you live on one hundred thirty three bucks a month for food i should try it because you know how fabulous i had lunch i got so many i mean i have way and sometimes i feel that i've seen the same thing really messed up. in the all three so personally apologize it's. worse cheaper to live through the life outside of a. radio guy or a minister of a click. such close to just you've never seen anything like this i'm still. welcome the break in a set i'm your host abby martin you know it seems that on every issue important to

americans the problem reaction and solution is always framed by the two dominating political parties in this country the problem is that these two teams democrats and republicans more closely resemble a single party one that stands for and periods and corporate gain yet several political ideologies are gaining traction in the us that virtually no representation in the political and media establishment so if you've tuned into the show hoping to hear the dueling perspective of democrats and republicans well you've come to the wrong place because today i'll be hosting a discussion with people who represent the voices of a growing alternative will be talking about libertarianism anarchism and socialism very philosophy is gaining momentum as more people are becoming disillusioned with the status quo to talk about everything from the role of government to an ideal society i'm joined now by a brilliant panel and breaking the sets first ever alternative voices debate starting with scott crow author of black flags and windmills and found. the

anarchist common ground collective petersen production director of freedom works and editor of libertarian republic dot com and eugene puryear former vice presidential candidate of the party for socialism and liberation thanks so much all of you for coming on so much for having us if you or are we start to this epic debate or conversation rather i want to briefly outline your political ideologies in about a minute's time scott when people think of anarchism they think total chaos can you break down that misconception it's a misconception energy is a living a dynamic framework based in. ideas of cooperation where we can all get along to make the world better for each other we call it mutually the ideas of direct action that we don't have to wait on others that we are more than voters we're more compelling consumers that we there are other paths that we should take that we don't need to wait on others to do it we start to do it ourselves and we do it in our communities the ideas. of there's a collective liberation that we're all tied in this together that that i do want to

do better on the back of somebody else and i don't want somebody to do better on the back of me but again we're in this together and these ideas have along over one hundred year tradition of libertarianism but it's social libertarianism where it's it's the better for all of us and it's also anticapitalist and i think that that's a really important distinction to make because capitalism has been exploited capitalism has been oppressive to communities all over the planet and to the extraction of resources destroy the earth along the way thank you and austin libertarianism is gaining traction that has been so convoluted by the establishment describe true libertarianism to our audience true libertarianism would be called classical liberalism meaning you get all of your liberties you get your social liberties and you get your economic liberties and i would disagree with that capitalism exploitative i think that capitalism is what allows us to accrue the materials that we need to help more people so if i go out and i make a lot of money like bill gates then i have money to do things like invest in cancer research or in malaria research and to do more good things for the community so to me. it's really about the idea that you should be allowed to have as much liberty

as possible without harming someone else but you know really make and have this funny quote he says you know i believe in one thing liberty but i don't believe in it enough to force it on anyone else so if you don't believe that you have the right to force your beliefs on anyone else you might be a libertarian and eugene you represent the big scary so many people around the opposite direction one of the probably the most misunderstood philosophies currently in this country explain socialism for the audience of course well in a nutshell socialism is essentially the mirror opposite of capitalism it's using the massive wealth and great things that we know our society can be created by and you know not waiting on a bill gates for example to solve cancer but mobilizing the governmental power of the democratic power of people concentrated in a governmental state power to defeat cancer if we know we need to defeat cancer to build affordable housing if we know we need to build affordable housing and all these things that as a society we know we have consensus on in terms of you know a humane standard of living so socialism ultimately is a means of actualizing a humane standard of living but recognizing that both counterrevolutionary

pressures the long history of class society does require sort of an organizational structure that can mitigate sort of the different varying realities of humanity to move towards that future that ultimately will be a classless society which is communism and let's take a look at some domestic issues going on right now right now forty six point two million people are living below the poverty line in this country on top of that of twenty five cities surveyed twenty one have seen an increase in home and finally despite obama's job numbers report only about sixty percent of american adults are working which means forty percent aren't austin what would you do right now to help the homeless the food and securing the unemployed it's a great question so the first thing is you have to look at how these statistics are measured so a forty six percent of people in the united states or below the poverty line what is the poverty line of the united states to take a look at in global terms the people who are on the poverty line in the united states have cell phones they have two cars they have microwaves they have refrigerators so the free market system that america. provides allows even the poor

people in the united states which i don't think there's anyone who believes that you could ever eradicate all poverty but that you want to raise the standards of living across the board capitalism means that as the rich get richer the poor get richer too and more people have more opportunities for more jobs so i think that if we were going to do things to help the poor we would do things like we would create you know we would deregulate a lot of our system and we would put into place more institutional regulations such as free market regulations or tort reform to do things like give incentives to people to actually help right now what happens is we when we create big government policies to help out poor people you have lots of unintended consequences and what happens is is that people who are in their communities are not incentivized to help one another so we create this big government and everyone assumes that the big government is going to help the poor people but when you deregulate and you stop taxing people to go and do charity you incentivize people to go and give charity what incentive do we have to go out and give charity right now when we have forty percent of what we own taxed and given away so there's no incentive right now but

what i want is for community used to be brought together by the fact that they need each other i think people need to need each other and we create a big government we say oh well the big nanny state will take care of things and i want to create a state of people who are more self-reliant and scott i'm sure you'd take a different approach. with this self-reliance but i don't not individual self-reliance i think we need to take government out of the picture but i also say we need to take multinational corporations out of the picture also because there's no real free market in this in this country you have you have basically you know private property private profits but subsidize risk and we don't talk about that we talk about free markets but what i want to do is take the long term it took hundreds of years for us to build up to power dynamics that we have today and what i want to do is unwind all of those that we don't rely on government so we don't rely on corporations to do all these things and we start to build an exercise power from below and that is localized economies built solidarity mutual aid where people sort of rely on governments for handouts that they start to work on food secure.

themselves create community guards create victory gardens create community supported agriculture these small scale things creating our own health care if there's a nationalized health care fine but we need to localize health care because there are people who still fall through that net for real all of these things we start to rebuild the infrastructure and civil society outside of multinational corporations and governments and you and i think if we want to help the point america we have to break the power of the capitalist class i mean you know corporations in the united states have over a trillion dollars that they refuse to invest you know a small tiny elite of people this is the sense of capitalism and this is what we've seen over the past thirty years or so that inequality has actually increased so the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer and it is relative because wealth is relative you can't measure wealth based on some abstract principle from somewhere else but on the abundance of your own society and i think what we see here is the vast majority of wealth accrues to a small amount of people and i think ultimately we have to ultimately eliminate the capitalist class and allow the broad masses of people to yes rely on themselves and through democratic self practice work together to decide what the priorities are

and use the massive productive in the abilities of our country to meet those and let's move on to wall street right now of course we have too big to fail banks c.e.o.'s of wall street immune to prosecution apparently and take a look at this article corporate profits have risen almost twenty times faster than workers income since two thousand and yet they're not hiring and virtually pain is zero and taxes austin how would you regulate wall street question i would let the market regulate wall street see what has happened is after the new deal corporations got in bed with the government and they said we need to work together so that we can stimulate our economy and they said well let's build infrastructure projects for example and what the government is doing is it's taking all of our wealth and it's redirecting them to what they think is a good use so i think what we have to do is we have to set corporations into the marketplace and force them to compete right now for example obamacare is a perfect example it guarantees profits to corporations so it's basically a bailout obamacare basically says that these and these institutions these insurance companies they are never. going to go bankrupt because we're going to get

a guaranteed salary from the state look at our farmers our farmers are heavily subsidized and what happens you get what you're talking about the stratification of wealth and it goes to the top but you have to understand is that corporations when they're in a free market they're in a much more chaotic atmosphere and they can be eaten up by smaller competitors much easier when they are hyper regulated the corporations write the regulations and then the congress goes in and passes them so that they benefit the big corporations because they don't like competition big corporations don't like capitalism if the small businessmen that have to compete in an economy that don't that are harmed by regulations so if you can talk about regulations i would set them afloat out in the ocean and make them fight for their own profits because what would happen is that the smaller businesses would come in and they would eat their lunch and eugene how do you respond to that well i mean i think the reality is we live in a society where it is correct that monopoly capitalism dominates the whole of the economy but you know as it concerns the banks in the wall street there's significant. regulation already the capital buffer agreements and other things like

that are sort of industry regulated things so i think that already exists and we see you know like the california energy example when when deregulation happens on mass there's a significant amount of gaming the system the competition it creates more and are a key if you will and create sort of a situation where volatility is introduced in a major way i think ultimately with wall street what we have to do is eliminate the profit motive i mean it's ultimately the profit motive that drives all corporations in capitalism and it drives wall street to pursue more and more and more reckless ways of making profit because that's what competition does competition certainly forces you to put profitable of all which moves you into more risky behavior which moves you in the economic crisis bubbles volatility and so i just have one quick question we have got a minute left but how would the market prevent the monopolies from forming if there is no regulation well you have to take a look at what is a monopoly so for example does anybody have a monopoly on all of the oil supplies all over the world and what are the products that people absolutely require for their basic living standards so if you're.

saying that microsoft has a monopoly you are basically saying that everyone has a right to microsoft's products in the first place so if you're talking about a monopoly the number one monopoly we have right now is the monopoly on force which is what the government so i really do want to break up monopoly i would like to end the monopoly on our banking system and by the federal reserve i'd like to end the monopoly on our agriculture system by the department of ag so the real monopoly is where the government monopoly is because those monopoly on force and there are no other choices but the free market is not a monopoly because you have choices and can take your money and move it somewhere else not so with the i.r.s. and scott do you have anything to add what would an anarchist society do with the banking system that we see right now i don't want a kinder gentler capitalism i don't want a kinder gentler government i don't want either of them we don't need either of them multinational corporations that are aberration of small business and they should not even exist there is always there is concentrated wealth no one can make a decision about that with there is no there's no free economy is no free market that's all that's a pipe dream stuff and so what i'm talking about is localized economies bringing it back where people can be face to face make decisions were people in bio regions can

make decisions about the resources you know there are there are monopolies exxon mobil has a monopoly they own upstream and downstream all the oil that touches anybody in this planet and it whether in a free market or with governments it's like i don't want to kinder gentler exxon mobil i don't want exxon mobil and we're going to talk about civil liberties next always amazing to hear you guys perspective stay tuned for that we'll be right back . zakk see what happened there i don't know. here's lakers when i got arrested. for a crime or did not do. polygraph results. people to consent to the police officers don't beat people anymore i mean it just doesn't happen really. in the course of interrogation why because there's been this it's like men know because the psychological techniques are more

effective in obtaining confessions than physical abuse and they were taking they could do what they wanted they can say what they wanted and there was no evidence of what they did or what they said. he'd. slip under full strong arm in a lot of these policies i think you know the. pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm sure.

the to. this is good if you've never seen anything like that. welcome back to breaking news that's first alternative voices debate let's talk civil liberties as we know since nine eleven republicans and democrats have pretty much been unified and their support for the investigation of the bill of rights you know from everything from the patriot act to the n.d.a. militarization of local police forces and everything in between scott under anarchism would there be a constitution at all how would people's rights be protected and what would the role of the police look like if any. in the short term or long term right so the short term is there to be transitional parts were where people set up their own constitutions in their low. lies to commies as we say as we dismantle this larger system and in the long term that maybe some people want to organize around that like they did in spain and nine hundred thirty s. or maybe they don't maybe we're looking to just cultures just have it by word of mouth and family and culture i mean that's for communities to decide themselves but

the thing is we don't need those pieces we don't need the force of the state the threat of use of force to back capital in any way and that i think dismantling is important and when you talk about patriot act i mean as somebody who's been a victim of the patriot act i was with domestic terrorism under investigation for ten years now that was never charged with anything i am definitely against bills like that were just everybody comes to the trial and gets to celebrate thing the war on terror is a sham and what it's done is it's criminalized dissent in this country and that's had a chilling effect on things the second thing is that it's created this false false war on the muslim communities and people of middle eastern descent as well as political dissent in this country and what about the police who would police society well i can tell you what we did after new orleans was we policed ourselves we took up arms in arm self-defense because i'm an advocate of arms self-defense and that we said that we will do ourselves because we cannot rely on the police because they were trying to kill us and that we would try to do it in the best way that we could by with the communities that we're there and we had to do

a sexual assault we had to deal with white militias trying to kill black people in communities very seriously taking a long history from social justice activists who would come before us and movements would come before us it would also be on the same thing and i say that we have to have community control we must break this down that we must know who our neighbors are who and i don't like the word policing but take care of our self self-determination for each of the communities eugene what about you how would you propose to revamp the constitution if you would go that route and how would you deal with government repression if all the power is concentrated by the state you know certainly well i wouldn't want to say too much about the constitution because i wouldn't want to preempt the opportunity of people to speak on that but i think there would be a new constitution a revolutionary constitution that would ensure that the whatever it may be education employment that people felt were these sort of important foundational bed . rights to be supported but i don't think all the power to be concentrated in the state i actually think ultimately and this is something that socialism marx's always say that we want the state to wither away we want to stay to exist with its whole aim being to eliminate the need for

a state but ultimately there's counterrevolutionary impulses i mean if you know we say we want free education and then there's a party of people who are willing to used armed struggle and sabotage to make it all possible again for only a small elite to go to college we want to suppress that but ultimately it's the democratic power of the people in the institutions attended by the people that hold the power which is something that sort of everyone always says but certainly under socialism we want to try to actualize that by making powers sort of really from the bottom up whether it's the factories the neighborhood schools and a committee of the committee like bases that can build more or less in a pyramid type way up to the top and in power power checked on that basis and also with virtually no government oversight how would you regulate these massive corporations that are entrenched in the surveillance state. and are in fact profiting off the spine well remember after nine eleven the war on terror kicked in the military industrial complex stepped in and said you know we're going to go ahead fill full of these contracts so the corporations are doing acting out their natural desires they're going out and getting these contracts that the government is handing them so i think we were what was happening was that we were just looking

for the new twenty first century conflict and that just happened to come along the act of terrorism gave them the right to do what they were already doing understand dick cheney was writing the patriot act ten years before it happened joe biden as well were pending those kinds of civil liberties violations ten years before those events happened so i mean there's always a steady growth of government and people libertarians always say that as government grows liberty recedes so i think what have what has to happen is that we need to have a culture of self empowerment individual empowerment and a belief in the second amendment which talks about individual liberty and the right to self-defense for ourselves we don't really need a huge super national government to keep us safe from anything other than perhaps a north korean nuclear missile strike but the most part americans can protect themselves if we are empowered to protect themselves do you think of pilots were armed on every single. cockpit that those that those people would have been able to pull off that kind of attack absolutely not but we were taught to be afraid we were told to stand down if terrorists stood up no don't see anything just give in instead we need to have an individual empowerment mentality in this country that we

are responsible for our own security and i think that applies to national security as well when you talk about things like terrorism the constitution actually has a provision in an article one section eight called letters of marque and reprisal and this was stated by congressman ron paul the day after the attacks he says why do we need to invade why do we need to give the spend all of these trillions of dollars and send tanks into the desert when all we need is to send seal team six in or basically private mercenaries which is the constitutional. equivalent so you have that and just take them out get it over with and come home but right now we have this whole idea that in order for us to have freedom we need to have regime change in occupation that's not the way to go and let's let's actually tell if what you're saying i want to give you guys a hypothetical scenario right now if there were a terrorist attack in this country on the same scale if not bigger than nine eleven being noninterventionist typically as a libertarian how would you respond would you just send in kind of that force that you were just talking about absolutely well the constitution is very clear and the letters of marque and reprisal haven't been used since sort of the days of high sales so i think the thing that we have to do is we need to update that provision

of the constitution and we need to give congress the power to perform those assassinations because of the terrorist makes a credible threat and is possibly going to kill american citizens and we have intelligence to that we need to be able to take action for that but what we don't need to do is take a ham handed approach invade these countries create more terrorists and have them come back and kill us because we're not targeting our bombs and we're killing civilians so what has to happen is we have to have targeted approaches now constitutional mercenaries they are under the law meaning if they kill an innocent civilian they're liable for that damage soldiers or not because of the way the laws are wars or the laws of war are structured so if we have evidence of a terrorist attack i think we need to revive these constitutional provisions because that allows us to do a surgical strike with. free market to hire mercenaries and then you get in and you get the job and you come back home with no nation building and it's less than two trillion dollars i guarantee it what's your response well i think the sort of important context of your question is not a level and i think the most important thing is to talk about the reciprocal sort

of cycle of violence put forward by the acts of reprisal after nine eleven i mean what we really need to look at if we want to prevent terrorist attacks in an overarching way is what makes people want to attack the united states and we certainly know that the policies the imperialistic policies of the united states around the world engender more hatred towards the united states government if not the united states people then anything else that takes place and i think what we need to really be talking about is that and not sort of these sort of well if they come get us how do we go get them you know eye for an eye tooth for a tooth the real question is how do we create sort of a system in this world that's based on humanity based on you know sort of mutual aid if you will move to a support and not one based on through these reciprocal acts of violence which is what i think these hypotheticals when they're posed in the u.s. media and pose like shows like twenty four you know would you kill a baby if you knew there was going to be a terrorist attack next week or something like you know it never happens that way but you know people pose these questions and sort of put us in a sense of fear and make us answer in a way that i think is always the most warlike. and let's talk about foreign policy

in general right now we're hearing a lot of strong rhetoric coming from the political media establishment about iran and syria and most recently in north korea i want to play a quick sound bite from that. this is tracking a mobile missile launcher that has been moved within north korea by train the launcher has the ability to strike japan as well as u.s. bases in okinawa and adding to the fears today the young leader of the north said the moment of explosion is coming so scott under an anarchist state or i guess not state but. how would these kind of threats be dealt with i guess. what you just said would you go kind of more of that route of just. thing with a long term thing is that historically nation states are new and new to this planet and they haven't worked and that we've done we would dismantle them we would take false borders i think that we'd also dismantle the military industrial complex we

just start taking it away because we don't need it if we're not an imperialist force who is actually trying to draw resources labor in and you know the natural world from other places that we don't need it and if we if we put in systems of federations where people can actually federate by voluntary association and exchange resources how they want that's fine but what i want to do is break it down we built these huge systems that we need to break them down that doesn't get rid of the the nukes immediately but we start to dismantle these systems bit by bit again we've built this stuff for hundreds of years we need to wind it but we have to ask the question first why is it like that. and eugene after these threats are made i mean if the u.s. makes an overture for peace with north korea would that make this country look weak i don't know if you want this country look we can all be the united states has thousands of nuclear weapons they have the most powerful military the united states government spends more money by far than anyone else on their military it's i mean in the past two decades they've invaded two countries they use military power all across the world really completely unfettered ways so i don't think a peace treaty with korea which ultimately and people need to remember it is the

understood that was put in place after nine hundred fifty three was supposed to evolve into a peace treaty the united states government has consistently denied. peace treaty but i don't know why anyone would think the united states was weak for not wanting to basically killed hundreds of thousands millions of people and i asked him if the military scaled back to the point that let's say ron paul proposes it to be what's the danger to america losing its posture is the force of this military strength in the world well you know that's a good question and a lot of people kind of give ron paul a hard time because he just says what was just come home and i think that there are ways to do scale drawdowns don't put the united states' national security interests in any danger but i think of the places that you have to look are places like germany and japan where we've been for over fifty years and we can start making cutbacks because really what. we're doing we're subsidizing the national defense of wealthy countries so i think that if you were to take a target approach excuse my expression their target approach and bring our troops home from places like that we can begin to take a more pacifistic viewpoint and people will see us as saying hey looks like they're

not going to be as warlike anymore but you have to make you also have to explain to people in clear terms that we will not allow aggression on our sand or on our soil the thing with north korea is if you look at that situation it's obvious that the military just charging him he's untested he's untried they just want to see you know if you can prove that he's as gutsy it is his father and his grandfather so i don't necessarily fear anything from north korea but i do believe that we need some sort of missile defense system so that these people know that there's no way that they could ever hit our mainland because the american people if you think that they are warlike and now you let another nine eleven happen on our soil and i guarantee you these people are going to go nuts because the government will bring the fear factor back so we have to take measured steps i think to do a tactical drawdown in certain areas to show that we are no longer a hostile imperialist power eugene i want to follow up with the whole pacifism idea that using the military as a peacekeeping force i mean do you recommend or what do you think about i mean with

a country so wealthy do we not have a responsibility to help countries like burma the genocide that's going on right now and how would you use the military for that or would you well i mean i think if we look at the record of most of these so-called peacekeeping missions there are some of the most warlike things i mean if you look at the eastern part of congo for example where over four million people have died in the long conflict their report came out from i believe it was the un inspector general report was made of the u.n. force there and they were engaged in the same type of profiteering and despicable behavior as all the other militaries in the region and the same thing with peacekeeping missions i mean the korean war was a police action to go keep your ideal sure well no i don't think so i mean i don't think that the united states has any sort of onus to use its military to enforce on other people what we think is right i mean just because i'm a revolutionary socialist. doesn't mean that of people in mexico are revolutionary socialist i should you know jet up some controversy and use peacekeepers to put them in place which is essentially exactly how peacekeepers are used out i don't think we should repeat them. and you guys that's it for the debate today thank you

so much everyone i think that the most important thing is how many commonalities we all have with each other in terms of restoration of civil liberties and even the imperialism the militarism and thank you so much for all of your input and time thanks so much for. really appreciate it well that wraps things up a break in the set first ever alternative voices debate and if you like what you see let me know on twitter at abby martin on facebook at facebook dot com breaking the set let's just make sure that this is just the beginning you know the mainstream marginalise of the alternative we know that these beliefs aren't arranged so it's time to focus on what unites us not what divides us instead of fighting with each other let's work to understand each other.