A Criminal’s a Criminal, No Matter How Powerful

By Kevin Carson, Center For A Stateless Society

The state, in legal theory, is the entity that claims the sole right to define what is lawful or criminal activity in a given territory.

Perhaps just coincidentally, the state tends to judge the actions of its official agents and favored clients by a less strict standard of criminality than the one it uses to judge the actions of its subjects. And it tends to hold those it regards as enemies to a much higher standard of legality than those it regards as friends — again, perhaps just a coincidence.

The state can undertake actions that, for you or me, would mean life behind bars or even a ride on Old Sparky. But when the state does them they're not really criminal, see, because they were done for — ahem — reasons of state.

In the famous words of Richard Nixon, in the David Frost interviews, "If the President does it, that means it's not illegal."

Consider, for example, recent revelations in a document released by Wikileaks that the Texas military contractor DynCorp was facilitating parties at which Afghan police officials placed bids on the sexual services of very young dancing boys.

Now, to the U.S. government, this was no big deal. In fact the State Department did its best to cover it up. But this is the kind of thing that, if it had been done by (say) a religious cult leader in Waco, would have been sufficient cause for burning a hundred people alive ("for the children"). Had it been done in Milosevic's Serbia or Saddam's Iraq, the news would have been trumpeted with indignation from White House and State Department briefing rooms every single day as a pretext for regime change.

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End of consumerism

It's not the end of the world, just the end of consumerism. We are about to wave goodbye to the dream of endless economic growth - always, every year, more stuff. However, we have enough already. We really do.

Dr Susan Krumdieck, an engineering professor at the University of Canterbury, addresses her audience with a smile. The message is radical, but she believes it will be good news once we have had time to get used to it.

A change is about to be forced on society because energy consumption pretty much is the economy. And we are about to run short of the cheap energy which has been driving the past century of unchecked economic expansion.

There is this myth going round, says Krumdieck, that with every decade we have grown wealthier because we have collectively become smarter and more productive. If everything is bigger, better, brighter, well, it has been earned.

Yet actually we have just been digging up and burning more fossil fuel. Graph the world's energy consumption against its gross domestic product (GDP) and the two lines track. So get down to the nitty gritty and this is what it has all been about. Converting oil or coal into shoes, hamburgers, cellphones and SUVs.

However, a reckoning is coming. The ecological limits on growth have come into view. Climate change and over- population. But peak oil most immediately.

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Ethos

We can fix this system. 'You' are the solution.

Hosted by twice Oscar nominated actor and activist Woody Harrelson Ethos lifts the lid on a Pandora's box of systemic issues that guarantee failure in almost every aspect of our lives; from the environment to democracy and our own personal liberty: From terrifying conflicts of interests in politics to unregulated corporate power, to a media in the hands of massive conglomerates and a military industrial complex that virtually owns our representatives.

With interviews from some of todays leading thinkers and source material from the finest documentary film makers of our times Ethos examines and unravels these complex relationships.

Our system is working against the public good. Our democracy is broken. But we can't change anything until we understand how our systems operate and what forces are actually set against us.The news is not all bad, however. Ethos offers a deceptively simple but powerful solution. We can fix this system. We can live in peace and justice in a clean environment. The steps we need to take would improve our lives instantly and are not difficult. They are very simple but extremely powerful. But...it does take our involvement. You and I learning the facts, taking responsibility and then acting accordingly. We can defeat the apathy and hopelessness that says 'nothing can be done' and take the future back into our own hands.

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