Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

You know, I thought of another fallacy behind all this stuff.

We're told this is to prevent the next 9/11, but there's a problem with that. It's very unlikely -- for basic political reasons -- that this will be used to investigate the rich and powerful.

Huh? I thought people in caves in Afghanistan attacked us cause they hated our freedom?

The cave dweller thing is probably the biggest lie about 9/11. Bin Laden was rich, from an even richer family, was financed by some of the richest people on Earth, and had state support.

The next Osama bin Laden probably owns stock in the companies that are acting as contractors for the NSA right now. Or if he doesn't, his supporters and financiers probably do.

Case in point:

So now the DEA is using it to bust drug dealers. Why isn't the SEC using it to bust criminals on Wall St.? Think about it. Who's richer? Who's more connected? Who's gonna lawyer up and bust your chops hard if you come after them? Who's got friends and family members who might actually sit on committees in Washington that oversee your project?

Edit:

Given the above, I also consider it a good possibility that systems like this could be used against us. Recall 9/11 again. They were our planes that were flown into our buildings, not someone else's. What's the probability that a well-connected rich state-linked international terrorist will use systems like this to gather intel against the United States itself in preparation for a terrorist attack.

Want to smuggle in a nuke? Wouldn't it be helpful to pull all the personal information and movement schedules for all the people who work security at the Port of Long Beach...? to give just one example. That could be made to look like a routine investigation quite easily, and if Snowden can exfiltrate so much data so can someone else-- especially someone with a higher level of expertise and sponsorship.

How many NSA analysts have access to these systems? How much does that job pay?

And do any of them have dangerous personality traits or ideological affiliations? Guerilla domestic terrorism from within is also a possibility. Remember this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks

"I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws."

-Sir Thomas More, "Utopia", 1517

And that my friend is why Anarchy or Libertarian Socialism is the only choice for proper governance.

As a fellow left-libertarian, thanks for mentioning libertarian socialism.

My thought for a long time has been that the most practical (as in achievable today in the real world) and best government for actual human beings who want to be free would be a very minimal non-invasive and efficient government with a negative income tax and possibly some kind of non-profit health cost sharing system. Other than the rest of the standard stuff, it would be minimal and stay out of things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Rather than gambling on one political idea, why not open certain smaller states to experimentation of new political structures, and stop trying to make one massive old machine work better (ala startups vs mega-corporations).

There is zero competition of ideas in political science. Mostly variations of the same thing happening in every country (big powerful state, mixed social/capitalist economies).

>There is zero competition of ideas in political science

I think this is because political science, to me, seems like a lagging indicator of whats going on in the political sphere of the world (at least when it comes to "current issues").

It is also very telling that established powers feel very threatened by Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years, yet academics seem to not be able to clearly frame what is really going on (maybe to the benefit of those who are marginalized by the status quo for that knowledge will most assuredly be used against them).

Though Hayden hinted about it, there are some fundamental things going on here that stand in the way of such analysis, after all one cannot truly fight that of which one does not understand…

I wonder if they really do feel threatened?

I wonder that to, but only time will tell.

Probably only when their lives, loved ones and assets are at risk. But those with more are probably less likely to be in the thick of it, when the peasants revolt - and start to kill each other.

Well right now, their assets are definitely at risk, so there must be some fear there.

Peasants, the vast majority, to me, seem far too distracted with the machinations of the corporate state, which allow cover for ghosts to move within the machine…

> There is zero competition of ideas in political science.

It's hard to compete when the government claims a monopoly on violence and will use it against non-violent citizens.

Because it will be killed off by the massive old machine which needs the status quo to survive.

Might be a stretch, but take Cuba for an example.

> There is zero competition of ideas in political science.

This is definitely not true.

> Mostly variations of the same thing happening in every country (big powerful state, mixed social/capitalist economies).

That's politcoeconomic engineering, not political science. And its not the same thing going on everywhere -- you see lots of things that don't meet that in the world, as well as a pretty broad range of "socialist/capitalist" mixes with pretty divergent poles -- its just that the succesful ones look pretty similar.

But then, that's true of successful designs in many engineering domains.

Rather than gambling on one political idea, why not open certain smaller states to experimentation of new political structures, and stop trying to make one massive old machine work better

This was tried. It was called The United States of America. The 9th and 10th amendments to the constitution delegated an enormous amount of powers to the states to try their own experiments, with the federal government standing by to adjudicate interstate disputes and maintain standards of currency and commerce.

Then Lincoln came along.

>Then Lincoln came along.

If only our public schools taught kids the real meaning of the war of northern aggression.

Can you elaborate? I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on this. (I am a foreigner and certain things can escape the little I know about US).

I'll attempt to be brief:

1: The civil war was not, by definition, a civil war. The south never fought for control of the north. The definition of a civil war is both side fighting for control of the whole.

2: The states joined the union of their own volition, they weren't conquered. The "Civil War" changed the notion of free states. Now the states are subservient by force to the federal government.

3: Lincoln didn't free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation decreed that slaves in rebel states were free. Slave states loyal to the north got to keep their slaves. So, Lincoln freed slaves in lands he had no control over.

4: Lincoln oversaw the first national conscription law in which the government is allowed enslave citizens to war. You can't be a free country AND force people to their death.

Lincoln is popularly considered the angel of liberty to an enslaved people, but in reality he did more to enslave all of us to an all powerful federal government.

I'm curious to learn more about this era of history.

Are there any good books/films about the civil war that are recommended?

Most books and films about Lincoln are meant to celebrate the popular understanding of presidency. His humble beginnings, awkward appearance, rise to power, difficult choices, freer of slaves, and untimely death.

Some books have a different angle. Many books written generally about the history of liberty in the US will specifically cite the "Civil War" and it's negative consequences.

There's also a book called "The Real Lincoln". I haven't read it, but it might be one of the few books that casts a critical eye on the precedents Lincoln set.

Sorry, there's nothing specific that I've read, just a bunch of sources combined.

https://blueseed.co/

If I understand correctly, when I make a nice app for a friend and you find out how much did he pay me, you will take out your gun, point at me and force me to give you money to sponsor some people who you believe earn less than you think they deserve? This does not sound libertarian at all.

How about: you do what you think is good for people and I do what I think is good for people. And we don't try to force each other to change our opinions. If you have something to say, put your gun down and make your arguments. Like we do here, over the internet.

Edit: if you propose some tax system, who do you think should execute it? Who should carry a gun to force people to give money? Who will watch the people who carry guns? Who will decide when the force was applied incorrectly? Will you have a moral system when 50%+1 majority can switch morality of murder by 180 degrees?

You don't understand correctly. Socialism is simply worker control of the means of production, states, taxation, etc are entirely orthogonal. "Libertarian socialism" does not refer to social democracy, it refers to socialism. Furthermore, before the 1950s, "libertarian" meant socialist.

"Libertarian" used to be the opposite of "authoritarian":

"The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -George Orwell, 1948

Because of the debasement of language, "libertarian" can now mean "creepy rightwingy person" or "antigovernment nutjob", depending on which flavor of Statism one prefers.

Totally. This is the underlying cause of why, since capitalist social and economic relations are inherently authoritarian.

I believe by some sort of Rule of Discussions I am required to mention that Orwell was a socialist, to the point of picking up arms in Catalonia.

Makes me chuckle every time I see a Republican quote 1984.

How is an economic relationship between two independent entities with complete freedom of action for both independent entities best described as "inherently authoritarian" ?

The snarky answer is "because that's not what capitalism is," but let's try to elevate the conversation a bit, shall we?

First of all, capitalism is not a synonym for 'trade.' Trade between people has existed since forever, capitalism has only been around for a few hundred years.

Secondly, capitalism relies on more than two entities; it also relies on someone to actually enforce property relations. So your explanation is far too simple to actually describe the situation. Your simplification hides the authority: the final arbiter and enforcer of private property. This is generally a state. It's also quite authoritarian.

This is the kind of authority that socialists mean when they talk about authoritarian social relations. There's more to it than that, but that's the simplest introduction.

> The snarky answer is "because that's not what capitalism is," but let's try to elevate the conversation a bit, shall we?

Sure, lets. It would be a waste of time to just spin definitions in a way that makes us inherently right about whatever it is we're talking about without reference to a common agreed set of terms.

When advocates for free markets or anarcho capitalists are talking about capitalism, they most decidedly are talking precisely about free trade. I am not sure where you're getting this other definition of capitalism that only exists as a subset of the westphalian nation state, that sounds a lot more like corporatism to me, where limited liability shells are set up with explicit protectionist policies and almost purchased legal protections supporting their manufactured business models from a nation state.

Just to be clear where are you getting this definition of capitalism as a creation of the state and something that cannot exist without it, completely divorced from the free market? How would you describe markets which exist outside the control and sanction of the state and without any participatory enforcement by the state, frequently enough actually even actively opposed by the state? The "means of production" and the control of that means is not necessarily within the hands of "the workers" in the marxist sense in those situations, so how is this not a direct example of capitalism without the state?

My description does not attempt to hide the authority, the seller is responsible for their security as is the buyer, they are both free to make whatever arrangements they choose with whatever other parties they choose in order to ensure the security of those products. Vendors might buy security cameras or other theft and violence deterrents. Buyers might buy insurance against defects or also be customers of third party organisations which have a vested interest in being trustworthy sources of information about the quality of products available at vendors a-z, and so on, and so forth. It is absolutely not implicitly necessary that security for both parties be provided by a nation state or its legislative, judicial and executive branches.

If socialist criticisms of capitalism entirely rely upon classifying capitalism as a sub branch of the nation state, it seems an awfully big hole to not acknowledge that trade and markets can exist entirely divorced from nation states?

Further on the subject of socialism; I don't see how it's actually possible for socialism to exist without states? Having a centralised body which exercises violent authority to which all parties must submit and participate in is pretty much the definition of a state, How can socialists criticise free market approaches for defacto use of state enforcement mechanisms because they are what is available rather than the only way free market participants may enforce their terms and conditions when the very nature of socialism is to rely on that exact same state but in a more direct way and with no alternative mechanism for enforcement at all? A political entity which dispenses edicts amongst a population which is entirely free to ignore them is little more than a church, of what consequence is a socialist platform without a monopoly on force to compel adherence to the edicts and forcibly finance the policies of the political entity through taxation?

> Sure, lets. It would be a waste of time to just spin definitions in a way that makes us inherently right about whatever it is we're talking about without reference to a common agreed set of terms.

Cool, this is not going to be productive, I will respectfully bow out. Thanks!

Alright, I'm sorry if I gave you the impression I was attempting to be prejudicially dismissive of your position, the things you told me about Mondragon were actually quite interesting. Wish you all the best.

It's not so much you individually as ancaps on the internet in general, I've learned that it generally gets really quite repetitive and just isn't very productive.

I linked a page in your sibling where both your and I's side in this argument gets played out, just continue on there. ;)

Yes, I've read that before and it's extremely unconvincing I'm afraid. I'd go into details but you've already expressed a desire to refrain from such so I'll respect that.

That's a shame. I was very much enjoying this thread and I'd be very interested in your answers to the questions posed in grandparent.

The rest of the conversation would basically play out like this: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/append1.html

"Capitalism" is a term invented by 19th century socialists to refer to the system that had displaced the common oppression of the mass of the people by the narrow class with disproportionate control over land ("feudalism") with the common oppression of the mass of the people by the narrow class with disproportionate control over capital (which had come to include, but not be limited to, land.)

The concept of the arrangements between the strong and the weak which socialists paint as being oppressive in each system being entered into by mutual consent was often a feature of the justification of many implementations of both feudal and capitalist systems.

Yes, badges can so oversimplify and mislead.

From Wikipedia:

Democrat: is a proponent of democracy

Republican: An advocate of a republic, a form of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship

Libertarianism: a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end.

All of them sound pretty great to me, to the point I could easily choose to be a republican libertarian democrat. Heck you could even probably be a republican libertarian democratic anarchist.

So by describing socialism as orthogonal to taxation are you attempting to imply that socialism can exist without taxation? How exactly does that work? What does it in practice mean for "worker control of the means of production" to be enacted without violent centralised control administered by a political entity?

"Worker control of the means of production" sounds an awful lot like classical marxist communism and all the associated implications. And thus the off in the reeds tangential strangeness associated with private vs personal property, ad et al.

I'm not attempting anything, I'm telling you how socialists define and use the term 'socialism.'

> How exactly does that work?

It depends on what kind of socialist you're talking about, and at what scale. For example, the Mondragon corporation is a form of socialism. It's a worker co-operative with 80,000 employees. Another example of socialism at a larger scale is revolutionary Catalonia, where Orwell fought. For three years, the entire region was run in a socialist manner. Most industries operated under trade federations, and the rural areas also collectivised. Unfortunately, due to some squabbling between communists and anarchists, when the fascists showed up they got steamrolled.

> "Worker control of the means of production" sounds an awful lot like classical marxist communism and all the associated implications

You're close but wrong. There are two main forms of socialism: utopian and scientific. Marxism is the 'scientific' form, but communism is a classless, stateless, moneyless (maybe) society. In the Marxist framework, socialism is a step on the path to communism, not the same thing.

But regardless of which kind you're talking about, workers run things rather than capitalists.

> It depends on what kind of socialist you're talking about, and at what scale. For example, the Mondragon corporation is a form of socialism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_corporation

At the smaller scale; Intriguing stuff, but from reading this it sounds a whole lot like just another company with an interesting incentive scheme for employees and shareholders? From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant rather than some top down re-organisation of the entire market system itself.

On the subject of revolutionary catalonia, it sure does sound more like what my initial perception of socialism really is, people being forcibly compelled to toe the communist party line with threats of death, ad et al. Against that backdrop I suppose it is unsurprising that the anarchists and communists were squabbling, and this is what I was aiming at with my initial criticism of socialism as a necessarily "political" entity rather than just another voluntary participant subject to the same market forces as all the other voluntary participants. And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition and also the negative externalities of being focused on politics rather than actual material results.

> workers run things rather than capitalists.

Doesn't that once again reduce to "workers control the means of production" and then you're left with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property and all the political nonsense that goes along with that, munging the entire thing once again at scale into a necessarily authoritarian and political entity?

> From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant

This is absolutely true. It's a socialist entity acting within a broader capitalist economy. That's how it starts.

By the way, with your focus on markets, you might enjoy Kevin Carson and mutualism.

> And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition

Ehhh, the USSR went from a backwards farm country to being the first country to putting someone in space in the span of 80 years. Don't forget that imperialism played a huge factor, and has in other cases as well.

> with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property

There isn't really a need for anyone to 'figure out' what's personal vs. private property. It's not as if you must stand before a worker's council to defend your right to keep your toothbrush. It's simply that without an organization (the police) upholding private property law, absentee ownership is impossible.

re mutualism, of all the variants of leftist anarchism I am familiar with, this one does indeed appeal to me the most. The problem I have with it is only the idea that as soon as anyone who has invested labor into real estate vacates the property, it is supposed to be perfectly ethical / justifiable to simply appropriate it. This puts all kinds of peculiar incentives in play for owners of real estate to avoid losing their property by maintaining "occupancy" of it, which is in itself kind of a nebulous and strange definition.

If we build a server farm and use it for staging and then push that environment to production and we're not actively using staging for the next month, is it OK to appropriate that? If you spend many years of labour constructing your own home and all associated facilities, is it acceptable that when you go on holiday to some remote location, it should instantly be up for grabs?

If it's just a case of being unable to enforce absentee ownership for any given interval, I think this is both a terrible failure of imagination on the part of mutualists as well as an undeserved tip of the hat to that old "might makes right" chestnut. We can take your property, therefore it is not yours anymore.

I'll admit there are problems with the concept of ancap homesteading also; the mutualist criticism of "rearranging a few twigs on a parcel of land not entitling the arranger to title in perpetuity" is not without basis, natural resources and real property are quite thorny and difficult to disentangle concepts by nature. This is why the original suggestion of a thousand competing political systems flourishing is even more appealing to me then just every space on earth appropriating the ancap model as laid out in "the machinery of freedom".

Through competition and the market, we can see how things play out in the real world and what people end up preferring. I have no problem with any political philosophy insofar as they keep to themselves and do not attempt to enforce their ideas on those that are unable to choose an alternative, which unfortunately as the status quo stands is almost no place on the planet.

> "Worker control of the means of production" sounds an awful lot like classical marxist communism and all the associated implications.

Marxism is form of socialism (as are its descendants Leninism, et al.), so, yes, they include at least reference to "worker control of the means of production". The difference between authoritarian socialisms like Leninism (I'm going to leave out "Marxism" because there are problems with categorizing it -- libertarian socialist often see the roots of libertarian socialism in Marx and see Lenin, et al., as diverging from Marx in important ways -- which make it non-helpful in this context) and libertarian socialism is that authoritarian socialism uses the state as the vehicle for worker control of the means of production in a top down manner, and libertarian socialism prefers more direct, decentralized worker control (different strands of libertarian socialism have different particular programs, but one form is worker control by "worker's councils" or labor cooperatives controlling the particular factories or firms.)

Libertarian socialists often criticize authoritarian "socialist" regimes, particularly Leninist-style Communist ones, as creating state capitalism, because you end up with a party elite that controls the means of production which ends up with the same kind of oppressive power relationship with the powerless common worker that socialist critics of traditional capitalism criticized in capital, stemming from the same source (narrow control of power over the means of production.)

If I take your friend's phone and you find out about it, would you take out your gun, point it at me, and force me to ...?

I expect the answer is "yes", so I'm assuming that for the remainder of this response - if the answer is "no" then let me know and I'll respond to that.

I would contend that the reason you would be okay with responding to theft with (ultimately) violence is because it violates a social agreement (property rights) that our society has predominately agreed to adhere to. I do not see any inherent philosophical reason that violation of other aspects of our social compact (taxation) is different - if you believe it is, either inherently or as a matter of practicality - please explain your reasoning.

As another avowed Left Libertarian (see http://twitter.com/praguebob profile): ditto!

Left-anarchists never managed to convince me how are they gonna have this society in which everyone is equal and has no private property without forcing people not to. I mean, if everyone agreed, I'd have no problem with that. But I surely wouldn't and many people wouldn't as well.

Ah, the fine art of replacing one tyranny with another.

Being engulfed in a Leviathan (governed state) is a major contributing factor to what makes us civilised. We need a central government to enforce laws to stop us all killing each other. I personally don't want to live in a society where violent death is more likely than not. As for all property being public; where would be the motivation to work hard if you can bust your ass and still get the same money every month as lazy joe over there.

Can someone explain to me why I shouldn't equate Anarchy with power vacuum? My view of all forms of government is that they are systems. Within these systems, people apply pressure or force in a manner according to their nature. Any system designed without due consideration given to the nature of people -- with a heavy application of game theory -- ought to be called naïve at best.

Perhaps I need to better educate myself more about anarchy but I remain skeptical.

My only problem with such philosophies is that they tend to ignore human nature. Really nice in theory, but in practice, some thugs will always organize to control the masses. That's a lesson in History, not a dumb statement.

One might argue that now it's different, people have access to much more information than before, and that given enough time to educate the public enough on these matters of government, the Anarchist or Libertarian movements could gain critical mass and truly work.

I think not, simply because that would do nothing to change human nature. Most people, no matter how rational they can be in their everyday life, have emotions and desires, which aren't rational. Thus my impression that organized groups of people would always strive to control the masses.

> Really nice in theory, but in practice, some thugs will always organize to control the masses.

AKA "Government".

Anarchy is about order without a state. Not chaos. It will take work, and probably incremental evolution rather than revolution, to get to that state. The goal is to become more free. Living under the boot of oppression -- whether from the government itself or a mafia-like criminal gang -- is not freedom.

I still don't really understand how you can establish order without winding up with a body to direct & maintain that order, aka a governing body, aka a government.

Hello sliverstorm. I'm an anarchist. I don't want to tell you how to think at all but I seriously recommend this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5PbLLBfiM8

It's fairly non biased, and explains what you're asking. Its position is more on anarcho-capitalism (what most of the world/our day to day consists of) while most anarchists will believe in collective labour and possession only property.

> some thugs will always organize to control the masses

So the solution is to preemptively install an organization of thugs to control the masses?

I don't think your assessment of human nature is fair. At some point in history, having a king was an improvement upon existing social conditions. Going from constantly warring tribal society to one united under a king meant safety and relative prosperity and was in fact a social gain, though we tend to think of kings only in a negative context at this point. The autocrat pilferers.

However, we inevitable evolved past the need for kings. With wider spread literacy, trade, communication, etc… individuals became more capable of guiding their own society, thus democracy emerged. Your average 6th century peasant had as much use for voting as they would've for string theory.

I'm not saying we're there yet, but to say there's never to be a time when we evolve past the need to make decisions for our societies via government, even a "democratic" one, is foolish, I think.

One day I think we will look back on democracy as we do upon kings now.

> One day I think we will look back on democracy as we do upon kings now.

Yup. Personally, I think tolerance and total pacifism would be needed in this next evolutionary step, so it'll probably take a few wars for us to be tired of conflict...

I can already see many young people being disillusioned by politics, war, and nationalism. But many still adhere to those ideologies as well.

You're probably right. I'm definitely an idealist but I'm an odd case. I believe in total pacifism and confederate municipalism. I also believe that good only comes from grief. We'll have to die/suffer/make a lot more mistakes if we're going to be able to function as a consensus based anarchy.

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of Freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."

-Thomas Paine

Ah, it's not really like that. Explain the change that occurred in U.S. government policy when FDR succeeded Hoover.

> So now the DEA is using it to bust drug dealers. Why isn't the SEC using it to bust criminals on Wall St.?

Because the SEC is captured. [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

There's kooks out there who think the DEA is captured too. Obviously that's a ridiculous paranoid notion. It's not like there's any money in illegal drugs or anything, and everyone knows being a middle manager at the DEA pays the big bucks.

What I'm fundamentally getting at in my OP is elite deviance:

http://www.amazon.com/Elite-Deviance-Edition-David-Simon/dp/...

The NSA will not protect us from the deviance of those with real power, because those with real power can fight back. Those with real power are also those who have the resources to execute a real worst-case-scenario attack-- exactly the kind of terrorist attack this is supposed to be protecting us from. If somebody nukes New York it will not be an anti-government windbag with an Internet connection who just got fired from their job and decided to search for "how to build an atomic bomb." It will be an elite deviant, supported by a network of elite deviants and powerful ideological sympathizers. Someone with the motive and the means to execute on such a thing.

This system might detect motive with some probability of success, but it will not be used against those with means because those people (and their supporters) will pull strings and hire million dollar attorneys. (Or turn agents, pay off managers at government contractors, etc.)

I also have serious doubts about whether it'll stop the next Boston bomber or Timothy McVeigh either, but for different reasons: small players easily vanish into an ocean of false positives. There are mathematical limits that come into play here-- it's why undirected fishing expeditions in seas of scientific data are rarely successful.

This project is a dangerous, politically and socially irresponsible pork-barrel boondoggle that creates far more opportunities for crime and corruption than it prevents. Limits to government power and requirements for judicial oversight (a.k.a. peer review) aren't arbitrary whims or kooky notions supported by paranoids. They're a lot like the OSHA rules put in place at factories and industrial facilities. They are there to keep people from getting hurt and to keep expensive, dangerous accidents from taking place.

I don't think the DEA is at nearly as much risk of being captured by those they're meant to regulate compared to the SEC. Power and money are extremely concentrated on wall street, and there is a well-documented revolving door between wall street and the SEC that I don't think exists between drug dealers and DEA officials. [0]

Totally agree with the rest of your posts.

[0] http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/sec-revolving-door.html

I think you're partly right. The risk is much higher with the SEC, and I agree that SEC regulatory capture is a virtual certainty at this point.

But with drugs I don't think it's the dealers we have to worry about. The dealers are the little fish. It's the financiers, the money launderers, the ones who profit. They -- if they are smart -- never touch the stuff. They invest in it like they'd invest in any other venture.

My suspicion is that a captured DEA would behave not as an actual facilitator of drug trafficking but as a selective turf war tool to take politically unconnected competitors' drugs off the street. All you need there is enough influence to ensure that the DEA targets the other guys, not your bread and butter. That also helps to support the price of drugs, increasing your margins.

Actually it could be even simpler than that. If you have enough spies in the DEA you could be one ahead of them, have intel about how they conduct searches, etc. Then the DEA would act for you like a passive turf enforcement army. With your advantage you could fly under the radar, allowing the DEA to mop up your competition and prop up your margins by creating scarcity. Spying on an organization is orders of magnitude easier than influencing it, and requires the compromise of lower-level personnel. There's far more field agents and mid-level paper pushers than there are higher-up agenda setters and they make less money, making them easier targets to flip.

This is why the drug war is so bad for democracy and why prohibition encourages corruption. Put simply it creates a massive financial incentive for every kind of political corruption imaginable, and in so doing begets a "corruption infrastructure" that can be used for other kinds of crimes.

Interesting, that would be a different type of capture - partial capture, you could call it - and both potentially more insidious and far more difficult to prove. One: to the public the DEA still appears to be doing its job (and in a sense, it is), whereas the SEC often appears totally ineffectual in the face of massive and obvious fraud. Two: it would be far more difficult to trace any murky connections between the financiers of drug operations (who are presumably carefully laundering their money) and DEA officials, whereas the SEC regularly openly hires wall street execs and lawyers and vice versa, so the potential for conflicts of interest is obvious.

I wouldn't be too surprised if this was happening at some level in the DEA, but is there any information pointing to it or is it pure conjecture?

Mostly conjecture. There are people who talk about it, but they're independents who are usually tarred as "conspiracy nuts."

Example: http://www.madcowprod.com/

It's not the way the media portrays them that causes me to be skeptical, but the fact that they're so small and independent. Investigation is hard, and good investigative journalism with proper vetting of all sources costs a lot of money. It is very easy to be misled by misinformation or by kooks with an agenda. On the flip side, a good way to keep something quiet from investigative journalists is to spread a lot of phony BS, wait, and then point out that it's phony in order to discredit them.

For example, Daniel Hopsicker of the above link believed and perpetuated the "Mohammed Atta's American Girlfriend" story. I strongly suspect this story was BS and that he was misled by a stripper with psychological issues.

But he does have some good and verifiable information on the intersection between drugs and high-level corruption, and he did uncover some links to the 9/11 highjackers that point to similar corruption. His work on drug planes and their ownership is very interesting, and those kinds of things are easier for an independent to vet.

> I don't think the DEA is at nearly as much risk of being captured by those they're meant to regulate compared to the SEC. Power and money are extremely concentrated on wall street, and there is a well-documented revolving door between wall street and the SEC that I don't think exists between drug dealers and DEA officials.

The DEA regulates legal distribution of controlled substances (part of which is investigating and enforcing rules about the illegal distribution of those substances.)

Regulatory capture of the DEA wouldn't be capture by "drug dealers" -- at least of the Pablo Escobar, et al., variety -- it would be capture by, e.g., pharmaceutical companies.

I think regulation of pharmaceutical industry falls primarily under the purview of the FDA, not the DEA.

> I think regulation of pharmaceutical industry falls primarily under the purview of the FDA, not the DEA.

Different aspects of the operation of the pharmaceutical industry are regulated by the FDA (under the Food and Drug Act) and the DEA (under the Controlled Substances Act).

(Very loosely, the FDA regulates the manufacture/labeling of all drugs, the DEA regulates the distribution of controlled drugs.)

It seems like a lot of people don't know that prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban controlled regions had reduced opium poppy production by 99%, which was 75% of the global supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...

Just a coincidence I suppose.

A recent Forbes article talks about the data that the NSA is sharing with the DEA and IRS. The DEA and IRS are told to lie about where they get the data. This seems no different than when evidence in a criminal case is thrown out if police obtained it through an illegal means. The article calls for a special prosecutor.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifergranick/2013/08/14/nsa-d...

It's inevitable that the rich/powerful will use it against each other too. I guarantee that because of Snowden's actions, the next presidential election will see campaigns treating electronic communication as untrustworthy and will have new strategies/policies for communicating sensitive information. Accusations of illegal snooping will be made to sway public opinion.

Eventually, someone will actually get caught with their hand in the NSA's cookie jar.

Osama bin Laden didn't go to Harvard. His (half?) brother, Abdullah bin Laden, graduated from Harvard Law School.

I stand corrected. Thanks. Edited my original post. But the point remains unchanged. He was not an isolated kook with no money or connections, and his supporters and his financiers definitely were not.

To illustrate my point, here's a solid gold Mercedes: http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/03/white-gold-mercedes/

Kooks in caves with no connections. Yeah.

Pedantic point: that car isn't made of gold. The body panels are carbon fiber which have been wrapped in a reflective foil.

Damn nice looking though!

Not to mention our truly massive intelligence system - which is actively violating every notion of privacy the US has ever enjoyed - failed to even come close to stopping the Boston bombing, nor was it responsible for finding or stopping the suspects.

A hundred billion a year spent on fraudulent security theater.

"A hundred billion a year spent on fraudulent security theater."

I definitely think there's a pork angle to all this.

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