To those following (or, in some cases, literally invested in) my ongoing financial saga: I met with the lawyer today, and he gave me a phonebook-sized (well, Auburn-phonebook-sized, not Manhattan-phonebook-sized) stack of financial info forms to fill out, plus he needs copies of my old tax returns etc., so that’s my homework for tonight.
In other news, I’ve paid my rent for the month – thanks to the generosity of my readers. More developments as they unfold ….
I have two problems with this story.
First is its title. Walmart has consistently promoted, and benefited from, neofascist interventionism for quite a long time. Switching from one form of neofascism to another – shifting the government’s mode of intervention from slightly more indirect to slightly more direct – is not “selling out,” and so describing it pays Walmart’s past self an undeserved compliment.
Second, in any case the switch is not as recent as the phrase “after years of strenuous opposition” implies, since Walmart had already started pushing for greater government involvement in health care two and a half years ago. (CHT Peter Suderman.)
In a 1966 letter which has not yet been published (Peter Klein quotes from it here), Rothbard writes:
For some time I have come to the conclusion that the grave deficiency in the current output and thinking of our libertarians and “classical liberals” is an enormous blind spot when it comes to big business. There is a tendency to worship Big Business per se … and a corollary tendency to fail to realize that while big business would indeed merit praise if they won that bigness on the purely free market, that in the contemporary world of total neo-mercantilism and what is essentially a neo-fascist “corporate state,” bigness is a priori highly suspect, because Big Business most likely got that way through an intricate and decisive network of subsidies, privileges, and direct and indirect grants of monopoly protection.
Seems like a useful passage to quote to our right-Rothbardian comrades whenever they accuse us of unlibertarianly treating bigness as automatically suspect or exaggerating the neofascist nature of contemporary kapitalism.
Kevin Carson:
A business model based on suing online news sources (not to mention search engines!) for linking to your stories makes New Coke look like a work of genius.
Read la enchilada entera.
Commenting on the Gates arrest, Boston police officer Justin Barrett explains his attitude toward the civilians who pay his salary:
His [= Gates’] first priority of effort should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC [= pepper spray] deserving of his belligerent non-compliance. … He indeed has transcended back to a bumbling jungle monkey, thus he forever remains amid this nation’s great social/racial divide.
’Cause we all know there’s nothing worse than when someone suddenly, belligerently, non-complies at you.
Still, such, um, frankness about a case that is already in the national spotlight was a bit too much even for his cop bosses (as well as for his army bosses), and Barrett is now facing termination – which is a shame, because, as he helpfully explains, he didn’t mean “banana-eating jungle monkey” in a racist way at all; it was just, you know, that standard non-racist use of “banana-eating jungle monkey.” Barrett assures us:
I have so many friends of every type of culture and race you can name. I am not a racist.
For some reason I’m reminded of Eichmann’s contention (I think it’s in Eichmann Interrogated) that he couldn’t be considered anti-Semitic because he used to visit his Jewish friends while wearing his Nazi uniform and they never expressed any disapproval. (“Guess who’s coming to dinner, honey. You know that chair we thought we were saving for Elijah?”)
Now comes before the court Barrett’s lawyer, who leaps into the fray to offer some further explication:
Officer Barrett did not call professor Gates a jungle monkey or malign him racially. He said his behavior was like that of one. It was a characterization of the actions of that man.
That is such a good point. This blue-costumed vicious thug despicable asshole conscientious public servant never said that Gates was a jungle monkey; he just said that Gates had “transcended” (I guess he thinks this means “regressed”) “back to a bumbling jungle monkey” and “thus he forever remains,” which is totally different.
So please leave race out of this. Banana-eating jungle monkeys come in all colours, after all; so what Barrett was really saying that he would have physically assaulted anyone, black or white, who acted like they had any rights he was bound to respect. And that, of course, is totally okay.
So, first my bank tells me there’s a tax levy on my bank account – which I believed, since the Alabama tax dept. has been after me in any case. Then it turns out to be some alleged credit card debt from years ago. Now tonight, on returning home, just as I was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of my current financial crisis, I find a notice from the good old Alabama Department of Revenue demanding that I pay $9,097.15 within the next ten days or else they threaten to issue a writ to seize “your bank accounts and/or up to 25% of your wages, or issue an execution on real/personal property,” etc. I guess this just isn’t my week.