there is sufficient.
2) The plumbing for the bathroom had notched through completely three floor joists. When I say completely I mean completely. Sorry for the quality of the pics, I did not realize I would be documenting this at the time when taking this in December, so the problem is not 100% clear here.
To fix this, the SE had advised us to put a 2-2x10 header up where the entranceway studs were cut. After completing this, we had to do something about the cut floor joists. B/C the old floor joists are 7 7/8 inch's, we had to rip 2 x 10's to replace the old ones. The engineer wanted these doubled up, so we gladly obliged.
Since these pics, we have added a few more nails, hangers, etc, and even one more floor joist in the bathroom in between the wall and the first joist.
Another issue we had is that the house sags slightly, so I had to put these joists in slighly unlevel in order to match what was there, or else my whole bathroom would have a ripple type effect when the subfloor goes in. It is flat, just not 100 percent level. We will be jacking up the house in an effort to regain some level back, but most likely it will still not be perfect.
Also, anyone know how to post pictures and then put text before or after the pictures? I would like to comment on the pictures directly above or below them but am having trouble doing so.
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As I was sitting here admiring the thread that I have going, I took a closer look at the pictures in the last post and it dawned on me that I made a mistake, hopefully a fixable one without re-doing everything.
This is a ballon framed house. In my SE drawings, there was no mention of how this would effect my measurements for the headers or the king stud. Notice currently I have no king stud. The reason is simple, there was none where I needed the header to be. In a platform house, I would simply have just placed one there. Notice also there is no top plate.
My proposed solution - cut the 2 x10 Header flush with the trimmers. The reason we through the trimmers there is that there is a floor joist right next to the trimmers to the left. I would like to essentially create a king stud here by adding both a bottom plate and top plate, which would hopefully sufficiently secure the header as well as create a fire block as required. My plan was to run the top plate on top of the header, fasten down to the header as well as the king ballon stud to the left and the first ceiling joist resting on the header.
If anyone has any insight or has run into this in the past, please feel free to share your experiences.
In hindsight, obviously we should have used the existing stud as the king stud (as we did on the other side). For whatever reason I decided not to do that and either have to come up with a code-proof solution or redo. Bummer. The trials and tribulations of a DIY'er. When I started this thread I promised to not only put the good parts up but also the bad...oh well.
Looking forward to the next update! Looking great!
Been There, Done That, Dont ever want to do it again. You buy old stuff with hard earned money, then tear out most of what you bought, throw it into a dumpster, and pay to have it taken away. Nothing is plumb, Nothing is level, There is usually Asbestos somewhere, The plumbing all has to go, the Electric all has to go, etc etc etc. and the dirt, where does all that black dirt in the walls come from??? At the end of the day you paid for a nice bannister, and for some reason, they did not have any closets back then. I guess they just left all their clothes on all the time, cause they didnt have insulation.
It is so much easier to build a new home than refurbish one of these that it isnt even in the same Galaxy, but good luck, and I hope you get through it with a couple of bucks and your sanity in tact.
PS They straightened those walls with the brown coat. Buy a power plane, you are going to need it.
I just looked at your house from the front view. Where are the posts that should be holding up the front porch????? There is no way to cantilever like that without steel??? Did your SE see that?
Jagans -
With regards to the porch, honestly I could not tell you. Perhaps this is a project down the road that I can look at. However, this porch was an addition in the 50's and has stood firm every since, so I do not feel as though it is something that I need to address at this minute, especially given the current situation in the house. That being said it is a very interesting point, and one that I appreciate you finding!
In response to your first post -
For the thread's sake, I will provide a little background as to why we bought how we bought, where we bought, and our decision to renovate as extreme as we are.
Way back when I was 23 I bought my first house (just turned 27) and took some of the Obama money that came with it. It was a beater, so we decided to renovate. The stuff we found was pretty shocking. For example, mold, no insulation, dangerous electric, etc. We kept tearing out further and further until eventually it was a complete renovation. We renovated into a really gorgeous little duplex in Philly and sold it and made quite a decent profit, more than we could make at our jobs anyway. That was three years ago (purchase) and sale was three months ago. Time went quick that's for sure!
We decided to do another fixer upper (bigger scale) for a few reasons:
The first was family. I did not want to live in a duplex where I did not like my neighbors and could not send my kids to public school. I wanted to be in an area where my future kids (wife is prego) could thrive and have as good of a childhood as I did. If you know anything about the Philly suburbs then you know they are pricy. At 27, I am priced out of most of those neighborhoods, even with the good job and decent down-payment we had. Which is the second reason: Finance. As an accountant, I take this stuff pretty seriously. We got this house (estate sale) at about 1/2 of the price of some of our neighbors homes. This also means 1/2 of the property tax, which in NJ is the highest in the country. My neighbors with the decent house are about 15K+ a year. Too much for me. We got this house for less than the small duplex we sold in Philly, so we have a reasonable (but still strict) budget to deal with. The third reason we are able to do this with a relatively sane mind is our in-laws. They have a very comfortable 4500+ sq. house within 20minutes of this location. We stay there, and in the mean time can save even more money for the renovations and live comfortably in the meantime. We also truly enjoy making it our own and being in control of the process from start to finish, including being in control of the subs and the whole she-bang. Perhaps that is the control freak side of me...
Obviously we are aware that this is a monster project, which is why I figure I get friendly with some people who know what they are doing ASAP. Bottom line is we like doing the work (for the most part) and we like knowing even better that everything that should be there is there. Even if I double my renovation budget, I will still come in about 120K under what the new construction on a crappier lot in a less desirable street is currently listed at. I am sure I could have found a very small nice new condo or townhouse for my budget, but that was certainly not what we were going for.
I am sure that answer was just about 75 lines longer than you needed, but hey. I always here on here the more descriptive the better.:thumbsup:
Question: How did your project turn out?
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Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation, including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.
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The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries.
For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all for labor to be separated from property. Marxians and other radical economists commonly refer to the process as "primitive accumulation."
"What the capitalist system demanded was... a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labor into capital." That meant expropriating the land, "to which the [peasantry] has the same feudal rights as the lord himself." [Marx, "Chapter 27: The Expropriation," Capital vol. 1]
To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land.
J. L. and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field system as a survival of the free peasant society of Anglo-Saxon times, with landlordism superimposed on it. The gentry saw surviving peasant rights as a hindrance to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural community was "taken to pieces ... and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government." [The Village Labourer 27-28, 35-36].
When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic lands to the nobility, the latter "drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub tenants and threw their holdings into one." [Marx, "The Expropriation"]. This stolen land, about a fifth of the arable land of England, was the first large-scale expropriation of the peasantry.
Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters. It acts first of all to conceal class conflict and exploitation behind a smokescreen of "national unity" or "general welfare." Those who point to the role of the state as guarantor of class privilege are denounced, in theatrical tones of moral outrage, for "class warfare." If anyone is so unpardonably "extremist" as to describe the massive foundation of state intervention and subsidy upon which corporate capitalism rests, he is sure to be rebuked for "Marxist class war rhetoric" (Bob Novak), or "robber baron rhetoric" (Treasury Secretary O'Neill).
The ideological framework of "national unity" is taken to the point that "this country," "society," or "our system of government" is set up as an object of gratitude for "the freedoms we enjoy." Only the most unpatriotic notice that our liberties, far from being granted to us by a generous and benevolent government, were won by past resistance against the state. Charters and bills of rights were not grants from the state, but were forced on the state from below.
If our liberties belong to us by right of birth, as a moral fact of nature, it follows that we owe the state no debt of gratitude for not violating them, any more than we owe our thanks to another individual for refraining from robbing or killing us. Simple logic implies that, rather than being grateful to "the freest country on earth," we should raise hell every time it infringes on our liberty. After all, thats how we got our liberty in the first place. When another individual puts his hand in our pocket to enrich himself at our expense, our natural instinct is to resist. But thanks to patriotism, the ruling class is able to transform their hand in our pocket into "society" or "our country."
The religion of national unity is most pathological in regard to "defense" and foreign policy. The manufacture of foreign crisis and war hysteria has been used since the beginning of history to suppress threats to class rule. The crooked politicians may work for the "special interests" domestically, but when those same politicians engineer a war it is a matter of loyalty to "our country."
The Chairman of the JCS, in discussing the "defense" posture, will refer with a straight face to "national security threats" faced by the U. S., and describe the armed forces of some official enemy like China as far beyond "legitimate defensive requirements." The quickest way to put oneself beyond the pale is to point out that all these "threats" involve what some country on the other side of the world is doing within a hundred miles of its own border. Another offense against fatherland worship is to judge the actions of the United States, in its global operations to keep the Third World safe for ITT and United Fruit Company, by the same standard of "legitimate defensive requirements" applied to China.
In the official ideology, America's wars by definition are always fought "for our liberties," to "defend our country," or in the smarmy world of Maudlin Albright, a selfless desire to promote "peace and freedom" in the world. To suggest that the real defenders of our liberties took up arms against the government, or that the national security state is a greater threat to our liberties than any foreign enemy we have ever faced, is unforgiveable. Above all, good Americans don't notice all those military advisers teaching death squads how to hack off the faces of union organizers and leave them in ditches, or to properly use pliers on a dissident's testicles. War crimes are only committed by defeated powers. (But as the Nazis learned in 1945, unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the new hegemonic power.)
After a century and a half of patriotic indoctrination by the statist education system, Americans have thoroughly internalized the "little red schoolhouse" version of American history. This authoritarian piety is so diametrically opposed to the beliefs of those who took up arms in the Revolution that the citizenry has largely forgotten what it means to be American. In fact, the authentic principles of Americanism have been stood on their head. Two hundred years ago, standing armies were feared as a threat to liberty and a breeding ground for authoritarian personalities; conscription was associated with the tyranny of Cromwell; wage labor was thought to be inconsistent with the independent spirit of a free citizen. Today, two hundred years later, Americans have been so Prussianized by sixty years of a garrison state and "wars" against one internal enemy or another, that they are conditioned to genuflect at the sight of a uniform. Draft dodgers are equivalent to child molesters. Most people work for some centralized corporate or state bureaucracy, where as a matter of course they are expected to obey orders from superiors, work under constant surveillance, and even piss in a cup on command.
During wartime, it becomes unpatriotic to criticize or question the government and dissent is identified with disloyalty. Absolute faith and obedience to authority is a litmus test of "Americanism." Foreign war is a very useful tool for manipulating the popular mind and keeping the domestic population under control. War is the easiest way to shift vast, unaccount- able new powers to the State. People are most uncritically obedient at the very time they need to be most vigilant.
The greatest irony is that, in a country founded by revolution, "Americanism" is defined as respecting authority and resisting "subversion." The Revolution was a revolution indeed, in which the domestic political institutions of the colonies were forcibly overthrown. It was, in many times and places, a civil war between classes. But as Voltairine de Cleyre wrote a century ago in "Anarchism and American Traditions," the version in the history books is a patriotic conflict between our "Founding Fathers" and a foreign enemy. Those who can still quote Jefferson on the right of revo- lution are relegated to the "extremist" fringe, to be rounded up in the next war hysteria or red scare.
This ideological construct of a unified "national interest" includes the fiction of a "neutral" set of laws, which conceals the exploitative nature of the system of power we live under. Under corporate capitalism the relationships of exploitation are mediated by the political system to an extent unknown under previous class systems. Under chattel slavery and feudalism, exploitation was concrete and personalized in the producer's relationship with his master. The slave and peasant knew exactly who was screwing them. The modern worker, on the other hand, feels a painful pounding sensation, but has only a vague idea where it is coming from.
Besides its function of masking the ruling class interests behind a facade of "general welfare," ideological hegemony also manufactures divisions between the ruled. Through campaigns against "welfare cheats" and "deadbeats," and demands to "get tough on crime," the ruling class is able to channel the hostility of the middle and working classes against the underclass.
Especially nauseating is the phenomenon of "billionaire populism." Calls for bankruptcy and welfare "reform," and for wars on crime, are dressed up in pseudo-populist rhetoric, identifying the underclass as the chief parasites who feed off the producers' labor. In their "aw, shucks" symbolic universe, you'd think America was a Readers Digest/Norman Rockwell world with nothing but hard-working small businessmen and family farmers, on the one hand, and welfare cheats, deadbeats, union bosses and bureaucrats on the other. From listening to them, you'd never suspect that multi- billionaires or global corporations even exist, let alone that they might stand to benefit from such "populism."
In the real world, corporations are the biggest clients of the welfare state, the biggest bankruptcies are corporate chapter eleven filings, and the worst crimes are committed in corporate suites rather than on the streets. The real robbery of the average producer consists of profit and usury, extorted only with the help of the state--the real "big government" on our backs. But as long as the working class and the underclass are busy fighting each other, they won't notice who is really robbing them.
As Stephen Biko said, "The oppressors most powerful weapon is the mind of the oppressed."
In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. Under capitalism, access to capital is restricted by the money monopoly, by which the state or banking system is given a monopoly on the medium of exchange, and alternative media of exchange are prohibited. The money monopoly also includes entry barriers against cooperative banks and prohibitions against private issuance of banknotes, by which access to finance capital is restricted and interest rates are kept artificially high.
Just in passing, we might mention the monumental hypocricy of the regulation of credit unions in the United States, which require that their membership must share some common bond, like working for the same employer. Imagine the outrage if IGA and Safeway lobbied for a national law to prohibit grocery co-ops unless the members all worked for the same company! One of the most notable supporters of these laws is Phil Gramm, that renowned "free marketeer" and economics professor--and foremost among the banking industry's whores in Congress.
Individualist and mutualist anarchists like William Greene [Mutual Banking], Benjamin Tucker [Instead of a Book], and J. B. Robertson [The Economics of Liberty] viewed the money monopoly as central to the capitalist system of privilege. In a genuinely free banking market, any group of individuals could form a mutual bank and issue monetized credit in the form of bank notes against any form of collateral they chose, with acceptance of these notes as tender being a condition of membership. Greene speculated that a mutual bank might choose to honor not only marketable property as collateral, but the "pledging ... [of] future production." [p. 73]. The result would be a reduction in interest rates, through competition, to the cost of administrative overhead--less than one percent.
Abundant cheap credit would drastically alter the balance of power between capital and labor, and returns on labor would replace returns on capital as the dominant form of economic activity. According to Robinson,
Upon the monopoly rate of interest for money that is... forced upon us by law, is based the whole system of interest upon capital, that permeates all modern business.
With free banking, interest upon bonds of all kinds and dividends upon stock would fall to the minimum bank interest charge. The so-called rent of houses... would fall to the cost of maintenance and replacement.
All that part of the product which is now taken by interest would belong to the producer. Capital, however... defined, would practically cease to exist as an income producing fund, for the simple reason that if money, wherewith to buy capital, could be obtained for one-half of one per cent, capital itself could command no higher price [pp. 80-81].
And the result would be a drastically improved bargaining position for tenants and workers against the owners of land and capital. According to Gary Elkin, Tucker's free market anarchism carried certain inherent lib- ertarian socialist implications:
It's important to note that because of Tucker's proposal to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his so-called Individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers' control but would in fact promote it. For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to (1) demand and get workplace democracy, and (2) pool their credit buy and own companies collectively.
The banking monopoly was not only the "lynchpin of capitalism," but also the seed from which the landlord's monopoly grew. Without a money monopoly, the price of land would be much lower, and promote "the process of reducing rents toward zero." [Gary Elkin, "Benjamin Tucker--Anarchist or Capitalist"].
Given the worker's improved bargaining position, "capitalists' ability to extract surplus value from the labor of employees would be eliminated or at least greatly reduced." [Gary Elkin, Mutual Banking]. As compensation for labor approached value-added, returns on capital were driven down by market competition, and the value of corporate stock consequently plummeted, the worker would become a de facto co-owner of his workplace, even if the company remained nominally stockholder-owned.
Near-zero interest rates would increase the independence of labor in all sorts of interesting ways. For one thing, anyone with a twenty-year mortgage at 8% now could, in the absence of usury, pay it off in ten years. Most people in their 30S would have their houses paid off. Between this and the nonexistence of high-interest credit card debt, two of the greatest sources of anxiety to keep one's job at any cost would disappear. In addition, many workers would have large savings ("go to hell money"). Signifi- cant numbers would retire in their forties or fifties, cut back to part-time, or start businesses; with jobs competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would be revolutionary.
Our hypothetical world of free credit in many ways resembles the situation in colonial societies. E. G. Wakefield, in View of the Art of Colon- ization, wrote of the unacceptably weak position of the employing class when self-employment with one's own property was readily available. In colonies, there was a tight labor market and poor labor discipline because of the abundance of cheap land. "Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-labourer remain indecently low. The wage-labourer loses into the bar- gain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of depen- dence on the abstemious capitalist."
Where land is cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourers' share of the product, but the diffi- culty is to obtain combined labour at any price.
This environment also prevented the concentration of wealth, as Wakefield commented: "Few, even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth." As a result, colonial elites petitioned the mother country for imported labor and for restrictions on land for settlement. According to Wakefield's disciple Herman Merivale, there was an "urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers--for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them." [Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism; Marx, Chapter 33: "The New Theory of Colonialism," in Capital Vol. 1].
In addition to all this, central banking systems perform additional service to the interests of capital. First of all, the chief requirement of finance capitalists is to avoid inflation, in order to allow predictable returns on investment. This is ostensibly the primary purpose of the Federal Reserve and other central banks. But at least as important is the role of the central banks in promoting what they consider a "natural" level of unemployment--until the 1990s around six per cent. The reason is that when unemployment goes much below this figure, labor becomes increasingly uppity and presses for better pay and working conditions and more autonomy. Wor- kers are willing to take a lot less crap off the boss when they know they can find a job at least as good the next day. On the other hand, nothing is so effective in "getting your mind right" as the knowledge that people are lined up to take your job.
The Clinton "prosperity" is a seeming exception to this principle. As unemployment threatened to drop below the four per cent mark, some members of the Federal Reserve agitated to raise interest rates and take off the "inflationary" pressure by throwing a few million workers on the street. But as Greenspan [Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan] testified before the Senate Banking Committee, the situation was unique. Given the degree of job insecurity in the high-tech economy, there was "[a]typical restraint on compensation increases." In 1996, even with a tight labor market, 46% of workers at large firms were fearful of layoffs--compared to only 25% in 1991, when unemplojment was much higher.
The reluctance of workers to leave their jobs to seek other em- ployment as the labor market tightened has provided further evidence of such concern, as has the tendency toward longer labor union contracts. For many decades, contracts rarely exceeded three years. Today, one can point to five- and six-year contracts--contracts that are commonly characterized by an emphasis on job security and that involve only modest wage increases. The low level of work stoppages of recent years also attests to concern about job security.
Thus the willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented. For the bosses, the high-tech economy is the next best thing to high unemployment for keeping our minds right. "Fighting inflation" translates operationally to increasing job insecurity and making workers less likely to strike or to look for new jobs.
The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it. Right-libertarian Murray Rothbard considered patents a fundamental violation of free market principles.
The man who has not bought a machine and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the inven- tion, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Pa- tents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasions of property rights on the market. [Man, Economy, and State vol. 2 p. 655]
Patents make an astronomical price difference. Until the early 1970s, for example, Italy did not recognize drug patents. As a result, Roche Products charged the British national health a price over 40 times greater for patented components of Librium and Valium than charged by competitors in Italy [Raghavan, Recolonization p. 124].
Patents suppress innovation as much as they encourage it. Chakravarthi Raghavan pointed out that research scientists who actually do the work of inventing are required to sign over patent rights as a condition of employ- ment, while patents and industrial security programs prevent sharing of information, and suppress competition in further improvement of patented inventions. [op. cit. p. 118] Rothbard likewise argued that patents elim- inate "the competitive spur for further research" because incremental inno- vation based on others' patents is prohibited, and because the holder can "rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent," with no fear of a competitor improving his invention. And they hamper technical progress because "mechanical inventions are discoveries of natural law rather than individual creations, and hence similar independent inventions occur all the time. The simultaneity of inventions is a familiar historical fact." [op. cit. pp. 655, 658-659].
The intellectual property regime under the Uruguay Round of GATT goes far beyond traditional patent law in suppressing innovation. One benefit of traditional patent law, at least, was that it required an invention under patent to be published. Under U.S. pressure, however, "trade secrets" were included in GATT. As a result, governments will be required to help sup- press information not formally protected by patents [Raghavan, op. cit. p. 122].
And patents are not necessary as an incentive to innovate. According to Rothbard, invention is rewarded by the competitive advantage accruing to the first developer of an idea. This is borne out by F. M. Scherer's testimony before the FTC in 1995 [Hearings on Global and Innovation-Based Compe- tition]. Scherer spoke of a survey of 91 companies in which only seven "accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments." Most of them described patents as "the least important of considerations." Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be "the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales." In another study, Scherer found no negative effect on R & D spending as a result of compulsory licensing of patents. A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.
The one exception was drugs, in which 60% supposedly would not have been invented. I suspect disingenuousness on the part of the respondants, however. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices.
The injustice of patent monopolies is exacerbated by government funding of research and innovation, with private industry reaping monopoly profits from technology it didn't spend a penny to develop. In 1999, extending the research and experimentation tax credit was, along with extensions of a number of other corporate tax preferences, considered the most urgent busi- ness of the Congressional leadership. Hastert, when asked if any elements of the tax bill were essential, said: "I think the [tax preference] extenders are something we're going to have to work on." Ways and Means Chair Bill Archer added, "before the year is out... we will do the extenders in a very stripped down bill that doesn't include anything else." A five-year extension of the research and experimentation credit (retroactive to 1 July 1999) was expected to cost $13.1 billion. (That credit makes the effective tax rate on R & D spending less than zero.) [Citizens for Tax Justice, GOP Leaders Distill Essence of Tax Plan].
The Government Patent Policy Act of 1980, with 1984 and 1986 amend- ments, allowed private industry to keep patents on products developed with government R & D money--and then to charge ten, twenty, or forty times the cost of production. For example, AZT was developed with government money and in the public domain since 1964. The patent was given away to Burroughs Wellcome Corp. [Chris Lewis, "Public Assets, Private Profits"].
As if the deck were not sufficiently stacked already, the pharmaceutical companies in 1999 actually lobbied Congress to extend certain patents by two years by a special act of private law [Benjamin Grove, "Gibbons backs drug-monopoly bill"].
Patents have been used throughout the twentieth century "to circumvent antitrutst laws," according to David Noble. They were "bought up in large numbers to suppress competition," which also resulted in "the suppression of invention itself." [America by Design, pp. 84-109]. Edwin Prindle, a corporate patent lawyer, wrote in 1906:
Patents are the best and most effective means of controlling competition. They occasionally give absolute command of the market, enabling their owner to name the price without regard to the cost of production.... Patents are the only legal form of absolute monopoly [America by Design p. 90].
Patents played a key role in the formation of the electrical appliance, communications, and chemical industries. G. E. and Westinghouse expanded to dominate the electrical manufacturing market at the turn of the century largely through patent control. In 1906 they curtailed the patent litiga- tion between them by pooling their patents. AT&T also expanded "primarily through strategies of patent monopoly." The American chemical industry was marginal until 1917, when Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer seized German patents and distributed them among the major American chemical companies. DuPont got licenses on 300 of the 735 patents [America by Design pp. 10, 16].
Patents are also being used on a global scale to lock the transnational corporations into a permanent monopoly of productive technology. The single most totalitarian provision of the Uruguay Round is probably its "intellectual property" provisions. GATT has extended both the scope and duration of patents far beyond anything ever envisioned in original patent law. In England, patents were originally for fourteen years--the time needed to train two journeymen in succession (and by analogy, the time necessary to go into production and reap the initial profit for originality). By that stan- dard, given the shorter training times required today, and the shorter lifespan of technology, the period of monopoly should be shorter. Instead, the U.S. seeks to extend them to fifty years [Raghavan, Recolonization pp. 119-120]. According to Martin Khor Kok Peng, the U.S. is by far the most absolutist of the participants in the Uruguay Round. Unlike the European Community, and for biological processes for animal and plant protection [The Uruguay Round and Third World Sovereignty p. 28].
The provisions for biotech are really a way of increasing trade barriers, and forcing consumers to subsidize the TNCs engaged in agribusiness. The U.S. seeks to apply patents to genetically-modified organisms, effectively pirating the work of generations of Third World breeders by isolating beneficial genes in traditonal varieties and incorporating them in new GMOs--and maybe even enforcing patent rights against the traditional variety which was the source of the genetic material. For example Monsanto has attempted to use the presence of their DNA in a crop as prima facie evidence of pirating--when it is much more likely that their variety cross-pollinated and contaminated the farmer's crop against his will. The Pinkerton agency, by the way, plays a leading role in investigating such charges--that's right, the same folks who have been breaking strikes and kicking organizers down stairs for the past century. Even jack-booted thugs have to diversify to make it in the global economy.
The developed world has pushed particularly hard to protect industries relying on or producing "generic technologies," and to restrict diffusion of "dual use" technologies. The U. S.-Japanese trade agreement on semi-conductors, for example, is a "cartel-like, 'managed trade' agreement." So much for "free trade." [Dieter Ernst, "Technology, Economic Security and Latecomer Idustrialization," in Raghavan Pp. 39-40].
Patent law traditionally required a holder to work the invention in a country in order to receive patent protection. U.K. law allowed compulsory licensing after three years if an invention was not being worked, or being worked fully, and demand was being met "to a substantial extent" by impor- tation; or where the export market was not being supplied because of the patentee's refusal to grant licenses on reasonable terms [Raghavan pp. 120, 138].
The central motivation in the GATT intellectual property regime, how- ever, is to permanently lock in the collective monopoly of advanced technology by TNCs, and prevent independent competition from ever arising in the Third World. It would, as Martin Khor Kok Peng writes, "effectively pre- vent the diffusion of technology to the Third World, and would tremendously increase monopoly royalties of the TNCs whilst curbing the potential devel- opment of Third World technology." Only one percent of patents worldwide are owned in the Third World. Of patents granted in the 1970s by Third World countries, 84% were foreign-owned. But fewer than 5% of foreign-owned patents were actually used in production. As we saw before, the purpose of owning a patent is not necessarily to use it, but to prevent anyone else from using it [op. cit. pp. 29-30].
Raghavan summed up nicely the effect on the Third World:
Given the vast outlays in R and D and investments, as well as the short life cycle of some of these products, the leading Industrial Nations are trying to prevent emergence of competition by controlling... the flows of technology to others. The Uruguay round is being sought to be used to create export monopolies for the products of Industrial Nations, and block or slow down the rise of competitive rivals, particularly in the newly industrializing Third World countries. At the same time the technologies of senescent industries of the north are sought to be exported to the South under conditions of assured rentier income [op. cit. p. 96].
Corporate propagandists piously denounce anti-globalists as enemies of the Third World, seeking to use trade barriers to maintain an affluent Western lifestyle at the expense of the poor nations. The above measures--trade barriers--to permanently suppress Third World technology and keep the South as a big sweatshop, give the lie to this "humanitarian" concern. This is not a case of differing opinions, or of sincerely mistaken understanding of the facts. Setting aside false subtleties, what we see here is pure evil at work--Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever." If any archi- tects of this policy believe it to be for general human well-being, it only shows the capacity of ideology to justify the oppressor to himself and enable him to sleep at night.
INFRASTRUCTURE. Spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to "externalize its costs" on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses. Chomsky described this state capitalist underwriting of shipping costs quite accurately:
One well-known fact about trade is that it's highly subsidized with huge market-distorting factors.... The most obvious is that every form of transport is highly subsidized.... Since trade naturally requires transport, the costs of transport enter into the calculation of the efficiency of trade. But there are huge subsidies to reduce the costs of transport, through manipulation of energy costs and all sorts of market- distorting functions ["How Free is the Free Market?"].
Every wave of concentration of capital has followed a publicly subsi- dized infrastructure system of some sort. The national railroad system, built largely on free or below-cost land donated by the government, was followed by concentration in heavy industry, petrochemicals, and finance. The next major infrastructure projects were the national highway system, starting with the system of designated national highways in the 1920s and culminating with Eisenhower's interstate system; and the civil aviation system, built almost entirely with federal money. The result was massive concentration in retail, agriculture, and food processing.
The third such project was the infrastructure of the worldwide web, originally built by the Pentagon. It permits, for the first time, direction of global operations in real time from a single corporate headquarters, and is accelerating the concentration of capital on a global scale. To quote Chomsky again, "The telecommunications revolution... is... another state component of the international economy that didn't develop through private capital, but through the public paying to destroy themselves...." [Class Warfare p. 40].
The centralized corporate economy depends for its existence on a shipping price system which is artificially distorted by government intervention. To fully grasp how dependent the corporate economy is on socializing transportation and communications costs, imagine what would happen if truck and aircraft fuel were taxed enough to pay the full cost of maintenance and new building costs on highways and airports; and if fossil fuels depletion allowances were removed. The result would be a massive increase in shipping costs. Does anyone seriously believe that Wal-Mart could continue to undersell local retailers, or corporate agribusiness could destroy the family farm?
Intellectually honest right libertarians freely admit as much. For example, Tiber Machan wrote in The Freeman that
Some people will say that stringent protection of rights [against eminent domain] would lead to small airports, at best, and many constraints on construction. Of course--but what's so wrong with that?
Perhaps the worst thing about modern industrial life has been the power of political authorities to grant special privileges to some enterprises to violate the rights of third parties whose permission would be too expensive to obtain. The need to obtain that permission would indeed seriously impede what most environmentalists see as rampant--indeed reckless--industrialization.
The system of private property rights--in which... all... kinds of... human activity must be conducted within one's own realm except where cooperation from others has been gained voluntarily--is the greatest moderator of human aspirations.... In short, people may reach goals they aren't able to reach with their own resources only by con- vincing others, through arguments and fair exchanges, to cooperate ["On Airports and Individual Rights"].
The logjams and bottlenecks in the transportation system are an inevitable result of subsidies. Those who debate the reason for planes stacked up at O'Hare airport, or decry the fact that highways and bridges are deteriorating several times faster than repairs are being budgeted, need only read an economics 101 text. Market prices are signals that relate supply to demand. When subsidies distort these signals, the consumer does not per- ceive the real cost of producing the goods he consumes. The "feedback loop" is broken, and demands on the system overwhelm it beyond its ability to respond. When people don't have to pay the real cost of something they consume, they aren't very careful about only using what they need.
It is interesting that every major antitrust action in this century has involved either some basic energy resource, or some form of infrastructure, on which the overall economy depends. Standard Oil, AT&T, and Microsoft were all cases in which monopoly price gouging was a danger to the economy as a whole. This brings to mind Engels' observation that advanced capitalism would reach a stage where the state--"the official representative of capitalist society"--would have to convert "the great institutions for intercourse and communication" into state property. Engels did not foresee the use of antitrust actions to achieve the same end [Anti-Duhring].
The leading sectors of the economy, including cybernetics, communications, and military industry, have their sales and profits virtually guaranteed by the state. The entire manufacturing sector, as a whole, was permanently expanded beyond recognition by an infusion of federal money during World War II. In 1939 the entire manufacturing plant of the U.S. was valued at $40 billion. By 1945, another $26 billion worth of plant and equipment had been built, "two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds." The top 250 corporations in 1939 owned 65% of plant and equipment, but during the war operated 79% of all new facilities built with government funds [Mills, The Power Elite p. 101].
Machine tools were vastly expanded by the war. In 1940, 23% of machine tools in use were less than 10 years old. By 1945, the figure had grown to 62%. The industry contracted rapidly after 1945, and would probably have gone into a depression, had it not returned to wartime levels of output during Korea and remained that way throughout the Cold War. The R & D complex, likewise, was a creation of the war. Between 1939 and 1945, the share of AT&T research expenditures made up of government contracts expanded from 1% to 83%. Over 90% of the patents resulting from government-funded wartime research were given away to industry. The modern electronics industry was largely a product of World War II and Cold War spending (e.g., mini- aturization of circuits for bomb proximity fuses, high capacity computers for command and control, etc.) [Noble, Forces of Production pp. 8-16].
The jumbo jet industry would never have come about without continuous Cold War levels of military spending. The machine tools needed for producing large aircraft were so complex and expensive that no "small peacetime orders" would have provided a sufficient production run to pay for them. Without large military orders, they would simply not have existed. The aircraft industry quickly spiraled into red ink after 1945, and was near bankruptcy at the beginning of the 1948 war scare, after which Truman restored it to life with massive spending. By 1964, 90% of aerospace R & D was funded by the government, with massive spillover into the electronics, machine tool, and other industries [Noble, Forces of Production pp. 6-7; Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948].
Infrastructure and military spending are not the only examples of the process by which cost and risk are socialized, and profit is privatized--or, as Rothbard put it, by which "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs." ["Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"]. Some of these government assumptions of risk and cost are ad hoc and targeted toward specific industries.
Among the greatest beneficiaries of such underwriting are electrical utilities. Close to 100% of all research and development for nuclear power is either performed by the government itself, in its military reactor program, or by lump-sum R & D grants; the government waives use-charges for nuclear fuels, subsidizes uranium production, provides access to government land below market price (and builds hundreds of miles of access roads at taxpayer expense), enriches uranium, and disposes of waste at sweetheart prices. The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 limited the liability of the nuclear power industry, and assumed government liability above that level [Adams and Brock pp. 279-281]. A Westinghouse official admitted in 1953,
If you were to inquire whether Westinghouse might consider putting up its own money.., we would have to say "No." The cost of the plant would be a question mark until after we built it and, by that sole means, found out the answer. We would not be sure of successful plant operation until after we had done all the work and operated succes- sfully.... This is still a situation of pyramiding uncertainties.... There is a distinction between risk-taking and recklessness [Ibid. pp. 278-279].
So much for profit as a reward for the entrepreneur's risk. These "entrepreneurs" make their profits in the same way as a seventeenth-century courtier, by obtaining the favor of the king. To quote Chomsky,
the sectors of the economy that remain competitive are those that feed from the public trough.... The glories of Free Enterprise provide a useful weapon against government policies that might benefit the general population.... But the rich and powerful... have long appre- ciated the need to protect themselves from the destructive forces of free-market capitalism, which may provide suitable themes for rousing oratory, but only so long as the public handout and the regulatory and protectionist apparatus are secure, and state power is on call when needed (Chomsky, Deterring Democracy p. 144].
Dwayne Andreas, the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, admitted that "[t]here is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians." [Don Carney, "Dwayne's World"].
Big business also enjoys financial support through the tax code. It is likely that most of the Fortune 500 would go bankrupt without corporate welfare. Direct federal tax breaks to business in 1996 were close to $350 billion [Based on my crunching on numbers in Zepezauer and Naiman, Take the Rich Off- Welfare]. This figure, for federal corporate welfare alone, is over two-thirds of annual corporate profits for 1996 ($460 billion) [Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996].
Estimates of state and local tax breaks is fairly impressionistic, since they vary not only with each critic's subjective definition of "cor- porate welfare," but involve the tax codes of fifty states and the public records of thousands of municipalities. Besides money pimps in the state and local governments are embarassed by the sweet deals they give their corporate johns. In my own state of Arkansas, the incorruptible Baptist preacher who serves as governor opposed a bill to require quarterly public reports from the Department of Economic Development on its special tax breaks to businesses. "[K]eeping incentive records from public scrutiny is important in attracting business," and releasing "proprietary information" could have a "chilling effect." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 3 Feb. 2001]. But state and local corporate welfare could easily amount to a figure com- parable to federal.
Taken as a whole, direct tax breaks to business at all levels of government are probably on the same order of magnitude as corporate profits. And this understates the effect of corporate welfare, since it disproportionately goes to a handful of giant firms in each industry. For example, accelerated depreciation favors expansion by existing firms. New firms find it of little benefit, since they are likely to lose money their first few years. An established firm, however, can run a loss in a new venture and charge the accelerated depreciation against its profits on old facilities [Baratz, "Corporate Giants and the Power Structure"].
The most outrageous of these tax expenditures is the subsidy to the actual financial transactions by which capital is concentrated. The interest deduction on corporate debt, most of which was run up on leveraged buyouts and acquisitions, costs the treasury over $200 billion a year [Zepezauer p. 122-123]. Without this deduction, the wave of mergers in the 1980s, or the megamergers of the 1990s, could never have taken place. On top of everything else, this acts as a massive direct subsidy to banking, increasing the power of finance capital in the corporate economy to a level greater than it has been since the Age of Morgan.
A closely related subsidy is the exemption from capital gains of securities transactions involved in corporate mergers (i.e. "stock swaps")--even though premiums are usually paid well over the market value of the stock [Green p. 11]. The 1986 tax reform included a provision which prevented corporations from deducting fees for investment 'banks and advisers involved in leveraged buyouts. The 1996 minimum wage increase repealed this provision, with one exception: interest deductions were removed for employee buyouts [Judis, "Bare Minimum"].
Right libertarians like Rothbard object to classifying tax expenditures as subsidies. It presumes that tax money rightfully belongs to the govern- ment, when in fact the government is only letting them keep what is rightfully theirs. The tax code is indeed unfair, but the solution is to elim- inate the taxes for everyone, not to level the code up [Rothbard, Power and Market p. 104]. This is a very shaky argument. Supporters of tax code reform in the 1980s insisted that the sole legitimate purpose of taxation was to raise revenue, not to provide carrots and sticks for social engineering purposes. And, semantic quibbling aside, the current tax system would be exactly the same if we started out with zero tax rates and then imposed a punitive tax only on those not engaged in favored activities. Either way, the uneven tax policy gives a competitive advantage to privileged industries.
In times of unusual popular consciousness and mobilization, when the capitalist system faces grave political threats, the state resorts to repression until the danger is past. The major such waves in this country--the Haymarket reaction, and the red scares after the world wars--are recounted by Goldstein [Political Repression in Modern America]. But the wave of repression which began in the 1970s, though less intense, has been permanently institutionalized to a unique extent.
Until the late 1960s, elite perspective was governed by the New Deal social contract. The corporate state would buy stability and popular acquiescence in imperialist exploitation abroad by guaranteeing a level of prosperity and security to the middle class. In return for higher wages, unions would enforce management control of the workplace. But starting during the Vietnam era, the elite's thinking underwent a profound change.
They concluded from the 1960s experience that the social contract had failed. In response to the antiwar protests and race riots, LBJ and Nixon began to create an institutional framework for martial law, to make sure that any such disorder in the future could be dealt with differently. Johnson's operation GARDEN PLOT involved domestic surveillance by the military, contingency plans for military cooperation with local police in suppressing disorder in all fifty states, plans for mass preventive detention, and joint exercises of police and the regular military [Morales, U.S. Mili- tary Civil Disturbance Planning]. Governor Reagan and his National Guard chief Louis Giuffrida were enthusiastic supporters of GARDEN PLOT exercises in California. Reagan was also a pioneer in creating quasi-military SWAT teams, which now exist in every major town.
The wave of wildcat strikes in the early 1970s showed that organized labor could no longer keep its part of the bargain, and that the social contract should be reasessed. At the same time, the business press was flooded with articles on the impending "capital shortage," and calls for shifting resources from consumption to capital accumulation. They predicted frankly that a cap on real wages would be hard to force on the public in the existing political environment [Boyte, Backyard Revolution pp. 13-16]. This sentiment was expressed by Huntington et al. in The Crisis of Democracy (a paper for the Trilateral Institution--a good proxy for elite thinking); they argued that the system was collapsing from demand overload, because of an excess of democracy.
Corporations embraced the full range of union-busting posibilities in Taft-Hartley, risking only token fines from the NLRB. They drastically increased management resources devoted to workplace surveillance and con- trol, a necessity because of discontent from stagnant wages and mounting workloads [Fat and Mean]. Wages as a percentage of value added have de- clined drastically since the 1970s; all increases in labor productivity have been channelled into profit and investment, rather than wages. A new Cold War military buildup further transferred public resources to industry.
A series of events like the fall of Saigon, the nonaligned movement, and the New International Economic Order were taken as signs that the transnational corporate empire was losing control. Reagan's escalating intervention in Central America was a partial response to this perception. But more importantly the Uruguay Round of GATT snatched total victory from the jaws of defeat; it ended all barriers to TNCs buying up entire economies, locked the west into monopoly control of modern technology, and created a world government on behalf of global corporations.
In the meantime the U.S. was, in the words of Richard K. Moore, importing techniques of social control from the imperial periphery to the core area. With the help of the Drug War and the National Security State, the apparatus of repression continued to grow. The Drug War has turned the Fourth Amendment into toilet paper; civil forfeiture, with the aid of jailhouse snitches, gives police the power to steal property without ever filing charges--a lucrative source of funds for helicopters and kevlar vests. SWAT teams have led to the militarization of local police forces, and cross-training with the military has led many urban police departments to view the local population as an occupied enemy [Weber, Warrior Cops].
Reagan's crony Giuffrida resurfaced as head of FEMA, where he worked with Oliver North to fine-tune GARDEN PLOT. North, as the NSC liaison with FEMA from 1982-84, developed a plan "to suspend the constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." [Chardy, "Reagan Aides and the 'Secret' Government"]. GARDEN PLOT, interestingly, was implemented during the Rodney King Riots and in recent anti-globalization protests. Delta Force provided intelligence and advice in those places and at Waco [Rosenberg, The Empire Strikes Back; Cockburn, The Jackboot State].
Another innnovation is to turn everyone we deal with into a police agent. Banks routinely report "suspicious" movements of cash; under "know your customer" programs, retailers report purchases of items which can conceivably be used in combination to manufacture drugs; libraries come under pressure to report on readers of "subversive" material; DARE programs turn kids into police informers.
Computer technology has increased the potential for surveillance to Orwellian levels. Pentium III processors were revealed to embed identity codes in every document written on them. Police forces are experimenting with combinations of public cameras, digital face-recognition technology, and databases of digital photos. Image Data LLC, a company in the process of buying digital drivers licence photos from all fifty states, was exposed as a front for the Secret Service.
It is almost too easy to bring back Bob Novak and Secretary O'Neill for another kick--but I can't resist. "Marxist class warfare?" "Robber baron rhetoric?" Well, the pages above recount the "class warfare" waged by the robber barons themselves. If their kind tend to squeal like pigs when we talk about class, it's because they've been stuck. But all the squealing in the world won't change the facts.
But what are the implications of the above facts for our movement? It is commonly acknowledged that the manorial economy was founded on force. Although you will never see the issue addressed by Milton Friedman, intellectually honest right libertarians like Rothbard acknowledge the role of the state in creating European feudalism and Amerian slavery. Rothbard, drawing the obvious conclusion from this fact, acknowledged the right of peasants or freed slaves to take over their "forty acres and a mule" without compensation to the landlord.
But we have seen that industrial capitalism, to the same extent as manorialism or slavery, was founded on force. Like its predecessors, capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer's market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market. To quote Benjamin Tucker again, landlords and capitalists cannot extract surplus value from labor without the help of the state. The modern worker, like the slave or the serf, is the victim of ongoing robbery; he works in an enterprise built from past stolen labor. By the same principles that Rothbard recognized in the agrarian realm, the modern worker is justified in taking direct control of production, and keeping the entire product of his labor.
In a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else's labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery.
All these forms of slavery together probably amount to half our working hours. If we kept the full value of our labor, we could probably maintain current levels of consumption with a work week of twenty hours. As Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated to produce a dollar he never received.
Our survey also casts doubt on the position of "anarchist" social democrat Noam Chomsky, who is notorious for his distinction between "visions" and "goals." His long-term vision is a decentralized society of self-governing communities and workplaces, loosely federated together--the traditional anarchist vision. His immediate goal, however, is to streng- then the regulatory state in order to break up "private concentrations of power," before anarchism can be achieved. But if , as we have seen, capitalism is dependent on the state to guarantee it survival, it follows that it is sufficient to eliminate the statist props to capitalism. In a letter of 4 September 1867, Engels aptly summed up the difference between anarchists and state socialists: "They say 'abolish the state and capital will go to the devil.' We propose the reverse." Exactly.
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On our way to Eau Claire to visit friends this weekend, and I had a TB that I needed to drop off. Besides we needed the stop to stretch out for a bit. Loved this hide. I might have to stop again to swap when we pass through. Giving this one a favorite point. SL, swapped TBs, TFTC. Prost!
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