This article was first published on AlterNet

It’s Nobel Prize season again. News reports are coming out each day sharing the name of the illustrious winner of the various categories — Science, Literature, etc. But there’s one of the prizes that’s a little different. Well, that’s putting it lightly… you see, the Nobel Prize in Economics is not a real Nobel. It wasn’t created by Alfred Nobel. It’s not even called a “Nobel Prize,” no matter what the press reports say.

The five real Nobel Prizes—physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and medicine/physiology—were set up in the will left by the dynamite magnate when he died in 1895. The economics prize is a bit different. It was created by Sweden’s Central Bank in 1969, nearly 75 years later. The award’s real name is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” It was not established by Nobel, but supposedly in memory of Nobel. It’s a ruse and a PR trick, and I mean that literally. And it was done completely against the wishes of the Nobel family.

Sweden’s Central Bank quietly snuck it in with all the other Nobel Prizes to give retrograde free-market economics credibility and the appearance of scientific rigor. One of the Federal Reserve banks explained it succinctly, “Few realize, especially outside of economists, that the prize in economics is not an “official” Nobel. . . . The award for economics came almost 70 years later—bootstrapped to the Nobel in 1968 as a bit of a marketing ploy to celebrate the Bank of Sweden’s 300th anniversary.” Yes, you read that right: “a marketing ploy.”

Here’s a Nobel family member describing it: “The Economics Prize has nestled itself in and is awarded as if it were a Nobel Prize. But it’s a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation,” Nobel’s great great nephew Peter Nobel told AFP in 2005, adding that “It’s most often awarded to stock market speculators. . . .  There is nothing to indicate that [Alfred Nobel] would have wanted such a prize.”

Members of the Nobel family are among the harshest, most persistent critics of the economics prize, and members of the family have repeatedly called for the prize to be abolished or renamed. In 2001, on the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes, four family members published a letter in the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, arguing that the economics prize degrades and cheapens the real Nobel Prizes. They aren’t the only ones.

Scientists never had much respect for the new economic Nobel prize. In fact, a scientist who headed Nixon’s Science Advisory Committee in 1969, was shocked to learn that economists were even allowed on stage to accept their award with the real Nobel laureates. He was incredulous: “You mean they sat on the platform with you?”

That hatred continues to simmer below the surface, and periodically breaks through and makes itself known.  Most recently, in 2004, three prominent Swedish scientists and members of the Nobel committee published an open letter in a Swedish newspaper savaging the fraudulent “scientific” credentials of the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economics. “The economics prize diminishes the value of the other Nobel prizes. If the prize is to be kept, it must be broadened in scope and be disassociated with Nobel,” they wrote in the letter, arguing that achievements of most of the economists who win the prize are so abstract and disconnected from the real world as to be utterly meaningless.

The question is: Why would a prize that draws so much hatred and negativity from the scientific community be added to the Nobel roster so late in the game? And why economics?

To answer that question we have to go back to Sweden in the 1960s.

Around the time the prize was created, Sweden’s banking and business interests were busy trying to ram through various free-market economic reforms. Their big objective at the time was to loosen political oversight and control over the country’s central bank.

According to Philip Mirowski, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in the history economics, the “Bank of Sweden was trying to become more independent of democratic accountability in the late 60s, and there was a big political dispute in Sweden as to whether the bank could have effective political independence. In order to support that position, the bank needed to claim that it had a kind of scientific credibility that was not grounded in political support.”

Promoters of central bank independence made their arguments in the language of neoclassical market efficiency. The problem was that few people in Sweden took their neoclassical babble very seriously, and saw their plan for central bank independence for what it was: an attempt to transfer control over economic matters from democratically elected government and place into the hands of big business interests, giving them a free hand in running Sweden’s economy without pesky interference from labor unions, voters and elected officials.

And that’s where the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economic Sciences came in.

The details of how the deal went down are still very murky. What is known is that in 1969 Sweden’s central bank used the pretense of its 300th anniversary to push through an  independent prize in “economic science” in memory of Alfred Nobel, and closely link it with the original Nobel Prize awards. The name was a bit longer, the medals looked a little different and the award money did not come from Nobel, but in every other way it was hard to tell the two apart. To ensure the prize would be awarded to the right economists, the bank managed to install a rightwing Swedish economist named Assar Lindbeck, who had ties to University of Chicago, to oversee the awards committee and keep him there for more than three decades. (Lindbeck’s famous free-market oneliner is:  “In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.”)

Notice there's no mention that Hayek actually won the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economics...

For the first few years, the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economics went to fairly mainstream and maybe even semi-respectable economists. But after establishing the award as credible and serious, the prizes took a hard turn to the right.

Over the next decade, the prize was awarded to the most fanatical supporters of theories that concentrated wealth among the top 1% of industrialized society of our time.

In 1974, five years after the prize was first created, it was awarded to Friedrich von Hayek, the leading laissez-fair economist of the 20th century and the godfather of neoclassical economics. Milton Friedman, who was at the University of Chicago with Hayek, was not far behind. He won the prize just two years later, in 1976.

Both Hayek and Friedman were huge supporters of the political independence of central banks. In fact, they built their careers on bashing government intervention in economic matters. Hayek developed a whole business cycle theory that blamed government and government-controlled banking systems for all economic problems. Friedman came out with a whole new subsection of neoclassical economics called “Monetarism” that had a scientific formula worked out, specifying exactly how much money central bankers needed to keep floating around in the economy to keep inflation low and unemployment high enough to keep big business happy. No democratic control over banking policies needed, just let the free-market do its thing!  The Swedish central bankers couldn’t get better spokesmen for their cause.

But Hayek and Friedman’s usefulness went way beyond Sweden.

At the time of the prizes, neoclassical economics were not fully accepted by the media and political establishment. But the Nobel Prize changed all that.

What started as a project to help the Bank of Sweden achieve political independence, ended up boosting the credibility of the most regressive strains of free-market economics, and paving the way for widespread acceptance of libertarian ideology.

Take Hayek: Before he was won the award, it looked like Hayek was washed up. His prospect of ever being a mainstream economist was essentially over. He was considered a quack and fraud by contemporary economists, he had spent the 50s and 60s in academic obscurity, preaching the gospel of free-markets and economic darwinism while on the payroll of ultra-rightwing American billionaires. Hayek had powerful backers, but was stuck way out on the fringes of reactionary-right subculture.

But that all changed as soon as he won the prize in 1974. All of a sudden his ideas were being talked about. Hayek was a celebrity. He appeared as a star guest on NBC’s Meet the Press, newspapers across the country printed his photographs and treated his economic mumblings about the need to have high unemployment as if they were divine revelations. His Road to Serfdom hit the best-seller list. Margret Thatcher started waving around his books in public, saying “this is what we believe.” He was back on top like never before, and it was all because of the fake Nobel Prize created by Sweden’s Central Bank.

"Unemployment iz necessary karmic price ov past inflationary policies"

Billionaire Charles Koch brought Hayek out for an extended victory tour of the United States, and had Hayek spend the summer as a resident scholar at his Institute for Humane Studies. Charles, a shrewd businessman, quickly put the old man to good marketing use, tapping Hayek’s mainstream cred to set up Cato Institute in 1974 (it was called the Charles Koch Foundation until 1977), a libertarian thinktank based on Hayek’s ideas. [Read eXiled eXclusive: Charles Koch told Hayek to use Social Security.]

Even today, Cato Institute pays homage to the Swedish Central Bank Prize’s marketing role in the mainstreaming of Hayek’s ideas and Hayek’s influence on the outfit:

The first libertarian to receive the Nobel Prize was F.A. Hayek in 1974. In the years leading up to the prize announcement, Hayek had reached a professional and personal nadir. Unable to maintain an appointment in the United States, Hayek had returned to Austria to take up a position at the University of Salzburg, Austria. With the announcement of the prize in 1974, however, Hayek’s work, and the fortune of Austrian economics, took a remarkable turn.

Hayek’s influence on Cato is profound. Two of Cato’s first books were by Hayek: A Tiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation & Unemployment and Monetary Policy: Government as Generator of the “Business Cycle.” Perhaps more than any other intellectual in the twentieth century, Hayek has inspired Cato and its researchers to develop policies that ensure a free society. When Cato moved into its current location in 1992, its auditorium was named in Hayek’s honor.

Friedman’s Nobel Prize had a similar impact. After getting the prize in 1976, Friedman wrote a best seller, got his own 10-part PBS series “Free to Choose” and became President Ronald Reagan’s economic advisor, where he had a chance to put the free-market policies he developed in Chile under Pinochet.

Like Hayek, Friedman was a big Pinochet fanboy. He would spend the rest of his time denying it, but he was deeply involved and invested in the Pinochet’s totalitarian free-market experiment. Chilean economist Orlando Letelier published an article in The Nation in 1976 outing Milton Friedman as the “intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy” on behalf of foreign corporations. A month later Letelier was assassinated in D.C. by Chilean secret police using a car bomb.

President Bush gives his pet free-market troll a pat on the head...

Friedman’s monetary theory was used by Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Paul Volcker to restrict the money supply, plunging American into a deep recession, doubling the unemployment rate, and had the added bonus of getting Reagan elected President. . . . And Hayek and Friedman were just the beginning.

For instance, in 1997 two economists won an award for their derivative risk models that minimized risk, just before derivatives would explode in the 2000s real estate-bubble.

The award was shared by economists Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for their work in figuring out how to value derivatives so as to minimize risk. The two economists used their Nobel-worthy economic models to run “the world’s biggest hedge fund,” which was called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). And the fund really lived up to its name. Nine months after winning the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economics, LTCM went belly-up, racking up over $1 billion in losses over a period of just two days. It was of course bailed out by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who considered LTCM “too big to fail.”

Then there’s Vernon Smith. In 2002, Vernon Smith, adored and funded by Libertarians like Charles Koch, won the “Nobel” — his patron looked at the money he spent funding Smith’s academic career as a successful speculatory venture, saying simply: “The Koch Foundation’s gift was an excellent investment.” Smith’s research basically entailed setting up theoretical “wind tunnels” to test how free-markets would respond in various conditions—all in a way that has nothing to do with reality.

As of 2011, 10 out of the 69 economists who’ve won the fake Nobel prize are Koch-connected libertarians.

It will take a brave act to bring this sham to the attention of the public. One year, one of the prize winners will have to speak out, and explain this ruse to the public as he wins the award.

This article was first published on AlterNet

***

Yasha Levine is an eXiled editor and co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project. Read his book: The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Calling yourself a libertarian today is a lot like wearing a mullet back in the nineteen eighties. It sends a clear signal: business up front, party in the back.

You know, those guys who call themselves “socially liberal but fiscally conservative”? Yeah. It’s for them.

Today, the ruling class knows that they’ve lost the culture wars. And unlike with our parents, they can’t count on weeping eagles and the stars ‘n bars to get us to fall in line. So libertarianism is their last ditch effort to ensure a succession to the throne.

Republicans freak you out but think the Democrats are wimps? You must be a libertarian! Want to sound smart and thoughtful in front of your boss without alienating your “socially liberal” buds? Just say the L-word, pass the coke and everyone’s happy!

Just look at how they play it up as the “cool” alternative to traditional conservatism. It’s pathetic. George Will wore the bowtie. But Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie wears an ironic D.A.R.E. t-shirt. And don’t forget the rest of his all-black wardrobe, complete with leather jacket. What a totally with-it badass.

***

With such a bleak economic forecast for the Millennials, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that our elites want to make “libertarianism” shorthand for “political disaffection.” Now there’s a demographic with some growth potential. And it’s inspired a lot of poorly-sourced, speculative babble about how “the kids have all gone Galt,” almost always through the personal anecdotes of young white men.

A couple of months ago, after Harvard released a poll on the political views of Millennials, libertarians took to the internet to tell the world how the youth of America was little more than a giant anarcho-capitalist sleeper cell–ready to overthrow the state and privatize the air supply at a moment’s notice. So I took a look at the poll numbers. And you know what? It’s utter horseshit.

Right off the bat, we’re told that 79% of Millennials don’t consider themselves politically-engaged at all so, uh, keep that in mind.

Much is made of the fact that less than half of the survey respondents thought the government should provide free health care to those who can’t afford it. What they don’t mention is that that number (44 percent) is twice the percentage who say they stand against (22 percent) such “hand outs.” Nearly a third didn’t think one way or the other.

Then we hear that the poll proves kids don’t care about climate change. But they don’t mention that slightly more Millennials wanted the government to do more on that front than they’re doing now–even if it hurt economic growth. Nearly half, you guessed it, “neither agree nor disagree.” (Come on kids, Rock the Vote!)

More Millennials identify as liberals than conservatives. Hardly any of them (10 percent) support the libertarian-embraced Tea Party. About three-quarters say they despise congressional Republicans.

Nearly two-thirds voted for Obama in 2008. Slightly over half approve of him now. Nearly three-quarters of Millennials hate congressional Republicans. 55% trust in the U.S. military, one of the largest state-socialist programs in the entire world, also responsible for, you know, those wars that libertarians supposedly hate.

Over a quarter put their faith in the federal government all or most of the time, and 55% “some of the time.” Only 17% answered “never.” And despite all their supposed Ron Paul love, they trust the “globalist” United Nations even more than they do the feds.

A little nibble here with only 36% approving of Obama’s handling of the budget deficit, but then again, that’s actually better than his rating on the deficit with Americans of all ages. Plus, worrying about the budget deficit is how dumb people have tried to sound smart since the days of FDR. And most people are dumb.

And when we finally get down to a hypothetical libertarian match-up between Obama and Ron Paul—41 percent pick Obama and only 27 percent pick Paul.

Oh, but the kiddies are cool with gay marriage and tired of bombing brown people overseas? No shit. That just makes them normal people living in the 21st century. I’m for single-payer health care and can’t stand Barney Frank. Does that mean I sip the Kool-Aid at the Lyndon LaRouche compound?

None of this should be too surprising. For almost two decades, roughly two-thirds of the American public have supported what we’d call a moderate European welfare state—putting the average U.S. citizen significantly to the left of the Democratic party, a center/center-right organization saddled, much to their dismay, with a perpetually-disappointed center-left constituency.

But hey, our ruling class would shit a brick if any of that wealth redistribution stuff happened over here. Which is why “this is a center-right nation” has been a favorite Fox News talking point for over ten years. It’s only now—after Occupy Wall Street forced their hand—that the media is finally willing to admit that it might be bullshit.

But libertarianism? Our ruling class is totally fine with that. Smoke your reefer and sodomize whomever you please, just keep your mouth shut and hand over your Social Security account.

***

Never trust a hippietarian

I get the appeal. The state’s been sticking it to working folks for decades. It seems almost unimaginable that Big Government could ever be run by us and not the One Percent.

But child labor laws, the Civil Rights act, federal income tax, minimum wage laws, Social Security, Medicare, food safety—libertarians have accused all of them as infringements upon the free market that would lead to economic ruin. And over and over again, they’ve been proven wrong. Life goes on—a little less gruesomely—and society prospers.

“There is no such thing as a free-market,” economist Ha-Joon Chang has said repeatedly. “A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.”

In other words, markets are social institutions, just as much under the thumb of politics and government as everything else. Which means they’re subject to democratic pressures, as they should be.

And what you “earn” from said markets? Chang: “All our wages are, at root, politically determined.” Despite what Ron Paul’s trolls might have you believe, gold Krugerrands don’t spray out your asshole every time you type up a spreadsheet or pour a Grande mochachino for your next customer.

Capitalism has always been a product of Big Government. Ever since the railroads of the nineteenth century, to Silicon Valley, Big Pharma and the banks, the Nanny State has been there all along, passing subsidies and tax breaks, and eating the costs the private sector doesn’t want.

So whenever a libertarian says that capitalism is at odds with the state, laugh at him. It’s like saying that the NFL is “at war” with football fields. To be a libertarian is to say that God or the universe marked up that field, squirted out the pigskins from the bowels of the earth and handed down the playbooks from Mt. Sinai.

***

When a Red like me wants to argue for something like universal health care or free college tuition, we can point to dozens of wealthy democratic societies doing just that. The Stalinist left is nothing more than a faint memory. But where are the libertarian Utopias?

General Pinochet’s Chile was a longtime favorite. But seeing as how it relied on a fascist coup—with a big assist from Nixon and Kissinger—Chile’s lost a bit of that Cold War luster. So these days, for the slightly more with-it libertarian, we get Singapore as the model of choice.

Hey, isn’t that where the Facebook guy lives these days? That’s pretty “hip”!

Ah, Singapore: a city-state near the very top in the world when it comes to “number of police” and “execution rate” per capita. It’s a charming little one-party state where soft-core pornography is outlawed, labor rights are almost nonexistent and gay sex is banned. Expect a caning if you break a window. And death for a baggie of cocaine.

But hey: no capital gains tax! (Freedom!)

Singapore: Libertarian Paradise

It’s not like any of this will make it through the glassy eyes of the true-believers. Ludwig von Mises, another libertarian pin-up boy, wrote in 1927 that, “Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization.”

Lately, Ron Paul’s economic advisor has been claiming that Communist Party-ruled China has a freer market than the U.S.’s.

***

So let’s talk a little about this freedom they’re always going on about. Or, to paraphrase Lenin, the libertarian’s ultimate nemesis: freedom for who to do what?

Most American adults spend about half their waking hours at a job. And during that time, libertarians do not give a flying fuck about your liberty. Instead, they condone the most brutal of tyrannies all in the name of a private employer’s freedom.

Racial discrimination, verbal abuse, random drug testing, body-searches, sexual harassment, illegal termination, email monitoring, union busting, even withholding piss-breaks–ask any libertarian how they feel about workplace unfreedom and they’ll tell you: “Hey man, if you don’t like it, you have the freedom to get another job.” If folks are hiring. But with four-and-a-half applicants for every job, they’re probably not.

Here’s another thing libertarians always forget to mention: a free-market capitalist society has never and by definition can never lead to full-employment. It has to be made to by—you guessed it—the Nanny State. Free market capitalism actually requires a huge mass of the unemployed—it’s not just a side effect.

And make no mistake: corporate America loves a high unemployment rate.

When most everyone has a job, workers are less likely to take shit. They do nutty things like join unions, demand better wages and refuse to work off-the-clock. They start to stand up to real power: not to the EPA, and not the King of England, but to their bosses.

But with a real unemployment rate close to 20 percent, that ain’t happening. Well, fuck. Better sign up for that Big Government welfare state they’re always whining about. Hey, don’t worry. You could always sell a little crack and turn a few tricks. Libertarians totally support that.

After all, that’s your freedom, dude!

***

Libertarianism isn’t some cutting-edge political philosophy that somehow transcends the traditional “left to right” spectrum. It’s a radical, hard-right economic doctrine promoted by wealthy people who always end up backing Republican candidates, no matter how often they talk about civil liberties, ending the wars and legalizing pot. Funny how that works.

It’s the “third way” for a society in which turning against capitalism or even taking your foot off the pedal is not an option. Thanks to our shitty constitution and the most violent labor history in the West, we never even got a social-democratic party like the rest of the developed world.

So what do we get? The libertarian line: “No, no: the problem isn’t that we’re too capitalist. It’s that we’re not capitalist enough!”

Genius.

At a time in which our society has never been more interdependent in every possible way, libertarians think they’re John fucking Wayne looking out over his ranch with an Apache scalp in his belt, or John fucking Galt doing…whatever it is he does. (Collect vintage desk toys from the Sharper Image?)

Their whole ideology is like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s all make-believe, except for the chain-mail–they brought that from home. Elves, dwarves and fair maidens for capital. Even with the supposedly “good ones”—anti-war libertarians—we’re still talking about people who think Medicare’s going to lead to Stalinism.

So my advice is to call them out.

Ask them what their beef really is with the welfare state. First, they’ll talk about the deficit and say we just can’t afford entitlement programs. Well, that’s obviously a joke, so move on. Then they’ll say that it gives the government tyrannical power. Okay. Let me know when the Danes open a Guantánamo Bay in Greenland.

Here’s the real reason libertarians hate the idea. The welfare state is a check against servility towards the rich. A strong welfare state would give us the power to say Fuck You to our bosses—this is the power to say “I’m gonna work odd jobs for twenty hours a week while I work on my driftwood sculptures and play keyboards in my chillwave band. And I’ll still be able to go to the doctor and make rent.”

Sounds like freedom to me.

Connor Kilpatrick is the managing editor of Jacobin magazine.

Would you like to know more? Read “Thirty More Years of Hell” and “Silent Majority Millennials” by Connor Kilpatrick.

This article was first published at TheNation.com

If there’s one thing that distinguishes Ron Paul from the rest of the GOP field, it’s his principled stand against American empire and his ardent defense of individual liberties. [1] Paul’s opposition to wars, bloated defense budgets and government espionage of US citizens has made him a hero among some young conservatives. His seemingly rock-solid principles and radicalism has even drawn some on the left; unlike even left-wing Democrats, Paul has said he wants to abolish both the CIA and the FBI to protect individual “liberty.”

So it should come as a shock and disappointment to his followers that Ron Paul’s single largest donor—his Sheldon Adelson, as it were—founded a controversial defense contractor, Palantir Technologies, that profits from government espionage work for the CIA, FBI and other agencies, and which last year was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting American political opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, including journalists, progressive activists and union leaders. (Palantir takes its name from the mystic stones used by characters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to spy on each other.)

According to recently filed FEC disclosure documents, Ron Paul’s Super PAC has received nearly all of its money from a single source, billionaire Peter Thiel. So far, Thiel has contributed $2.6 million [2] to Ron Paul’s Super PAC, Endorse Liberty [3], providing 76 percent of the Super PAC’s total [2] intake.

Thiel, a self-described libertarian and opponent of democracy [4] who made his fortune as the founder of PayPal, launched Palantir in 2004 to profit from what the Wall Street Journal described [5]as “the government spy-services marketplace.” The CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, was brought in to back up Thiel as one of Palantir’s first outside investors. Today, Palantir’s valuation isreported [6] to be in the billions.

Palantir slide for proposal to attack WikiLeaks on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce

A recent Businessweek profile [7] explained how Palantir makes its money—and why Ron Paul’s followers should be bothered:

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’”

Read the rest of this article at TheNation.com by clicking here.

Y’all have probably heard of the ancient Sumerian peoples and their penchant for spooky burial rituals and books like the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, which was penned in human blood and has the ability to raise the dead. But did you know they also cared deeply about liberty, freemarkets and private property rights?

Or at least that’s what the Liberty Fund, a libertarian moneybag outfit that bankrolls all sorts of Koch-linked youth-oriented baggertarian propaganda projects, would have you believe. In what must go down as the mother of all cuneiform-malapropisms, the Liberty Fund appropriated a weird looking Sumerian cuneiform symbol as its cult-logo, in what appears to be an attempt to prove that libertarianism is not just an ideology thought up by a bunch of rank 20th century oligarchs, but rather comes from an ancient small government tradition older than even Jesus. It goes back back to the dawn of civilization itself!

If you go onto one of the Liberty Fund’s project websites, the Library for Economics & Liberty, you’ll find this ancient cuneiform symbol at the footer of the home page:

The Liberty Fund-backed website goes on to explain that the significance of the amagi symbol goes deeper than just the word “liberty.” It represents the first popular struggle against big government tyranny:

Lagash was the site of the first recorded social-reform movement. Once considered a relatively free society of farmers, cattle breeders, boatmen, fishermen, merchants, and craftsmen, the Lagashites found that a change in political power had stripped them of their political and economic freedoms and subjected them to heavy taxation and exploitation by wealthy officials.

Sumerian historians believe that at this low point in Lagash’s history, Urukagina became the leader of the Sumerian city-state of Girsu/Lagash and led a popular movement that resulted in the reform of the oppressive legal and governmental structure of Sumeria. … On the tablets of the period is found the first written reference to the concept of liberty (amagi or amargi, literally, “return to the mother”), used in reference to the process of reform…

There’s only problem with Liberty Fund’s lesson in Sumerian history and language: the real meaning of the amagi cuneiform isn’t about abolishing “big government” or abolishing the Fed–nope, it’s about abolishing debts to free citizens from debt slavery. What the history-failures at Liberty Fund hilariously mistranslated was that the term “return to mother” is Sumerian-speak for “jubilee”–as in “debt forgiveness” or “freedom from debt.”

Here’s how David Graeber explains it in his brilliant book Debt: The First 5,000 Years:

Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties … Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families. Before long, it became more or less a regular habit for kings to make such a declaration on first assuming power, and many were forced to repeat it periodically over the course of their reigns.

In Sumeria, these were called “declarations of freedom”—and it is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for “freedom” in any known human language, literally means “return to mother”—since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed to do.

So in other words, amagi’s not about “freedom” from government interference at all–it’s about welching on your debts and sending Sumerian deadbeats back home to mooch off mommy. “Moochers,” “deadbeats,” “debt welchers”–Now that sounds more like the true face of libertarianism!

Despite the misunderstanding—or maybe because of it—the amagi symbol has become all the rage with baggertarian youngins’ all across the USA, many of whom have been known to get their pasty white hides branded with “deadbeat 4-ever” tats en masse at Koch-sponsored Free State campouts.

So does this make them moocher-bashing moochers? Or maybe closet-freeloader freeloaderphobes?

We’d like to thank Koch operative Peter Eyre for taking the time to maintain an up-to-date bagtard tat page, which includes a big collection of Sumerian deadbeat tats, as well as a nice range of other freemarket groupie ink. Eyre’s got himself branded a “deadbeat” in 2007, back before it was considered cool:

An amagi – one of two tattoos (the other being a quote on my left forearm) I got during a break at the Free State Project’s 2007 Liberty Forum. Months before the conference I researched tattoo shops in the area and had scheduled my session. The amagi appealed to me as the oldest written word/symbol for liberty as it shows these ideas are universal and that rights are not contigent on where one happens to be born but inherent in each individual. Done at Gothic Tattoo in Concord, NH.

Here are a few deabeat tats from Eyre’s ink page:

Deadbeat #1: This guy’s name is Daryl and he’s running for President 2016…

Deadbeat #2: Nothing says sexy like “deadbeat moocher chick” in Sumerian…

Deadbeat #3: Some libertarian dude who thinks wristband tats are macho…

Deadbeat #4: Freeloadin’ Assistant Professor of Economics at Loyola… Totally, brah!

Update: The libertarian “moocher-4-life” campaign has made it across the Atlantic. The official journal of the Hayek Society at the London School of Economics is called “ama-gi,” and sports the awesome Sumerian “freedom for deadbeats” cuneiform. Which is a fitting for a man like Hayek. After all, we here at the eXiled were the ones who first outed Freddie von Hayek as a socialized medicine queen, who sucked on America’s Social Security teat with blessings from his patron and master, Charles Koch.

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Want to know more? Read Yasha Levine’s account of LAPD’s appalling treatment of detained Occupy LA protesters…His other Occupy LA coverage…And LA Weekly’s writeup of his arrest.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

Here’s the article spread, published in the October 1995 issue of Spy:

And here’s a close-up of the historic moment when NAMBLA’s spokesman declared himself as a lover of liberty, so to speak:

Obviously, this can mean only one thing: Spy magazine was a mouthpiece for Obamabots.

Adam Curtis has just posted a must-read blog that tries to answer the big political dead-end we face today: Why can’t we think up any new ideas besides the failed libertarian free-market ideology that brought us to ruin? Curtis’ answer: We’re all prisoners of the Libertarian Think-Tank Archipelago.

Curtis argues that the reason we can’t think of any ideas is because free-market think-tanks have perverted and strangled ideological thinking–both in Britain, whose free-market think-tanks were essentially set up by one of America’s Founding Fathers of libertarianism, FA Harper–and in America, where the free-market think-tank archipelago has done a fantastic job of transforming the political imagination into something like Amway salesmanship. Above it all stands the Amway Master Salesman, Friedrich von Hayek, author of Glenn Beck’s favorite book, The Road To Serfdom.

Curtis’s piece includes some hilariously grotesque detours, including the story of how one of the founders of free-market Thatcherism, Maj. Oliver Smedley, murdered a pirate radio pop legend in anger because free-market Smedley could not tolerate free-market competition. His pirate radio rival was too authentically anti-government rather than pro-business, and too good; and as such, he was fucking with Smedley’s own fake-pirate-radio project, which was really an Astroturf PR campaign meant to turn Britain’s youth against the state. So Smedley hired a gang of thugs–real free-market pirates–to “raid” and seize the rival pirate radio station, and hold its staff hostage. Later, when Smedley’s popular rival visited him at his cottage to demand answers, Maj. Smedley answered with a shotgun blast, liberating his rival from his bodily vessel.

Pirate rock’n'roll radio as a PR campaign to get kids identifying with libertarian crony-capitalism–that’s definitely something worth murdering for.

Naturally, Maj. Smedley was acquitted of the murder.

Curtis also posts some amazing clips showing Margaret Thatcher looking on horrified as an even harder-core Thatcherite, Linda Whetstone (daughter of Anthony Fisher, founder of the first libertarian think-tank in Britain with none other than Oliver Smedley) delivers a “Let them die!” speech to the Conservative Party back in 1978, when that sort of talk still made right-wingers uneasy in public. Recently, Linda Whetstone resigned in controversy from her now-destroyed climate-denialist libertarian think-tank, the International Policy Institute (IPN). The founding director of the IPN, Julian Morris, quickly found a new job in the U.S.–well, take a wild guess where–as Vice President of the Reason Foundation. You know, the Koch brothers’ Reason Foundation. That’s the nice thing about being a Koch Whore. They’ve always got your backside.

Click here to read and watch Curtis’s blog post.

Joel B. Pollak, Teafailure: Be careful, he might use a proxy on you!

Urgent update, folks! Andrew Breitbart’s Koch-monkey, Joel B. Pollak, just outdid himself as the top ace gumshoe reporter of the retarded-right. Yes folks, Joel. B. Pollak, peddler of the “Johnny Chen Conspiracy Theory” that changed the face of journalism as we know it, now has another shocking scoop about eXiled editor Mark Ames–and to get the scoop, he even used what hi-tech futuristic types call a “proxy.” Yep, betcha you never heard of a “proxy” before, but that’s because you’re not an ace reporter like Joel B. Pollak. But don’t take it from me, take it from the shocking “UPDATE” posted by Joel B. Pollak himself:

UPDATE: Ames responded on August 30 in a rambling ad hominem attack that made no effort to dispute the claims made in the article above. Indeed, its basic factual errors–e.g. my graduation date, easily checked–reinforce Ames’s sloppy reputation.**[see below--Exiled Editor]

Would you like to know more? Read more about Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart’s Koch-monkey: ANDREW BREITBART ATTACKS EXILED EDITOR MARK AMES!…HIRES FAILED TEABAG REPUBLICAN TO INVESTIGATE THE GREAT “WHO IS JOHNNY CHEN?” CONSPIRACY.  For more background, read “Jim Goad and Gavin McInnes Beg Mark Ames: ‘Answer Me, Please?’” Also read “KKKat Fight! White Power Fashionista John Galliano VS. White Power Fashionista Gavin McInnes.”

This anti-TSA protester coming straight outta Waco!

On Saturday June 4, a dozen or so anti-TSA protesters marched on the Texas State Capitol, demanding that state legislators and Governor Rick Perry stand up to the federal government and pass a bill that would allow cops to arrest and imprison TSA screeners.

As readers of The eXiled know, Mark Ames and I have thoroughly exposed America’s anti-TSA “movement” as a rightwing union-busting PR campaign designed to prevent TSA workers from unionizing, pushed by an alliance of Koch-funded libertarians, warmongering neocons, notorious DC union-busting front-groups and rabid Christian homophobes. Well, the anti-TSA movement in Texas pretty much fits the bill…

Saturday’s rally was organized by a pro-police-state/anti-fluoridation libertarian group called Texans for Accountable Government, along with a whole bunch of  far-right authoritarian Christian activists. And as you can see from the picture above, some of them look like they were bussed in straight from some Branch Davidian compound.

Does the TSA make you mad as McManus?

Take the guy being interviewed in the video above. He might look like you and me, but it turns out Adam McManus is a crusading Christian talk radio host, who describes himself as an “articulate champion of the traditional Christian values that have made this country great” and brags that he was a 40-year-old virgin until he got married five years ago, after finally deciding that he “no longer wanted to burn with passion” (and wrote a painful 40,000-word online book about how he met and fell in love with his wife, who presumably deflowered McManus and stole his innocence).

But McManus is not just a repressed freak. Turns out he’s also a really big fan of freedom and liberty, which is why he hates the TSA so much!

Although McManus, like all the anti-TSA crowd, is kind of selective about his civil liberties concerns: In 2005, McManus mailed out a bunch of action alerts promoting news stories that described Guantanamo  as a  paradise of freedom, where prisoners are lavished with first-world luxuries like Twix candy bars and subscriptions to “Martha Stewart Living”—things they could never have experienced back home.

But that’s not all. On his website, he clearly positions himself as a pro-police state, homophobic anti-abortion activist, who wants to force other people to act in accordance with Biblical law.

Here’s McManus on the “gay problem“:

“I’ve been accused of being ‘homophobic’. But I’m not afraid of homosexuals, I’m afraid for homosexuals. The average age of death for a homosexual male with AIDS is 39. And the average age of death for a homosexual male without AIDS is only 42. It seems like the compassionate approach would be to challenge the person to stop participating in unnatural deviant behaviors that lead to his own premature death.”

Here’s McManus on curbing state power:

“When it comes to capital punishment, I’m pro-choice. The inmate can choose the electric chair, the gas chamber or a lethal injection.”

McManus on the nanny state:

“There’s one thing the government can never dole out: self-respect. That can only come with hard work, integrity and personal responsibility.”

Yes, sir! Every moral fiber in Adam McManus’ flabby body screams in agony at even the slightest hint of a government handout! No wonder he’s so proud of his younger brother, John McManus, who’s spent the last decade working in D.C. as a lobbyist-shill for the pharmaceutical industry. On the website of his lobbying firm, The McManus Group, little brother McManus brags that while working for Republican Congressman Bill Thomas, he helped engineer the half trillion dollar federal welfare program for the pharmaceutical industry, otherwise known as the “Medicare Modernization Act of 2003.”

Yup, that’s the anti-TSA, pro-liberty Tea Party crowd for you.

But Christian free-market extremists like McManus weren’t just rallying outside the capitol building, they were also the ones inside, writing and pushing the anti-TSA legislation.

Take David Simpson, the freshman senator who introduced the anti-TSA HR 1937 bill. Not only does Simpson own a lumber business, he is also the proprietor of his own Christian publishing company, which prints titles like “We Must Obey God: The Biblical Doctrine of Conscientious Disobedience to Human Authority with Special Reference to Operation Rescue,” a book that puts “[r]ighteous disobedience to civil and other authorities in biblical perspective” and explains why God wants you to bully and harass women, and take away their reproductive rights.

While Simpson is a political rookie, he has been getting plenty of support from Texas’ far-right Christian political establishment. His chief of staff, Kathi Seay, comes with serious Koch pedigree and has been a longtime fixture in Texas’ anti-abortion movement. She previously served as a staffer and spokeswoman for Texas Rep. Frank “Look at the Fetus” Corte and has been a longtime member of a rightwing youth training outfit called Torch of Freedom Foundation, where she sits on the board of directors, along with Morton Blackwell, founder of Koch-controlled Leadership Institute (which teaches young rightwingers how to prevent people from voting and churns out rightwing operatives like James O’Keefe, of ACORN pimp fame).

Then there’s Dan Patrick, the Texas state senator listed as the sponsor of Simpson’s anti-TSA bill. Turns out puffy-faced Patrick, whose forehead looks like it’s been treated with Juvéderm, is also a hardcore Christian radio host and author. He wrote a book called “The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read: A Personal Challenge to Read the Bible” that was so bad, even illiterate believers gave it bad reviews on Amazon:

1.0 out of 5 stars Sceptical, July 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read: A Personal Challenge to Read the Bible (Hardcover)

I think it is good to read about religion but I’m not so sure about this book’s author’s intentions. Da n patrick has always been prety arragant and now we hear him shamelessly self promote his book day after day after day after day on his radio. It just seems like he is out to make money, not converts.

Arrogant or not, Patrick is a big supporter of civil liberties and the Constitution, including the First Amendment, which he demonstrated by launching boycotts against newspapers and media outlets that he thought had a pinko bias.

Not surprisingly, Dan Patrick is also part of a conservative think tank that’s been supported by Koch Industries, among other corporations. Yep, he’s just the kind of freedom fighter the oligarchy needs. And it’s clear from the way he describes himself on his website that Senator Patrick knows that he been done doin’ good by his masters:

Dan Patrick is considered by many as the most conservative member of the Texas Senate. In just his first term, he has become a leading conservative voice in Texas and in the Texas legislature.  In a recent Austin political news magazine ranking the most influential Republicans in Texas, Senator Patrick was listed at #3, just two spots behind Governor Rick Perry and the only member of the Texas Senate to be named in the top 20.

Senator Patrick has accomplished more in his first term than some legislators accomplish in a career. He passed legislation placing “In God We Trust” permanently in the Texas Senate Chamber and passed the Senate bill to place “Under God” in the state pledge.  Senator Patrick passed the largest tax cut of any legislator in the country in 2009 – a $172 million cut to business taxes for small business.

Governor Rick Perry just convened a special secession of the Texas legislature to take another stab at passing the anti-TSA bill. Meanwhile, Kochites in Utah and New Hampshire are following Texas’ lead…But it doesn’t matter where the anti-TSA gather next or what Glenn Greenwald of the libertarian Cato Institute might tell you, the fight against  TSA screeners is not about civil liberties. It is about attacking labor and pimping privatization. The rightwingers and Christian homophones leading the fight are not so much concerned with being “groped” at the gate, as they are about being groped by unionized workers. Getting their asses felt up by minimum-wage grunts working for private security firms is just fine by them–and apparently fine by Jesus, too. This is what their fight against the TSA is all about, and it fits in with the larger attack by free-market extremists on government-run security. It’s all about busting up the 43,000 TSA workers before they can form a union, which they’re voting on right now.

Take George Koch-Mason University-educated ”economist” Edward Stringham, who recently wrote a paper singing the praises of  David Lipscomb, a 19th-century biblical anarchist who preached that Christians should not participate in civil government. Turns out that Stringham not only advocates for privatizing the TSA, he also goes around giving Koch-sponsored talks on the benefits of privatizing the entire process of law and order—yeah, the whole thing. Here’s an email announcing one of his pro-private-security propaganda talks at a college in Denver:

From: Padilla Alexandre
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 3:46 PM
To: XXXXXX
Subject: Save the Date: EEF Lecture Series: Do We Need Government?: Private Law & Private Enforcement Speaker: Edward P. Stringham, Monday, March 25th, 11:00 am- 12:15 pm TIVOLI 320s

Dear students,

I am pleased to announce that the next Exploring Economic Freedom Lecture Series talk will take place on Monday April 25th, 2011 from 11:00 to 12:15 pm in Tivoli 320s. Our speaker for this event is Dr. Edward P. Stringham from Fayetteville State University. His talk is entitled: “Do We Need Government? Private Law & Private Enforcement” Economist Edward Stringham will ask whether law enforcement must be provided by government. He will talk about how private law enforcement is extremely common in the United States and the world, and discuss ways in which private law enforcement is an attractive alternative to government law enforcement.

This talk is generously sponsored by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Pizzas and sodas will be available for free for attendees. I have included below a short biography of Dr. Stringham.

Please let me know if you have questions.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Alexandre Padilla
Associate Professor of Economics & Interim Director
Honors ProgramMetropolitan State College of Denver

You can’t deny that for the Kochs and their ultra-rightwing billionaire buddies, “private law enforcement is an attractive alternative to government law enforcement.” The fact is that while it’s not hard to get unionized rightwing white cops to beat up on blacks, Mexicans and junkies, it’s not so easy to get them to go against their own kind. And there’s always a chance, no matter how slim, that union cops will turn on the oligarchy. A private mercenary force is so much more efficient:

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com. Check out other Koch takedowns here: The eXiled vs. The Kochs.

Want to know more? Then read our anti-TSA expose:

Really?

This is the year that the Republican right-wing, backed by corporate sponsors like the billionaire Koch brothers, have declared all-out war on public sector unions. It’s the culmination of a decades-long crusade against organized labor, which has only hit the national radar screen in recent months. The showdown in Wisconsin between Scott Walker and the unions has changed all that: suddenly, Americans had their eyes opened up to just how ruthlessly and cynically the Republican right was ready to fight to destroy public sector unions because they see it as a way to cripple the Democratic Party by killing off a major source of funding, as well as political muscle and votes.

If there’s some good to come out of the right-wing’s war on Wisconsin and other state employees, it’s that we now have a better insight into the Republican playbook against public sector unions, which boils down to this: 1) Manufacture a fake budget crisis in order to frighten the state’s residents; 2) PR the false-crisis hard enough until it breaks out of the right-wing/libertarian pipeline and into the mainstream media; 3) Blame the fake crisis on a fake villain — “greedy” state employee unions — thereby pitting the public against state workers. That way, when Republicans pass new laws destroying teachers and firefighters unions, they’ll come off as heroes defending the public from greedy unions, rather than as sleazy mercenaries carrying out their corporate sponsors’ dirty work.

Republicans have used this playbook before, of course, it’s just that Wisconsin finally made us all too aware. Perhaps the most obvious example — and the least understood — is from last November, when the same basic strategy was used to wage war against the TSA’s 55,000 employees, who have been locked in a savage decade-long battle to gain the same collective bargaining rights that employees of all other federal agencies enjoy. Unlike in Wisconsin, the Republican right succeeded in burying the story about the TSA employees’ struggle for collective bargaining rights underneath a sophisticated, well-PR’d campaign demonizing TSA screeners as modern-day Gestapo agents, rapists and child molesters.

But lost in all the media hysteria vilifying the TSA was the appalling story of labor abuse against the agency’s screeners, a consequence of Republican anti-union policies. If anyone is wondering why collective bargaining rights are so important to public sector workers, look no further than the TSA, whose employees suffer the lowest morale and highest attrition rates of any federal agency, year after year. Complaints and lawsuits abound, accusing TSA management of rampant sexual harassment, racism, bullying, wrongful termination and abuse of power. If that didn’t make working in the TSA difficult enough, the recent campaign demonizing TSA agents as modern-day Gestapo-agents turned them into the most hated of all federal employees; passengers, encouraged by incendiary PR, hurled abuses in TSA screeners’ faces, and in a few cases even physically attacked screeners.

Last November, we published an article in The Nation questioning the media-driven anti-TSA campaign, which we argued smelled of AstroTurf. For one thing, it made little sense that an issue like TSA pat-downs, offensive as they were, could dominate headlines for two straight weeks at a time when America was suffering from unprecedented corruption, lawless evictions of homeowners, unheard-of inequality, and wars that barely make news.

Sure enough, we uncovered numerous Koch-linked libertarian activists spearheading the campaign to demonize TSA screeners, DC lobbyists specializing in fake-grassroots campaigns setting up “Opt Out” websites while posing as regular Joes, and sleazy Republican hacks who had shown little interest in protecting civil liberties suddenly getting their ACLU on over the TSA’s intrusive pat-downs and “porn scans.” Progressives were understandably drawn into the anti-TSA campaign and hysteria, as the PR campaign cleverly framed it not as a union-bashing operation, but rather, as a purely civil liberties issue.

The anti-TSA campaign was at its media-hysteria peak in the weeks after the Republican election sweep, spurred on by last year’s hero, John Tyner, who refused a pat-down, telling TSA agents, “You touch my junk and I’m going to have you arrested.” Tyner disappeared from the scene after he apologized on his blog, and admitted that he didn’t tell the whole story and had actively tried to erase it.

Read the rest here…