Prosthetic Conscience

• More money from the poor to the rich: Clinton campaign edition
  

  From the Infamous Brad.

  The chutzpah of the Clinton team never ceases to amaze me.

• Book review: Rebirth of American Industry
  

  Kevin Carson gives an amazing in-depth review of what looks like a remarkable book, Rebirth of American Industry: a Study of Lean Management, by William Waddell and Norman Bodek. Basically, it contrasts the Toyota model of manufacturing and management with the American model of management, and shows how the Toyota model could form the nucleus of a future local, sustainable manufacturing industry.

You may rejoice in the fact that I will not be voting for the Libertarian Party candidate in the 2008 presidential election. At their May 25 convention, they chose their second worst candidate (from my perspective), Bob Barr, for their nominee, and the absolute worst, Wayne Allyn Root, as their vice presidential nominee. Mike Gravel would, of course, have been my first choice, and George Phillies my second.

It’s interesting for this reason. The US libertarian movement has been moving rapidly left since 2004 because of several factors: the extent to which conservatism has been discredited in the public mind by the Bush administration, the collapse of the historic libertarian-conservative fusion (due again to the Bush administration), the rise in availability of information on the Left roots of libertarianism thanks to the internet and a growing net-based left-libertarian movement, and the aging and moderation of the Seattle generation of anticapitalist anarchists, many of whom are settling into left-libertarianism. But the Libertarian Party has, if anything, moved right since 2004. Is it because the hard-core right-libertarians (who have always dominated the LP and US libertarianism generally) feel threatened? I suspect so. The center of gravity of net.libertarianism these days seems to be somewhere around the left-Rothbardians (I am, of course, much further left than that), and the LP are trying to pull back. I think the end result will be to make the LP less relevant to the libertarian movement than it already is.

Side note: in the Green Party primaries, Cynthia McKinney is leading by a significant margin over Ralph Nader, and both are far ahead of any other contenders, but neither has enough delegates to clinch the nomination. Sadly, Elaine Brown has withdrawn.